By the People: Part III: A Propitious Moment

In his latest book Charles Murray has come up with a plan to push back against the oppressive regulatory state. We won't get there with normal political process, not even with a Republican president and Congress he writes in Part I of By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. See By the People: Part I: Where We Stand. It will take "civil disobedience" to fight back and in Part II Murray unfolds his idea to create a "Madison Fund" to pay the bills of businesses and individuals that want to fight back against the regulatory state. See By the People: Part II: Opening a New Front.

In Part III: A Propitious Moment, Charles Murray takes a broader look at the United States in the decades ahead. He gets out of the trenches of the fight against the bureaucrats and looks at the larger horizon. And he likes what he sees.

[I]n the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century the stars are in fact aligning for a much broader rebuilding of liberty than we could have imagined even a decade ago.

First of all, Murray says that we are experiencing a return of a diversified America. You think that the US has always been a white-bread patriarchy? Don't tell the four European cultures that battled each other back at the founding. Using David Hackett Fischer's analysis in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America he argues that while Yankees in New England, Cavaliers in the tidewaters, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish in the back-country were all from one nation, they had radically different ideas about everyday life, and what it meant to "live life as one sees fit."

Murray "celebrates" the differences between Yankees, Quakers, Cavaliers and Scots-Irish in a table of 30 different cultural memes. Let's look at a couple. On "Marriage," the Yankees observed a civil contract, Cavaliers a sacred ceremony, and the Scots-Irish had "abduction rituals." How about their "time ethic?" Yankees believed in "improving the time," Quakers believed in "redeeming the time," Cavaliers believed in "killing the time" and the Scots-Irish believed in "passing the time." And in dress? Well, those Scots-Irish girls were notorious for tight clothes that accentuated the positive in their lady parts.

Then came the "post-founding" immigrants, the Germans and the Irish, and they brought Catholicism. The "Germans were the antithesis of the Irish." The Irish lived in exclusive Irish and Catholic neighborhoods and the Germans were "typically farmers that practiced advanced agriculture or highly skilled craftsmen." And that was just the beginning. After the Civil War the South identified as defiantly Southern and the North filled up with Italians, Slavs from eastern Europe, and after 1900, the Jews.

The point is that mid-twentieth century America was an anomaly, created by the restrictive immigration laws that obtained from the mid 1920s to the mid 1960s. For forty years the diverse brew of pre-WWI immigrants got to Americanize without a new crop of immigrants in the mix. And, of course, millions of Americans got homogenized in the uniforms of World War II. So it wasn't that hard to do one-size-fits-all politics in the mid 20th century.

The America of the twenty-first Ameica will be going back to normal, with Hispanic and Asian immigrants, and the new segregation by culture, the sorting of liberals into blue urban areas and conservatives into red suburbs and ex-urbs. And then there are the African Americans.

Murray makes several points about the re-diversified America.

1. Some regions are being latinized by Hispanic immigration, but "America as a whole is not being latinized."
2. African Americans are also concentrated in specific areas of the old Confederacy and large urban areas.
3. Asian Americans. Here's the interesting bit. They are only 5 percent of population, but already are concentrating in New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are "heavily overrepresentative in the elite zip codes of those cities." Silicon Valley? Asians are 33 percent of the population.
4. The "cognitive elite." Call it what you like, the middle-class college-educated people have a culture with distinctive tastes and they like to live together.

With all this diversity, the one-size-fits-all politics of the post New Deal area is making a lot of people unhappy. So can we dig our way out of it?

In Part I of By the People Murray told us this was the worst of times. Now he tells us that it's the best of times. First of all there's "liberation technology."

This is no longer 1900 and tainted meat, or the Solid South and laws keeping African Americans "in their place." Modern technology can make a scandal out of any political oppression, e.g., Ferguson and Baltimore, and the internet marketplace means that everyone gets rated, from plumbers to bed-and-breakfasts, and Uber can fight and beat the taxi cartel. The point is that bad behavior gets publicized.

That means that it's going to become more and more difficult for government to hide its incompetence from the average citizen. Call it the "collapse of the blue model." For instance, Californians can now go to TransparentCalifornia.com and find out that there's a Los Angeles firefighter named "Murray" that made $273,773 in 2011 in salary, overtime, and benefits.

Murray predicts that we are going to see an "alienation of the people who pay the tab for government." Our Democratic friends are comfortable about "the rich" paying their fair share, but in fact the 1% in 2011 "paid 35 percent of all income taxes." The people in the top quartile that "pays 86 percent of the federal government's income tax revenue are not billionaires... They have earned their success." The top 25 percent, says Murray, are not happy about politicians that demand the "rich pay their 'fair share'" and the anger "crosses party lines."

Up to now big corporations have made their peace with the administrative regulatory state, but maybe the world of "collusive capitalism" could be changed. Up to now, corporations have just been trying to go along to get along with the regulation and the criminalization of their world, but since the Crash of 2008 government has upped the ante and has been extending its activities into frank shakedowns, with billion dollar settlements imposed on oil companies and banks. The formula is simple. You find a corporation that may have done something wrong; threaten its managers with ruin and criminal charges, and then have them pay a huge fine in a "secret settlement." Then repeat.

So far, corporate America hasn't fought back. But at "some point, some of them will start defending themselves." And that could be a gamechanger.

Don't forget, Murray adds, that the rank-and-file bureaucrat isn't a happy camper. There can easily be up to 22 layers of management in a federal department. Federal employees like "their benefits and job security" but not much else about their jobs. When the Madison Fund starts to roll, its offensive will be going up against an army that is badly demoralized.

Charles Murray ends By the People on an optimistic note. It's time we pull aside the curtain at government, he writes, and say "This is ridiculous."

First of all, per-capita wealth has been going up ever since reliable records started in the late 19th century, from $5,000 to $50,000 in 120 years, through all the wars and depressions and government blunders. If wealth continues to increase,

[I]t is unimaginable that Americans will still think the best way to live is to be governed by armies of bureaucrats enforcing thousands of minutely prescriptive rules.

Somehow we will have to figure out a better way. Because it's ridiculous:

• "It's ridiculous that the cost of routine health care has not been falling for decades."
• "It's ridiculous that towns and cities can't afford to provide basic services."
• "It is ridiculous that anyone lacks the means to live a decent life."
• "It is ridiculous to impose one-size-fits-all national solutions for policies that involve morally complex cultural differences."

Notice the cunning in that list. The items all point accusing fingers at the basic assumptions and coercions of the current Progressive-inspired administrative regulatory state. As I might say:

• Never mind about Obamacare, what would "Walmartcare" look like? 
• How come lifer bureaucrats get better pay and pensions than ordinary middle-class families in the private sector and they still can't fix the potholes? 
• Can't we find a better way to relieve the poor than our current failed welfare system? 
• Hello gays and feminists! Are you really sure that the way to the future is to beat up on Christians and frat boys? 

The point is that in a culturally diverse society the only way to avoid lose-lose conflicts over loot and religious wars over morality is to overlay the whole with a culture of live and let live, and a limited government with limited powers.

But that is exactly what the gentry liberal ruling class refuses to consider.

I'm not as sanguine as Charles Murray about the glorious future. This is politics; politics is about division. This is government; government is about force and coercion. The gentry liberal ruling class is not going to give up without a fight. But like most dynasties, the quality of the liberal leadership tends to decline from generation to generation. Think Obama; think Hillary Clinton. Today's gentry liberal leaders are just not up to the job.

No doubt the United States will one day climb to Charles Murray's new sunny uplands from out of the present dusty Obama plain. But the way from the plain to the uplands is uphill. The path is steep, and the obstacles formidable.

But that's no reason not to just to try it, but to do it.

See here for a final summing up of By The People.

By the People: Part II: Opening a New Front

In Part I of By the People Charles Murray told us how our government is broken and can't be fixed by politics. The problem is that government has become practically lawless under the "living constitution" championed by the Progressives over a century ago. See By the People: Part One: Where We Stand.

But we are humans; we don't give up just because the political system is broken. So what should we do?

In Part II: Opening a New Front of By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission Charles Murray proposes a way of fighting back against lawless government.

Murray is proposing a program of civil disobedience, and that is a serious matter, for "The rule of law is the foundation of civilization." To resist the government Americans need a reason, and that reason is that "government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights." If it doesn't protect our rights, then "revolution is not treason, but the people's right."

Our America is founded not on some divine right or "ties of ethnicity and culture" but the right of people "to pursue their own interests without hindrance", and Murray enlists the German immigrant Francis Grund and Alexis de Tocqueville in his support. If that is so, then the federal government lost its legitimacy in the constitutional revolution of 1937-42 when the ruling class expanded the Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution to mean anything the rulers wanted.

Even though Americans have got used to life under unlimited government, they are getting progressively more suspicious of government. In 1958 Americans were asked whether they trusted government to "do what is right" and 73 percent agreed "just about always" or "most of the time." The trust level rose a bit in 1964 but then began a decline. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, the trust level was down to 25 percent. The trust level went up under Reagan, then down, then up again at the end of the 1990s. But now it's down, hitting a low of 13 percent in 2014. It's easy to see why. "Washington looks like a sophisticated kleptocracy... [and] American government isn't supposed to work this way."

Murray develops three reason why government has lost the trust of the American people. It has "voided" three tacit compacts with the people. First, that the federal government would only provide freedom at home and defend from enemies abroad. Second, it "would not unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided Americans." Third, it "would make it easy for Americans to take pride in themselves," for good Americans were people "who made an honest living, took care of their families, and didn't bother anyone else". You can see the problem. Today our government wants to be in on every problem; it is imposing one-size-fits-all policies on moral questions on everything from abortion to marriage; and with the expansion of law, "Just about all of us are criminals now".

OK. So Murray proposes that we "ignore large portions of the laws and regulations with which we are burdened." But since we are Americans we must think about the limits to this. First, we are not going to license murder, destruction of property, etc. Second, we are not going to refuse to pay our taxes. Third, we are not going to muck up "public goods classically defined". What we are going to do is use "strict scrutiny" against the regulatory state. First, we are going to resist government telling us what to do with our land. Second, we are going to go resist the government meddling with the details of how people go about their work. Third, we are going to go after licensing laws. Fourth, we are going to insist that people be allowed to take "voluntary risks". Fifth, we are going to go after employment law. Sixth, we are going to go after "regulations that are arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion".

But we've got to be careful. Certain topics have a "halo" effect: everyone wants to protect the environment. And we want to choose to resist government in cases where the victim of government is trying to do the right thing. In other words, we want to push America towards a "no harm, no foul" regime.

Now it's time to describe the details of Murray's "Madison Fund, a privately funded foundation to map terrain and probe defenses while helping ordinary Americans who are trying to cope with the regulatory state." But how?

The dirty little secret is that the government doesn't have that much bandwidth to harass American citizens. In a table of regulatory agency staff numbers, Murray shows that your EPAs, your OSHAs, your FDAs, your CPSCs, etc. only have a couple thousand attorneys, 2,500 odd "investigative personnel, and 150 odd "administrative law judges." Those bureaucrats can only go after a few people at once. OSHA oversees "8 million worksites" with 2,200 inspectors that conduct about 27,000 inspections a year. EPA in 2013 conducted 18,000 inspections: this for the whole land area of the US. This "Goliath... is actually the Wizard of Oz." Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Enter the Madison Fund. Its task will be simple. When a businessman or an individual wants to fight a bureaucrat,

the bureaucrat [can] say to him. "You do that, and we'll put you out of business."

The Madison Fund would be designed to change the terms of trade in this transaction. It will "tap the bureaucrat on the shoulder, and say,

We are taking over this man's case. We will litigate it as long as it takes.We will publicize that litigation in ways that will embarrass you and your superiors. None of this will cost our client a penny, and we will reimburse him for any fine you are able to impose. And if you come back and bother him again, we will go through the whole process again.

And we don't need to ask anyone's permission to start. All we need is one of the many billionaires that have made fortunes in past decades. It just takes one billionaire and "a few hundred million dollars." As far as expertise goes, we already have a bunch of foundations like the Pacific Legal Foundation that know how to do this stuff. But the current crop of litigating foundations are tiny; we need a Madison Fund that will grow to an annual litigation budget of "a few hundred million dollars a year." And the Madison Fund won't just be doing litigation; it will be doing publicity.

And another thing. The Madison Fund is just a start. What if professional associations insured their members against "government as an insurable hazard"? Why not? Murray proposes the American Dental Association for this task, for dentists are subject to a 307-page OHSA manual for dentists, not to mention employment law, EPA regulations etc. I don't know about your dentist, but my dentist is treating patients, managing employees, providing free services as a group home in addition to the full-time job of complying with the government's mandates.

But is this legal? Free assistance is legal; think Legal Services and public defenders. Overloading government bureaucrats? Well, the Madison Fund is not going to be faking evidence. It is going to be trying to exploit the system, just like lawyers do every day. The one snag might be reimbursing clients for fines.

Suppose the ADA started a Dental Shield program, to provide insurance for dentists against regulatory oppression. Then Dental Shield will go to bat for dentists getting torqued around by the local bureaucrats.

But what happens when "The Empire Strikes Back"?  Suppose you are an OSHA bureaucrat offended by the dentists and their Dental Shield program to protect dentists from bureaucrats. In retaliation, you unleash "wholesale inspections on dental offices, levying the maximum fines." But, of course, the dentist's Dental Shield fights back, "appealing adverse decisions" all the way to the federal courts. Dental Shield makes the pursuit of the dental citations more trouble for OSHA than it's worth. Now OSHA is facing the need to ask "Congress for more inspectors." It might not go down well on TV.

You and your bureaucratic pals could try to win the publicity battle with Dental Shield:

[You] are a duly constituted agency.. [keeping] America's workplaces safe. That important mission is being cynically compromised by dentists who, in collusion with Dental Shield... are endangering Americans seeking dental care.

Except that "Americans generally like their dentists". I know I like mine, and I would get right on the phone to my congressman, "Baghdad" Jim McDermott, in a minute if my dentist got harassed by the Feds.

Or the OSHA bureaucrats could try to get the courts to declare Dental Shield illegal. But that would mean getting out of the safety of their own domesticated administrative courts into the real court system. Maybe that's not such a good idea. Maybe in the end the bureaucrats could beat a strategic retreat and "limit its citations of dental offices to cases in which a genuine safety issue exists.

Then OSHA is retreating to a "no harm, no foul" policy, which is exactly what we want.

But is that what will happen? Murray has consulted legal experts and they have told him of all the "technical issues of procedure and precedent" that have to be dealt with. But Murray is optimistic; the Supreme Court will help, he thinks, provided that "its decision will have enough support." And the key is to get the courts to revise their interpretation of "arbitrary and capricious" to a position that stops favoring the regulators, both in the creation of regulations and their enforcement; then we can start to move the needle. Murray cites an EPA wetland case, Sackett vs. Ennvironmental Protection Agency, which gives cause for optimism. The Sacketts fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won with "the help of two pro bono lawyers from the Pacific Legal Foundation".

The next step is to attack the whole idea of the "disinterested expert" governing philosophy, as in:

• Problems of public policy can be analyzed so that they yield objectively correct solutions.

Maybe that works when you are talking about sewer systems and smog reduction. But what about traffic signals, urban freeways, bike paths? "It's too politically sensitive to be left to the experts." In fact, "all public policy is ultimately political."

• The people who frame these solutions are disinterested experts who can put aside their own biases and institutional self-interest as they go about their work.

First of all, most policy sciences are immature, e.g., climate science. And bias is inevitable. It was and is "monumentally naive" to think that experts are disinterested.

But will the Supreme Court give up on its policy of "deference" to regulatory agencies and actions and so create a level playing field where the regulatory agency no longer gets to play judge, jury, and executioner in its own case? Murray reckons it will if and when the Madison Fund and defense funds like Dental Shield start to show results and gum up the works. Then comes the collision, the crisis: "the courts will realize that they have to give people a chance at a day in court" but without "ten-year cases with forty-thousand-page case files."

Is all this possible? Can we reverse the Progressive model of the lordly educated ruling class and its disinterested experts dealing out wise and objective decisions all based on settled science? Or is Charles Murray sending us up over the top into a senseless trench warfare that nobody can win?

I'd say the answer is: Yes, But.

First of all the billionaire that sets up the Madison Fund has to be a guy with incredible cojones. That's because once liberals figure out what is going on their are going to be very angry. Already they don't like the Koch Brothers and their mild libertarian activism, and have taught millions of liberals to hate them. Imagine how they are going to react to the backer of the Madison Fund.

Second, I think that the tactics of using the reverse terrorist effect, of humiliating one bureaucrat to scare ten thousand, is brilliant. A Republican Congress can help by disbanding all the SWAT teams that every agency seems to need these days. And they can then cut the budgets of agencies that get publicized for arbitrary and capricious actions against mom-and-pop businesses. After all, if they've got the time for that penny-ante stuff, then their budgets must be too big.

Third, I think that the publicity battle is crucial. And here I think that the Obama years have helped us with their parade of idiot-left activism from the beer summit to the racist Justice Department to the "rape culture" activists to the follies of "hate speech", "microaggressions", climate deniers, and the rest. We need leaders who can teach the American people to experience the lefty activists as totalitarian bullies. How hard can that be? They are totalitarian bullies.

And that's the beginning, the middle, and the end of Murray's proposal. We must push back against the bullies, and the way to do that is for each of us to know that there is someone who "has our back."

Next, we'll look at Part III: A Propitious Moment. 

By The People: Part I: Where We Stand

Charles Murray is the great political scientist of our generation. First he told us in Losing Ground that liberals knew by the early 1970s that the Great Society programs weren't working. But they kept them anyway. Then in The Bell Curve he told us that IQ is really important and it applies to race, and got his head handed to him. Most recently in Coming Apart he showed that the upper 20 percent in America was doing fine, but in the bottom 30 percent the women don't marry and the men don't work.

Now he's really mad, and in By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission he is calling for revolution. If you are with him, then you are not a libertarian or a conservative. He wants to call the supporters of a limited government: "Madisonians."

OK, he's not calling for blood in the streets, but he is proposing a cunning way to neuter the administrative state. But first, let's look at Part I of his book, where Murray analyzes the federal government and determines that it can't be reformed from within.

The problem is that the Constitution has been set aside and there's no way to get it back. Congress isn't going to do it, even with a Republican president, because the current system favors the status quo and the Supreme Court won't do it because, e.g., limiting the meaning of "general welfare" to its original meaning would cause chaos.

It's Hamilton vs. Madison, according to Murray. Hamilton and the Federalists favored a strong state and Madison and the Anti-federalists wanted a weak state. But back then nobody was thinking of anything like today's state. A strong state meant something like Hamilton's report of manufactures. A century later, under the influence of the Germans like Hegel and Nietzsche, the Progressives decided that the Constitution was outmoded.

To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong  unifying leader... They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.

This progressivism got implemented by the judicial system, and "ultimately transformed the nation." The progressives saw the old Constitution as Newtonian and mechanical, "with its three separate branches and checks and balances." They wanted something evolutionary and Darwinist. So the game was on to change the meaning of law.

It started with the erosion of the Contracts Clause in the Constitution, and continued with the validation of the Social Security Act (which really put the federal government into the general welfare business). Then there was the gutting of the Ninth Amendment and the extension of the Commerce Clause to let the federal government regulate whatever it wanted under the power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."

But we can't go back. If the Supreme Court invalidated current understanding of the "general welfare" it would mean the end of spending on "Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all welfare programs, all spending on K-12 education" and so on. The fact is that by 1942, "we stopped obliging the American government to control itself."

But that's not all. We now have "a lawless legal system." Why? Because legal process is so costly. Because the ancient concept of mens rea is gone. In the old days,

You not only had to do something wrong, you had to be aware that you were doing something wrong. But the law also held that ignorance is no defense.

How did that work? It worked because "there weren't many laws" and most of the laws covered things that were instinctively wrong, like "murder, rape, and theft." But now we have a huge body of law and "the government has chosen to convert mistakes, or sometimes simply choices with which the government disagrees, into crimes."

So we have laws that are arbitrary, complex, subjective, discretionary. That is lawless. But that is just the beginning.

It used to be that lawsuits were rare; but now changes in legal rules make lawyering very profitable. First there was the introduction of Strict Liability which lowered the bar for claiming damages. Then there was the broadening of discovery, where a plaintiff could now go on fishing expeditions into the records of the defendant. Used to be that you had to sue someone in the defendants court district; now you can forum shop. And now the ethical limitation on lawyers for "stirring up litigation" is gone. Then there is the "private enforcement regime" where Congress lets private parties sue against business or individuals in violation of a law.

OK, so it's too easy to sue. But that is just the beginning. Now there's the regulatory state.

Today Congress passes a general law and sets up an agency to come up with the details. Typically the targets of the regulation will have to deal with the bureaucracy and the administrative courts of the regulatory agency. And the Supreme Court through the "Chevron Deference" has held that the regulatory agency is almost always right. It goes back the the Progressive Era faith in government by disinterested experts. The problem is that if the regulators get their eye on you they can destroy you in the expense of the system before you ever get to a real court of law (as opposed to an administrative court that belongs to the regulator).

OK, so the regulators and the administrative judges are too powerful. But that is just the beginning. There is also the corrupted political system.

Murray is not saying that today's politicians "are more venal or dishonest than political of the past." It is just that that

todays' political process has produced politicians who, while keeping within the law, do things that are operationally indistinguishable from the way Third World kleptocrats operate.

Back in the old days, before the 1960s, the government didn't have that many favors to distribute, campaigns weren't that expensive, special interests didn't give much money, and only a few leading politicians got to write the laws.

But with the expansion of the regulatory state, particularly industry-wide regulation by EPA, OSHA, and EEOC, every corporation had to get into the game in Washington DC. Now it takes a ton of money to run for office, there are hordes of lobbyists, and the number of staffers is way up.

In 2012 the Democrats set up a "Model Daily Schedule" for members when in DC. It tells members how to allocate their time.

It includes four hours [per day] of "call time" -- the term for phoning contributors -- and one hour of "strategic outreach" which includes such things as breakfasts and meet-and-greets with supporters.

On top of that, the parties regularly hold fundraising dinners. They go to lobbyists and tell each of them to cough up a million bucks. Because only "friendly" interests get friendly results from office holders.

A kleptocracy? Well, politicians usually seem to manage to get rich in government service. And you have to pay for access to the authorities. And when a congressman calls for a contribution you cough up. And officeholders reward their friends. And "bribes produce results independently of political principle."

Can it be reformed? After George W. Bush pushed through the budget-busting Medicare drug plan, don't expect much reform from Republicans. And Murray goes to Mancur Olson and The Logic of Collective Action for the explanation.

First, advanced democracies inherently permit small interest groups to obtain government benefits for themselves that are extremely difficult for the rest of the polity to get rid of. Second, these successful special interests inevitably pile up over the years until the political system becomes rigid and unresponsive, unable to adapt[.]

In other words,

People who receive government benefits tend to vote for people who support those benefits.

We may call for reform as much as we like, but the fact of all of today's programs and benefits "will push the Republican Party to the center in all presidential elections."  We are not going to get truly "Madisonian majorities in both houses and a Madisonian president."

Something else will have to give. But that's the topic for Part II: Opening a New Front.

President Obama's Racist Legacy

I was to the University of Washington's Meany Center for the Performing Arts last night to hear Rhiannon Giddens. Giddens is a 2000 graduate of Oberlin and she's parlayed her opera degree into a nice little gig doing bluegrass.

What with the opera training, Giddens has a fine singing voice, and she also plays violin and banjo.

Did you know that the banjo was invented by African Americans?

But guess what, this privileged lady is now doing protest, so she contributed to We Are Not For Sale: Songs of Protest by the NC Music Love Army.

Gotta love these Oberlin liberals: their echo chamber lets them say and sing the darndest things!

Hey Rhiannon! When you are performing at the UW World Series isn't it a bit racist to be talking about 4-year-old Chinese child workers? Are there any 4-year-old Chinese workers? Google doesn't seem to think so. But there is this youTube of a 5-year-old Chinese boy operating his Dad's frontloader. Yes, we should definitely put a stop to that! Why pretty soon every 5-year-old All American boy will be demanding to be allowed to do the same!

But here's what I took away from the concert.

President Obama has flown African Americans up a box canyon. The man that talked about ending America's divisions had divided us. Well, what do you expect: he's a politician. Not one, but two of Giddens's sidemen gave us the Black Lives Matter line that the po-lice are targeting African American young men. One of them sang a song about dear old Huey P. Newton.

Look, it's a free country, although we should thank our lucky stars that Giddens's group wasn't a bunch of crazy whites babbling racist hate speech about Waco or Ruby Ridge. Imagine!

Did I mention that Rhiannon Giddens was African American? Who knew? She presents herself as a nice middle-class girl that might be any combination of mixed race -- rather like Cablinasian Tiger Woods. But she did go to Oberlin. That explains a lot.

The thing about politics is, as I like to say, that politics is division. Any professional politician is an expert in dividing up the cake so that he gets 51% of the vote and the other guy is let with the remainder. But the measure of any man is how he rises above the ordinary.

The measure of a general is to rise above merely using his troops as food for powder. He knows that in order to win the battle or the war he is going to use up many of the lives of the young men assembled under military discipline in his command. Can he use those mothers' sons for a worthy cause or are they going to be complete wasted, men dying by the roadside of hunger or sickness -- the usual fate of the soldier -- or shattered in the holocaust of battle?

Same thing with the CEO. The measure of a CEO is to rise above merely using his employees as cannon fodder for the market wars. Can he rise above that? Can he generate a corporate culture that actually helps his employees grow and flourish?

Then there's the politician. Is he just a divider? President Bush's famous line that he was a uniter, not a divider, is actually a sheepish admission of the politician's art. He is a divider, but every politician nurses in his heart the faith that all this dividing is really for a higher, better cause: to unite his nation and lead it from the dusty plains into sunlit uplands.

I don't know what President Obama thinks about the calling of the politician. With any public figure I assume that I know nothing about him, because any public figure is a social construct, a creation of publicity. But the evidence of his actions suggests that he is not a man that has risen above the dust and grime of his calling to something higher and better.

That's a shame: for African Americans -- who he has confirmed in their racism and victimology -- for America --which has not flourished on his watch -- and for the world -- which has not become more peaceful during his leadership.

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.