Reading Hillary Between the Lines

The great question in life is how much to believe your own bullshit. I am talking of everything from religion to politics to economics.

What I mean is, how much should you blindly conduct your life on faith, and how much with a skeptical eye on things, knowing that everything you believe might turn out to be wrong?

My answer is straight forward, for I am a Kantian, believing that we can never know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances.

How much should you believe your religion's creation myth, from God creating the world in seven days to the magical Big Bang of today's speculative scientists?

How much should you believe the eternal growth myth of modern economics, and how much the "immiseration" myth of Marxist economics?

And how much, if you are a Democrat, should you believe in the The Emerging Democratic Majority of women, minorities, the educated and the young prophesied in the 2000s by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira?

Probably the answer is the same as it has been for every loyal foot soldier down the ages. You believe until you find yourself dying of hunger and disease on the side of the road as your army disintegrates in defeat. But then it's too late.

I think that's where we stand in the Democratic ascendancy of the last ten years. It comes through rather clearly in Rich Lowry's piece on "The End of the Clinton Coalition." He writes:

Bill Clinton got elected by peeling off working-class whites and suburbanites from the Republican party, while holding traditional Democratic voters.

 But Barack Obama won with the Emerging Democratic Majority of "minorities, liberals, and upper-class suburbanites."

Elsewhere in the former Clinton coalition, though, his support collapsed, with older and blue-collar whites continuing to flee the Democrats.

That worked pretty well for Obama because of the peculiar enthusiasm of blacks and the educated and youth for his promise of Hope and Change. And when Obama ran for reelection he did a good job turning the white working class off Mitt Romney with his Joe Soptic ad.

But now the white working class is probably gone for good.

Even if Hillary wanted to try to recapture those kinds of voters, it’s not clear that she could, and the effort would risk alienating the Obama supporters she needs if she’s going to win a national election.

So Hillary Clinton is faced with flogging the Obama coalition into one more Big Push.

But let's look at the numbers at uspresidentelection.us. In 2008 Barack Obama won with 69.5 million votes to McCain's 59.9 million. In 2012 Obama won with 63.5 million to Romney's 59.7 million.

Leaving out the natural expansion of the electorate, you think that Hillary is going to beat Obama's turnout in 2012 after eight years of disappointment for the Democratic faithful? And you think that the new generation of GOP operatives haven't been thinking 24-7 about how to bounce the GOP vote up over 70 million?

The big hit against Hillary Clinton is that people can't name a single achievement from her 25 year time on the national stage.

But I think there is another, bigger problem with Hillary Clinton. She is an utterly conventional thinker; she has never vouchsafed a single thought that wasn't liberal conventional wisdom. So how can she possibly inspire Americans with hope and change?

The conventional wisdom about presidential elections is that it is always Four More Years vs. Time for a Change. After eight years of government by one party the instinct for a change is almost irresistible.

And after eight years of Obama there must be a still small voice in the mind of many Democratic voters asking: "What difference did it make?"

Arguing Over the Zombie Corpse of Keynes

As I understand it, the core of Keynesianism is that, in an economic slump, it is a good idea for governments to borrow and spend, particularly on infrastructure. Because stimulus.

The idea is that when the government spends money on a useful thing like a bridge or a highway, there will be a "multiplier" effect, and the monies spent on infrastructure will "multiply" through the rest of the economy. Hence stimulus.

We non Keynesians have always been a bit suspicious about the "multiplier" effect and recent research has indicated that the multiplier might be less than one, meaning that the Keynesian stimulus has an anti-stimulus effect. In real recessions it seems that government spends a lot of the stimulus on e.g., grants to state and local governments to avoid laying off teachers.

Anyway, almost everything the government does is payoff to a special interest. What is the chance that any government spending "stimulates" the economy? I'd say pretty slim, Solyndra.

So it's natural for a non-Keynesian like historian Niall Ferguson to needle Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, who predicted disaster for the "austerity" policy of the Cameron government in Britain in 2010. Instead Britain has outpaced the rest of the EU in economic growth.

So did the Brit economy do better than forecast because of its austerity policy or in spite of it? Good question.

In my view the Keynesians are missing the point.

The point is that in an economic contraction a lot of people can't pay interest on their debt, and, what is worse, cannot repay their debt because their collateral can no longer liquidate the debt. Banks, of course, are the worst of all. this creates a financial crisis.

That's why we have central banks as the "lenders of last resort." The idea is to fold the debt of defaulters into bigger, healthier institutions, including the nation state itself. A lone borrower may be broke and unable to make payments, but the whole nation is not; the bigger, healthier institution can still make its debt payments and keep the credit system afloat.

In the Crash of 1907 the United States did not have a central bank and this was considered to be a Bad Thing. But in the crisis point, J.P. Morgan was told that a certain brokerage house was set to fail on the following Monday. So he got permission from President Roosevelt to do a debt-equity swap and saved the brokerage. End of crisis. Then Morgan grabbed the richest men in America into his library and they did triage on the economy. They lent money only to troubled corporations that they thought would survive if they lent them money.

But the establishment decided that this was not enough and so they legislated the Federal Reserve System. Unfortunately when the Federal Reserve was tested in 1929 it failed in its core mission by allowing a bunch of banks to fail. This reduced the money supply and created a cascade of failure. The result was the Great Depression and it didn't matter what stimulus and what-have-you the government got into. The basic credit system collapsed because the Federal Reserve did not do its job and act as lender of last resort.

The same thing almost happened in the Crash of 2008. The Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, proprietor, let investment bank Lehman Brothers collapse, saying that he didn't have the authority to rescue it. That was in September 2008 and the financial markets went into free fall. In the end, with TARP and other programs amounting to about $20 trillion in outlays and guarantees (see my TARP bailout page), the federal government executed on a gigantic lender-of-last-resort program (meaning, roughly, that the feds took all the dodgy debt onto their own balance sheet) and the economy recovered.

Now my view is that Keynesian stimulus is counterproductive. In my view the problem at a financial crash is that, as the Austrian economists say, too many capital investments have turned out to be malinvestments. Those malinvestments of the previous boom must be liquidated and the resources released into more productive channels. A recession is the period of adjustment for the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom.  But governments are in the business of bailing out politically favored corporations like General Motors, not in liquidating failed businesses so that the resources they consume can be reallocated to better businesses.

There is indeed an argument for temporary relief to workers thrown out of work during the period of adjustment. My argument is that this has a little to do with compassion and a lot to do with keeping disappointed people off the streets until the economy recovers and businesses are hiring again. What people call "austerity" is really the government's attempt to reduce the flood of government benefits so that people will start looking for work instead of reposing on their benefits.

I'm inclined to categorize Keynesianism in the category of what Charles G. Battig calls "bespoke science." It's science that is made to order for politicians by tame scientists. Politicians naturally respond to any economic crisis by spending and borrowing. Keynesianism gives them a fig-leaf to hide their economic embarrassment.

On Witch Hunts and Reigns of Terror

The trouble with the Left is that, time and time again, their politics creates a witch hunt. As in the current hunt for rapists on campus.

Sometimes, time and time again, their politics creates a reign of terror. As in the war against privilege that is beginning to put liberal professors in the tumbrils. Hang on a minute, you social justice warriors! The whole point of cultural Marxism is to hang the white male bourgeoisie out to dry. You're not supposed to start in on good faithful New York Times readers and NPR listeners.

Oh all right. It's not really a reign of terror because nobody has been executed. Not yet.

I was reading about witch-hunts recently, and a couple of features stood out.

First of all, witch hunts tend to occur in borderlands where the writ of central government is weak. E.g., Salem in 1692. Witch hunts tend to reflect the enthusiasm of local yokels anxious to do their bit for truth, justice, and the American Way. The first witch discovered is usually some marginal woman living out of town, e.g., Salem in 1692. The witch hunt usually ends when it starts to devour the rich and powerful. That's when the rich and powerful -- think Graham Chapman's "The Colonel" -- step in to stop the silliness. The other thing you might not know is that the fabled Spanish Inquisition was an attempt to stop the freelance pursuit of heretics, and bring it under sensible central control, complete with due process.

The point is that now, as then, the folks running around spouting off about white male privilege and microaggressions and "safe spaces" are ignorant fools that know not what they do. They are just repeating stuff that their teachers taught them in school. But that's what happens when stupid teachers teach stupid students stupid ideas.

Second, reigns of terror are a natural part of revolutions. On this one I do have chapter and verse. It's Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution. Brinton writes that revolutions tend to have four phases.

• Fall of the Old Regime The old regime is discredited, and probably running out of money. But there is hope, for that is what the revolutionaries are selling.
• Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power Typically the old regime is succeeded by a regime of moderates, but the moderates soon find themselves in conflict with extremists who act illegally and independently of the moderate regime.
• Reign of Terror The extremists win for a bunch of reasons, including that they are more ruthless and better organized. Then they embark on a campaign of terror and virtue, ruthlessly purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.
• Thermidor Humans cannot live forever in a fervor of holy rage; eventually the tension breaks and they fall back into a more normal life. But the solution typically involves a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

You can see that the way to stop this is for the government to stick to its job and to keep its finances in order.

But it's fair to suggest that the failed war and the financial crisis of 2008 set up a kind of mini-revolution with Barack Obama offering Hope and Change. And the lefty extremists seemed to get a green light to push their agenda to the max. So we've had a kind of mini reign of terror with the president showing the way with his extra-legal executive orders. Then there was that nice lady in the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights sending out her "Dear Colleague" letter in 2011 that told universities that if they didn't pursue extra-legal policies to stamp out campus rape, why then their funding might be affected. When every last administrator is a feminist liberal you can see that it would be remarkable if the universities pushed back.

At some point all this enthusiasm in the pursuit of witches and the reign of terror and virtue collapses from exhaustion and the improper capture of regime supporters. And so it ends.

Whether the collapse (or "reaction") ends in a Republican president and Congress with a mandate to do serious reform of the administrative welfare and regulatory state is another question.

Why are Liberals in a Blather Over Gender?

If you are a conservative then gender is pretty simple. Or as they say nowadays, binary. There is male and there is female, and that's all there is to say, except vive la difference.

But liberals are in a complete blather about gender, insisting on the one side that gender is not binary, but multifaceted, and on the other side that cisgendered white males are the very devil.

What is going on here?

I think that my three stage theory of humans explains everything.

On my view there are three kinds of people. There are the People of the Subordinate Self, the peasants, serfs, and victims of the world. They experience themselves as helpless and naturally seek to attach themselves to a powerful lord. They are clients to a great patron. We know who they are: women, minorities, rank-and-file Democratic voters.

Then there are the People of the Responsible Self, the responsible individuals that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. These people think they they are responsible for making their way in the world on their own and they understand that to do this they must serve other people, spouses, children, communities, and consumers. It's up to each individual to figure out how to contribute to society and thus earn a living.

Finally, there are the People of the Creative Self, people who believe that meaning in life comes from work of a creative endeavor. You cannot just go to work and follow the rules; you must create your own work, and discover your own rules, for otherwise you are just a routinist and a mass man.

In my view, it is easy to be a subordinate self; anyone can give up and become a victim. It is challenging, but rewarding, to become a responsible self. Most people are up to the challenge of responsibility. But it is very hard to be a successful creative person. The reason is simple: many are called, but few are chosen.

In our modern America, as I've written before, the nation is divided into two cultural/political camps. On one side are the People of the Responsible Self and they identify as conservatives, libertarians, Christians, Republicans. On the other side is a coalition of the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self and they identify as liberals, progressives, atheists, victims, Democrats.

In the old days liberals and progressives were proudly elitist and served their subordinate clients as great lords, but the strain, the stress as we like to say, was unbearable. That's because the life of a person truly dedicated to the creative life is remarkably challenging.

So liberals came up with a cunning plan. Instead of living lives of true creativity they would live lives of ersatz creativity. They would get get tenure in universities and churn out ersatz scholarship; they would get creative on gender, faking life as creative people. But above all they would reimagine themselves as victims, and they would partake also of life as subordinate people. They would create and inhabit dozens of sexual or gender identities and also pose as helpless victims of the white patriarchy.

Now you understand what all the Title IX rape crisis is about. Now you understand what all the gay marriage thing is about. Now you understand the whole Bruce/Caitlin Jenner media mega-splosion.

But it's all a lie, and the worst kind of lie: the lie people tell themselves.

The most creative thing that most people can ever hope for is to create and raise a clutch of children. A few people get to create new mechanical contraptions; a few people get to create new abstract concepts. But the most that the overwhelming majority of people can hope for is the responsible task of searching out a mate, creating and raising children with that mate, and leaving the world a better place than they found it.

But we humans are forever tempted by squirrels! We are forever getting distracted from the hard work of making a living and caring for those we love. We are forever imagining what might have been, what could have been, what should have been, given a couple of breaks.

And of course when we have power, cultural and political power, we get corrupted by that power, and we declare that our sordid little appetites and oppressions are actually noble and grand.

Usually we only fool ourselves, like our liberal friends in America, right here, right now.

My Problem with Gay Marriage, Transology

I was reading the comments on an article over at RedState about the Jenner transsexual case, and was struck by the repeated posts of "Zoe_Brain," referring to countless scientific papers that reported on the perfectly natural and physical nature of transsexualism.

Of course the other commenters were making standard conservative arguments against transsexualism by appealing to natural law and God's law.

In other words, we had "is" battling with "ought."

Now I take a different view on the whole World War G and World War T issue, and I suppose that my view amounts to "social Darwinism."

To tell the truth, I don't really know what Social Darwinism is supposed to be, only that it is bad.
Darwinism Good, Social Darwinism Bad. Everybody knows that.

Only I don't understand why there is any difference between the natural selection of beneficial genetic traits in the survival of living things and the natural selection of beneficial social/cultural traits in the survival of living things.

That was just a rhetorical flourish. Of course I know why Social Darwinism is Bad.

If the notion that society advances by the natural selection of social and cultural memes then the whole Leftist project is rubbish. The whole Leftist project is based on the notion that we know what is the best social/cultural arrangement for humans; it is the arrangement being advocated by the current generation of leftist political activists.

Let us therefore try to draw a bright line between left and right on this. In the leftist view, the just society is discovered by left-wing activism, organizing people politically and imposing the leftist solution on the rest of society by force. The right has a whole panoply of views, from the Christian view of God's law to the Enlightenment idea of natural law to the Burkean view of gradual reform, having regard for the ancestors and the generation yet unborn to the Hayekian view of human society as an irreducibly complex social organism. Force may or may not be appropriate.

My view is: we don't know how to organize society for the survival and the flourishing of humans and other species on this planet. All we have is a bunch of theories. So here is my take on the present issues:

Gay marriage: It's telling that religions down the ages have voted against homosexuality. Could it be that the religions that have valorized homosexuality have disappeared from this earth?

Transsexualism: Completely new, because prior to the current generation we didn't have the medical technology to do anything about it. But see gay marriage above.

Sexual revolution: Religions tend to be strongly pro-natal and strongly against libertine sexual behavior in women. And of course honor among women is chastity. Could the collapse of child-bearing in educated women, particularly in Germany where 40 percent of college-educated women are childless, be telling us something?

All I am saying is that when you normalize cultural memes like gay marriage, transsexualism, and sexual freedom in general, you are launching cultural memes into the social world that might have unanticipated consequences.

In fact, despite all the catchphrases about "freedom" and "safe spaces," all cultures valorize certain social behaviors and shame other behaviors. Some people shame sluts; other people shame privileged white males. The question is: which social behaviors are beneficial? And by beneficial I mean "promote human survival and flourishing."

We don't know. I'm a libertarian conservative, so I believe in freedom, because I believe that letting people make mistakes is the best road to the future. That way, I believe, mistakes will be made, and the people that make them will have to pay the price, even to the extent of getting a Darwin Award.

In my view, gay marriage and the normalization of transsexualism are mistakes because they encourage people to believe that there is no cost to veering off the mainstream of heterosexual pairing, marriage, and raising the next generation. People that do that should know that they are going off the mainstream of life.

In my view we already know that sexual libertinism is destructive, that the delay of childbearing is destructive, that the devaluing of lifetime marriage is destructive. But we are not allowed to say it.

In my view we will pay, at some point, a frightful cost, for our present cultural and social follies, courtesy of the left. And that cost might be as high as western civilizational annihilation.

Because that's how the world works. People and groups introduce political, economic, and cultural memes into the world. Some of the memes die immediately, but others grow and take over the world. Any meme, even one that takes over the world, might be destructive; we just don't know until we try it. People come into the world and adopt the memes they find close at hand. When they do so, they lash their lives to the mast of their particular cultural meme-boat.

And as their life works out they find out whether their choice was a good idea or whether it was a good idea at the time.

I don't have a problem with gays living together, if they want, or transsexuals changing their body parts, if they have the means to do it.

But I think that it's a mistake for society to go beyond tolerance to celebration of behaviors that veer off the mainstream of life. Because survival.

Look on the Bright Side of Obama's Follies

Today in National Review the classicist Victor Davis Hanson writes about the world as Pottersville, the mean and nasty world that is developing without the good-natured power of the United States to stand up to the Potters of the world. Pottersville is what the ideal New England small town Bedford Falls would have become had It's a Wonderful Life hero George Bailey not lived and the greedy banker Mr. Potter had had his sneering, cynical way.

Golly Gee. That's just a day after I wrote about the "Fargo" Presidency, comparing Obama to clueless car dealer Jerry Lundegaard, who thought he could make some quick money by having his wife kidnapped. What could go wrong, I asked.

Yes, things do look like a mess, what with the Iran threat and the ISIS threat and the Putin threat, but they always do. Just think about the last 100 years. In World War I it was the Hunnish threat. After 1917 it was the Bolshevik threat. Then it was the Nazi threat. the End of the World was nigh.

After World War II we got the Cold War and the global Communist threat. Only this time we had the additional threat of global thermonuclear war. Then, with Korea, we discovered the Maoist threat. Then with the birth of Israel and its wars, the Nationalist Arab threat. Then it was the domino threat, with the Soviets backing anti-colonialist thugs all over the world. Then Communism collapsed, China and then India took up capitalism, and lo and behold now we have the Islamic threat.

And that's to say nothing of all the threats that liberals throw up, from racism to pollution to population explosion to global cooling to sexism to world hunger to homophobia to ozone holes to global warming to peak energy to islamophobia.

Yes, but after the disasters of Obama, what will come of the United States? Can we roll back the thugs and the jihadis and resume our climb to the sunlit uplands of live-and-let-live under limited government and capitalism? The simple answer is that we don't know.

But think back to the middle of the Civil War. I wonder what people thought then about the future of the United States. Or back in December 1776 when Thomas Paine wrote "These are the times that try men's souls." What about the days of the Robber Barons when everyone was railing against the evil railroads? Or in the mid 1800s when the Irish were staggering ashore more dead than alive from the coffin ships. Truth is that the past always looks more tranquil and ordered than it seemed at the time.

My favorite example of the past is the British Empire. We like to think of it as Britain painting the world red. But actually it was one disaster after another with the government trying to pick up the pieces. Local chaps on the ground out across the other side of the world were always getting into a scrape. Before the days of the telegraph it would take three to six months for the news of the disaster to get back to Britain and then the government had to decide what to do about it. If anything. But first it had to pretend to the domestic public that everything was in hand and there was no need to worry.

But think about the disasters: losing North America; the Crimea War; the mess of the Indian Mutiny (called the Great Uprising in India); Gordon in Khartoum; the South African messes ending in the Boer War. Nothing but incompetence recovered at enormous expense in lives and treasure.

The good thing about the Years of the Obama Disasters is that they have really discredited the Democratic Party and liberalism with the American people. It's going to make really hard going for Democrats for a few political seasons. That means that there will be a calm in the usual trade winds of liberal cultural domination. That will provide a chance to do some genuine reform that rolls back government, just a little, for just a while, until the political climate returns to normal and the liberal trade winds resume.

And think of the gift of Hillary Clinton as the Democrats' Anointed! We conservatives and Republicans should be paying the Democrats to keep her in the race.

Hmm. I wonder.

Obama: Not Cloward-Piven but Jerry Lundegaard

Some people think that the Obamis are executing on a brilliant Cloward-Piven strategy to make the country ungovernable. That's why the president and his minions are "angrying up" African Americans against white cops killing young blacks.

All part of the plan, according to John Nolte.

Keep ‘em down. Keep ‘em angry. Pretend you are their savior not their oppressor, and keep ‘em voting for the very thing destroying them: big government and the Democrats who control it.

This sinister plot is no secret. It’s openly called the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

But I think that the Cloward-Piven Strategy, named after two lefty professors predicting revolution, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. Sure, it can angry up the proles so that radical leaders can enlist them into a political street army. Then the police hold back from vigorous policing and the violence gets worse. But then what?

I suspect the same goes for Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's all about mobilizing the urban working or underclass against The Man, making him follow his rules. But like Gandhi's non-violence, it only works against a "Man" that operates according to bourgeois law and a "Man" that has compassion for the struggling masses.

But the question is, with Cloward-Piven and Alinsky, what next? When you've got your urban army set up and organized, what do you do with it? Can you look around a corner and see where your lefty activism is going to take you?

There, in my opinion, is where things start to go wrong.

It's like the set-up in the movie Fargo. Car dealer Jerry Lundegaard sets up a cunning plan to have a couple of low-lifes kidnap his wife so his rich father-in-law can pay the ransom and Jerry can get his hands on his father-in-law's money. What could go wrong? As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds would say.

Everything, that's what.

Think of the Obama presidency. After the biggest financial crash since 1929, the Obamis say Hey, let's nationalize the health care system, let's drench the energy sector in stupid green subsidies and drive coal plants out of business. Oh and let's make sure we get out of the slump with a quick $1 trillion stimulus to keep state and local government employees on the job. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from a failed Obamacare built on lies and a fracking revolution that makes nonsense out of green energy. And an excruciatingly slow recovery because of all the new costs that the Obamis have thrown over the economy.

Now the Obamis think it's a brilliant idea to end the "broken windows" and "stop and frisk" policing of the last 20 years. Because Black Lives Matter. Because liberals hate the unjust "stop and frisk" policing policy that unjustly targets young men of color. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from murder to mayhem. Here's Leah Barkoukis in "Families of Shooting Victims to de Blasio: 'We Need Stop-and-Frisk'." You mean that urban residents actually want unjust and racist "stop and frisk?" Golly. Who could have seen that coming? In Baltimore:

Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend.

And now in Baltimore "the people who not too long ago decried the presence of police in their communities are now are wishing they’d come back."

There are two narratives about urban policing. There is the Robert Peel narrative, that in the modern big city policemen are needed to control young lower-class single men. Robert Peel was the guy that created the Metropolitan Police in Britain in 1829. Then there is the progressive narrative that the "gentle giants" are victims of the system. Because racism, or inequality.

The "broken windows/stop and frisk" policy belongs in the Peel tradition and was developed in response to the urban riots of the 1960s and the explosion in crime thereafter. The combination of riots and crime created the "law-and-order" politics that elected Richard Nixon to the presidency.

The idea of "stop and frisk" is that you go after minor street crimes on the theory that the guys creating street disturbances are the same as the guys doing the murders.  Says Wiki:

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy, including the controversial mass use of "stop, question, and frisk" by the New York City Police Department.

When Wiki writes "great debate" and "controversial" they mean that liberals hate it.

But there is a bigger issue that "stop and frisk" solves. The problem is that people in the inner city won't testify about gang murders; they are too afraid. Of course the inner-city folks blame the po-lice for their failure to arrest and convict the killers. But "everybody knows" who done the killings, including the police. So the police get their own back by arresting the known thugs for minor crimes whenever they catch them. The young thugs and their liberal activist mentors hate this.

And so when Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York City he pushed back on "stop and frisk".  Of course he did; he's a progressive and progressives hate "stop and frisk." And in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore police all over the nation have eased back on "stop and frisk." Hey, why risk your freedom and your family and your career because you didn't dot the 'i's and cross the 't's in your last arrest? But coincident with the backoff in "stop and frisk" has been a startling rise in urban killing. Who could have see this coming? As always Heather Mac Donald is the go-to person on this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

What we are getting is almost a scientifically controlled experiment to measure the effectiveness of "stop and frisk." We all know, because we all understand scientific method, that "correlation is not causation." That goes back to Hume. In the last 20 years the crime rate has come down dramatically. And also police forces across the nation have been implementing "stop and frisk." But hey, that's just correlation.

But now, courtesy of Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio and the lefty rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore, we have a suspension of "stop and frisk." And low and behold, urban killings are up sharply.

I'd say that this is just about as close as we get in this world to "causation."

What is the explanation for the dumb-as-posts policies of our liberal friends, who just cannot seem to learn? Why in the world have liberals insisted that "stop and frisk" was mere racism and oppression, and are now seeing their opposition to effective policing blow up in their faces?

Here is my evaluation, gleaned from a commenter at National Review. The answer to the question is that liberalism is not a governing philosophy. It is a secular religion. "The Z Man" is commenting on the inability of the progressive ruling class to curb the Clintons:

The central issue is that Progressives lack the ability to police their ranks, other than the hunting of heretics. They are good at chasing off a guy like Juan Williams for apostacy, but they can't figure out how to police common criminals like the Clintons.

See what he is saying? He is saying that the only thing the Progressives know how to do is to police orthodoxy, and hunt the heretics. But that is a tactic of a church or a religion. It does not try to look around the corner and think about what the hunting of heretics might do in the larger world. It does not think about a code of honor for the governing class, either from a moral or a strategic perspective.

And here is The Z Man's big point. "A political class with a moral grounding would have cut off [the Clintons] long before they made it to national politics." But in 1992 the Dems were desperate.

But now we have the "Fargo Presidency." Hey, let's angry up the African Americans and drive them to the polls in 2016. What could go wrong?

Well, everything, that's what. Let's just start with the vital Republican "war on women." If everything is quiet at home and abroad then it's a fine idea to terrify women into believing that evil white Republican men want to take their contraception away from them. But suppose the news is full of urban rioting and the sudden rise in crime?

Then America's biddable women, that once were soccer moms and then security moms and then hands-off-my-uterus moms, would now become law-and-order moms. It's visceral. A woman cannot begin to function as the bringer of life until she is safe. As Jack London opines in The Sea Wolf, when the ship starts sinking the women start shrieking. They expect the men to make them safe. Of course Jack London was a jerk and an alcoholic and a drug addict. But he did believe in socialism.

The number one question women have is "Mr. President, Is it Safe?" And it looks like "safe spaces" will be front and center in 2016.

Thanks to the Fargo Presidency.