Because Life is Too Easy

The excellent John Derbyshire opines today that "In advanced societies, the average amount of reality people can bear has declined across the past few decades."

He proceeds to talk about about the denial of reality involved in the Jenner and the Dolezal affairs.

There is nothing world-shattering in this, says Derb. After all, T.S. Eliot reminded us that "human kind cannot bear very much reality."

Derb writes about the decline in reality:

This, I believe, has something to do with the ever-increasing availability of screen-based entertainment (movies, TV, the internet), something to do with the decline of religion, something to do with the revolution in manners that we call “political correctness,” and something to do with the falloff in violence, as chronicled by Steven Pinker.

While I agree with Derb's assignment of blame I think that the first reason for the falloff in reality is that we can afford to.

When nearly all children survive infancy and we are not losing 0.5 percent of people a year to violent death then the urgency of getting children on the ground and fed and off the nest becomes rather less urgent.

When most of us can get a decent job by sleepwalking through school for 12 or 16 years, then we can afford to indulge ourselves in a bit of fantasy in between the times we have to show up for work.

We can afford to have educated twentysomethings wasting their youth pretending to be artists and writers in some yeasty urban "ideopolis." We can afford to have people experimenting with gender. We can afford to have and "underclass" of violent gangbangers and welfare scroungers. We can even afford to have people bullying other people around with their stupid and twisted doctrines of social justice. We can afford to have a huge government edifice doing useless things with extraordinary ineptitude.

We can afford this because we are so rich, as a result of 200 years of the Great Enrichment. If and when things turn south than the penalty for living in a fantasy will go up.

Of course, I think, following my piece "The Age of Ineptitude," that the big problem at any time is the notion, common among ruling classes, that the rulers are ordained by God to rule over their subjects with compassion and wisdom. This, I believe, is a vicious fantasy, and it always has been. It was bad when the king was the representative of the sky god on earth, and it is bad when the ruling class is an educated, evolved class of administrators and experts, ordained to rule by their knowledge and their expertise.

Government is force. Its job is to do the things that cannot be done by social cooperation, because of bad guys. There is nothing of wisdom or of compassion in the workings of government. It is an armed minority occupying and defending territory with armed might, and it can only stay in power by rewarding its soldiers and its supporters. It is a bad idea, but better than the alternative. Government always and everywhere is accompanied by chicanery, cruelty, injustice, ineptitude, folly, and brutality.

Some men, in some times, have advanced the notion that the way to deal with government is to limit it -- to limit its powers and limit its scope. But that notion imposes a harsh reality on people and requires them to look to themselves and their neighbors for safety and prosperity, and they would rather not. Only in times of trouble are people are forced get serious and lose the fantasy or lose their lives.

But in prosperous times like the present, when life is too easy, there is no need for every person to lose the fantasy.

Derb finishes with an important apércu. In the old days, religion focused wishful thinking into sensible channels like "kindly Sky Fathers listening to our prayers." But not any more.

With that focusing lens gone, wishful thinking runs amok. “I feel female/black, so I am female/black!” “Race creates tensions we don’t know how to manage, so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist!”

Still, with the Great Enrichment we can afford to have half the country zoned out. The only problem arises when the Great Emergency arises and we all have to pay attention.

But will we know it when we see it? There are always alarms and excursions and would-be saviors telling us to mind our ways because the End of the World is nigh. How can we tell if it really is the End of the World, or just another political/religious scam, like global warming?

The Age of Ineptitude

What is wrong with our government that it can't, e.g., keep the data on its own government employees out of the hands of the Chinese? Why doesn't President Obama do something?

And why, to ask an impertinent question, does the director of the Office of Personnel Management still have a job? Last week a Nobel Laureate resigned his sinecures because of a stupid joke. But OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, testifying before Congress, declined to resign.

I will tell you what is going wrong. There are two things.

First, our government class operates under the world-view that a perfect society is possible with government by the right sort of people with the right sort of evolved world-view, and government should be conducted by rational processes advised by technical experts. To them, the only problem is that we have not yet applied a sufficient amount of reason and expertise.

This, you will agree, is a new idea, at least since the notion of the divine right of kings took a tumble. In the high ascendancy of Dickens in Bleak House, for example, it was received opinion that government was corrupt and inept, from its law courts to its Circumlocution Office staffed by Barnacles and Stiltstockings. But no longer. Today we are all taught from our cradles that the failures of government result from insufficient government.

Second, under Chantrill's Law of Government, the sole purpose of government is to occupy territory, tax its inhabitants, and reward the government's supporters. So of course the government lets Lois Lerner retire on full pension. And of course all the failures don't result in anyone getting fired. These are the government's supporters, silly.

It all dovetails. Government failures don't faze the governing class because their faith in their own rationalism and social evolution and expertise blinds them the possibility that they could be horribly, foolishly wrong and inept.

And this inability to see no evil, hear no evil, descends down to the everyday tasks of government like health care and education. Nobody really serously looks at the government failures in things like health care or education. Because that would mean casting aspersions on Our Healthcare Professionals and Our Teachers.

And yet it is nothing for people to blast capitalism to kingdom come whenever some tiny safety defect turns up in a consumer product.

I am reading Jürgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms and it is driving me crazy. This is a guy that wrote a two volume tome on The Theory of Communicative Action where he developed the notion to have the dominative systems of the modern world in government and business balanced by the intersubjective dialog in the face-to-face "lifeworld." But Between Facts and Norms assumes that the rationalizations and actions of people like him are the sole requirement for a just and flourishing society. Everything can be solved by passing laws, administering bureaucracies, and issuing regulations.

No! The requirement for a just and flourishing society is that we can and we do fix our mistakes, starting with the recognition that almost everything humans do is wracked with mistake and error and that only painful effort enables us to undo our mistakes and move forward. That must mean, for starters, that when educated and evolved people lead society down a rabbit hole following their religious or secular faith there is a possibility for someone to say: "hey, this isn't working" and to have people listen. It means that the governing class should not have the power to inflict their faith on the rest of us without the rest of us being able to rise up and say: No!

Jim Geraghty writes that "An NR commenter calls our current system of government an “ineptocracy.”" I tell you what I call that. I call that a start.

We have got to lose the current Panglossian zeitgeist that looks fondly on our present age as the best of all possible worlds as long as the right people are in charge, and we must rebrand it as the Age of Ineptitude. There is no silver political bullet that leads us from the dusty plains to sunlit uplands. There is only the climb, one step at a time, interspersed with discouraging retreats whenever we find that we have been on the wrong trail that leads to the bottom of an unclimbable cliff instead of around it.

Meanwhile, we must go work in the garden.

Dolezal's Resignation: A Window into the SJW Mind

We conservatives don't often get to read the internal communications of the social justice warriors, the jargon, the corporate bubblespeak, that they emit when talking to each other. But Rachel Dolezal's resignation letter, penned by the fake black head of the Spokane NAACP to her fellow SJWs, gives us a window in the the lefty soul.

Dolezal starts with delicious bureaucratic gobbledegook.

Many issues face us now that drive at the theme of urgency. Police brutality, biased curriculum in schools, economic disenfranchisement, health inequities, and a lack of pro-justice political representation are among the concerns at the forefront of the current administration of the Spokane NAACP.

Notice what is missing: Jobs, jobs, jobs.  Because our liberal friends these days, and presumably their social justice clients, aren't really that interested in jobs. (I'm assuming that "economic disenfranchisement" is really about access to some sort of government privilege rather than ordinary access to the job market.)

Then Dolezal segues into delicious corporate PowerPoint-ese.

While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death outcome. 

Yay! Gotta love those "Game Changers." It's really delicious to see these anti-capitalist SJWs using the very language that sales managers use to motivate their sales crews out there in corporate-land.

And of course we are all interested in the Game Changers, even the lowest of the low: the racists, sexists, and homophobes that so pollute our world. Let's take those bullet points and restore some sanity:

• Criminal Justice & Public Safety. Because of gangs in the inner city it is very difficult to get residents to testify against gang thugs. So we must restore the "broken windows" policing policy that the Ferguson Effect has stopped. Why is "borken windows" so important? It gets around the fear of "snitching" by using the testimony of police officers when arresting and trying gang members. So it puts them away for minor infractions, when people are too afraid to testify against them for their drive-by shootings.
• Health & Healthcare. Let's repeal Obamacare and convert Medicaid into a cash subsidy with which low-income African Americans can buy real health care, instead of the second-rate care they get with Medicaid.
• Education. Let's implement school choice nationwide and give black mamas the chance to get their kids out of violent inner-city schools that basically act as jobs programs rather than tickets out of the ghetto.
• Economic Sustainability. Goodness knows what the twisted liberal meaning of that is. I suspect it may be that people with jobs can never be fired. But the truth about the economy in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that there is no "safe space" where today's workers can hide from the gusty winds of economic growth. People need to get a decent education and they need to surrender to the market. Any policy that "saves jobs" is a policy that is taking money away from Hillary Clinton's "everyday Americans" and giving it to people with powerful friends.
• Voting Rights & Political Representation. I suppose this is all about the Democrats' efforts to gin up the black vote by insisting that Voter ID and limited early voting is about bringing back Jim Crow. But if I were an African American I'd be thinking about illegal immigrants voting and taking jobs away from people like me.

Dolezal finishes with the usual call to action that every motivational speaker uses at the end of a speech.

It's about moving the cause of human rights and the Black Liberation Movement along the continuum from Resistance to Chattel Slavery to Abolition to Defiance of Jim Crow to the building of Black Wall Street to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement to the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement and into a future of self-determination and empowerment.

I like that "future of self-determination and empowerment." It reads a lot like my own notion of "responsible individualism." And indeed I have faith that most white Americans that haven't given in to the temptation of putting on a fright wig to access the benefits of politicking-while-black would like nothing better than for African Americans to come out of their self-imposed racial ghetto and join the rest of responsible individual Americans trying to make a decent life with work and marriage and children in the greatest country in the world. 

Politics, Clinton, and "Fighting"

Back in 2000 when Al Gore ran for the presidency by "fighting for the people against the powerful" I was offended. And then when I looked at his campaign website, I found more fights, as in fighting for seniors, fighting for children, etc.

Come on, I thought. We are all Americans. Why do we need to fight?

But of course, Al Gore was right. Politics is a fight, it is civil war by other means.

But we stalwarts in the bourgeoisie and the established middle class don't want to open old fights. We want to prosper and flourish in the existing system with its various status quos and compromises.

Now comes Hillary Clinton with her Four Fights. Not for her the Four Freedoms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Hillary's into Fighting. Here's what she said in her campaign relaunch speech on June 14, 2015.

"If you'll give me the chance, I'll wage and win Four Fights for you," Clinton told the crowd. Those fights are: 1) the fight "to make the economy work for everyday Americans"; 2) the fight "to strengthen America's families"; 3) the fight "to harness all of America's power, smarts, and values to maintain our leadership for peace, security, and prosperity"; and 4) the fight for "reforming our government and revitalizing our democracy."

Yeah. Don't we all. But there's one little problem. Well, four problems, if you want to get technical. Today's Democratic Party and today's liberals like Hillary Clinton are the main force in the land that's standing in the way of these Four Fights. Let's take them one by one.

1. Make the economy work for everyday Americans. The whole point of the administrative welfare state and the entitlement programs is to sew up the economy into silos and turn the economy into a rigid administrative system that responds to powerful national interests. For everyday Americans to get ahead they need a political and economic space that keeps the Bigs on the sidelines so they don't gobble up all the opportunities for themselves and their clients. Don't look for today's Democrats to do that.
2. Strengthen America's families. When Democrats say this they always mean more entitlements and government handouts. But the way to strengthen America's families is to reduce government handouts so that women need men once again in order to start a family and provision it. The decay in American's families is a result of government programs that encourage women to marry the state instead of the father of their children. Don't look for today's Democrats to incentivize women to marry men rather than government.
3. Harness all of America's power, smarts, and values to maintain our leadership for peace, security, and prosperity. This of course is about the Pax Americana. But it is so attenuated that it is meaningless. Because it means  nothing until it is informed by a strategy. I talked to a military strategist a week ago, and he approved of President Obama's aimlessness because the American people weren't ready to do anything. Very good. But the Next President of the United States is going to have to formulate and persuade the American people about America's role in the world. Don't look for today's Democrats to do that.
4. Reforming our government and revitalizing our democracy. Oh please. If there is one thing today's Democratic Party stands for it is to oppose all efforts to reform government. I get that "revitalizing our democracy" means mobilizing the Democratic base to believe that Republicans want to take them back to the Jim Crow era. Don't look for today's Democrats to take one step in reforming our government and revitalizing our democracy.

What Hillary Clinton is really telling us, between the lines, is that she knows what America needs but  she really can't do anything about it.

The simple fact about the modern era is that we have learned that our prosperity comes from technological and entrepreneurial surprises that emerge out of nowhere and cunningly sidestep the best efforts of government to block them. Everything that the modern educated elite and the modern Democratic Party stands for amounts to stopping economic change and protecting established interests from the wave of the future.

The best thing that can happen to America is for Hillary Clinton to lose the next election and for Republicans to undo as many of the entitlements and carve-outs that Democrats have written into the law over the past century. They won't dare to do much, of course, because humans are dogs-in-the-manger that defend their privileges till the world is collapsing around them.

But there is always the chance that they might do something, and that's worth voting for. And fighting for.

If Every Young Liberal Longs to be an Activist, What About Conservatives?

A liberal friend recently confided to me that she'd always wanted to get into "activism." And I must say that the notion struck me forcibly. It wasn't that I didn't already know that. I just hadn't heard it from someone I knew personally, and I hadn't thought about what that meant for her and for me.

I've been thinking about this for about a year now, and I've come to think that it encapsulates the whole question of the culture war. If young liberals all want to escape the necessity of earning a living and doing activism, where does that leave conservatives? Do we just sit back and take it?

It's the basic question. Liberals want to get away from their hum-drum little lives, as Lina Lamont might have said, and fight injustice. Conservatives? What do we dream about sitting in front of the computer in our cubicle? Living responsible lives as spouses and parents? Fighting against government corruption? Reforming the welfare state?

It's really important, because according to the latest opinion polls they are making more liberals these days. Peter Wehner has the numbers and he wonders if conservatives are losing the future.

If we are losing the future it's no mystery why. Our kids are being raised by liberal labor-union teachers and all they get is 100% liberal line and liberal activism that issues from the cultural Marxism agenda of identity politics. Lots of nice liberal girls decide that they want to do activism, just like nice Catholic girls a century ago got a "vocation," and they end up indoctrinating our kids and proselytizing their secular liberal religion.

If you wonder about the kids, I got a chilling lesson from R.K. Modena, the daughter of a Filipino reporter and activist. She reports from the years when her father was the Filipino ambassador in East Germany. The young people were totally indocrinated by the "system;" they knew nothing except what they had been taught by the government. Here's what happened when a young woman got smuggled out into the West.

One of the people working at the consulate fell in love with an East German woman. The only way they could marry was if she escaped East Berlin, and so he smuggled her out. The details of that I don’t know, but I remember my dad saying she was struck dumb for three days from sheer culture shock after she saw West Berlin for the first time – and realized that everything she’d been raised to believe, and had known as truth was in fact a carefully manufactured and maintained lie that was possible only through total control of information.

If only that liberal secular religion didn't always call for more government, more spending, more subsidies, and more jobs for liberals. And lies. And total indoctrination of "our kids."

So what are we going to do about it?

I'd say we need a two point program. Point One is to develop a culture of conservative activism. We want millions of young Americans earnestly working towards solving our national problems by reforming and reducing government. I had a email from a woman church member in Vermont last week, wanting data on Vermont spending on welfare. She wrote:

My project is for a church coalition considering a serious attempt at offering alternative services/approaches to poverty in the state of Vermont. 

See what I mean? Here you have conservative activism, honest, earnest Americans trying to make government smaller and people bigger.

Point Two is to delegitimize liberal activism. And I would say it starts with the idea that liberal activism makes government bigger and people smaller. It's time to ask whether the answer to all our problems is another law, another entitlement, another subsidy, another bureaucracy, another unholy alliance between activists and government bureaucrats. I mean, it's 150 years since Marx demanded justice for the workers and for government force as the solution. Here we are, almost two orders of magnitude richer. Couldn't we dial back the coercion, now that the poor are doing better?

How does this work? How about the presidential campaign of Carly Fiorina? She is doing a full court press to change the dialog on women and feminism:

“A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses,” Mrs. Fiorina told a free-market interest group dinner in Washington in speech that was billed as her first major policy address since declaring her candidacy May 5. “A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO or run for president.

Right. And I'd say that a real feminist is a woman who disdains "safe spaces." She's a responsible woman and she owns her choices.

“The left fights to protect late-term abortions and sues the Little Sisters of the Poor, but they oppose over-the-counter birth control,” she told the crowd.

You see what she's doing? She's turning the left's rhetoric back on it, making liberal feminists the issue rather than dead white males and male privilege.

Or, as I like to say: "There is only one kind of privilege in America: Liberal privilege."

When the Ruling Class Defines Humor It Isn't Humor

We are having a little ruction this week about Jerry Seinfeld. He's been saying that he can't do colleges any more because the students are so politically correct.

Even his 14-year-old daughter has caught the bug, telling her mother "that's sexist!"

So a "politically correct" student writes a response so correct that, surely, it has to be a parody.

The official line of the liberal bullies is that it is wrong to make fun of women and minorities because they don't have the power. This is in the same chapter as the line the blacks can't be racist because they don't have the power.

Here is liberal Dean Obaidallah:

Where Seinfeld and I disagree is that I don't see "political correctness" as being inherently bad -- unless it goes way overboard. To me, "political correctness" is about being respectful to minorities -- be it based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.

Quite so. Except that political correctness doesn't work that way. It's more about liberals saying "you will be respectful to minorities who vote Democrat or you will lose your job." Which is a bit different.

When we unpack this and recall that the Democratic Party is an over-under coalition of the powerful and the marginalized, you can see thatit all makes sense. The PC brigade are really saying "You cannot make fun of our political clients." Which is what the ruling class has been doing since time out of mind.

Laughter and humor, of course, are mysteries. Why do humans laugh and make jokes? Let us just suggest that they play a part in the drama of human sociality.

Back in the day when liberals thought of themselves as cultural underdogs, oppressed by the Puritans and the WASPs, we were told that humor and satire were important tools for the oppressed to speak truth to power. But that was then. That was when liberals could get political advantage out of humor and satire. But now that liberals are politically and especially culturally dominant, now you're not allowed to make fun of liberals and their political clients.

Now liberals say it's OK to do humor and satire if you are "punching up" but not if you are "punching down" to e.g., Muslims.

But this is typical of liberals lying to themselves. Because when they say you can't punch down to Muslims they are really saying that you can't punch down to Muslims who are political clients of the liberals. Want to punch down to fundamentalist Christians? Perfectly OK. Want to punch down to white crackers like Honey Boo Boo? Go right ahead. Want to sneer at NASCAR fans? No problem.

But, as usual, liberals are their own worst enemies. Back in the day, kings used to have court jesters. "There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail." The rulers can't afford to cut off all feedback from their subjects; they need to know what is bubbling away down there.

But liberals keep narrowing the Overton Window about what you are allowed to say in America. And they are becoming more and more specific about demanding that we care about liberal agenda items.

The result is that liberals don't have a clue about what Americans think and feel. Too bad. When you are a ruling class and you shut yourself off from feedback and deny the right of the people to petition the government about their grievances, and forbid the people to laugh at the rulers and their little darlings you are not just unjust rulers, you are fools.

When you forbid your subjects to laugh at you and your political clients there is a good chance that you won't be a ruling class for much longer.

How Does the Next President Beat the Liberal Activism Culture?

The current "rape culture" flap was started by a "Dear Colleague" letter from an official at the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. The letter -- which was not a law, not a regulation -- told universities that they'd better put in a Star Chamber system of adjudicating accusations of sexual harassment. Or else they'd be violating Title IX, the federal law that is designed to "end discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding." Jessica Gavora, who's written a book on Title IX gives us the state of play. As she writes:

As long as Title IX’s victims were wrestlers or swimmers from low-revenue men’s sports that were jettisoned to achieve participation-parity with women’s sports, nobody much cared. But now that the law is being turned into a tool to suppress free speech on college campuses, even liberals are starting to cry foul.

At least they are crying foul when card-carrying liberals are involved.

Did you know that the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education has about 950 lawyers working for it? I read this recently, but can't find it on Google.

And of course "Title IX" is just one tiny part of the federal government's activities in service to liberaldom's identity politics agenda.

The context on this, for me, is supplied by the following points.

• About a year or so ago a liberal friend told me at lunch that she had always wanted to do "activism." You can see what is going on here; liberal secularists turn to activism in lieu of religion. Doing activism, for them, is making a difference in the world. But what they do not realize is that government is force. It is one thing to work for a better world; it is another thing to empower government bureaucrats to enforce your will on the world. If their activism involved advocating for a new law or a new regulation or a new "Dear Colleague" letter they are saying: We Need More Force.
• There is a whole universe of liberal groups out there doing activism. There really isn't anything close to a conservative or libertarian counterforce to the liberal activism culture. But the liberal activism culture is everywhere, advocating for more government, more spending, more regulations, more bullying, more force.
• Since 2009 the Obama administration has put its pedal to the metal pushing the left-liberal agenda by any means possible. To take a single example, the Obamis essentially neutered the bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. Without a "conversation," without a change in law. They just did it. And the mainstream media did nothing.

What happens in 2017, assuming a Republican president and a Republican Congress? What would happen if the Republicans reduced the number of lawyers in the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights down to five? What would happen if they gutted the Environment Protection Agency's global warming initiatives that are essentially shutting down coal-fired electric power stations? Suppose the president issued as executive order banning all federal government employee unions? And so on. Would the next President of the United States have the cojones for that? Would his appointees have the cojones?

It seems to me that the first priority for the next Republican president should be to make it very difficult for liberals ever again to do what they did during the Obama era, pushing the liberal agenda without attempting to obtain consensus first, without bothering to pass a law in Congress. They could do it because the mainstream media, being partisan operatives with bylines, did nothing when the Obama administration blatantly violated the letter and  spirit of the law and bulldozed the de-facto consensus into the ditch on a whole host of public policy issues.

I've been reading that the strategy of the GOP Congress back in the Clinton presidency was to flood the zone in the details of the appropriation bills with a host of spending cuts and policy changes and set up certain issues as veto bait. The idea was that a president could veto a bill or two on some headline issue, but he can't really veto a bill because of 950 spending cuts and policy changes that he doesn't like.

Should that be the strategy of the next Republican President of the United States? To flood the zone will jillions of executive orders, cuts to liberal pet programs, forcing the liberal activism culture to focus on one or two issues?

You could say that, given that the liberals changed the rules and just pushed the pedal to the metal, that the old game is over, that Republicans can do what liberals just did, and to hell with their objections. But that is unrealistic, because the media will revert to its traditional role of "speaking truth to power" once a Republican administration takes power. They will make a scandal of any Republican initiative that offends the liberal agenda. And they will have liberal activist groups backing them up. And most important of all, we conservatives don't believe in extra-legal government. We want limited government with powers that are agreed upon by the citizens.

Obviously the GOP presidential nominee in 2016 must prepare the ground. He must lay out an agenda of reform and roll-back on the grounds of the Obama administration's violation of the old rules, and the oppressive use of regulatory power to dominate and marginalize ordinary American citizens. He must be able to say: look, the American people gave me a mandate to reform the egregious injustices and abuses of power committed by the Obama administration. All I am doing is correcting the egregious abuses of a lawless administration, just as I promised.

Suppose the GOP ticket wins in a 55%-45% landslide. Suppose the GOP increases its majority in the US Senate despite current projections; suppose the GOP increases its majority in the House despite the fact that they already gone about as far as they can go? Can a Republican administration really move the needle on reform, or will it get bogged down by a frenzy of liberal activist opposition?

Nobody knows what is possible. What troubles me is that I haven't heard a whisper from the conservative media about a post-Obama pushback. Check that. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has announced his reform agenda, including Medicare (!) reform. Now maybe it's too early for whispers and hints. But at some point in the road to November 2016 we need to see the battle space being prepared; we need to see spokesmen and mentioners saying that this or that candidate has big plans to reform the federal government and roll back the regulatory state and retrofit the administrative echo chamber for the liberal activist agenda with sound baffles.

The point is that you can't beat liberal politics without a conservative politics. And I don't see the conservative politics coming together to create a new Morning in America.