President Obama and Patriotism

Patriotism, you may have noticed, is just a polite word for near-fascist nationalism. Except when our side does it.

So President Obama, trying to push his unpopular Iran deal over the finish line, is reduced to painting opponents of his deal as unpatriotic when he says that:

It’s those hardliners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus[.]

The only thing to do is quote Hillary Clinton back in 2003:

I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.

Yes. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, except when it isn't.

Look, I understand that liberals and Democrats and progressives have a bit of a problem with the patriotism thing. Strictly speaking, they don't like patriotism. They don't like the nation state, because they associate it with aggressive nationalism, as in Fascism and Nazism and the Pax Americana.

The only problem is that the United States of America is a nation state. You appeal to its people by appealing to their patriotism.

The solution for the problem of nationalism, in the minds of liberals, Democrats, and progressives, is the supra-national organization, like the European Union and the United Nations. They are better than nation states because they are run by educated, evolved people that live above the petty hates and passions of the nationalist demagogue and his uncouth followers.

But of course this is rubbish. Liberals and Democrats and progressives deal in demagoguery and uncouth followers too. What do you think their rent-a-mobs are all about? Or their Soros-funded #BlackLivesMatter chappies? Or Occupy? What do you think all the stink about racism, sexism, and homophobia is about? They get to put their supporters in the street for the least little thing, and they call it "peaceful protest" when it is really a show of force. And they are eager to name and shame anyone that disagrees with them.

The thing is that people will want to "belong" to something, and political leaders know that they have to appeal to people as members of groups.  If the group isn't a nation state then it will be a religion, a clan, a race, a gender, a class.

The reason that conservatives believe in limited government is that we believe that politics should be limited. And if politics is limited then the gangs of uncouth followers will be limited. And the amount of hate will be limited. And the amount of government force will be limited.

But President Obama believes in politics with everything. That's why he pushed Obamacare. That's why he mewed up with financial system with Dodd-Frank. That's why he's just put out an excruciatingly bureaucratic climate plan. But the thing is that whenever you do politics you get people riled up, people that are going to have to pay for your wonderful bureaucratic plan. It's shocking, of course, that anyone could object to the rational, expert, bureaucratic plans of an educated, evolved elite, but there it is.

And then when President Obama encounters opposition he finds himself questioning the motives of his opponents.

See, the way that most presidents operate is that they get on the phone and do a bit of arm-twisting. They line up the votes beforehand and then present their latest excruciatingly bureaucratic plan as a bipartisan consensus. But not this president.

I think that the result of President Obama and his accusatory style of politics will be a Republican president and a solid Republican Congress. Because I believe that anyone in America that's not a liberal, Democratic, progressive partisan is fit to be tied right now.

But what do I know?

One Thing, Bob. Professors Like You are Part of the Ruling Class

If there were ever a mind-numbed liberal robot spewing liberal talking points without prompting, it would have to be Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration.

Now Reich is warning about "a revolt against the 'ruling class' of insiders that have dominated Washington for more than three decades." Says he:

What’s new is the degree of anger now focused on those who have had power over our economic and political system since the start of the 1980s.

Included are presidents and congressional leaders from both parties, along with their retinues of policy advisors, political strategists, and spin-doctors.

Most have remained in Washington even when not in power, as lobbyists, campaign consultants, go-to lawyers, financial bundlers, and power brokers.

The other half of the ruling class comprises the corporate executives, Wall Street chiefs, and multi-millionaires who have assisted and enabled these political leaders – and for whom the politicians have provided political favors in return.

Notice who doesn't get included in this tableau of the ruling class? It is the Cathedral, the cultural ruling class of professors and media that is probably more powerful that all the insiders and what-nots that Reich tags as the guys to blame.

Robert Reich is telling us that chaps like him, that write op-eds and pontificate as "Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy" at UCal Berkeley and formulate public policy as cabinet members, aren't really part of the problem.

Let us give Bob Reich the benefit of the doubt. I'll bet that it never occurred to him that he is a ruling-class member and part of the problem. My argument for that issues from his comical comparison of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.

On the right are the wreckers. The Tea Party, which emerged soon after the Wall Street bailout, has been intent on stopping government in its tracks and overthrowing a ruling class it sees as rotten to the core.

OK. But wait!

On the left are the rebuilders. The Occupy movement, which also emerged from the Wall Street bailout, was intent on displacing the ruling class and rebuilding our political-economic system from the ground up.

Oh please! No-one but a purblind partisan could write two paragraphs like that.

If we want to differentiate between wreckers and rebuilders we'd have to pay some attention to the Great Enrichment under capitalism and limited government which has taken the world from $3 income per head per day to $120 per head per day in 200 years. I don't think that the Tea Party plans to do too much to that operation. But the Occupiers? "[R]ebuilding our political-economic system from the ground up" sounds suspiciously like the program of Lenin and Castro and Pol Pot. Would you call those chaps "rebuilders" or "wreckers?"

Just asking, Bob Reich, what with you being a member of the ruling class and the Cathedral and all.

Women and the Sexual Revolution

I may as well come out and say it. I think that the best way for most people to live is the Bourgeois Ethos. It means living life responsibly, from work to family to community to sex. Bourgeois education, bourgeois achievement, bourgeois surrender to the market, and bourgeois love and marriage.

But over the last 150 years of the Great Reaction to bourgeois culture, many of the best and brightest have argued against the bourgeois ethos as too patriarchal, too restrictive, too oppressive. They want sexual liberation -- or at least liberation from the values of the bourgeois ethos.

And so the best and brightest have succeeded in normalizing divorce, normalizing sex without commitment, normalizing abortion, normalizing single parenthood, normalizing non-heterosexual behaviors, normalizing gay marriage.

If you think about it, all these normalizations amount to the social endorsement of what comes naturally to young men. They want sex with anything; they don't want to consider the consequence of anything. They just want to get laid. We are talking about the universal male appetite for loot and plunder.

But women are different. They are different because, as I like to say, men are fighters and women are lovers.

Of course down the ages humans recognized two kinds of women: modest women and immodest women. It is my experience that the overwhelming majority of women are modest women, and their whole lives are oriented around their circle of love.

So in my view the implied notion of the Sexual Revolution, that most women were straining at the leash wanting to become immodest and let it all hang out, is a lie.

Oh, modern women will tell you different. They will tell you about their careers, about work, about their liberation. Women are overwhelmingly conformable Kates: they do not have to be told to get with the program; they already did. And the women that tell you this are upper-class women, and upper-class women have tended, down the ages, to have more important things to do than look after babies and raise children.

In my view we are seeing with the "rape culture" activism on the one hand, and the Planned Parenthood video activism on the other an inchoate sense among women that the Sexual Revolution was bad for women. It reduces the central fact of woman as the miraculous fount of life to a sordid thing of meat and butchery.

When you read between the lines about the campus "rape culture" you read about the young woman that drank half a bottle of vodka before she turned up at the young man's dorm room. You read about Mattress Girl getting angry, months later, with her German lover because he didn't want to continue their relationship beyond the rough sex of their early couplings.

You mean to say, as the late Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes would intone, you mean to say that women have to drug themselves into near insensibility to dull themselves enough to do a booty call? You mean to say that women get angry when the early sex they have submitted to doesn't cement a relationship but merely hastens its end?

You mean to say that the old rules of courtship were better tuned to the rhythm of life and the needs of women?

The fact is that Planned Parenthood and its abortions are the necessary plumbing to flush away the back-flow of the sexual revolution. Free sex is all very well, but what sort of a guy would couple with a girl if he didn't want to father her baby? And what are we doing to women when we normalize the obliteration of the unwanted baby? Unwanted by whom?

Our liberal friends like to think of their progressivism as a one-way road to the future, and their sexual revolution the once-for-all liberation from centuries of oppression. But history also goes in cycles, and sexual attitudes seem to fluctuate between what we might call prudery and license. I have a suspicion that we are reaching the end of the current licentious period, and things are starting to swing back to prudery.

The problem is that the leading prudes are the feminists whose mothers helped lead the sexual revolution, so their solution will attempt to return to prudery without actually facing up to the follies of their own sexual revolution.

That won't end well, as we like to say.

Do Liberals Know Their Slip is Showing?

Over the years, in numerous "national conversations" liberals have stated over and over again that they, liberals, are the educated ones, the evolved ones, the ethical ones. And conservatives are just patriarchal bullies, and probably racists, sexists and homophobes for disagreeing with them.

So it was in the great Nixon impeachment drama. Oh, the outrage of the president's men burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Oh, the injustice of using the FBI to spy on the president's enemies! Oh, the venality of trying to get the IRS to audit the president's political enemies! Oh, the disgrace of the president's lies! Everyone that had half a thought in their brain knew what to think of all that. The president had to go.

Remember Iran-Contra? Where aides in the White House took money from arms delivered to Iran in defiance of an embargo and gave the money to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Oh, the outrage!

But then we got to the Clinton administration and somehow the mainstream media was not as outraged by Clinton scandals as Nixon and Reagan scandals. Under Nixon and Reagan, administration lies had been the worst of the worst. Under Clinton, everyone lied about sex. In 1991 everyone had been outraged about alleged smutty talk by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In 1998, everyone was allowed one free grope.

In the Bush era, we got to be outraged again. By the "lies" told to the UN to justify the invasion of Iraq.  And Scooter Libby. What exactly did Libby do that deserved a federal prosecution? Never mind: he worked for Vice-President Cheney.

Now we have the Obama era, featuring the monstrous lie that "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Followed by flagrant administrative rewriting of the Affordable Care Act on the fly. Followed by the IRS targeting Tea Party groups. Followed by Hillary Clinton conducting official business with a private email server.

And what do we hear from the mainstream media? Crickets.

Now we have the Planned Parenthood videos where Planned Parenthood officials or their contractors are shown by undercover videos to be bargaining over the sale of fetal organs.

And what do we get from the Cathedral? We get an Obama judge placing prior restraint on the Center for Medical Progress activist group enjoining them from publishing future videos featuring StemExpress employees. We get calls for a Justice Department investigation -- of The Center for Medical Progress! Imagine that happening to a liberal group.

Now my Greek philosopher friend, George Maroutsos has always said: You don't have power unless you abuse it. Otherwise, you just have responsibility. So abuse goes with power like ham and eggs.

But the point of government under law is that abuses don't just go with the territory. There is recourse under law. Flagrant abuses of power get punished.

And the reason for this is simple. All government is force, and all government is experienced by the "out" party as injustice. If the abuse of power is too egregious then people in the "out" party start to mutter under their breaths. If the abuse continues then they start to get angry. If the abuse continues some more then they start to organize.

I don't think my liberal friends have a clue just how much rage they are stirring up with their abuses of power. You can understand why. Every ruling class imagines itself the acme of virtue. If today the elite doesn't think itself chosen by God it certainly thinks it has been chosen by History. So it thinks of its abuses of power as little things, the inevitable shortcuts you have to make to get things done in the name of progress.

But the "out" party doesn't think that way. Liberals certainly don't think that when they are in opposition. And so, in due course, you get the formation of a head of opposition. You might even get the formation of a head of rebellion.

The whole point of government under law, with the rulers actually obeying the law on email correspondence, Hillary Clinton, is to redress the grievances before it is too late.

And that is something that our liberal friends are going to have to learn the hard way, when things have got way past the embarrassment of someone's slip showing.

Why Politics is Always About Looting and Plunder

In the era when progressive minds were concerned about the power of the absolute monarchs the word on the street was "limited government." Progressive minds realized that the absolute monarchs, like the feudal monarchs before them, maintained themselves in power by distributing favors to their supporters. That was insupportable, according to reason and natural law.

That lasted for about 100 years, from 1750 to 1850.

But once the absolute monarchs had been dispatched to the dustbin of history progressive minds forgot all about limited government. Now they saw themselves as the rising ruling class and developed a politics where they would replace the monarch and win political power for themselves by offering favors to their supporters. So much was obvious to the best minds. And it was all discernible from the march of history and from social justice.

Of course, the truth is that politics has always been about loot and plunder. It was about loot and plunder when the hunter gatherers conducted their dawn raids on the neighboring tribe, killing the men and taking the women into slavery. It was about loot and plunder when Agamemnon and his pals including Odysseus, sacker of cities, besieged and sacked the city of Troy. It was about loot and plunder when the Roman legions ranged through Europe and the Middle East. It was about loot and plunder when Europeans discovered America and took the silver from Bolivia and the land from the North American Indians.

The formula is simple. A would-be political leader -- we might call him a freebooter or a buccaneer -- recruits an army with the promise of loot and plunder. We might call these followers freeloaders. If successful, this leader takes political power over some territory and taxes and regulates the people therein to benefit his supporters.

For that brief century from 1750 to 1850 the idea got about that maybe the loot and plunder idea was not such a good plan for government. Because, after all, loot and plunder are destructive. They sweep away productive economic relations and strip people of their wealth. And give it to people whose only talent is military or political soldiering. So the idea got about that government, the agency of looting and pillaging, ought to be limited, so that wealth could increase and benefit everyone.

But in the middle of the 19th century, as we have seen, a new idea got about. The educated sons of the bourgeoisie, shocked by the squalor of the industrial slums, intuited a new society in which all the squalor would be gone and society would become truly social and cooperative, rather than hierarchical and exploitative.

But there was one little problem with their ideas. How would we get from here to there? The answer was as old as the hills. We would get there by recruiting a political army with promises of loot and plunder: bigger wages, less working hours, free education, old-age pensions, health care.

It did not seem to occur to these people -- it still does not occur to their political descendants -- that a political movement based on loot and plunder will end up 100 years later as government based on loot and plunder. And what does loot and plunder do? It strips the land and the people of their wealth and their livelihood.

The trouble with socialism, according to Margaret Thatcher, is that in the end you run out of other peoples' money. It's easy to see why. The nature of the political game is that you must come to each election with a new promise of loot. That is what you have taught your supporters down the decades and that is what they demand. That was why President Obama had to lie about Obamacare and pretend it would lower health insurance premiums, and why Hillary Clinton has to conjure up brain-dead ideas to complicate the capital gains tax to make it look as though she is shaking new money out of the trees that can be spent on her supporters.

In the end the politicians over-promise on the loot. In the end you run out of other peoples' money. In the end you get Greece or Argentina.

So the solution is pretty obvious. You replace the current system with a system of limited government, where the politicians do not rally support by offering free stuff.

After all, any sensible voter should be able to see that in the end the government runs out of money to pay its pensions, so the practical thing to do is to make sure that your life is not dependent upon the continued payment of a government pension. On that view the idea of paying payroll taxes for 40 years on the faith that the government will pay the pensions it promised seems close to certifiable delusion.

But that is the system we live under. Until we don't.

The #cuckservative Meme

I get it. Conservative leadership, from Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the Senate and John Boehner (R-OH) in the House to the mainstream conservative media is disappointingly wimpy. You might even say that they had been cuckolded by the shameless hussies in LiberalLand who have been cheating on them for decades. Thus #cuckservatives.

When are they going to do something about it? And act like real men for a change?

The answer is: not until conservatives (or some other non-liberal cultural groups) acquire the cultural power to "put a bit of stick about."

To put it in military terms, the non-liberals have to join battle with the liberals over some issue, win the battle, and put the liberals into retreat, and then go on to win the war. The reason that #cuckservatives are so effeminate is that whenever there's a skirmish on the cultural front they get creamed by the liberals.

This is explained by Mencius Moldbug in his blog, where the universities and the media are the Cathedral that get to define the moral and cultural norms, the Democratic Party is the Inner Party that gets to rule when it wins elections, and the Republican Party is the Outer Party that just gets to govern when it wins elections. If you don't get the difference between "rule" and "govern" it is the difference between making up your own rules as you go along and following the rules.

Another thing to think about is the difference between left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists.

Moldbug has a sneer at Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism over this. Liberals can't be fascists, he writes, because fascism only worked in a limited time in the years after the collapse of a monarchical regime where right-wing judges could wink and nod at fascist street thugs.

But that's the point, and that's why the "fascist" tag applies to liberals. These days left-wing street action gets a wink and a nod from the justice system and the police know which side their bread is buttered on. The riots in Ferguson and Baltimore couldn't have happened if they were right-wing demonstrations. The demonstrators would first have had to get all their paperwork and their protest permits in order, and who knows how long that would have taken, Lois. And then any peep of violence or inappropriate protest sign would have been excoriated from The Nation to The New York Times to National Review.

In other words, today the left has the power. The left can intimidate ordinary citizens with regulators and judges. Why just today we have the report of a judge putting a restraining order on the folks that are doing the Planned Parenthood videos and enforcing prior restraint on future videos. Imagine that happening to 60 Minutes. You can't, because everyone knows that the Cathedral and the Inner Party would erupt into moral outrage. The left can intimidate with the power of the bully pulpit; that's why left-wing bloopers disappear while right-wing bloopers are proof of racism, sexism, homophobia. The left can intimidate with street action by bused-in rent-a-mobs. And it can intimidate with its neo-peasant supporters outraged by any "cut" in their entitlements.

So yeah. Conservative politicians and media are indeed #cuckservative. And they will be until we change the cultural order in America. And I'd say we are decades away from that, because any cultural change comes from the young people, and I view today's young people as mind-numbed robots pretty well completely indoctrinated by and in the pockets of the gentry liberal ruling class and its Cathedral.

Hey kids! Prove me wrong!

How to Talk to Your Liberal Women Friends

I'm going to be lunching with my liberal women friends in the next week or so. We are talking about the kind of woman that will be on board for the idea that it's time for America's First Woman President.

Here I am, aching with sorrow about the way that America's government has failed its people, because of the faith of its ruling class in its top-down paternalism, and your average educated woman of a certain age is serene in her sexist politics without a cloud in the sky.

Just as the idea of electing America's first black president was racism, straight up, so the idea of electing America's first woman president is sexism, straight up.

But you can't tell them that, not directly. They have ideological armor up against that sort of comment.

No, I think it's better to play on liberal guilt.

It's not the 1%; it's the top 20% First libertarian Charles Murray in Coming Apart and now liberal Robert D. Putnam in Our Kids have said that life is great for the top 20% in America. But lower down the socio-economic scale things are not so good. Something Must Be Done, because, as I say from my take on Coming Apart, in the lowest 30% the women don't marry and the men don't work, and that is causing a cultural Armageddon. But what to do?

We know what the liberal response is: more government and more power for liberals. But they are wrong.

More entitlements, regulation, and $15 minimum wage are baloney. Because science. Look, I get it. Politicians get elected by promising free stuff. More entitlements. Free community college. Make those exploitative employers pay a living wage. Only if there is one thing we know from political science it is that the more you pile on the free stuff, the more that people want. And the end of it is you go Greek. What is happening in Greece right now? The young and educated (the top 20%) are bailing out, leaving the bottom 30% to face the music. Same thing happened to Argentina in 2002. We know plenty of middle-aged educated Argentinians here on the North American west coast.

If there is one thing we know from public-choice economics, it is that economic regulation is crap. We have known that for 50 years that regulation kills everything and supports established interests. But liberals can't let go, because it brings in money and support and political power.

If there is one thing we know from Economics 101 it is that regulation of wages is crap. The $15 minimum wage is the cruelest cut of all. It makes it harder for young uneducated kids to get started. And it encourages more and more work to go off-the-books to illegal immigrants. This is basic economics, going back at least to the marginal revolution of 1870.

Big government and presidential executive orders are recipes for corruption and injustice. I imagine that gentry liberal women don't hear too much about the IRS scandal, the EPA ignoring its requirement to base its policy on science, the crony capitalist mess in renewable energy if they listen to NPR and read the New York Times. Obviously when you are a member of the top 20% and a gentry liberal you figure that Obama and his appointees are doing the Lord's work. Oh good, you think, President Obama believes #BlackLivesMatter and wants to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows. Oh good, President Obama is fighting carbon pollution and dirty coal plants. Oh good, the Supreme Court is finally OKing gay marriage. But what about the cultural chaos in the inner city, where the war on "broken windows" policing is making the chaos for black lives worse? What about the utter waste of resources on crony capitalist wind and solar power that slows the economic recovery and prevents Americans from getting good jobs? And what about the collapse of ordinary heterosexual marriage in the bottom 30%? Doesn't that seem to be a little more important than gay marriage for the 3% or so?

The trouble with government and politics is that it can't fix anything until it is so well and truly broken that even an upper-class educated woman can see it.

I don't think that my liberal women friends are within ten years of realizing that something is desperately wrong with the gentry liberal agenda. But I do think that they are going to be pretty shocked by the 2016 campaign.

That's because we are going to find out over the next year that a lot of things that gentry liberals thought were agreed upon and settled by all educated and evolved people actually aren't.

Because the ruling class is always the last to know.