Lefties Like Corbyn and Bernie Aren't Mad or Bad. Just Sad

If you are a libertarian conservative you look at the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and shake your head. You look at the election of left-wing extremist Jeremy Corbyn to be leader of the parliamentary Labour Party in Britain as madness.

But really, the 150-year collectivist movement makes a lot of sense. Of course there are people, lots of people, who want to return to the "safety" of collectivism. That was the human social order since forever. The modern society of individualism is frightening, and comparatively untested. Why wouldn't people instinctively yearn for the good old days when people were bundled up in a family, a clan, a tribe, a village, or a race?

Moreover, the people just arriving in the city are people that are still living under the old order. They expect their lives to be ordered by a patriarch, a village big man, a landed cacique. Because that's the way it has always been.

The thing about collectivism, ancient and modern, is that all you have to do is "go along to get along." There are no responsibilities; responsibility is the job of the patriarch, the big man, the cacique. It is, obviously, profoundly anti-social. You sit there, like a bump on a log, and do what you are ordered to do, but no more. You give your loyalty to your lord. And you expect in return food and lodging to keep you and your family alive.

In reality, the subordinates under collectivism were treated like dirt. They were near slaves; they starved and died and nobody cared.

But then, in northern Europe, a new idea emerged. We call it individualism, the idea that individual people, not just collectivities, are important.

The thing about individualism is that it is up to you to figure out how to "get along." Everything is your responsibility. There is no patriarch, big man, or cacique to tell you what to do. It is, obviously, profoundly social. You have to think, every day, every hour, how to contribute responsibly to society with work, ideas, or your savings. You cannot just hide behind the skirts of your liege lord. You are the principal. And nothing is guaranteed: not food, not lodging, not employment. It is up to you.

What kind of person is drawn to this individualist ethos? Lots of people. The middle class. The bourgeoisie. But not the worker, just starting out in the city without much in the way of skills. And not the creative class, who yearn for something more than responsibility.

When you think about it, it makes complete sense that northern Europe would develop a political-religious movement of nostalgia for the old collectivist ways. The radical movement of individualism would be bound to provoke a movement of rejection.

The only problem for the rejectionists is that individualism works like nothing in the world. The material prosperity of north Europeans has gone up by 3000% in 200 years. The notion that you don't need the big boss in control with an engineer at his side reading the dials and working the levers of the economy is true. The economy does work without a single controller calling the big shots. And so, every time that the nostaglists get political power they push to control the economy with government power and the economy tanks, and whenever the individualists get political power they try to get the hands of the political class off the economy and the economy improves.

In the 1980s the combination of individualist Reagan and Thatcher was so successful that the Democratic Party in the US and the Labour Party in the UK had to produce leaders that grudgingly admitted the power of markets and individuals. But their leadership cadres hated it, and so with Obama and Sanders in the US, and Corbyn in the UK they have returned to their old-time religion.

Only time will tell if they will convert a majority of voters to their collectivist sawdust trail.

If they do, it will be a sad day for all of us. Because collectivism doesn't work.

Will Muslims Take Over the World?

The people of Europe have a long history with Islam. All in all, it's hasn't gone well. From the conquest of Spain to the Crusades to the Fall of Constantinople to the battle at the gates of Vienna.

And when the northwest Europeans darn near conquered the world, there was one place they shied away from: the Islamic Middle East, at least until the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I.

Today the Muslims are mad and they aren't going to take it any more. They have plans for world conquest, both by migration and by war.

Will it work?

Of course, the last half millennium of the glorious world conquest by northwest Europeans has seen plenty of counter-movements that were going to take over the world. Communism and socialism were one such movement. History was on its side, and if not, the commies were willing to give it a little nudge. And don't talk about the H-word. The truth is that these counter-movements really did change the world. They made possible the idea that the modern nation-state government could turn the bourgeois state into a neo-feudal state where the average person looked to the state for succor rather as the feudal peasant looked to his lord of the manor.

But the counter-movements have failed in their millennarian dreams.

Of course it is possible that our present western world hegemony is like the ageing Roman Empire that let the Goths in. Or the several Chinese dynasties that collapsed before culturally inferior nomads from the North. Or the South Asia that has experienced numerous invasions from out of Central Asia and the Khyber Pass.

But in retrospect we can see that all the counter-movements thus far had a real problem. The irresistible force of their militant ideology ran up against the immovable rock of the modern economy and its need for responsible individualism to make the product that provides the foundation of wealth and power. However much that young hotheads think that capitalism stinks and they have a better idea their politics-first ideas have failed and failed miserably. Hello Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and now Chavez.

If millions of Muslims migrate to Germany, might they not transform Germany and then Europe? Might not the Muslims in France presently marinating in the old Communist banlieux around Paris rise up and seize France from the French?

They might. But let us examine the words of a Chinese Christian quoted in David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing. He quotes a Chinese man that had wondered what everyone on the receiving end of the West must have wondered over the last 500 years.

At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we did. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.

In China, Christianity is growing at about 3 percent per year.

But it makes you think. What was it that caused the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years? The simple answer is that we don't know. We each have our faith: Christianity, individualism, capitalism, social programs, labor unions. But really, we don't know.

So it may be that the jihadist movement of hegira and the militant expansion out of the Middle East with Iran and ISIS and Boko Haram might take over the world. But think of the headwinds.

First, the only thing that keeps Iran and ISIS going is oil. These are people that haven't made the least accommodation to the modern global exchange economy. Yet the number one basis for a powerful state in the last 500 years is an economic state that can sustain the political state's projection of power. And that needs a people acculturated to work in the exchange economy and its world-wide network of trust.

Second, the militance of the Islamists is likely to provoke the rest of the world to combine against it, particularly now that the fracking revolution has diminished the value of Middle Eastern oil, so that the world can say of the Middle East: who needs it?

Third, the migration of Muslims out of the Middle East is likely to change the Muslims more than they are likely to change the world. That is, after all, the story of the last 200 years. Peasants and tribesmen from all over have migrated to the city and brought their peasant culture with them, particularly the universal peasant subordination to powerful patrons. The big problem for each migrant peasant has been to shuck off their subordinate collectivist self and surrender to the individualist exchange economy culture. The sooner the migrant makes the transition, the better for his/her life and family. Migrant groups that were slow to adapt -- think Irish and African Americans -- have not thrived, and have tended to isolate themselves in dysfunctional ghettos. Is it really going to help Muslims if they set themselves up against their host cultures?

Fourth, contra Barack Obama, there is no "right side of history." The future is a mystery. We all have faith in our religion -- especially lefty progressives like the president -- but that don't mean nothing. Whatever the future may bring, it won't be the global triumph of anything. It will be, indeed, the usual messy, foolish, incompetent muddle. And people will still be optimistic about their faith in their vision of the future.

Hello Progressive "Ancien Regime"

It's always a puzzle, innit. A great civilization, or a Roman empire, or a great Chinese dynasty suddenly crumbles into dust. Who could have seen it coming? As Glenn Reynolds like to say.

Well, we are now living through such a time. "Unexpected" disasters keep crashing in on the western cultural and political elite. Like the current immigration crisis in Europe.

Some people are recalling the Roman emperor Valens, the guy who let the Goths in. Well, the Empire needed the revenue. The rest is history.

Sound familiar? The Germans are letting in the immigrants because they have a fertility rate of about 1.3 to 1.4 children per woman per lifetime. A rate of 2.1 is generally considered necessary to keep the population stable. Obviously when you have a fertility rate of 1.4 and significant immigration you are not going to be Deutschland for much longer. But the Germans have a labor shortage and they need the workers. It is, of course, profoundly symbolic that the German Chancellor right now is a childless woman.

Back in the day the Soviets used to like to predict the collapse of the West as a result of its "internal contradictions." They had a point, especially with respect to their own socialist contradictions, and so Communism collapsed before western Social Democracy.

But western democracy is also certainly built on a profound contradiction. On the one hand the progressive ruling class maintains its political power by encouraging peasant subordinate culture in its people. Western people in western nations have "rights," to pensions and health care and education and welfare, which were invented by leftist intellectuals, and can only be satisfied by politicians with access to big money. You can see that this politics encourages a mean and narrow dog-in-the-manger culture among the sheeple; you deserve your benefits, but not other people. But at the same time as they bribe their voters with free stuff, western politicians also affect a concern for all the less fortunate in the world, and they encourage immigration from poor countries. Anyone that opposed immigration is a bigot and a racist, even though the people most affected by immigration are the low-skilled and the low-paid, the natural constituency of the progressive ruling class.

And that is to say nothing about green energy subsidies and regulation. Its costs necessarily fall most severely upon the low-paid, and its benefits are enjoyed by grant-sucking scientists and subsidy-sucking crony capitalists. Not to mention gentry liberals with their Priuses.

But, as the Marxists say, eventually things fall apart because of their inherent internal contradictions, and we now experiencing that, in Europe as millions swarm the borders, and here in the US as anti-immigration politics suddenly explodes into a blaze with the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

Who could have seen it coming? Anyone with half a brain.

But the ruling class of the ancien régime is always the last to know. Because, as we have seen from Hillary Clinton's emails, ruling-class princes and princesses are surrounded by sycophantic courtiers that bury them in flattery.

"Identify problems but offer no solutions"

A commenter on my "I Want a President That's a 'Strong Leader.' Not!" piece complained about people "who just identify problems but offer no solutions."

Good point. So here are my solutions. Part One is stuff that can be done in 2017 with any Republican president and Congress. Part Two is the agenda for the rest of the president's term. Part Three is what I really believe.

What Is To Be Done, Part One

First, the easiest. Reverse as many Obama era regulations and executive orders as possible as soon as possible on the Macchiavellian principle that you should do all the dirty work right away. There will be a huge hullaballoo, but the president can argue that his election is a mandate to roll back Obamism.

Then, the economy. The problem here is that government spending is a weight on the economy and government regulation is a brake on the economy, and monetary activism is a distortion of the economy.

So the president should send a mini-budget to the Congress that rolls back as much domestic spending as possible, right now, starting with green energy. Then he should do as much as possible with executive actions to make welfare and disability unattractive, and make it as easy as possible to hire new workers. He should make a start on simplifying the tax code by reducing marginal tax rates as much as politically possible.

Then he should start an attack on all the anti-growth regulations of the Obama era, starting with the National Labor Relations Board and the regulation of the internet with the FCC. Sarbanes-Oxley should be on the chopping block.

Then we have financial regulation and monetary policy. The president should gut Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and return to a rules-based monetary policy with a return to normal interest rates. We should dial back the mad policy of subsidizing sub-prime mortgages which are a constant dagger pointed at the financial heart of America.

What is to be Done, Part Two

There are four big trillion dollar functions of government in the United States. See my usgovernmentspending.com for details. The four big functions costing about $1 trillion each per year are: Government pensions, including Social Security; Government healthcare, including Medicare and Medicaid; Government education, K thru graduate school; and Defense. Non-Medicaid welfare comes in at about $0.5 trillion a year.

So the first thing to do is to reform Social Security and Medicare. Social Security should be started on the road to a real personal savings program, with subsidies for the working poor; Medicare should be moved to a normal health insurance program with subsidies for the elderly poor. We should start to disassemble the education monopoly with education choice. And on welfare we should be looking at fixing its perverse incentives. Right now, a welfare recipient trying to get off welfare typically faces a marginal tax rate of 50%, higher than a billionaire.

What is to be Done, Part Three

Government is force, so we need to ask, with every government program, is force really called for? On retirement savings, the answer is yes if someone willfully refuses to provide for themselves; but most people should provide for their own. On elderly healthcare, we don't want grannie neglected by cruel children; but most people should provide for their own. On education, we don't want children neglected by their parents and refused a chance to rise in the world; but most children want to grow up and at least be like their parents, and today they can get a pretty good education from a tablet, especially if they have to become literate to learn how to play the games. On welfare, we don't want the poor thrown on the streets, but most people could take care of that by belonging to mutual-aid societies as they did a century ago before the welfare state put them out of business. Maybe anyone that ever went on welfare should be forced to belong to a mutual-aid society.

This program would only be possible in an America where the vast majority of people said to politicians and government: you can put that free stuff and those subsidies where the sun don't shine.

But the truth is that humans love free stuff. That's why we have coupons and sales and supermarket specials and affinity programs. And what people really love is getting free stuff from the government. So the world I imagine is not yet.

OK: there it is. That's my three point program!

Are Political Cycles Unnecessary?

We in the West that think that the US is exceptional and that the Western Way is irreplaceable are feeling a little pessimistic these days.

Why wouldn't we when America and much of Europe is governed by men and women that don't seem to "get it." Maybe it's just the civilizational cycle.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that it is all so unnecessary.

Bounty to boredom to decadence to panic to reawakening to ascendance has always been the cyclical way of the West.

Its curse has been that the cycles of nihilism are as long as they are unnecessary.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. Given that the central fact of life is the cycle of conception to birth to growth to reproduction to decay and death and repeat, I'd say there is something necessary and sufficient in the great cycle of generation.

In other words, things can't go on in some Panglossian best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, the old is always getting flushed out, and that's the way that the world gets renewed.

And there always seem to be opposing and opposite forces. In the last two millennia we had the church and state as rival power centers. And probably a good thing too, because we know what happens when church and state get united as in Stalinism and Hitlerism and Castroism.

In our day it seems that there is an endless argument between the constant renewal of the Great Enrichment and the constant critique of the socialist reactionaries that want to return the West to the pre-individualism of the feudal estate or even the hunter-gatherer tribe.

For me as an individualist -- experiencing individualism as a new and remarkably social way of life -- it is hard to deal with the constant backward force of the progressive. The progressive talks about Change but actually wants to pour society into a concrete form, there to set for all eternity.

The problem with all the old empires is that their central political elites were too powerful. They had the power to stop change all over the empire.

But the innovation of the West, intensified in the US, is that change, by the very nature of the market economy, is baked right in. The market is pitiless to old established economic interests. As soon as a new and better idea comes along it relegates the old dominant actors to the sidelines. They can yell and scream and get politicians to pass subsidies and privileges for them, but in the end it doesn't matter. There is no escape from renewal and the verdict of the market.

And yest, contra Hanson, at some point in the cycle there is nihilism. People on the down cycle, in a culture or a market past its prime think there is nothing good in the world, and they tell everyone how awful everything is, and how right and proper it all was when they were young.

(I am experiencing that feeling directly myself as I am reading Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice about how everything was young and fresh and new in Aussieland in the years of renewal after World War II).

And the glorious cause for hope in 2015 is that President Obama has been such a hopeless president that anyone except a New York Times reader and an NPR listener feels it in their bones and right now is fit to be tied about America and its prospects.

Really, if you wanted a Republican resurgence after the election of the nation's First Black President in 2008 what would you figure it would take?  Something like a stupid "stimulus," a stupid expensive Obamacare, a stupid Dodd Frank to mew up the financial system with regulatory bureaucrats, a stupid green energy program to raise energy prices on the poor. But, you would say, the Democrats can't be that stupid.

The nihilism stage of the cycle has its uses. As H.L. Mencken wrote, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

The Straight Line from The Klan to #BlackLivesMatter

The reason for the rise of Black Lives Matter, the black racist "protest" group, is plain, according to Victor Davis Hanson.

Threats of unrest and collective violence by the urban underclass often come in handy.

In Hanson's interpretation, the Black Lives Matter agitations serve the interest of the "black elites." But I think that he is thinking too narrowly. It's the whole liberal ruling class that likes to have mobilized rent-a-mobs ready to "protest" before the cameras. And the purpose of it all is intimidation.

That's why I link the Ku Klux Klan to Black Lives Matter.

The purpose of the Klan as it developed in the decade after the Civil War was intimidation. By killing a few blacks and scalawags the Klan succeeded in intimidating millions of blacks and Republican whites in the South. And it succeeded in erasing the political power of the victorious North and the policy of Reconstruction. Notice that it did not challenge the power of the federal government directly, as the South had done in the Civil War. No, the idea was just to intimidate the North's supporters in the South.

Notice that it does not matter if the Klan was a part of the Democratic Party in the South or not. It served the purpose of the white Southerners in making it very costly and dangerous for blacks and scalawags to do politics and even business in the post-war South. The key to understanding the whole thing is that the Klan succeeded because the white power structure winked at the crimes of the Klansmen.

The next stop, obviously, in the Nazis in Germany. But before them was the guerrilla war against British rule conducted by the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century. The Brits won that one. That is to say, they declared victory and then went home and left South Africa to the Boers.

In Weimar Germany both the Nazis and the Commies operated formal armies of street thugs. And the purpose was intimidation, to make Germany ungovernable. Hey, it worked! And the Nazi street gangs couldn't have succeeded in their extralegal violence without the passive acquiescence of the powers-that-be.

Let's talk about labor unions. The whole point is to be able to intimidate workers and employers -- with a nod and a wink from the liberal ruling class. The problem with unions, though, is that they are parasites that kill their hosts. And these days private-sector workers just aren't interested in unions.

Then we get to the Sixties and the anti-war movement. Liberal Parents, Radical Children wrote Midge Decter. The mainstream media wrote about the heroic kids rebelling against the hypocrisy of their conformist Fifties parents. But in fact the liberal parents shielded their children from the strong arm of the law. Barack Obama's mentor Bill Ayers was the son of an executive at Commonwealth Edison. And his terrorist activities didn't disqualify him from a career in the academy. The purpose of the anti-war movement and the New Left was intimidation. And it worked.

Now you know why lefty groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center are paranoid about right-wing extremism. They think that the right wing is just like they are, and eager to use political intimidation to advance its agenda.

But the right isn't really interested in political intimidation. The right is overwhelmingly middle-class and just wants the government to do its job protecting the nation from enemies foreign and domestic.

The Tea Party proves the point. The left immediately assumed that the Tea Party was a radical group of extremists and mobilized (hey Lois Lerner!) to keep them down on the farm. In fact the Tea Party quickly became a part of the Republican Party and organized to promote Tea Party candidates for political office. How boring.

But Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter are simple intimidation groups informally condoned by the liberal ruling class. Else how come that Occupy Wall Street was allowed to occupy a city park in New York City for weeks in violation of all the sacred health regulations? Good luck to the Tea Party trying that.

Black Lives Matter got almost direct encouragement from President Obama and black protesters were allowed to riot with a nod and a wink from city authorities. And Black Lives Matter is trying directly to intimidate police into easing up on the policing of black urban neighborhoods in informal cooperation with liberal office-holders like NY Mayor Bill DeBlasio.

And then we have the Social Justice Warriors. Their whole shtick is to intimidate ordinary middle class Americans into silence and political and cultural serfdom.

The Question is: Will It Work? Will the liberal ruling-class wink for Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter work as the Klan and the Nazi Sturmabteilung and the anti-war movement did back in the day?

Nobody can tell for sure. But the collapse of Democratic Party electoral power since the accession of President Obama is surely telling us something. I would say that the Democratic electoral collapse is directly connected to the fact that the US is overwhelmingly a middle-class nation and it doesn't like street thugs of any description.

Oh, and let me tell you. Middle-class women really hate street thuggery.

Social Justice? Because Politicians Gotta Divide

Isn't it interesting, writes Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, that in the administration of divider-in-chief Barack Obama and in the year of #BlackLivesMatter we have ordinary people coming together with love and forgiveness?

Reynolds cites the multiracial 15,000 that showed up in the streets after the Charleston shooting. He cites the multiracial 20,000 that showed up at Glenn Beck's "All Lives Matter" rally in Birmingham, Alabama. And the 1,000 that showed up at an "impromptu memorial for murdered Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth" in Houston, Texas.

Writes Reynolds:

The American people have a strong spirit of egalitarianism and kindness, one that shows over and over again. But our political class sees more gain in promoting hatred and division.

Well, yes. That's because politics is all about division. There's nothing good or bad about that. It's just the way it goes. When you have an election, or any political issue, the whole point is to have the good guys that want change on this side and the bad guys who want to return to the evils of the past on that side. Or vice versa. You think you can trust those bad guys? I gotta bridge to sell you.

Now I think that the Big Thing about the modern era is that it has radically extended the frontiers of trust. Used to be that you would only trust your kin, or your village, or your tribe, knowing rightly that everyone else could descend on your kin, or village, or tribe without a moment's warning.

But now that has changed. Now, under modern capitalism, the way to thrive is to trust anyone that demonstrates trustworthiness. And the modern information age has extended this principle about as far as it can go by having everyone report on the other guy's trustworthiness in ratings on Ebay and Uber.

This New Trust would have sounded the death knell of divisive politics except for one thing.

Left-wing reactionary geniuses determined to tell the industrial working class that they were famously exploited just as the lower class was emerging from 4,000 years of brutal oppression from the beginning to the end of the agricultural age.

And the working class listened! Bit of a shame really, because wherever left-wing economic policies have been implemented the people have perished.

After a while the working class realized that it was dong OK really, so it didn't need to come out in the streets to protest at the behest of left-wing revolutionaries. So left-wing reactionary geniuses came up with another idea. Just as blacks were coming out of centuries of slavery and oppression the geniuses told them they were famously oppressed. And the blacks believed them. Just as women were being liberated from involuntary childbirth by modern contraception the geniuses told them they had been historically oppressed by the patriarchy. And women believed them. Just as gays... Well the gay thing is such absolute baloney. Self-conscious homosexuality is a modern elite thing, an argument within the elite. It is just a liberal conceit.

On my reading, social justice politics is a last, desperate attempt to maintain the primacy of politics in an age that really doesn't need it. We don't really need to be armed against our fellow men: only against those that haven't accepted the capitalist ethos that you trust everyone that can be trusted. It will fail because it is a lie.

According to Marx,

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

I wonder if #BlackLivesMatter is going to be the farce that makes a stupid joke out of social justice. The point is that African Americans are divided on the question. Some are enraged at the po-lice, but others are enraged at violent young men. And I wonder if President Obama's "legacy" will be to discredit social-justice Alinksy tactics as brutally divisive and un-American, something that every American just wants to forget and put behind them.

You see, I think that the average politician knows that it's all very well to divide the electorate during the campaign, but that after the campaign you want to bind up the wounds and get everyone on the same page again. Problem is that the Democrats of the last few years have bought into the full Alinsky and the permanent campaign, perhaps in confirmation of the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I think that the average American doesn't really buy into the Alinsky game. I think that the average American gets tired of endless political war just as the average person tires of a shooting war. Indeed, politicians know that the biggest problem in fighting a shooting war is keeping the morale of the troops up in the field and the support of ordinary people back home. War-weariness is the great enemy of the warmonger.

But if politicians can't divide us over class, and race, and gender, what will they divide us over next? Good point. But, like Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about that tomorrow.