Tying Trump, Berlusconi, UKIP, Le Pen Together

On the view of Reihan Salam of National Review, Donald Trump is just one of a number of protest candidates and parties that have been emerging in recent years in western democracies (H/T PowerLine). Here's the money quote in "Why Donald Trump Isn't Going Away" in Slate.

Britain’s Labour Party has been devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party, but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state.

Or this:

The Danish People’s Party went from the far-right fringe to become Denmark’s second-largest party by combining anti-immigration sentiment with a commitment to protecting social programs that serve native Danes. 

See what is going on here? The electorates of the western democracies were promised cradle-to-grave social benefits forever. That's what they thought was the deal. But really, the educated Ruling Class had other ideas, because no ruling class wants to just sit there a manage Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid for the rest of time. So we had to have green energy; we had to have gay marriage; we had to have immigration; we had to have sanctuary cities.

The electorate of the western democracies look at all this and they see the shaking of the foundations.

Now the right thing for the electorate to do would be to say: take your social benefits and shove it. Take your immigration and shove it. Take your everything else and shove it. We are a free people, you and I.

But they can't. They can't give up on the benefits. And why should they? They've paid those swingeing taxes on labor all their working lives. Why should they give it all up when they paid their dues?

The Trumps and the Berlcusconis and the Farages and the Le Pens are all saying that you can keep your benefits and dump immigration and dump political correctness too.

But they are lying. The problem is not immigration. It is not even political correctness. The problem is the benefit state. Unless you reform that and contract the size of the state then you haven't started to solve anything.

The telling point is Britain's UKIP and its drift towards "largely abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare state." UKIP understands that it doesn't get to compete as a major party unless it promises to keep the benefit checks coming.

Back in 2010 our liberal friends were wont to sneer at the Tea Party. The Tea Partiers were talking a big line about limited government and the Constitution, they said, but it was still "hands off my benefits." They were right to sneer. Reform of the current mess begins and ends with the shrinking of the benefit state.

Instead we have Hillary Clinton promising to solve the problem of student debt by increasing government spending and regulation on higher education to make higher education more "affordable."

The Trump phenomenon shows that people are all exercised that "something is wrong." But the people are still a country mile away from doing anything about it.

The market economy is a system -- and it is a brutal system -- whereby you must adjust yourself to the market every day if you want to prosper. There is no free lunch and no place to hide, but the market economy delivers prosperity and a rough sort of justice for those that submit to its hegemony.

The government is a system -- and it is a brutal system -- whereby you capture political power and promise yourself and your supporters perpetual pensions that continue forever without regard to the economic facts on the ground. Free lunches all round, and don't worry about the future! It ends like Greece and Argentina, or even Venezuela.

Every day each of us makes the choice, whether to serve our fellow humans and hope for a reward, or vote for a politician that offers free stuff. Most of us, most of the time, choose the latter.

We all will, of course, get exactly what we deserve.

#BlackLivesMatter Means More Race Politics

If you are sick to death of Donald Trump I have a proposition for you. Let's talk about Black Lives Matter instead. Did you know that Black Lives Matter is George Soros funded?

I get the problem. Blacks are disproportionately arrested by police. If you are black or liberal or both you figure this disproportion is a manifestation of institutional racism, and you want it to end. You demand that it end.

And now we read about a detention center in deep blue Chicago that visits horrible indignities on the 82% of its inmates that are black. How's that Blue Model working out for ya?

The problem is best illustrated by my American Thinker piece "Why Don't Liberals Care about Black-on-Black Killing" on Jill Leovy's book Ghettoside about murder in the black LA ghetto. Even as a card-carrying liberal, Leovy tells how hard it is to get witnesses to testify against gang members when they shoot and murder. The police are really frustrated that the folks in the ghetto won't testify against the gang members. So the police compensate by arresting young blacks for "broken windows" offences. The black community gets really frustrated by that.

But liberals like New York mayor Bill de Blasio really hate "broken windows" policing. They think it is racist. Only trouble is that "broken windows" policing lowered the crime rate in big cities wherever it was tried, big time. Murder in New York City peaked at 2,605 in 1990 and was then brought down to 648 in 2013 by police chiefs like Bill Bratton and mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.

Now, under liberal Bill de Blasio, crime is up. Why? Because liberals are harassing the police for harassing the hoodlums, and so the police aren't keeping the hoodlums off the street.

But yesterday, on the anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, police in Ferguson, Missouri shot a black man they say was shooting at them.

So, if Black Lives Matter, what do we do? Do we clamp down on the police and tell them to stop harassing young black men for street misdemeanors? Or do we double down on "broken windows" policing?

The truth is that, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a vicious circle about the oppression of the lower class in the city. On the one hand, the new immigrants to the city tend to be unskilled and more violent than seasoned city dwellers. So they are low paid and discriminated against by employers. On the other hand, the violent young men provoke demands for a police crackdown on hoodlums, and the crackdown is used by radical activists to mobilize the lower class for marching and protesting.

My solution is to help the lower class socialize to the ways of the city and the market economy. Then they will all become boring middle-class jobholders and householders. But there are always radical organizers that believe the problem is injustice. And there are always marginal young men drawn to the excitement of the dawn raid.

Last weekend we saw the disruption of a Bernie Sanders rally by Black Lives Matter protesters. Does that mean that the Democratic Party will be pushed left by a new outbreak of radicalism?

But the last time we had a lot of black protest was back in 1967-68, and we know how that turned out for the Democrats.

One fine day America's blacks will all be boringly bourgeois and working and married-with-children, and we will be worrying about something else.

But that time is not yet.

Is This The Obama Sinking-Ship Moment

Immediately after the 2014 midterms I predicted that, at some point in his last two years in office, Democrats would desert President Obama to save their political skins as they contemplated life after Obama. The extraordinary Democratic Party discipline would break down.

Could the Iran deal be the straw that breaks the camel's back? I say that because of today's news that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is breaking ranks and deciding to vote against the president's Iran deal.

"After deep study, careful thought and considerable soul-searching, I have decided I must oppose the agreement and will vote yes on a motion of disapproval," Schumer wrote in a 1,600-word post on the website Medium.

OK. It could be that the fix is in and that Obama doesn't need Schumer's -- or any other Jewish Democratic vote.

Or it could be that the dam is breaking and Democratic legislators are jumping ship. 

Crude Insults to Women a Blow Against PC, Donald?

Back in the day, a gentleman never made crude comments about women. Because he just didn't.

Then came the Sexual Revolution and suddenly everyone was talking about sex.

But you know what? Women don't like talk about body parts. They didn't like it in the old days in the Age of Modesty and they don't like it now in the Age of the Hookup.

One of the reasons for the strength of Political Correctness is that something had to be done about the "let it all hang out" attitude of the Sixties. Oh, of course, the left exploits it mercilessly as part of their project to destroy bourgeois culture. But that's what they do: exploit anything to score a political point and name and shame the opposition.

The whole "rape culture" and "microaggression" game works because women really don't like the male culture of the public square. They don't like public knock-down drag out fights; they don't like public insults. Women prefer to fight at one remove, talking about people confidentially behind their backs. So if men won't curb their tongues and their hands out of a male code of honor then women will arise and write sexual harassment into law.

So when Donald Trump explains away his gratuitous insults to women with "I don't frankly have time for total political correctness" he is blowing smoke.

Gratuitous insults to women are bad behavior, in any culture. Period.

The man who insults women publically is not a sexist. He is just a boor.

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.