Has PC Gone About As Fur As It Can Go?

One thing we have seen from all three of the outside GOP candidates for President of the United States is that they have been breaking the rules on Political Correctness.

Donald Trump seems to break the rules all the time. Ben Carson said that he didn't think a Muslim should be elected president and lived to tell the tale, and Carly Fiorina told Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to watch the Planned Parenthood tapes, and it didn't seem to hurt her either, although every liberal on the planet is convinced that the PP tapes are a pack of lies.

The point that occurs to me is that the regular elected officials running for president wouldn't dare to do that. They have been, if you like, neutered by what we like to call Cultural Marxism. They know what you are not allowed to say, and they don't say it.

Republicans and conservatives complain about this cowardice all the time, but we don't have to try to do politics in the new lethal battlefield where one "gaffe" can end your career.

So what's going on? Why are the new guys getting away with it? The short answer is that they had nothing to lose, so they could afford to take risks that the professional politicians, from long experience, knew not to take.

But the long answer, I hope, is that political correctness is starting to run up against opposition from the ordinary American people.

Look, there is immense strategic cunning in Gramsci's "march through the institutions" and with Marcuse's tolerant intolerance to shut up the opponents to the glorious march of lefty justice. They have taught generations of lefty activists how to play the PC game.

But there is a principle bigger than politics; it is that all government is injustice. It is one thing to be an outsider, railing against injustice. But as soon as you seize the reins of power then you become the brute insider, the exploiter, the oppressor, the dominator. Our liberal friends make a great show of being outsiders battling against Wall Street and Big Business and the white patriarchy. But the truth is that they are the ruling class, not some chappie on Wall Street or another one sitting in a corporate boardroom. Hey, when President Obama told BP to cough up $20 billion, it did so. It didn't go and argue in the courts. So who has the power?

Oh sure. People knuckle under to the PC boys. They recite the approved ideas to get grades in school and college. And they end up parroting a lot of the ruling class's agenda. But they hate it. They hate it because of the basic instinct in all men, articulated by Nicholas Wade. Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they cannot have power their next choice is that no-one shall rule over them.

Back in 2009 I wrote again and again that the Obamis were making a strategic mistake by putting the pedal to the metal on their liberalism. The best thing would have been to keep the mailed fist inside the velvet glove and make nice, and solidify the emerging Democratic majority. But they didn't. They acted like thieves in the night that had to to grab the swag and run. Maybe they were right and had no time to lose.

The whole Obama experience has been a vast seminar in Government 101. The reason for the government to rule according to law is that when you rule by executive action or by ignoring the law you provoke a head of rebellion. And that is a really stupid thing to do unless, like Mao and his adepts, you are willing to use Terror. And even then, according to Crane Brinton in his Anatomy of Revolution, Terror cannot last forever. Eventually it must relax and reaction will set in.

The point is that people will cringe before bullies, but they hate doing it. And sooner or later they find a way to do for the bullies.

I wonder if this is the electoral cycle when the PC bullies get their comeuppance. Only time will tell.

But here is something to ponder. Those professional politicians that are used to playing under the old rules are paying attention. Pretty soon they will be coming out and playing under the new rules. That should be interesting to watch.

Playing Out Obama's String

When an NFL team at the end of the season has no chance left to get into the playoffs, sportswriters write about "playing out the string." There's no death or glory in it, but the team is still expected to come out on game day ready to play.

That's the situation the US is in with nearly sixteen months to go in the Obama Era. There is almost nothing to be done until President Obama leaves office on January 20, 2017.

So perhaps we just have to sit by while the president makes a mess of the Middle East and the economy continues to sputter.

For many it is too frustrating, and that's why the Republicans in the House just showed Speaker John Boehner the door. And that's probably why three people without experience of elected office are leading the Republican race for the president.

The problem is not that Obama is unteachable, as the Wall Street Journal recently opined. The problem, as I've written, is that liberals are unteachable.

There is not necessarily anything shameful in that. We all have our world views, our belief systems, and we stick to them no matter what. The liberal world view is that foreign wars and carrying the big stick solves nothing. In fact it is worse than nothing; it is imperialism and colonialism. We should concentrate instead on solving problems at home, fighting racism and inequality and homelessness.

So that's why the Democrats determined to retreat from the US world empire built up since World War II. We can't solve the world's problems; in fact we often make them worse. For instance we took Iraq and broke it. Every culture is different; we should let people determine their own political arrangements rather than impose our own.

Domestically, of course, Democrats believe in fundamental transformation. They believe in detailed political and administrative supervision of race relations; they believe in political and economic interventions to correct historical inequality. And they believe in detailed political and administrative supervision of the workplace and the market economy. Even left-wing writers like Jürgen Habermas have admitted that such a politics amounts to "internal colonization."

My world view says that all politics and government is colonization. Because government is force. And my world view says that, if you are going to choose, it's better for the US government to carry a big stick outside the US rather than inside. In other words the job of the United States government to protect our external trade from tin-pot dictators and pirates, and force and projection of force are the only ways to do that. Within the US the efficacy of force is more limited, and morally questionable. Because what is the government doing when it puts the hammer down on, e.g., Uber drivers?

Over the years liberals have convinced themselves that their world view for external retreat and internal conquest is the right and proper thing to do. My judgement is that they are wrong, and the Obama experiment is a pedal-to-the-metal effort that will prove it.

Remember back in the 2000s? Judis and Teixeira prophesied that Democrats would own the future with The Emerging Democratic Majority of minorities, women, educated and young people. Well, minorities got to be hardest hit by the real-estate crash, young people are living in their parents' basement. So how's that emerging majority doing, Barack?

Back in 2008 I voted for Barack Obama because I wanted Democrats to own foreign policy and show what they really believed in beyond attacking President Bush and everything to do with him.

But I can see now that I only saw half the picture. We needed Democrats to take the bull by the horns and implement their entire world view and prove to the world that it was all rubbish and delusion.

So that's where we are today. Americans instinctively understand that something is wrong with the way the government works. They understand that it is Time for a Change. Hey maybe we could have Hope and Change. For a change.

The only question, after we play out the string, is what change?

An Open Letter to UW's Sarachik and Wallace

Dear Dr. Sarachick and Dr. Wallace:

I was rather disappointed to see your names on the now notorious "Gang of 20" RICO Letter. You see, I live over the hill from the University of Washington Seattle campus in Green Lake. It is painful to me that you two scientist chaps would get yourselves involved in such a tawdry affair.

There was a time when liberals cared about siccing the government on political opponents. Remember the McCarthy era? But these days, it seems that any means is OK for advancing a political agenda. The RICO act was passed to make it easier for the federal government to pursue actual criminal gangs. Do you really want to expand the use of RICO so that the government can use it against any conspiracy? Really? Have you thought through that? Have you thought about what a Republican administration staffed to the gills with Koch Brothers adepts could do with such an expanded RICO?

I have a number of problems with your letter, reproduced here, now that the original on the IGES website has been withdrawn.

The letter you signed is not about science, but about politics. I looked at Brulle, 2013, and it is not science. It is political advocacy. Surely you can see that. And the other references in the letter are obviously books of political advocacy. Nothing wrong with that. It just isn't science.

The letter you signed wants to make normal political chicanery into a crime. Let's accept the climate advocates' premise that the opposition to climate change policy is driven by Big Oil and Big Conservatism and that it is a cynical program knowingly based on lies to mislead the American people. If you made that illegal you make just about all politics illegal.  All politics is a conspiracy: people agreeing on a particular cause band together. They raise money; they spend it. Very often their contributors want to hide their identities, because of fear of reprisal. They castigate their opponents as knaves and liars. So even if Big Oil and the Koch Brothers' financed foundations are monsters and are opposing climate change policies for their own selfish and anti-social purposes, that is their right in a free country.

The letter you signed used the tobacco company suit as an example to follow. Really. How much do you know about the tobacco suit? Do you know that most of the money went to the lawyers, and a lot of the rest to governments so they could run anti-tobacco campaigns although in the event a lot of the money was just spent on programs, money being fungible? Do you know that actual smokers got very little of the settlement money? In my view the tobacco suit itself was something of a conspiracy -- to milk the tobacco companies of their profits.

The letter you signed says that, speaking "as climate scientists... America's response to climate change... is insufficient." You may be right. But the point of politics is that the people and their representatives are perfectly within their rights to say: "screw the future, we ain't spending no money on this egg-head stuff. Give us our entitlements and shut up." And if Congress is "recalcitrant," well the answer to that is to elect a Congress that isn't recalcitrant. But judging from the election returns of the last few years, the people are perfectly happy with a recalcitrant Congress. What people want right now is jobs, and I must say, as a member of the 1% (which you pretty well have to be to afford to live in North Seattle) I sympathize with the people.

Now we have the revelations that the lead signatory of your letter, Jagadish Shukla, seems, on the face of it, to be "double-dipping" in violation of the protocols of the National Science Foundation. Who knows what the truth is? And what does it say that only right-wing organizations have so far written about it?  Only I would say this. When Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit gets involved you'd better start looking for the exits.

I'm sorry that you chaps got involved in this mess; I'm sure that you regret it. Perhaps we could get together for coffee some day. I doubt if I'd be interested in your politics, but I would certainly be interested to hear about the science.

Sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

It's Not the President Who's "Unteachable"

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an edit page piece on "An Unteachable President." And the whole conservative commentariat chimed in too.

Yeah, the president is unteachable. Unreachable even. But that's not the point. President Obama is not an island entire of itself. He is exactly what the liberal ruling class wanted. First of all, black, so it can pat itself on the back for its evolvement and its fight against racism. But the whole constellation of President Obama's policies, from Obamacare to green energy to the response to the "rape crisis" in the universities, all of it is just what the liberal professor wanted from his willing student.

It is not President Obama who is unteachable. It is the whole liberal ruling class.

It is not just President Obama who wanted to ram Obamacare down America's throat, it's the whole liberal ruling class. They think that they are called to design and administer the whole US health care system, because fairness, and nothing is going to talk them out of it.

It is not just President Obama trying to ram green energy down our throats, it's the whole liberal ruling class. They think that the science is settled, the earth is going to fry, and they have a moral duty to manage the switch from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy, and nothing is going to talk them out of it.

It is not just President Obama pushing the whole sexism, racism, homophobia agenda, it's the whole liberal ruling class. They think that racism is America's Original Sin, and they are called to atone for it--with your money and your life and your job. That's what the whole "victim culture" is all about. The world is full of victims, and the liberal ruling class is called to advocate for them.

It is obvious that nothing is going to educate the liberal ruling class, nothing except a rebellion.

A couple of early 20th century philosophers knew what had to be done in a case like this. Smokoe Joe of Brendan Chase and The Badger of The Wind in the Willows both understood that, with certain people, you can't teach them. You "learn 'em."

That is the situation we face with liberals. There is no way of teaching them. Why, they are supposed to be the teachers, the educated evolved ones. So we will have to "learn 'em." This is also known as learning the hard way when your fashionable theories collapse of their internal contradictions and you lose political power to the insurgents.

If you look back, we almost had liberals on the ropes in the 1980s. Liberals said in the late 1970s that in the complicated modern world America was ungovernable. So the inflation and recession and the failures of President Carter were facts of nature. Nothing can be done, as the song has it.

Then came President Reagan and proved them all wrong. And then WASPy President Bush succeeded him. Liberals made a tactical correction and pretended that they were New Democrats and that they agreed that "the era of big government is over." But they couldn't change their spots, didn't even want to. And so we got to President Obama and his "fundamental transformation." I wonder who taught him that catchphrase?

The good thing is that we can definitely experience the existential disquiet bubbling up in the great American middle class. They know that something is wrong.

But look, this is democracy. Just because the people think that something is wrong doesn't mean that help is on the way. We could elect a chucklehead for President who could compound the Obama liberal errors into a real disaster. All that the voters can do is vote for Four More Years or they can vote for Time for a Change. That is all.

The good news is that almost all the Republican candidates are proposing about the same agenda. That's not surprising. They all have pollsters, and they all have conservative intellectual policy analysts, and they all swim in the same water.

The bigger problem is how to change the culture. How to delegitimize the victim culture. How to up-vote bourgeois dignity, bourgeois equality, and bourgeois virtue and down-vote the sexual revolution, entitlements, and the victim culture of Julia the Government Girl, Pajama Boy, Mattress Girl, and Clock Boy.

It's the cultural agenda that troubles me. Because we have not yet begun to fight.

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.