Why Would Ta-Nehisi Coates Ignore the Elephant in the Room?

Understanding a chap like Ta-Nehisi Coates is troublesome for a conservative. Why would he insist in his book Between the World and Me that anti-black racism is still America's big problem. Why would he pen his 17,000 word "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" in The Atlantic and never mention the problem of fatherless boys. Kay Hymowitz:

You might think that an article on the Moynihan report and the black family would mention somewhere that today 72 percent of black children, up from 24 percent when the report was written, are born to unmarried mothers. 

Instead, what Coates wants to talk about is that "Mass incarceration is the latest iteration of the American oppression of black people."

Well, maybe, but there is the unfortunate fact that young black males commit murders at 8 times the rate of young white males. Of course we could let them back on the streets so they could kill more black people.

So what is going on here?

It is really quite simple and it is staring us right in the face. It is the problem with capitalism. The problem with capitalism is that it says that, if you sort out a few things like property rights, you don't need much in the way of government to supervise the economy.

And that is a problem -- for the ruling class.

If you are the son of a bourgeois father with a yen for politics and a hall pass into the ruling class, untrammeled capitalism must not stand. Because if you are into politics, you are into government, and government is all about finding things that need force, and even a war.

Marx was the guy that first got a handle on this. Capitalism was a monstrous system of oppression and exploitation, he argued. Only revolution and complete subjection of the capitalist class to the political class would release the burden of exploitation and oppression on the working class.

Well, Marx had an excuse. Nobody knew in 1850 that the average person was just starting to experience an increase in material living standards of 3000 percent in 200 years.

After World War I it was clear that, first, the working class was in fact getting a lot more prosperous. Second, it was also clear that the working class identified first with their nation and only secondly with their class.

So the geniuses at the newly coalesced Frankfurt School took President Eisenhower's big idea -- before he had even thought of it. If you don't know how to solve a problem, make it bigger. They decided that not just the working class, but women and the subjects of the European colonies, and oppressed minorities and gays were grievously exploited and oppressed. Therefore an evolved and enlightened elite was morally and ethically bound to do something about it, using government force.

And so was born the whole poisonous culture we call political correctness, from Gramsci's march through the institutions to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to the Cloward-Piven strategy.

In his book The Devil's Pleasure Palace Michael Walsh accuses the left of cynicism in formulating and executing on this cruel and monstrous philosophy. But I give the left credit for actually believing in its faith. For it is a faith, a millennial faith in "fundamental transformation" and totalitarian politics. I use "totalitarian" in the strict sense of economic, political, and moral/cultural life being collapsed into the political.

I look at the totalitarian current in our modern ruling class as merely the normal surrender to temptation that you would expect in any ruling class. Any member of a ruling class will believe in the uses of political power. Of course the real message behind any belief in political power is that "I like power" but we humans are smarter than that. We do not usually own up to such a crude philosophy. We say we only want power because of the existential need to fight foreigners or enemies or end oppression. Otherwise we would be like the improbable Iago who revels in his evil.

So I just say that our modern ruling class, descended from the German Romantics of the late 18th century, has just assembled an apology for power just like any other ruling class. If it hadn't come up with economic Marxism, that the working class was cruelly exploited, or with cultural Marxism, that women, blacks and homosexuals were grievously oppressed, because sexism, racism, and homophobia, they would have figured out something similar.

And so a chap like Ta-Nehisi Coates can expatiate in books and articles about oppression and racism and American oppression of black people and make a great name for himself. Nice work if you can get it.

Our problem is to develop a counterculture against this naked apology for power. Our challenge is to formulate and spread a culture that says this oppression stuff is all baloney. It is baloney that is exposed as baloney by the facts. All anyone has to do in America is make themselves useful by acquiring a marketable skill and they will do OK. All anyone has to do on the sexual front is get married before having children. It's the old formula: don't drop out of high school, don't have kids in your teens, don't have kids before marriage.

It's all so obvious that the next question is: how could we be living in an America where the tenets of cultural Marxism are ruling the culture and ruling the country? How could it have happened? How could we have allowed it?

I don't know, but there is no use whining about it. Our task is to restore the great bourgeois culture of responsible individualism, spread it out among the people, and then storm the commanding heights of politics, recognizing that politics is downstream from culture, and take America back.

I suspect that, beneath the extraordinary excitement caused by the Donald Trump presidential candidacy and the extraordinary viewing figures for the first two presidential debates, is an inchoate madness of crowds that is yearning for a different America.

You might say that that different America is as different from Ta-Nehisi Coates' and Barack Obama's America as black is from white. You might think that.

I couldn't possibly comment.

After the Debate: Obama's Gift

OK, so I actually watched most of the CNN debate. And I wish that the candidates had tried the "Democratic operatives with bylines" gambit. On at least abortion. As in: "hey Jake and Dana, how many minutes has CNN devoted to the Planned Parenthood videos? And when you propose to cover this important, possibly criminal issue?"

And yes, I liked Carly and Marco and maybe Chris and Ted. And I liked that the candidates did not really pick up the invitation from CNN to fight among themselves.

But here I want to shake a finger at the media types that don't like the issue-free nature of the Trump campaign. I was getting it yesterday from Michael Medved on his radio show. And then there is the Wall Street Journal talking about The Joy of Madness of the voters.

I come back to Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. There can be no such thing as democracy, he writes, in the sense of the people actually ruling.

Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity if accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.

That definition explains a lot. It explains why political campaigns are typically fought over one-and-a-half rather inconsequential issues. Or indeed basically over two questions: "four more years" or "time for a change."

In this context it seems perfectly ordinary that we should have a candidate like Donald Trump whose campaign has much of the flavor of a TV reality show. The voters are saying "screw you!" Which is perfectly natural and physical.

It is appropriate that voters should act like cornered rats from time to time. When you are cornered, the sensible thing to do is to lash out, in the hope that you will change the situation. That is entirely sensible and practical if you are otherwise screwed. And the fact is that, ever since the start of the agricultural age, humans have been "caged" by the fact that without the benefit of society life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The Journal knows who is to blame for all this in their "madness" piece.

Barack Obama is fundamentally apolitical... Doing politics, left or right, isn't his thing... You think you're mad? Talk to members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, and you will discover people also driven nuts by the virtual impossibility over two presidential terms of practicing normal politics.

And Michael Barone too:

In 2008 Obama promised he would "fundamentally transform" America, and Obamacare and the Iran deal are indeed fundamental transformations of policy --transformations most Americans oppose...

And so a president who came to office with relatively little experience has managed to tarnish experience, incumbency and institutions: a fundamental transformation indeed.

The truth is, though, that the "fundamental transformation" that conservatives want is only likely to come when ordinary ruling class politics is seen to fail.

And that seems to be the reason for the madness of the moment. Voters are coming to see that their lordly ruling class has got them in a box. And they don't like it. The only thing to do, the rational thing, is to stir the soup, and hope that something good comes up from the bottom of the pot.

And so the bottom line is that President Obama is the gift that keeps on giving. He has done what seemed unthinkable. He has brought the legitimacy of the established ruling class into question.

What is the Right Way to Undo Obama?

The great challenge facing the next President of the United States is perhaps not what to do but how to do it.

It is easy to say that we should reverse all the executive actions of President Obama and teach the liberals a lesson.

But then we would be just making the same mistake as the Obamis made, pushing the limit on everything without bothering to forge a consensus. Arguably, the reason that the Democratic Party has been put in the worst electoral position since 1928 is that President Obama has not governed by consensus. His Obamacare was passed by legislative legerdemain and lies, and was always opposed by a plurality of voters. His Iran deal is a folly. If you can't get a treaty passed in the US Senate, mainly because there is no support in the country, then what you may have agreed with a foreign power isn't a treaty.

So what do we do about Obama?

Victor Davis Hanson asks this question as it applies to The Middle East, The Law, Race, and Debt.

On The Middle East, Hanson says it doesn't matter what Obama's motive was, he's broken the Middle East and now we have to deal with it. But I think that the bigger issue is this. Obama has inadvertently made clear that peace in the Middle East was predicated on US hegemony. The end of US hegemony -- a long-term liberal objective -- means a humanitarian disaster as the various regional powers fight it out. OK, but now we have to decide what to do next. What really is the US interest in the Middle East? Obama has provoked this question like no president before him.

On The Law, Hanson writes:

There will be a temptation for a reform president to use the lawless means that Obama has bequeathed — executive orders to unconstitutionally bypass Congress; arbitrary suspension or simple non-enforcement of laws, depending on where we are in the national election cycle; exemption of party loyalists from legal accountability — to achieve the noble aim of restoring legality. But such short-cuts to reform would be a terrible mistake.  

"Instead," he writes, "the next president must, as never before, obey both the spirit and the very letter of the law to restore to us what Obama has almost destroyed."

Yes, but it seems to me that the only way to make this stick is to make liberals regret they ever tried to cut corners with executive orders and ignoring the plain meaning of the written law, and do it by applying the law to liberals. Hey kids! What a concept! The next president has to get himself a mandate to do this by saying that there will be no corner cutting in his administration, and no liberal opt-outs like "sanctuary cities."

But suppose the president says that -- after liberals overturned decades of consensus on labor law at the National Labor Relations Board, and suddenly decided, by regulatory fiat, to regulate the internet as a utility -- that their lack of good faith means that the NRLB and the FCC must be abolished, because we cannot have institutions of government as cat's paws for a single political party. Could he get a consensus to do that?

On Race Hanson notes that Obama has taken racial tensions and made them worse. He suggests that

The next president should take a hiatus from our racial obsessions, and simply try treating Americans as if their race or ethnic background were irrelevant.

I have a better idea. I think that the next President should list all the failed race politics of the last 150 years, from the disaster of Reconstruction to the cultural wasteland left by Great Society programs to the resentments of Affirmative Action to the poison of diversity, the failure of the nation's First Black President and the community-organizer divisions of #BlackLivesMatter. Then he should say that the only way to solve this problem is to take it out of politics and government. All politics does is divide us. All government goes is try to force us together. There is only one thing to do. It is to beg African Americans for forgiveness. You know, just like they did in Charleston, South Carolina.

Seriously. What would happen after such a presidential speech? How would liberals deal with the president calling groups of people into the Oval Office every couple of months for their achievements in racial healing?

On Debt, Hanson writes:

When interest rates climb to 4 or 5 percent, the next president will face a budgetary crisis, augmented by Obama’s failure to address entitlement spending. We are in for rough times; whether Obama will get out ahead of the reckoning is unknown.

The way forward, of course, is to privatize as much as possible of pensions and health care and education and welfare. But that cannot be done by shenanigans and budgetary tricks. It has to start with the president and the ruling class selling the American people on the idea that they are much better off running their own pensions, health care etc. than letting government come in and screw it up. But I don't think the American people will be ready for that until after the money runs out.

The governing approach of the Obamis has been a disaster, because the Obamis either knew or feared that they couldn't get their agenda done any other way.

But it won't do for Republicans to do an Obama in 2017. We believe in law, in consensus, in the consent of the governed, and all that rubbish. We have to persuade. Every other way leads to the Maelstrom.

A Kidney Stone for Breakfast

This morning, out of a clear blue sky, I got a sudden pain in my lower-left abdomen just before breakfast. Pretty soon I was sweating, breathing rapidly, and finding it painful to walk. After a while, prompted by the Lady Marjorie, I called Group Health and they told me to call 911.

Pretty soon four burly firemen turned up and took my vital signs. The general consensus was to head to the nearest hospital, and so, once the fire truck had cleared the driveway, we headed off to Swedish in Ballard. Thanks fellas!

After the usual admissions frou-frou -- and the first thing they do is hook up an IV -- Dr. Burdick showed up and allowed as how he thought it was urolithiasis. That's a kidney stone to you. And the MRI confirmed a 2mm kidney stone that has just "turned the corner." All the folks at Swedish were pleasant and competent. All except that Burdick guy, who said I'd have to break his arm if I thought I was going to get out of hospital without submitting a urine sample.

OK, so that's all right.

They keep asking you to rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10. I said 6-7 but pretty soon it was down to 3. Now it's just a ache in the lower abdomen. How do you rate that? Then, after thanking everyone, it was off to Group Health pharmacy to sit around for an hour to fill four prescriptions for pain, real pain, nausea, and a drug to "open up" the ureter.

Of course everyone at the hospital from the doc to the MRI tech said they had already had a kidney stone, so I guess that, as usual, I am the last to know.

Knowing what I know now, I would have said that I would have just sat there and waited for the stone to pass. But you never know. It could have be something else, as in life-threatening! And Lady Marjorie would have none of such foolishness.

Anyway, tomorrow it's back to the crimes and misdemeanors of our abysmal ruling class. But right now I have to go downstairs and do my DuoLingo.

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.