Robert Reich and "Rigging the System"

Perennial leftist Robert B. Reich has a piece out on "rigging the system" and "The Real Divide in America."

After doubting the sincerity of GOP candidates like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and their rhetoric against "fat cats" and the "rich and powerful" he admits that things have changed.

It is likely that in coming years the major fault line in American politics will shift from Democrat versus Republican to antiestablishment versus establishment.

That coming divide will pit much of the middle class, working class, and poor, all of whom see the game as rigged, against many of the executives of large corporations, the inhabitants of Wall Street, and the establishment billionaires, who are perceived as doing the rigging.

What chaps like Reich cannot seem to understand is that everything that government does amounts to "rigging the system." I've been reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction, a blow-by-blow account of the ten years after the Civil War. It was a disaster, and the disaster had mostly to do with the fact that everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted the government to rig the system in their favor.

Let's take one issue: railroads. In the 1860s railroads were like green energy today. Everyone wanted the government to get into it. They proposed grants and subsidies, and many state governments went into debt to help finance railroads in their states. But when the railroads were up and running then the farmers got all pissed off because they didn't like the sky-high freight rates and the discounts that were only available to big shippers. So they wanted government to rig the system in their favor and give the farmers lower rates. (Never mind that before the railroads there was no way to ship farm products except by water and by horse and cart.) In other words, Americans are shameless. They want the government to rig the system in their favor, and they are enraged when the government rigs the system for somebody else.

The problem, Robert Reich, is not the big establishment players rigging the system. The problem is that we the people open the doors to rigging by voting for the government to do stuff. As soon as you allow the idea that it is beneficial for government to spend public money on some worthy purpose you are opening the door for moneyed interests to lobby for the government to subsidize their purpose.

The consequence is that privilege gets piled on privilege, system rigging follows system rigging until the whole economy is bound hand and foot with special carve-outs for everyone -- or at least everyone that can get the attention of a politician.

Could that be a credible explanation for the anemic Obama recovery?

The problem, Robert Reich, is that liberals like you have sanctified a particular form of system rigging, the kind that creates jobs and power for credentialed experts and political activists and distributes benefits to the "middle class, working class, and poor" in the form of social services. Next thing you know, the "executives of large corporations, the inhabitants of Wall Street, and the establishment billionaires" show up to "help" deliver those social services. That's why Obamacare was a total sell-out to Big Health and Big Pharma. If you want to give free health care to Nancy Pelosi's artists and writers then you have to write a check to the folks that will actually deliver the health care to those deserving voters.

But why do I have to tell you that, Robert B. Reich? Surely you are smart enough to figure that out for yourself.

Pope Francis Elected by Lefty Cardinals

The election of Pope Francis was a surprise to me. I thought that the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI meant that the Catholic Church had turned away from lefty social and political fashion.

Now the boys at Powerline have made everything clear. Pope Francis was the project of a cabal of lefty cardinals determined to reverse the conservative trend of John Paul and Benedict.

The group wanted a drastic reform of the Church, to make it “much more modern”, and for Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to head it. 

OK. That explains everything. I suppose it's only natural that the Catholic Church should have factions, with one wanting to bring the church kicking and screaming into the modern age and the other wanting to reconnect with the basics of Christian faith.

But I wish that the College of Cardinals would read, learn and inwardly digest the work of Rodney Stark, sociologist of religion. In numerous books he has developed the idea that churches (and their more extreme versions in sects and cults) are faith organizations in some tension with the rest of society. The more they are in tension the more they need to establish and maintain strict rules for member behavior. The Jehovah's Witnesses are an example of a sect in strong tension with secular society and with strict rules for members. The Unitarian Church might just as well be the liberal ruling class at prayer; it is not in tension with the larger liberal society and does not enforce church discipline. This is all explained in Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke.

According to Stark, the decisions that church leaders make about tension and strictness will strongly influence the size of the church. There is a bell curve on church popularity. Both very low tension/strictness churches and very high tension/strictness churches tend to be small. The sweet spot is moderate tension and moderate strictness. Stark explains the decline of the "mainline" Protestant churches from the decision of their leaders to get more "modern" and reduce the tension with the rest of society and strictness enforced upon members. They moved out of the sweet spot of moderate tension/strictness into the less favorable low tension/strictness zone.

Now the Catholic Church used to be a moderately high tension/high strictness church. This seemed to be highly satisfying to the priests and nuns and to the loyal members. It was highly unsatisfying to the highly vocal Catholic children that experienced suffocation and domination from their Catholic childhoods. But the fact is that when the Church executed a lowering of tension and strictness in Vatican II membership fell off dramatically. And Stark shows that "vocations" -- meaning people entering the priesthood or a religious order -- is highest in the US in conservative Catholic dioceses.

So now comes another reform group anxious to liberalize the Catholic Church, reduce its tension with outside society on issues like marriage and climate change, and become more modern. What could go wrong with that?

This all dovetails with my Three Peoples theory. On my view, Christian churches are agencies that facilitate the transition from the People of the Subordinate Self to the People of the Responsible Self. Church reformers like the Vatican II chaps and the cabal that got Pope Francis elected are People of the Creative Self feeling irritated by the schlumps that want to keep on with the job of helping People of the Subordinate Self graduate into the sunny uplands of the People of the Responsible Self.

So, on my view stolen from Rodney Stark, the Pope Francis chaps are going to make the Catholic Church smaller. And that's a shame, because the Catholic Church is needed as never before helping Africans, Asians, and South Americans get out of their age-old subordinate peasant culture and become competent city dwellers and People of the Responsible Self. And that is to say nothing of demoralized underclass people in the developed West.

Are Republicans "Needlessly Alienating Large Chunks of the Electorate?"

Here comes Charles Krauthammer rounding up the usual suspects. Ben Carson is needlessly insulting Muslims and Donald Trump is needlessly insulting Mexican Americans.

Really?

And what about Hillary Clinton who is determined to run on the "rape culture" platform. Is not the rape culture campaign needlessly alienating large chunks of the electorate, namely men?

So let's get real, chaps.

First of all there is Chantrill's Second Law: Politics is Division.

Alienating chunks of people is what politicians do. They do it in order to rally the folks on their own side. The idea is not, of course, to alienate, so much as to divide the electorate down the middle with 51 percent or more voting for your side. The time-honored strategy is to call out some minority, within the borders or without, and suggest that they are a threat to the nation.

Ideally, of course, your enemy should be what H.L. Mencken called a "hobgoblin" that doesn't get to vote. Liberals are the experts in this, with their hate campaigns against "greedy bankers" and job-killing CEOs. How many people are turned off by that? Just a few libertarians like me.

But, of course, liberals don't stop at alienating bankers and CEOs. They are positively ferocious about alienating racists, which could include all white people. They are ruthless about hunting down sexists, which could expand to the set of all males. They are fanatic about stamping out homophobia, which could include all heterosexuals.

Talk about large chunks of the electorate!

David Brooks is harping on a similar theme.

Let's step back a bit. This whole frou-frah goes back to what we will stipulate was a good liberal sentiment of the 1960s and the civil rights movement. The idea was to stop the automatic racism and marginalization of black people. Let us give liberals a gold star for that.

But there is a dark side to this. Conservatives have recently got all hot and bothered about it. It is the conscious leftist strategy, invented by the Frankfurt School, to rile up and separate minority groups from the general population and stigmatize anyone that says a discouraging word against these clients of the liberals. We have seen this political strategy expressed as the future of the Democratic Party in the iconic The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira in which the future in America belongs to a coalition of minorities, women, the educated and the young.

Hello Krauthammer and Brooks. Do you not see that this Frankfurt School strategy and its culture of political correctness amounts to nothing less than "needlessly alienating large chunks of the electorate," specifically the great honest mass of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans" in the service of a cynical political strategy that aims to fundamentally transform America from a middle-class society of live and let live into a politically mobilized activist state of warring identity groups led by liberals.

Over the last 20 years liberals have successfully divided America by cowing large chunks of Americans into submission through their culture of political correctness that they learned from Frankfurt Schoolman Herbert Marcuse. Their politics was cynically divisive but it worked because the people that they "needlessly alienated" were at the same time cowed into submission.

But suppose these large chunks of alienated people started fighting back? What would it look like? 

I suggest it would look like USA 2015.

Let us give liberals their due, on minority rights and immigration.

It's a good thing to restrain the natural instinct of the majority to marginalize the minority.  But when you amp this up to intimidating the majority and using minorities as cat's paws to humiliate the majority then you are sowing the wind and about to reap the whirlwind.

It is a good thing to leaven the national dough with immigration, but the ruling class first of all owes the native population a chance at a decent life and upward mobility before it lets one immigrant (like me) in the door. Immigration increases the labor supply and that drives down wages. Period. And it impacts the low-skilled native population most keenly. Anyone that argues against this is denying settled science. To coin a phrase.

At some point the voters are going to push back against a ruling class that favors the minority over the majority and refuses to defend the border against illegal immigrants.

Now I think that President Obama has been the trigger that has fired off the push-back. To understand why you could start with this piece about "Bully's Pulpit" by Jay D. Homnick. Jay talks about how Obama bullies his opponents and disrespects them. Talk about alienating large chunks of Americans.

I have written several times that it is one thing to demonstrate and protest and fling insulting words around when you and your party are the Out party. It is quite another thing when you do this as president of the In party.

Liberals have been playing this game of cultural bullying for so long that it just seems to them the natural order of things. They are right and the racists, sexists, homophobes are wrong. It is their historic destiny to curb and correct the atavisms of the American people. They have made the "protest" into a holy religious ceremony and the "activist" into an eternal hero fighting for the powerless against the powerful.

You see, it is one thing to protest if you are truly the helpless and the powerless. But it is rather a different matter, as in Ferguson, Missouri, when the protesters are celebrated by the President of the United States and the ruling class.

Hey liberals! Whose job is it to curb the atavisms of liberals?

I think this liberal culture of bullying is in the early stages of experiencing its moment of truth. It has worked thus far because its targets have been the middle class. Now the middle class, cultural product of the great global exchange economy, are what I call the People of the Responsible Self. They live by working and relating responsibly in the global exchange economy where the watchword is Trust. You trust anyone and everyone unless they demonstrate untrustworthiness. So when liberals descend on the great American middle class and accuse it of racism, sexism, and homophobia, the average middle-class person assumes liberal good faith and looks at himself and sees he is not perfect. That is the culture of the exchange economy's trust culture.

But what happens when the liberals have demonstrated their bad faith, when they have shown that the idea of their politics is merely to cow the great American middle class into submission for the greater glory of liberal politics? What happens when they put up a candidate for president that's the worst liar in US history? That is the question we are now facing. We will have the answer in November 2016.

Because the truth, contra Charles Krauthammer, is that Muslims are a problem for the peaceful development of the global exchange economy. The truth, contra the Beltway ruling class, is that immigration on the scale of the last 50 years is a problem for the harmonious development of the American nation.

And if we don't face facts now we will have to face facts later.

Ben Carson, American Exceptionalism and the Huddled Masses

In conversation with a Democratic operative with a byline that is married to another Democratic operative the Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson opined as how he had a problem with a Muslim getting elected as President of the United States.

Because sharia, the notion that Allah and state are one, and taqiyya, the doctrine that Muslims are called to lie about their real intentions.

Of course every liberal in the nation immediately threw themselves on the nearest fainting couch. Because how dare Ben Carson say anything so Islamophobic?

Mind you, I kinda wish that Carson's concern about taqiyya had also been applied to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Isn't it pretty obvious that a lot of his agenda was hidden from the American people, including the notion that he is a Christian? And what about the notion in his famous 2004 convention speech about the pundits slicing America into red states and blue states? Who would have thought that such a high-mnded orator would turn into the cynical divider of 2009-2015? For the truth about Obama is that he is a guy who walks and talks and acts like a secular liberal that believes in the 39 Articles of Liberal Faith with a passion. Now that he is president.

But it all made me think. For Carson's concern is the concern of anyone that believes in American exceptionalism, that the US founding was a unique combination of culture and political ideas, and that every new immigrant group to the US presents a challenge, because they bring to the US a culture that might not assimilate to the glorious exception that is America.

There are two common responses to this problem. The first is what I would call American Apprenticeship. The idea is to indoctrinate the children of immigrants into the culture of American exceptionalism, to tell them that, while we honor and respect where they came from, we also expect them to read, learn and inwardly digest the political, social, and economic culture of America before they take the stage as fully-fledged Americans. This, of course, is what the old idea of the "common school," advocated by Horace Mann in the 1830s, was all about. It was designed to cure the Irish of their shanty Irish culture and their Catholicism. And anything else that needed correction.

The second approach is what we might call the Liberal Plantation. The idea is to indoctrinate the children of immigrants into the culture of liberal victimhood, to tell them that their culture is just as good as ours and that we should honor the differences. Anyway, America has a pretty lousy record, featuring slavery, racism, discrimination and marginalization and "Irish Need Not Apply," when it comes to immigrants. So liberals tell immigrants that they are just as good as any native-born Americans, that any opposition to them and their culture is some sort of -phobia, and that liberals and the Democratic Party are their only friends while native-born Americans are mean-spirited bigots on the wrong side of history. Any difficulties they face in getting up to speed in America are due to racism, sexism, and, in the case of Muslims, Islamophobia.

History shows that both approaches suck. If we take the Irish, the despair of Boston Brahmins in the 1830s, we note that the Irish responded to the "common school" by taking the Catholic Church mainstream, putting St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and building their own parochial school system, building first the school and then the church. How cool is that?

If we take African Americans, the darlings of today's liberals, we note that the programs that liberals have developed to help African Americans have had, at very least, mixed results. But the programs have been really great for liberals, providing them with endless excuses for more political power and government sinecures for liberals. How sick is that?

On the other hand, you see around you every day immigrants and the children of immigrants working hard to make it in America. In my acquaintance there are the two daughters of Mexican immigrants, father a high-school dropout working at the Postal Service, who are both now going to college. There is the young son of Hungarian immigrants that refused to speak Hungarian after his first week at pre-school. We should not discount the immense cultural power of the exchange economy and the powerful forces on eager young employees to conform to the dictates of the market culture.

And think of India and China. Both these cultures, that led the world prior to 1500, went for socialism in the 20th century because their leaders genuinely thought that socialism was the wave of the future. Boy, was that a big mistake. Today both India and China are converts to capitalism and working hard to make up for lost time.

And that brings us back to 2015, the presidential election of 2016, and the outsider candidacies of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina.

Er, just a minute. "Outsider?" These three are all bona-fide members of the ruling class. Donald Trump is the son of a real-estate developer and builder and has spent his adult life as a mover and a shaker in New York. Ben Carson is up from nothing, but a standout success in the very establishmentarian health-care industry. And Carly Fiorina, for all that she started adult life as a secretary and rose to CEO, is a Stanford University graduate. These folks all know how to play the game in the higher reaches of today's American ruling class and power elite. No outsiders they.

What Trump and Carson and Fiorina have succeeded in doing is doing a breakout through the current rules of political engagement. They have dared to say things that you are not allowed to say and have survived to tell the tale. This, as we now like to say, is huuuuge. The best way to appreciate this is to consider Ted Cruz. Up till a month ago, Cruz was considered the wild man in the race. He had set himself up as the man who will fight for the Republican base against the Beltway establishment, and he got what he wanted, for "everyone knows" that the leaders of the US Senate hate the guy. (Do they really? Surely they must know and understand the game that Cruz is playing). But Cruz was pretty careful not to be too wild; he was always mildness itself in TV interviews, and now Ted Cruz seems rather tame and safe compared to the three outspoken outsiders.

Here's what I think. The outsider candidates represent the American Apprenticeship advocates in the American people that think that immigrants and Democratic identity groups, the huddled masses on the Liberal Plantation, should shut up and get a job. The base is really frightened by the Obama administration and fears that their America is slipping away.

When you think about it, the news that the base is frightened ought to be great news for the Republican Party. There's nothing a politicians likes more than a frightened voter begging to be led to safety, especially when the folks in the other party must be just a little disappointed about the failure of Hope and Change to show up.

But is the Republican base right? Is America slipping away? Maybe. But I'd be more worried about America if nobody were worried. The truth is that typical Americans have always been terrified by the latest batch of immigrants and the latest gang of hoodlums creating mayhem in the city. Will the latest batch end up wrecking the whole American experiment? Will Muslims and their sneaky taqiyya really take over America?

The question answers itself. America and the American idea is a lot bigger than the taqiyya guys at CAIR, a lot bigger than the smallness of the Obama years. And a lot bigger than the Republican candidates for President of the United States in 2015.

When America does fall, as it will in the end, it will not fall because of some sneaky Muslims or even because of Obama and his Alinsky community organizer culture. It will be something else, and it will be our own fault, the fault of typical Americans who let the whole thing slip away while distracted by squirrels.

Adorno: Cultural Marxism Isn't All Bad

Conservatives are all riled up about "cultural Marxism" right now, with Michael Walsh's book The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West providing chapter and verse for preachers on conservative hustings.

But my encounter with the inventors of cultural Marxism, the so-called Frankfurt School, has been more equivocal.

I agree that the switch from economic Marxism and its liberation for the workers to cultural Marxism and its liberation for everyone else except patriarchal white men has the odor of rank political opportunism, along the lines of: Hey, our war to take down capitalism using the workers as our cat's paws didn't work so let's try it with women, blacks, and gays.

I agree that the Gramscian idea of the "long march through the institutions" is chilling, and the Marcusian doctrine of intolerance towards the opponents of progressivism is monstrous. And Reich is getting into cuckoo-land.

But The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno is a book that any supporter of capitalism and freedom ought to respect, and that is why I give it its due in my American Manifesto. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Enlightenment and its cult of reason is about freedom for humans gained at the expense of the rest of creation. "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men." Here is Alex Thomson in Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed:

[M]an's attempt to set himself apart from nature is bound up with the domination of nature, which reveals that man has not in fact escaped from nature at all.

You could say that with reason man has made nature his plantation slave, with all that implies.

Here is Thomson's gloss on Adorno's idea of freedom, a treatment that explains the Marxian distaste for capitalism.

Freedom is partially activated in the transition from feudal or absolutist to a bourgeois society. The individual gains a degree of autonomy in being able to determine his own actions, and in buying and selling his or her goods or labour power. However freedom it a market society is in theses terms submission to the market. The freedom of the individual is only partial, remaining dependent on economic needs. Freedom fails to live up to its promise of reconciliation between the individual and society: a promise which allows us to criticize not only social unfreedom, but also the partial freedom hypostatized in liberal philosophies which justify the freedom of the individual.

Now I think that this paragraph is telling. It says that capitalism promised freedom and didn't deliver. It freed the peasants from feudalism but enslaved them to the market. And the paragraph also sets up the argument for the socialist promise. We will complete the freedom revolution, say the socialists; we will liberate you from the market. That is what Nancy Pelosi was talking about when she proudly announced that because of Obamacare artists and writers could go on writing and painting now that government had taken care of their health insurance.

Only, of course, such a promise is rubbish. All humans live under the daily servitude of finding the means to live: food, shelter and so on. The only question is how, in a human society, to do it. There is the idea that we should all go out and work and share and share alike. That doesn't work because of the problems that e.g. the Pilgrims discovered immediately on arriving in the New World. Some people shirk work and other people get demoralized and slack off too. So something other social arrangement is needed.

What we are left with are the two options developed by Eric Hoffer in "The Readiness to Work." Either the boss tells everyone how and when to work or the worker shoulders that responsibility himself. There is also a third option that rests half way between the two: the laborer hires his time out to an employer and the employer tells him what to do. The worker works for wages.

The conventional Marxists got themselves all in a twist about the exploitation of wage labor under the system of capitalism. But Adorno's student Jürgen Habermas saw that system was domination in any social setup: not just capital but government exploited and dominated by the nature of any hierarchical system, and government's form of domination amounted to an "internal colonization" of society. His solution in The Theory of Communicative Action was to leaven the dominatory systems with the reciprocal exchange of human-to-human communication and truth values in the day-to-day lifeworld.

Adorno also sees beyond the Enlightenment cult of reason and the fantasy of liberation. Suppose you experience reason not as the transcendental key to understanding the universe but as a natural development of man's instinct for self-preservation. You experience that reason gives man a competitive advantage over other animals. But, as Thomson paraphrases Adorno:

The fact that reason can reflect on its own nature, also allows for the possibility of going against nature. Reason means that we have the chance of going against our instincts and desires.

But we must not forget that reason does not free us from our natural condition. Freedom does not mean freedom from nature. Human life is equivocal, not a simple march to liberation.

These more careful voices have been drowned out in the modern left's lunge for power. The anti-colonialists in the left rail about the colonization of non-white peoples, yet they propose and advance a complete and cynical internal colonization of everything in their own society. Nothing is to be hidden from the gaze and the power of the social justice activist.

The optimistic thing about left-wing politics is that it fails every time it is tried. But it would be nice if some of the left's practitioners had actually thought a little about politics beyond the immediate tactical problem of how to dominate the political conversation and silence opposing voices.

It would be nice if they used their critical theory to critique not just bourgeois society but their own ideas.

Republicans Have Never Reached Out

Last Monday I was listening to Michael Medved doing the liberals' work for them by castigating Ben Carson on the Muslim issue. Michael ended his radio show segment by asking how the Republicans possibly can expect to thrive if they don't reach out beyond the Republican base.

Er, what planet are you broadcasting from, Michael? The Republicans have never reached out, at least not in my lifetime. They don't know how, because they are just a teeny bit embarrassed about handing out free stuff.

And yet Republicans have still managed to elect their share of Republican presidents and now control Congress. What gives?

It is simple. Republicans are nothing more than Americans that have been chucked out of the Democratic Party. Starting with Ronald Reagan, who famously said: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."

That's how it works for everyone else. Remember the Reagan Democrats of 1980? They also felt that the party had left them. Then it was Conservative Christians that found the Democratic Party didn't want them. Then it was white men.

Oh, and don't forget the whole South. Democrats have been telling themselves ever since I came to political consciousness that they lost the South because of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. Could be. But the reality is that Democrats have been dissing the South for decades and the South has got the message. Just in case the South didn't get the message the Democrats just reminded them how they don't belong in today's inclusive Democratic Party with an unmistakable message in the Confederate battle flag flap.

Now it's the turn of the Trumpers, who sound to me like the much maligned white working class when they call Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Remember when the Democrats just loooved the white working stiff? That's ancient history now.

And what about chaps like you, Michael, America's corps of smart Jewish kids? The Republicans have never known what to do about the Jews, not since the days of the Jewish quota at Harvard, but they didn't have to. First of all liberal Jewish intellectuals like Irving Kristol got mugged by reality in the 1960s back in New York, and now Jewish Americans know that the Democratic Party is the party of Muslims and Palestinians and is developing a reputation for anti-semitism. So Jews are moving silently into the Republican column. Not because they left the Democratic Party but because the Democratic Party left them.

I wonder who will be next? Obviously married people with children would be crazy to vote Democrat. And in fact any unsuspecting "cis-gendered" American today would be unwelcome in the ranks of the inclusive. After all, any uncloseted cis-gendered American is committing a microaggression by just existing.

Then there are college men. Why would any man in college have anything to do with the Democratic Party? After all, the Democrats want to criminalize good healthy young male behavior, by making any sexual assault accusation into an immediate ticket to oblivion, without benefit of the court system and its protections for the accused.

Then there is the Uber generation. Anyone that works in the gig economy is bound to get the message sooner or later: Democrats are not your friends; they are instead the pals of established interests that want to roll over you and continue to enjoy the customary rents they enjoy as a reward for their votes and their contributions.

That's not to mention ordinary wage workers. One fine day the workers are going to wake up and wonder what they are getting in return for the swingeing payroll taxes they and their employers pay for the possibility, one day, that they will get a pension and a bit of death-panel-administered health care. They might think that the Democratic Party and its politics of tax-and-spend is a direct attack on people like them. They might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

But never mind about the nobodies that nobody who is anybody cares about. How about east Asians? They are already being Asian-quota-ed at the nation's select universities, and they have pushed back against the Asian quota at the University of California and at Harvard. How long can it be before the signal goes out to the Democratic operatives with bylines that Asians are really as racist and exclusionary as cis-gendered whites? How long till Asians find out that they didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left them?

What about Hispanics? The information I've read is that Hispanics are Democratic when they first arrive and want to bring the rest of the family to the US. But when the family is all here and they start to thrive -- well then they start to vote Republican.

And hey, what about the most Democratic of all Democrats: African Americans? Surely African Americans must be fit to be tied by the disappointments of the Obama administration. In fact they would have a good argument to say that they were the hardest hit by "fundamental transformation." And pretty soon they won't have to support America's First Black President as a part of their racial identity.

Maybe the only people left in the Democratic Party after a suitable period of adjustment will be the liberal poster-children that we have learned to know and love in recent years: Julia the Government Girl, Pajama Boy, Mattress Girl, and now the Muslim Clock Boy, all celebrated by non-cis-gendered people, credentialed social justice warriors, and those darlings of the Democratic Party, the Global Association of Green Energy Crony Capitalists, Tom Steyer, proprietor.

So come on Michael. Get a clue. We Republicans don't have to do anything to win elections, even if we knew how. All we have to do is sit here on the sidewalk with a nice cup of Starbucks Blond and wait for the migrants and the refugees pouring over the border from their forty years in the wilderness of the Democratic Party into the Promised Land of the People of the Responsible Self.

The Liberals' Modest Proposal

A couple centuries ago, Jonathan Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal" to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland. The subhead for the article was:

For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public

The solution? Parents should eat their children. And this was over a century before the Potato Famine.

Yesterday I read Charles Murray's review of the book of a fellow poverty intellectual, Robert D. Putnam. Putnam rose to fame on his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse of American Community, which bemoaned the fact that Americans don't join organizations any more. Gosh, I wonder why?

Now Putnam has written Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. It is the liberal answer to Murray's recent Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. Both books demonstrate that things are not well with America's working class.

Like Charles Murray, Robert Putnam grew up in a small town in the 1950s.

Port Clinton had class divisions in the 1950s, but the town corresponded closely to the American ideal: lots of interaction across social classes, stable and mostly loving families in all social classes, low crime, and high levels of community engagement. I grew up in the same era in the same kind of town.

But things are different today.

Since Putnam left Port Clinton, it has become a radically different place, with haves and have-nots separated by chasms not just in income, but on a wide range of cultural dimensions that, to borrow from the book’s subtitle, have put the American dream in crisis. The kids of today’s working class have it worse in so many ways that climbing the socioeconomic ladder, as many of Putnam’s classmates in the 1950s succeeded in doing, has become dauntingly difficult.

Murray's book tells a similar story. Things are great in Belmont, a suburb of Boston, where folks like Mitt Romney live. Things are horrible in white working-class neighborhoods like Fishtown in Philadelphia, where the women don't marry and the men don't work.

From Murray's perspective, Putnam's book provides a good view at the liberal conventional wisdom on how this could have happened.

The leading culprits are economic—globalization, stagnation of working-class wages, and loss of manufacturing jobs. When cultural factors are involved, they are such things as the sexual revolution.

Could the policy reforms of the 1960s be a cause? Not a chance.

This is not rocket science. Why do women marry? To bind the father of their children to them. Why do men work? To provide for their children and maintain access to sex. But marriage to an unskilled, undisciplined man is a hard row to hoe. It's much easier to take free stuff from the state.

In Visible Man, George Gilder showed how this works. He tells the story of a disabled vet from Vietnam that knocked up an underage girl and worked hard to support her and his child. But when the girl got old enough for welfare she ditched him and got a nice apartment.

Putnam has a raft of liberal ideas to fix things, including universal pre-K. But Murray argues that pre-K doesn't make that much difference. What really matters is IQ, and that is inherited.

So that set me to thinking. If you look at the range of liberal policies they appear as though they were designed to hammer the poor. Margaret Sanger and abortion and cleansing the race of the unfit with Planned Parenthood conveniently close to minority neighborhoods? Check. Welfare policies to discourage marriage and fatherhood and so make lower-income boys into gang-bangers? Check. Lousy inner-city schools that don't even succeed in basic discipline? Check. Race and identity politics that divide the poor and recent immigrants from the basic cultural myth of the American Dream? Check.

Here's another issue that Charles Murray brings up. The IQ chasm between college graduates and high-school graduates has been getting bigger. Back in 1960 the gap was 14 points. Today it is 23 points.

So the result of another liberal policy, that "everyone goes to college," means that everyone with an half decent IQ goes to college and the rest get left behind. And their children get left even further behind.

Now we all know what a big premium liberals put on being the smartest people in the room and how they know that they are more evolved, more intelligent that other people.

People like that would instinctively make life difficult for people with a low IQ. They would naturally segregate themselves into a kind of Brahmin caste. Oh, they would care for the Untouchables, but not so much that they would dirty their hands.

And think about it. The modern workplace requires people with a certain facility for service and interacting with computers and media. There is not much need for the strong back. Wouldn't it just be a kindness to put the low IQ People of the Strong Back out of their misery?

I don't know. You tell me.