Liberal Intolerance Will End Up Hammering Liberals

A couple days ago an 80-year-old Duke professor got in trouble for racism. He made a four-paragraph comment in The New York Times about the Baltimore riots. Hey, he said, back in 1965 racial discrimination wasn't just against blacks; it hit Asians too.

The racism against what even Eleanor Roosevelt called the yellow races was at least as bad.

So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn't feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.

I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existemt because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.

Oh dear oh dear, professor. You know you aren't allowed to say things like that in America. Because racism.

Seriously, I suspect that we are approaching what we sophisticated people call an "inflection" on liberal race and gender oppression. And I suspect that we will look back on today's liberals as being as dumb as Romanovs or Bourbons. Or Manchus, for those that don't confine their reading to European ancien régimes.

Here's why. Government is force.

The reason that I keep hammering on this "government is force" meme is that I believe that it explains a lot. And the people that should always keep this in mind is the members of the ruling class -- whether Bourbon or gentry liberal.

The ruling class should always remember that government is force, because the next thing it should remember is: "who is going to be totally pissed of by our latest noble attempt to force people to do the right thing?"

Timeout for review of the Law of Incoming Rounds. Humans are immensely sensitive to mortar rounds landing on the ground right next to them. But humans regard mortar rounds landing half a mile away as something of a joke.

Wise rulers understand that government is force. Wise rulers understand the Law of Incoming Rounds. Wise rulers do not let their more enthusiastic supporters oppress the little people just for the fun of it. Wise rulers do not let their supporters oppress the opposition and deny them freedom of speech.

Liberals have a foolish understanding of things like the rule of law and freedom of speech. They have converted the importance of the rule of law into a passion for justice. And their understanding of freedom of speech doesn't seem to stir very far from outrage when liberals are attacked for speaking their minds.

But the real point of things like the rule of law and limited government and freedom of speech is to minimize the opportunity for opponents of the regime to get really pissed off.

The rule of law means that the government doesn't get to do too many arbitrary things that make people on the receiving end totally mad and enraged.

Limited government means that the government isn't using force very much. That means that the clunking fist of government isn't beating too many people over the head.

Freedom of speech means that opponents of the regime get the chance to freely assemble and demand a redress of their grievances.

But the Obama regime, starting at the top, doesn't seem to get this.

It thinks that government is a matter of the president with a phone and a pen. No doubt, but then you don't get to manufacture a consensus over the next government application of force. And the people on the receiving end of the phone and the pen get really pissed off.

It thinks that government is a matter of administrative systems advised by policy analysts and experts. No doubt, but what happens if the system is a mess and the experts are wrong? As in Obamacare? You think that the Democratic operatives with bylines are going to be able to convince the American people that Republicans are to blame for Obamacare?

It thinks that opposition to liberal ideas is "hate speech" and thus not deserving of the constitutional support for free speech. Yeah. Every tin-horn dictator believes that.

What the Obamis and the gentry liberals don't get is that their politics is perfectly designed to make people really pissed off and vote for the other party.

Perhaps that's why Sean Trende reports that support for the Republican Party is at the highest level in decades. If you look at Trende's RCP Election Index you see that there is nothing quite like a Republican administration for raising Democratic strength, and nothing like a Democratic administration for raising Republican strength.

In other words, government is force and it makes people really pissed off.

Of course, I think that the real Obama own-goal is the race politics of Ferguson and Baltimore. I just keep wondering what Asian and Hispanic Americans think about that.

That 80-year-old Duke professor mentioned white-Asian interracial dating and marriage. I notice too that there is plenty of white-Hispanic dating and marriage going on. Now the Asians are mounting an anti-Affirmative Action lawsuit against Harvard for doing a redo on the old Jewish quota of the early 20th century, only this time against Asians.

What I say is: why don't you Asians and Hispanics come on over to the Republican Party? I don't know what the Democrats have been saying about us behind our backs, but why not give us a try? We're kinda stuffy and old-fashioned, but we do believe in that fusty old idea of the career open to talents, and we do believe in judging people on their character, not on the color of their skin.

But that is just by the way. My prediction is that people are getting really pissed off with the liberal-gentry ruling class because the liberal gentry ruling class is too stupid to realize that Job One for every ruling class is to avoid pissing people off.

Embarrassing Clinton Revelations: Is It Something in the Water?

Ever since the Clinton era, say about the time that Bill Clinton was running around during the mild 1990-91 recession talking about "the worst economy in the last 50 years" there has seemed to be a jinx on reality.

Whatever mind-numbing fantasy the liberals came up with would get accepted as reality. And good conservative common-sense got anathematized as racism, sexism or homophobia. Or "on your own" economics.

But in recent months something has changed. News that challenges the liberal line seems to be getting through.

Item: the flap over George Stephanopoulous' interview of Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer. Look, it's no big deal to me that George gave $25,000, $50,000, $75,000, whatever, to the Clinton foundation. It's no big deal that a Clinton loyalist would try an ambush interview on a conservative. That's what loyal retainers do in America to demonstrate their fealty to their noble lord. But the fact that there is the teeniest reaction on the part of the mainstream media that maybe there's a problem here is startling.

Item: "New docs reveal administration knew about Benghazi 10 days before attack." What? Who let the dogs out? Because this could be a suppurating wound on the Clinton campaign. It means that Republican candidates can run around repeating that Clinton lied, lied to the faces of the relatives of the brave Benghazi martyrs. For ever.

Item: Chelsea Clinton is a rich bitch and is causing chaos at the Clinton foundation. Whaat? How did that one ever get out? For 22 years, ever since the first Clinton campaign, we've never heard a peep about Chelsea, except heartwarming stories in connection with Socks the Cat. Now they are dishing on Chelsea on the NY Post "Page Six."

“A lot of people left because she was there. A lot of people left because she didn’t want them there,” an insider told me. “She is very difficult.”

I know. Gentry-liberal trust-fund baby demonstrates arrogant sense of entitlement and starts wrecking her inheritance. This is not news. But still, for someone to break the Clinton Code of Omerta, that is news.

So what is going on here? The movie The War Room has the Stephanopoulos character telling a Clinton bimbo:

"I guarantee if you do this, you'll never work in Democratic politics again."

Hey, it's only a movie, but my nickel says that the message goes out to every journalist that thinks of writing or fronting anything that's embarrassing to Democrats.  Report this and you'll never work in this town again. In my view that's why we've heard practically nothing about the real Obama all these years.

So what's going on? Don't tell me that it's the power of the conservative media that's finally forcing these stories out. No, I don't think conservative media has that power.

No, I think we are seeing a power struggle emerge in the liberal/Democratic world, the beginnings of a struggle to own the party after the Obama years. And my guess, and I mean guess, is that this starts with the elected officials in the Democratic Party, because they are starting to realize that they are screwed. They are starting to realize that the 2010 and 2014 elections are not flukes; those mid-terms represent a fundamental shift in the sentiments of the voters.

Let's go out on a limb here. I'd say that a lot of senior and up-and-coming elected officials know that the Obama people have flown them up a box canyon. There is now no alternative but hitting the wall in 2016 as the American people desperately decide that it's time for a change. The question is: Who will inherit the ruins in 2017? The elected officials don't want the Obama crowd; they are the guys that wrecked the party. And they don't want the Clinton crowd either; they are yesterday's men and women.

If this is true, or close to true, then it means that the Democrats are in much worse shape that we think.

Kinda reminds me of the good old Soviet Union. It seemed invincible, until one day in 1990, it wasn't. On account of a washed-up B-movie actor called Ronald Reagan.

Of Course "Motherhood" is a Social Construct

Just in time for Mothers Day Harvard professor Kathleen McCartney wants to remind us that motherhood is a social construct. Thanks, Kathy, we needed that.

But need I remind you, professor, that feminism is also a social construct. If we are to delegitimize this kind of motherhood:

In US culture, we hold to the idea that young children are better off when cared for exclusively by their mothers. 

which you feminists like to do 24-7, then we should admit that any other motherhood is also a social construct. But you don't do that, professor. You appeal to science.

Anthropologists have attempted to disavow us of this view... In foraging societies, mothers stay in close proximity with their babies, while in agricultural societies mothers share child-rearing responsibilities with those less able to be productive in the fields, like grandmothers and young girls. Shared child-rearing has been and continues to be the norm across cultures.

No kidding? You mean like the way that women in suburbs today form a community of mothers and help each other, and then go on to form a kind of informal home-schooling collective? But no. This stunt is meant to justify "child care."

In contemporary society, child care is our form of shared child-rearing. 

I don't think so, professor.  Child care is about dropping your kid off for a paid employee to look after the kid. It's similar to the old days when rich women had nurses and governesses to raise their kids and had their kids presented to them once a day for an hour.

But actually, according to McCartney, "child care" is OK. Because science.

Our culture’s ambivalence about maternal employment spurred research on whether child care was a risk factor for young children. In time, social scientists demonstrated definitively that infant care did not disrupt the mother-child bond and that children thrived in quality child care.

And Dr. McCartney was one of the scientists that proved it.

Back in the 1970s she thought that "believed solid research findings, like my own, would lead to policy change." But it didn't, and now she's mad.

But do you not see, professor, that "policy change" is a weasel word for changing the social construct, by force. So it's not really a social construct but an oppressive construct.

Oh, and by the way, the studies I've heard of say that children that spend their first year away from Mommy tend to develop attachment problems. There is no substitute for direct contact with a mother's love in the first year. Because science.

Liberals like Kathryn McCartney would be amusing if they weren't such dangerous oppressors. If the old concept of motherhood was attached to women defining their identity in the home, what in the name of honest scholarship is the new paradigm of career-oriented women that define their identity by "leaning in" and doing the work/life balance? It's just another social construct of motherhood!

Here's my social construct on motherhood. Rich women have, down the ages, wanted to schuck off the work of nursing and raising their children on servants. Naturally, they have devised cunning social constructs to justify their decision; that's what humans do when they do something shameful.

Today, after a brief moment in the notorious 1950s when Communist feminist journalists like Betty Friedan found themselves unwillingly caught in the suburbs with their kids, rich educated women have reverted to type.

Naturally, as humans have ever done, they have clothed the nakedness of their selfish acts in the alluring raiment of virtue.

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.