Middle Class Isn't THAT Mad

Everybody knows that the middle class is mad as hell and it isn't going to take it any more. Monica Crowley has a piece going down the list: deficits, debt, immigration, etc. Including the failure to reform entitlements.

I don't think so.

The voters are mad, for sure. But they are mad in an unfocused way. They are mad because things don't seem to be working the way they should. The economy isn't growing like it should. The world isn't under control, like it should. The rulers don't seem to have things under control like they should.

I think the last item is the key one. The truth is we moderns are all subordinate peasants, and we expect our government to make things right for us; we expect our leaders to have things under control. If things don't go right then we start looking for someone to blame. Usually, the politicians are way out in front on this, and are leading the charge against greedy bankers or corrupt CEOs. But not this time, for some reason.

Really? What's wrong with our rulers? Don't they know how to play the scapegoat game any more?

But the real problem is that the scapegoat game isn't really working, because the rulers don't seem to have things under control. First 9/11, then the Iraq blunder, then the Crash of 2008, then the slow recovery, and now the spread of ISIS and Muslim shooters. Hey, ruling class, what's your plan to get things back under control?

Unfortunately, the old cry of shut up, you racist, sexist bigots doesn't seem to be working this time out.

Maybe the loss of control problem explains the rise of Donald Trump. He plays a guy on TV that bosses around kids on The Apprentice and seems as though he knows what he is doing.

Yes. But playing a smart guy on TV is not the same as being The Guy to set the world aright.

Of course, the middle class is not so mad that they are really willing to kick over the traces. We all still want the cops to patrol the streets -- at least everyone except Black Lives Matter. We still want the government to protect us from evil corporate fat cats. We still want our checks from the government.

But the fact is that the average man or woman in the street is clueless. All we know is what we learned in school and most of that is regime propaganda. If you are Democrat rank-and-file you look to the Big Man to make things right for you. If you are a gentry liberal you look for principled activists to advocate for ethical and just policy that will make things right. If you are a rank-and-file Republican you look for a government that doesn't tax and spend too much so you can take most of what you earn to the bank.

If you are a rank-and-file Democrat you must be feeling that something went wrong between Hope and Change and today's lousy economy. If you are a gentry liberal you are starting to wonder if the happy talk at NPR and the New York Times isn't missing out on something, but you can't quite put your finger on it. If you are a rank-and-file Republican you are mad as hell, mostly because you feel that President Obama has been sticking you in the ribs for seven years and you are not going to take it any more.

On top of that the average expert is clueless, and the average politician is clueless.

But that's democracy. All we the people get to do is choose who will rule over us. That's why there are only two types of elections. There is Four More Years, and there is Time for a Change. Democracy does not protect us from clueless experts and clueless politicians. It just gives us a chance to choose between This Lot of Clueless Clots and That Lot of Clueless Clots.

If you really pay attention to the candidates running for president they are not all that far apart -- except for the Bern, of course. The Republicans are all offering some sort of flat tax plan. And Hillary Clinton is offering steady as she goes.

So the Republicans will probably enact some tax reform, some rollback of Obamacare, and clean up some of the regulatory mess left behind by Obama.

Democrats, I suspect, are going to be asking each other What Went Wrong? I think that in 2008 they thought they had all the answers, and that they had learned their lessons from the Clinton years. This time they would really get their administrative model of health care enacted, and prepare the energy future with cunning green energy subsidies, and whack the economy into shape with a good robust stimulus plan. I suspect that the top policy circles are shocked at the mess their Baldrick Cunning Plans, incorporating their carefully learned lessons from the Clinton era, turned out to be.

Meanwhile, the middle class is mad as hell, and that does not mean they are not going to take it any more. It just means a Time for a Change election.

After that, we'll see.

When Will the Densification Movement Crash and Burn?

Living in Seattle means living the liberal-enforced dream of densification. We've had a policy of "urban villages" here for decades, and this means defining new urban focus points and replacing single-family housing with 5-storey apartment buildings and retail on the ground floor. Typically, apartments for rent don't have much in the way of parking, for who needs cars when they have public transportation that connects the urban village hubs -- or might do, one fine day.

I recently got to see the ideal liberal city, complete with bike lanes, extensive street-based light rail (also known as trams) close to downtown, and a heavy rail system extending to the suburbs. This city is Melbourne, in Australia. It creates an environment ideal for twentysomething single creatives. You can move easily around the downtown core waving your transit card as you board or exit the various forms of public transportation. You can wander around the culturally rich city in your artistical black while working on your novel. No need for the expense of a car, and you can pat yourself on the back for reducing your carbon footprint and saving the planet.

The only problem is that the basic job of human adults is bearing and raising children, and, as Joel Kotkin writes, humans seem to prefer doing this in the leafy suburbs. Even if they wanted to live in the inner city with their children, it's just too expensive for young families with children.

Liberals have been sneering at the suburbs since shortly after World War II, and feminists have been sneering at the suburbs since Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. And then came environmentalism, which disliked "sprawl" and climate change that seemed to need dense cities to save the planet.

This sets up an interesting political situation, because the folks that might be thinking about heading for the suburbs, minority families, are in a political coalition with gentry liberals that don't want to make it easy or cheap for people to live in a single-family home with a yard and a minivan. Eventually, something has to give.

Maybe it already has, as Hispanics and Asians are heading for the suburbs.

Roughly 60 percent of Hispanics and Asians already live in suburbs. Between 2000 and 2012, the Asian population in suburban areas of the nation’s 52 biggest metro areas grew 66.2 percent, while in the core cities it expanded by 34.9 percent. Of the top 20 cities with an Asian population of more than 50,000, all but two are suburbs.

Kotkin thinks that conservatives should start seriously thinking about how to get the support of the suburbanizing Hispanics and Asians, but as is usual with opinionating about "reaching out," I think he is missing the point. Recruits to the conservative cause have never been recruited. They tend to be like Ronald Reagan, who opined that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. In other words, the children of immigrants become Republicans when they just can't take it any more.

I recently read a piece by a California GOP activist who is finding support in the California minority community. So all is not lost. Not yet.

The terrifying feeling about the present moment is that so many liberal conceits are collapsing about us, from densification to entitlements to climate change to multicultural identity politics to the whole philosophy of the administrative state. Yet liberal cultural and political power prevents us from making incremental, sensible change. Which means that we will only be able to change when the crash comes.

Of course, the problem is Us. We insist that our politicians promise to make us safe, not just from foreign enemies but from any danger, any setback. And that is something that nobody can promise. The only thing that politicians can promise is to make things a bit easier for us to get back on our feet after the storm.

Meanwhile there is no substitute for Candide's philosophy: il faut cultiver notre jardin. Or, in modern American demotic: back to work, fellahs. Because you'll probably need something to fall back on in the years right after the crash.

Seattle Political Earthquake!

It had to happen some day. And now it has. Baghdad Jim McDermott (D-WA), the liberal's liberal in the most liberal district in liberal Washington State, has announced that he will not seek reelection to his 7th District seat in the House of Representatives.

I'm reminded of Harry Truman's words at the end of World War II. "I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day." Only in my case it's the satisfaction of living to the day that Jim McDermott finally retires as the 7th District's Congressman. Who knew? Even though I'm ten years younger than Jim, I could have keeled over tomorrow, never living to witness the day that Seattle got out from under the McDermott boot.

My point is this. McDermott is now 79, and will just 80 when his current term ends. Couldn't he have retired 10 years ago and given up his seat to some up-and-coming Democrat back then? I mean, McDermott got elected in 1988, so by 2006 he would have had nearly 20 years in his seat. Enough, you might think, to make a mark and then graciously withdraw to give some other progressive liberal a chance to make his or her mark. But no. Instead McDermott has hung on until he will be almost 80. Now, according to the Seattle Times, he is going to retire to to pursue interests including painting and sailing."

Sailing? At age 80? What are you thinking, Jim? Sailing ain't exactly beanbag. It's about wind and weather and battling the elements. Some might call it a young man's game. And what does Mrs. McDermott think of that? Actually, there isn't a Mrs. Not since 2012. So that's all right.

Since yesterday's announcement, of course, hope is thrilling in the heart of every good liberal politician in Seattle. Who will win the coveted liberal seat in the most liberal district in the nation? And maybe hold the liberal seat for another 30 liberal years? A number of liberal Seattle pols have expressed interest, but my favorite is our own Seattle socialist, the Brahmin from Pune, Kshama Sawant.

Sawant, elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013 after advocating for the $15 minimum wage, is just the progressive Seattle needs to keep the flame alive. There is no danger that she will be a mere go-along-to-get-along progressive Democrat like Baghdad Jim. She will pick up every liberal craziness from here on out, and run with it, flat out. This will put Seattle on the map, and force America to pay attention to the home of Amazon and Costco and Starbucks and ailing Microsoft (over in Redmond).

Of course, the $15 an hour minimum wage may end up destroying the economy as we know it in Seattle and make it even more of a city of liberals guzzling at the government trough than it is today. But that shouldn't be a problem for Sawant. She clearly has the shamelessness necessary to the character of every successful elected politician.

I say vote for Sawant and put Seattle on the map.

Obama's Phone-and-Pen Politics is a Weakness, not a Strength

The standard conservative line on President Obama is that he is a lawless president that has wantonly expanded presidential power where no previous president dared to go.

I get this. And I get that no Republican president could ever get away with the extra-legal executive actions that have characterized Obama's presidency.

Now we have President Obama returning from his Hawaiian Christmas vacation determined to enact "common-sense gun laws" by executive action. (Which I expect to be very small beer, when we actually get a look at it.)

But I think that all the extra-legal stuff in the Obama era reflects not a liberal president demolishing our cherished freedoms so much as a liberal movement out of ideas, out of energy, and out of sync with America.

Because if you are a movement at the height of its power you don't have to play bureaucratic games to get your agenda passed.  You sit astride the political process like a colossus and everyone is eager to get with the program. But that is not the way things work in the Obama era. Everything, but everything that liberals push through the political process has to be pushed through by some sort of procedural shenanigans. If I were a liberal, I would be very concerned.

Forget Obamacare, which was advertised with a lie, that you could keep your doctor, etc. That was born of the failure of Hillarycare in 1994 and the iconic Harry and Louise TV ads. But the Democrats learned the wrong lesson from Harry and Louise. They didn't learn the obvious truth that average people opposed Hillarycare and would oppose Obamacare because they already had decent health insurance. They learned the lesson that they had to lie to the American people to get Obamacare passed.

I am talking about the shenanigans with the National Labor Relations Board, where the New-Deal-era agency was used to bully Boeing into keeping most of its manufacturing in unionized Washington State. Where the Democratic majority is making franchise outfits like McDonalds treat the employees of their franchisees as if they were employees of McDonalds. Then there is the effort to impose "net neutrality" on the internet by a decision of the Federal Communications Commission rather than by express legislation. And the effort to use the Environmental Protection Agency to kill coal-fired electric generation without benefit of Congress.

Put it this way. Republicans already hate all these regulatory agencies that seem to be wholly-owned subsidiaries of the liberal ruling class. We have all learned about the settled science of "regulatory capture" that makes regulatory agencies the creature of the people they are supposed to regulate. But up to now, Republicans have hesitated to reform these agencies because they didn't want to have to spend political capital on sideshows when more important things were on the agenda.

But you have to believe that in 2017, with a Republican president and Congress, Republicans will be loaded for bear. And if they have any sense they are already planning the public relations battle and how to marginalize the usual suspects in the MSM when they rise to oppose what we might call common-sense reforms of corrupted and unjust regulatory agencies.

In football, teams will occasionally use "Hail Mary" plays, long-shot pass plays that have a low chance of succeeding, but you never know. That's how I see a lot of today's Democratic politics. As Walter Russell Mead writes, the "blue model" of big government programs is breaking down, most particularly in blue states and blue cities where government worker unions have cleaned out the kitty. So why not put the ball up in the opponent's end zone and hope for a miracle?

The problem with Hail Mary plays is that quite often they make things a lot worse, as in interceptions returned for a touchdown. That's also the problem with the president's phone-and-pen presidency. By ignoring the old rules about getting some apology of a bipartisan consensus before enacting legislation in Congress the president is riling up the opposition.

My biggest fear a decade ago, in the wake of the Judis and Teixeira prophecy of The Emerging Democratic Majority, was that President Obama would carefully advance the liberal agenda with cunning bipartisan legislation that had just enough support from squishy GOP centrists to make a reality out of the Judis and Teixeira prophecy and set the Democratic majority of 2008 in concrete. Instead, Obama punched the moderates in the eye from Day One, forcing them to throw in their lot with the conservatives. Everything he has done is Democrat-only. Since most government is a disaster, that makes the job of Republican candidates very easy, because nobody can say: well, you voted for it.

My prophecy is that we will look back at the Obama era as the last great effort of the supporters of the administrative regulatory state. It was the last effort of the policy analysts to devise cunning administrative and regulatory ploys to advance the liberal agenda by any means necessary. That's how I judge Jonathan Gruber's Obamacare, Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, and all the cunningly wrought abuses of the old-line regulatory agencies. It will all crumble into dust, and for a good reason. That reason is that these policy ideas could never have passed Congress because they could never persuade a majority of the American people that the ideas would improve their lives.

I've been reading a number of Marxists in recent years, and one thing has struck me. Marxists don't acknowledge any economics later than the classical economics on which Marx built his theory of surplus value. They can't because if they did the whole edifice of Marxian economics would collapse. For instance, here is Theodor Adorno making a swipe at the exchange economy in ¨Progress," an essay in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.

Exchange is the rational form of mythical ever-sameness. In the like-for-like of every act of exchange, the one act revokes the other; the balance of accounts is null. If the exchange was just, then nothing should really have happened, and everything stays the same. (p159)

No, Ted. No. You miss the point completely. Exchange is not "like-for-like" or a double-entry bookkeeping transaction that balances out. Exchange only takes place when both parties prefer the exchange to the status quo. I go out and buy Adorno's Critical Models because I value having and reading the book and deepening my understanding about the mind of a Frankfurt School Marxist more than the $16.50 the book cost me. And I am glad to pay the bookseller for the effort of finding and stocking this hard-to-find item. Exchange is not about like-for-like. It is about win-win.

So much for the Marxists. With administrative state liberals we have a similar settled-science problem. Liberals believe in society by administration, but the science has showed that administrative government is a very weak reed to lean on. Mises pointed out that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices. Hayek sharpened the analysis by pointing out that the man in Whitehall (or Washington DC) couldn't outperform a million consumers and producers interacting through the price system. He called it an information problem. Today we would probably call it a bandwidth problem. Administration and bureaucracy just cannot get the job done, because they don't have the information and they don't have the bandwidth to compete with the information and the knowledge and the experience of the consumers and the producers. Yet liberals keep coming up with new Hail Marys hoping that that this time they will thread the needle with their administrative plan to centralize and homogenize education or healthcare or consumer finance.

One day, I hope to understand Hegel, and his notion that progress is not a straight line but a to-and-fro of ideas and counter ideas. It's an irony that the left, which bases its ideas on Marx's take on Hegel, always wants a one-size-fits-once-for-all solution to every problem. As though everything shouldn't be reworked every few years or every generation.

The wonder of the market is that it institutionalizes the to-and-fro in a process that responds to everyone's input and bends the world to peoples' needs expressed through their buying and selling. The problem of government is that it does not respond to individuals, only to power plays big enough to register on the political radar.

President Obama's faith in his phone and his pen, and in the efficacy of the administrative state is going to cost his party plenty. And you ain't seen nothing yet.

Can Trump Win Elections?

Everybody is all worked up about Donald Trump's campaign for president. But the real question is: can he win elections?

Up to now, Donald Trump has walked on water with his campaign by insult, amazing experts and not-so-experts near and far. He seems to be breaking all the rules of campaigning and getting away with it.

Recently, news reports tell that Trump is making ad buys in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, the three early primary/caucus states. So now he is starting to move towards a more conventional campaign.

So let's think about some campaign conventional wisdom.

• Typically, politicians are careful about the insults, indeed about everything they say because, with everything that comes out of a politician's mouth about four things can happen. He can encourage his supporters; he can discourage his supporters. He can discourage his opponent's supporters; he can make his opponent's supporters enraged. And who knows about the moderates in the middle. You can see why politicians are very careful what they say and poll-test every word.
• There is the question of the ground game, and it is not clear what Trump has done about that. These days, ground game includes Big Data and microtargeting of voters, the tactic that Obama brought to the game in 2008 and 2012. I have read nods and winks that Ted Cruz has gone heavily into Big Data and microtargeting, but nothing about the other candidates. My understanding of microtargeting is that is affects turnout -- that's why the Romney campaign completely missed the result of the 2012 election; they misread the effectiveness of the Obama microtargeting. My understanding of microtargeting is that it requires, e.g., people working door-to-door with tablets that upload the results of each interview into the campaign database in real time. How does that work in 2016? Does everyone use an RNC app to do the door-to-door canvassing? Or what?
• Apart from immigration, Trump's agenda is pretty mainstream. And on immigration his rhetoric is pretty mainstream, unless you are a regime liberal or an immigrant that hasn't yet got the whole family to the US yet. It's not just the white working class that opposes immigration; it's everyone that worries about their job. In recent years you were a racist for opposing immigration, but now Trump seems to have changed the rules. So what happens now? And what about the nexus between immigration and terror?

Nobody knows what will shake out in 2016. But the words of Joseph Schumpeter keep ringing in my head. The skill possessed by elected politicians is the skill of running and winning election campaigns. That is their profession: it is not governing, it is running for election and winning.

That's why I'd put my money on the professional politicians like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio to win the Republican nomination for President of the United States. But you never know.

The Problem with our Elites

What's the matter with our elites? How could they be making such a mess of things, from immigration to finance to climate change?

The answer, I believe, lies in the fundamental divide our rulers face between getting elected and doing the right thing.

To get elected, the elected politician must lay out bubba bait. On the left, the politician must promise pension and health care programs; on the right, the politician must kiss the ring of the nation.

But what the politicians really want to do is save the world.

What our elites really want to do is create a happy world beyond the petty squabblings of nations and tribes. What they really want to do is make the environment into a nice shrubbery where Jane Austen heroines can take a pleasant walk. What they really want to do is save the world from the sin of grubby people driving around needlessly in fossil-fueled pickup trucks.

I suppose political leaders have always been like this. Does not Shakespeare have his Henry IV long to go rescue the Holy Land after he has dealt with his troublesome marcher lords?

And were these inward wars once out of hand,
We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land.

Of course he would. Who doesn't long to get beyond the grubby business of day-to-day politics? Thus does the ordinary politician Al Gore puff himself up by inventing the Internet and fighting climate change.

But there is one thing about bubba-bait politics. It is much more respectable in our elite to advocate for left-wing bubba bait than right-wing bubba bait. Nobody is ashamed to advocate for more spending on workers, women, blacks, or any other certified victim. But plenty of people are ashamed by the idea of nationhood, of national traditions, of middle-class culture.

In reality, of course, the administrative state with its government handouts has been shown by settled science to be a mistake, and a cause of economic distress. We really need to dial back on the entitlement state. Whereas the national idea is the best idea yet to get bubbas to buy into a larger identity than family and tribe.

We know why this is so. The administrative state has been supported and advocated by most of the elite enthusiasms of the past century or so: Marxism, Fabianism, Progressivism, and now environmentalism and political correctness. Nationalism, at least since 1945, has been an embarrassment to our elites, because of the H-word.

Well, now we are in a bit of a pickle, because the elite suppport for government handouts has put the public finances of the western world in a mess, and ruined the lives and culture of those that rely on the handouts, while the neglect of nationhood has created a problem of unassimilated immigrants from Germany to California that has got the bubbas in a rage. Now our ruling class is looking at their angry peoples and wondering what went wrong.

It's really not that hard. The problem is you, ruling class, your grubby pursuit of power and your elite conceits and enthusiasms.

But what is to be done? It's not that hard. Ease up on the pension promises, and move national finance towards the idea that most people most of the time should take care of their own pensions and their own health care. And bulk up on the nation state and the idea of protecting the German people, the American people, right here at home, rather than running around, like Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, taking care of poor benighted souls in foreign lands while neglecting their own children.

See? Things are not as bad as we think. If only our ruling class would get a clue.

The Special Snowflakes Are Having the Time of Their Lives

Yesterday I was pointed to a couple of links at Salon about an adjunct college teacher, Rani Neutill, that finally couldn't take it any more. So she quit her adjunct-faculty job and went to work as a waitress.

That in itself is an interesting story. But the tale she told about the special snowflakes in her classes that needed trigger warnings every other minute gave me an epiphany. They didn't just need trigger warnings before reading some excerpt or watching some movie clip. No, the special snowflakes in the class needed an email the night before!

Neutill gave her class a reading about Blaxploitation movies, and then ran a clip from a movie to illustrate the reading (after giving a trigger warning). During the clip, two students left the class in tears.

Later that day, I had a white female student come to my office hours crying. Between picking up tissues and blowing her nose she said, “I’m doing a minor in African American Studies. How could your first images of black people be that horrible?”

OK, so let's do a clip from a movie that shows a "positive image of black sexuality and sex." How about a gay sex scene from The Wire? Will we discuss that other movie, asks the same student? Yes. More tears. So Neutill decides to give a trigger warning before every clip. "Every. Single. One." Then a student came an asked her to send emails before class warning about the triggering scenes so that "so that I wouldn’t 'out' survivors if they had to walk out of class when hearing what I was about to show."

It was about then that I had the epiphany. These poor helpless special snowflakes and not poor and helpless at all. They are having the time of their lives. They are getting rewarded for being helpless little emotional wrecks. They are wielding power by getting the teacher to accommodate their ever-so-special needs.

And that got me to thinking about those Victorian women and their fainting couches, of whom we've heard tell. Just exactly how helpless and oppressed were those delicate flowers that were worshiped on their pedestals by men in between their necessary retreats to their couches? Maybe they weren't so helpless after all. Maybe the opposite was true; maybe these women had their men eating out of their hands, and they loved it.

Rani Neutill was annoyed by the fact that "all of the students who were upset were the feminists, the activists," and what's more they were "treating a woman of color professor like she wasn’t an authority" while accepting an old white guy in the department as though he was an authority.

Hey, Rani! Don't take it personally. It's not about you, it's about them. The students didn't play the helpless victim game with the white guy because it wouldn't have occurred to him to play along. But you are sensitive and caring, so they take advantage of you.

Women are not like men. Men try to ignore affect, because it interferes with the fight. But women are different. The whole point of the community of women is to share, even to hype, emotional experience. So you wouldn't want to just sit through a bunch of Blaxploitation and gay themed movies without getting all worked up, and getting out the Kleenex and having a good cry on the shoulder of your BFF.

The point is that the feminists, after the initial fight for equal rights, are now reverting to their feminine type. They don't want to be men; they want to be women, and that means that they are bringing feminine cultural memes into the public square. Yes, women have the vote and are now often elected politicians. But you still can't treat a woman politician as though she were a man. That would be sexist. Yes, women have the right to have pick-up sex just like men. Only they still want to control every step of the sexual process, just like they did under the patriarchy when men had to woo them, on and on for months, before they got their grubby hands inside their beloved's bloomers.

Well, in Part II of her Salon series Rani Neutill chucks it all in and goes back to work as a waitress, at age 38. And she finds the work atmosphere a lot more cooperative and healthy than the twisted world of academia.

Now, I’ve been working there for almost six months. I have started to get to know the people I work with. All of my co-workers are smart. Many are in school, one was in the Army, a few are moms. They are funnier than a lot of academics, but that seems unfair to them because most academics aren’t that funny.

The biggest difference is that it feels like a family.

Yeah. An ordinary American workplace feels like a family, unlike academia. I wonder why that is. Still, at least the special snowflakes are enjoying themselves, even if the adjunct faculty isn't.

Read the whole thing, Part I and Part II. You won't regret it.