The President's Rhymes-with-Bucket List

Just imagine if President Bush had declared, in the spring of 2007, that in the last two years of his presidency he would be working on his rhymes-with-bucket list.

Oh, the liberal gnashing of teeth! Oh the disrespect to the country! Oh, the disaster for the Republican Party! Oh, the final proof that Bush was an idiot!

Actually, it may not be so bad. Because what the president meant was doing all the things you are not allowed to do, like go to Cuba and hob-nob with the Castro brothers. Like closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist jail. Like nominating a liberal to the Supreme Court in your last year when tradition has it that the president doesn't do that, out of respect for his successor.

What all those things are likely to do is rile up Republican voters in November 2016. And what could be wrong with that?

The path not taken is the path taken by President Bush in 2008. Like nominating a Democratic Treasury Secretary with a nasty financial crash looming on the horizon. Like working with Nancy Pelosi in the spring of 2008 to pass a stimulus program to help ward off recession, or leaving the auto bailout half completed at the end of 2008 so that the incoming Democratic administration could put its imprint on it.

The thing is that we want a president that so loves America that he would not do anything to hurt America, even if it were politically advantageous. He wouldn't do anything to rile up the opposition. Not because it would help his party but because it would keep America from unnecessary division.

But President Obama is different. He is mean. He is petulant. He doesn't really love America. He doesn't even really love his party. So he does nasty stuff. He stiffs Sen. Chuck Schumer some extra money for anti-terror funding in New York. He doesn't attend the funeral for Justice Scalia. He resumes diplomatic relations with Cuba. He plans to visit Cuba, home of the cruel Castro brothers. And the repression increases on Cuba's democracy activists.

Now my feeling is that there's a reason why most presidents don't do this. It's not because they are good guys. It's because doing your rhymes-with-bucket list is really stupid, for getting anything done with Congress, with helping your party, with keeping the rage of the opposition down to a dull roar, with making America a better place.

For some reason, President Obama doesn't get this. Maybe it's because he's a Saul Alinsky leftist. Maybe it's because he's an Ivy League liberal. Maybe it's because he was abandoned both by his father and by his mother, and left to be raised by his "typical white people" grandparents. Maybe it's because when you are a Magic Negro being wafted aloft by liberaldom and the Democratic Party you never have to mend bridges with the rest of the world, never have to say your are sorry. Maybe it's just because President Obama is a small, unpleasant person.

But I think that the president and his rhymes-with-bucket list are worse that a crime,  they are a blunder. For him, for his party, and for the nation.

Trump's Big Advantage

Here we are down to three candidates in the Republican presidential race. And the leader is the guy that has broken all the rules.

How could this be? How could the political novice Donald Trump break all the rules and win? How could the practiced and polished politicians like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio be outgunned by a novice like Donald Trump?

The answer lies in the Breitbart dictum: politics is downstream from culture. Liberals have dominated the culture and they have remade the culture so that conservatives cannot win in politics. Conservatives are racist, sexist homophobes. But racism is defined as opposing race-conscious diversity and affirmative action. Sexism is defined as not hiring and promoting enough women. Homophobia is defined as not affirming the gay agenda with sufficient enthusiasm. In other words, liberals are racist, sexist, genderists, that accuse the other side of racism, sexism, and genderism.

It's brilliant. Liberals have confined conservatives in a cage without a door.

But Donald Trump has succeeded in breaking out of the cage cunningly designed half a century ago by Herbert Marcuse, the inventor of intolerant tolerance (or was it the other way around?). How he has done it is still a mystery to me. And I am sure it is a mystery to Cruz and Rubio and their campaigns. After all, if they knew how to do it, they would have done it first. Hey, they are in the game to win.

The key to controlling politics is to control what people are allowed to say and not allowed to say. That is what the whole universe of political correctness is about. And that is what Trump has blown apart.

But notice that the only guy that has broken out of the cage, to this very moment, is Trump. The others are still sitting around wondering what has happened to them. They are still wondering how to play the game by the new rules. If the game has changed, and if the rules have really been broken.

Yes, but, you may say. Trump is in the enviable position of being able to throw caution to the wind. He is 69 and wealthy and can afford to play a high-risk game. If he wins, he gets all the marbles. If he fails, he is still rich and powerful and married to a beautiful woman. Cruz and Rubio have their political careers to think about.

The fact is that Trump should not have been able to happen. It was supposed to be death to insult a woman journalist, as Trump has insulted Megyn Kelly. It was supposed to be death to get into an argument with the pope, but Trump has done it and survived.

OK, but Trump has connected with the white working class that has been abandoned by the Democrats for the last half century. He has said things that they have been longing to hear. Exactly, but haven't Republicans been longing to discover the magic bullet to penetrate the hearts of the Reagan Democrats since forever? How come that Trump is the first politician to do that?

How come a political novice was the first to figure it out?

Let's think ahead and wonder if Trump can win the general election. Over at Mark Steyn there is a piece on the shriveling of the map for Republicans since George Bush senior. Look at the map, he says.

In the south-west he won California. In the north-east he won four New England states. He won the home state of a young community organizer called Barack Obama.

And he won Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Since then things have gone straight downhill so that the idea of a GOP win in 2016 looks pretty improbable.

But with Donald Trump you have to say that the map has been scrambled. The ideological divide of the past three decades has been shattered. How or why is for the historians to decide. Trump has found a way to scramble ideology, break the rules of political correctness and simply appropriate the voters' general unfocused anger into support for him personally. It does no good to point to Trump as a classic confidence trickster, or to complain about his complete lack of worked-out issues. The fact is that politics is about charisma and bombast, about grand denunciations and accusations; it is not about a serious and well-argued discussion of the issues, the careful calibration of messages, and appeals to various constituencies.

Nobody knows what will happen from here on out. All we know is that Donald Trump has blown up the liberal grand strategy in which America would become defined by liberal identity, as liberal identities expanded and included more and more of the electorate, and the rest of America would cower in the shadows, afraid of the mortal accusation of racism, sexism, or homophobia.

When you blow up the world, you don't know how the pieces will fall. By the fall the liberal cultural hegemony may be back in control and everybody will be minding what they say, afraid of the political commissars as of old.

But for now, Donald Trump has broken all the rules, and lived to tell the tale. And that is all that matters.

Mend the Fed? Be Careful What You Wish For

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused the Fed of keeping interest rates low at the behest of President Obama. Marco Rubio waffles about Fed overreach that has led to an unhealthy “Fed-centric economy.” Ted Cruz talks about tying monetary policy to the price of gold.

But I wonder if anyone has really thought about what it would mean to reform the Federal Reserve System.

No doubt, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy is all about keeping the government’s debt interest costs down and protecting debtors from the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. But what would it mean to return to a normal interest rate policy?

No doubt the Fed has badly warped the economy, not just in the past few years, but ever since its inception in 1913.

No doubt, all things being equal, it would be best to link the dollar to gold.

But what, really, should we do? And more to the point, what do we dare to do?

We all complain about the Federal Reserve System. But do we really want to do anything about it?

Modern central banking started with the Dutch and their Amsterdam Exchange Bank. It provided the credit that enabled the Dutch to fight and win independence from Spain. Then the Dutch Prince William of Orange invaded Britain in 1688 and within a decade founded the Bank of England and used the British National Debt to conduct a Second Hundred Years War against the French, ending with victory in 1815. But the fact is that the central bank tended to roil the economy badly, since its war finance operations created inflation, and its post-war resumption tended to bankrupt debtors with withering deflation. Even without a central bank, the US Revolutionary and Civil Wars created first ruinous inflation and then bone-jarring deflation.

Our situation is the same, but different. Now the central bank is involved in goosing and/or cooling the economy on the conceit that monetary policy can help moderate the boom-and-bust cycle.

But I suspect that the real role of the central bank today is to smooth over the distortions caused by the huge presence of government operations in the modern big-government economy.

In the old days, the central bank’s credit operations helped the government commandeer the nation’s resources so that it could fight its national wars. That would result in ruinous inflation during the war and ruinous deflation after the war.

But today the central bank’s credit operations are intended to help the government commandeer the nation’s resources so that it can conduct its redistribution operations, from Social Security to mortgage subsidies. This has resulted in a century of inflation punctuated by various financial panics and banking collapses. The Crash of 2008 was caused by the Fed trying to cool the Fannie/Freddie fueled housing bubble of the 2000s. Call it the government’s clumsy right hand trying to correct the errors of its clumsy left hand. But before that was the Savings and Loan collapse, in which the government’s subsidized Savings and Loan lenders collapsed in the 1980s. It was a case of the government’s deflationary policy of the 1980s having to deal with the fallout of its inflationary policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

We are taught to believe that the Fed wisely guides the economy with the predictions of its economic models and economic data. But most likely it is just muddling through, trying to pick up the pieces of the government’s continuing failed interventions in the national economy. And every time we never see the crash coming.

So what are the chances of reforming the Fed so it doesn’t keep interest rates down to reduce the government’s interest payments. or reduce the “Fed-centered” economy, or get back to gold?

I’d say the chances are slim to none. As long as the government is seizing 35 percent of GDP to redistribute to to powerful interests, and using the credit system in all kinds of ways to favor certain interests, it is going to set up inflations and deflations, and crashes, and it will need the power of the printing press get itself out of a jam, by bailing out banks and frequently acting as lender of last resort to prevent a “sudden stop” in the credit system, and using cheap money to "stimulate" the economy.

And we will continue to build up the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System, from William McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke to Janet Yellen, as wise financial soothsayers protecting the nation from fearful portents in the financial heavens.

Because the alternative of recognizing that they are all dull political hacks fumbling their way in the dark is too horrible to admit.

No, The US Budget Is Not Bankrupt

In the American Spectator today they do the usual piece about how the United States is bankrupt, that Barack Obama is doing nothing to fix the budget and that spending is going up and revenue not so much. So it says:

The U.S. is bankrupt. Not in the same sense as an individual, of course. Uncle Sam has the power to tax. But at some point even Washington might not be able to squeeze enough cash out of the American people to pay its bills.

Actually, the US is not bankrupt. That's because, unlike you and me, the US is a sovereign nation and it can renege on anything it wants. Only one thing matters to a sovereign nation: Can it sell its debt? Venezuela is bankrupt; it cannot sell its debt and so it pays its bills by printing currency and launching hyperinflation. And yet it is not bankrupt. It is still operating, and it will continue operating even after it reduces the economy to ruins.

The situation of the United States is that it has promised all kinds of entitlements and programs to the American people and the many special interests and client groups, and there isn't going to be enough money to pay for them all. Basically, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are going to eat the budget.

But really, what else is new? Every government has promised all kinds of things to all kinds of people and the fact is that a lot of people get disappointed.

So at some point the US will start to renege on its promises. It can do it clean, and cut the spending and reform the entitlements and put the special interests on a diet, or it can do it ugly, like Venezuela.

The problem is, of course, that when the cuts come, the recipients will be mad as hell and will declare that they won't take it anymore. Just like the folks in Greece. So the government will do nothing, until we get to Greece.

At no time is the US really bankrupt. The US has the power to renege on anything it wants to. So there! The only question, at any moment, is who it decides to renege on. Will it be entitlement recipients? Will it be government bureaucrats?  Will it be bondholders? Will it be holders of US dollars and dollar denominated bank accounts?

The answer is obvious. When the US gets into a bind about meeting all its obligations, it will take the easy way out. It will renege on the folks that have the least political clout. That is not bankruptcy. That is just politics.

So the US budget is not bankrupt. It is just a measure of how badly the government is lying to us.

Waiting for the Moral Revolution

We've heard a lot recently, all of a sudden, about the drugs and heroin epidemic in the white working class. Only, according to Kevin D. Williamson, it ain't just the white working class. It's everywhere, including in the Volvo and trustafarian set.

(I thought that liberals had abandoned Volvos for Subaru Outbacks years ago, but maybe not on the east coast.)

Seems like the driving force, what you might call the "root cause," of addiction in the Subaru set runs more towards "divorce, and addiction in the family" than the failure to find good jobs in the energy industry.

With all this "dysfunction" and "substance abuse" you really get to see the point of what liberals sneeringly call "organized religion." As if listening to NPR and reading The New York Times and babbling today's liberal talking points isn't organized religion.

The fact is that 99.7 percent of people aren't moral philosophers (assuming that moral philosophers are any more moral than other folks). They need to join some sort of moral community to get straight about things. There is no particular mystery about this. Humans are social animals, and they like to be well-thought-of by the people they know. Modern organized religion is a spontaneous means to do this. You join a church or a liberal activist group and you internalize its moral structure, and you behave in ways that win the moral approval of the others in the community. And you go on to have a stable, worthy life that leaves a brace of kids and a passel of grandchildren behind.

The glory of the US is that, by an accident of history, its moral communities have tended to live at arms length from the state and its political power. So churches have tended not to be bureaucratic Departments of State Religion, but entrepreneurial outfits that have had to figure out what ordinary people wanted in the moral community line, and then give it to them.

And yes, people want structure, and rules, and costs. That's what makes a moral community worthwhile.

Of course, not all moral communities are a good idea, and every moral community is one step away from getting in bed with the state to impose its moral code on the rest of society. We are seeing this with our gay friends who are busy agitating to make it a crime against the state to say or do anything against gayness.

That's been the problem with the Left from the beginning. It can't get its mind around the fact that limited government and the rule of law are designed to limit the enthusiasm of people just like them, who cannot see anything wrong in combining the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural into one total system, providing that they are in charge.

System is domination, as the Frankfurters imply, or at the very least, "internal colonization."

According to Kevin, "There were 47,000 lethal overdoses in the U.S. in 2014, almost 30,000 of which were prescription painkillers and heroin." Maybe that's a lot, maybe that's a little. Back in the 19th century, the consumption of alcohol was said to be four times what it is today. And you could get opium without a prescription. You have to think that that kind of consumption led to millions of broken lives and premature death. In those days it was cheap gin that had the working class by the throat. The current heroin epidemic is said to be caused by a crackdown on the overprescription of opioids and painkillers. But is this worse than it used to be?

Here's a thought. Maybe the peculiar placidity of the famous Fifties was due to the government regimentation of World War II. Maybe the government tamed everyone to live good regular lives when it sent a generation of young men into the services to fight Hitler and Tojo. But then the kids of the Greatest Generation grew up in the Sixties and decided to go for more excitement. Or something.

And then the government decided to kick the white working class to the curb and get in bed with minorities and women.

Here's what I think. I think that liberals have so totally messed up America's moral communities, by their moral imperialism the last hundred years, that it is going to take a moral revolution to recover.

And if you ask me what that means, I admit that I haven't a clue. 

Is the Politics of "Crush or be Crushed" The Only Way?

I got an email yesterday from Sam, a long-time reader of my blog, and he wonders if the Left has it right after all, that "the ends ALWAYS justifies the means." He continues:

[W]hile I debated how many Bastiats could dance on the head of an anarchistic needle the Left was busy owning education, passing socialist programs for over a century, wholly controlling the popular media sphere, co-opting judeo-christian religion, dominating every bureaucracy, writing every rule, setting every tone, winning and losing battles but nearly always the victor in culture wars. 

Frédéric Bastiat was the French economist who famously developed the notion of the Broken Window fallacy, "what is seen and what is unseen" and the modern idea of cost as the foregone opportunity.

In other words Bastiat was at the center of what we might call "Second Wave" economics, that included the idea of marginal price and demolished the Marxian economics that was built upon a tendentious reading of classical economics and its dichotomy between use value and exchange value. It is because of chaps like Bastiat that Marxists, to this very day, cannot venture out of the fenced pasture of Marx's economic writings. To do so is to abandon the Marxian dream.

OK, great. So the science is on our side! That, and $7, will get you lunch at McDonalds. My reader Sam continues, noting that history doesn't care how the winner wins, but the fact of winning.

When learning about a past war, no student cares if one or both sides followed the Geneva Conventions.  They only care about who won, because that is all that matters.  I now believe that it is not enough to win the argument, but to force it as well.  The left wins because they have no compunction putting the boot heel to their opponents, so I now believe liberty lovers have to get the bigger boot.  An unavoidable contradiction.  After all, did the founding fathers content themselves with posting their grievances and accepting their lot through gritted teeth - as we do today - or did they rise up and double down on the violence inflicted upon them?  What's one of the few culture wars that the Right has won?  Gun ownership - the one right that the leftist government must get bloody to trample.  Coincidence?

 Of course, to the Left, it is always the capitalists that strike first. The whole idea of "capitalism-and-imperialism" in one word is that capitalism grew across the world as much by force of arms as by exchange and markets. And in a milder vein, Karl Polanyi in his Great Transformation argued that the introduction of the exchange economy in the colonies more or less forced the locals out of their rural idiocy into the global exchange economy.

So if you are a lefty, capitalism is the most powerful force in human history, crushing everything in its path, and it is the bounden duty of all the Melissa Clicks of the world to shout F-words in the face of policemen and call for muscle at their glorious little peaceful protests and fight to protect those in the path of the capitalist Godzilla.

So who is right? How about everyone?

It is true that capitalism and freedom have increased per-capita human income by 30 times in 200 years, but it is also true that it has obliterated everything in its path, and utterly transformed the human experience. In other words, capitalism is transforming the world with almost brutal power, whatever we do or say.

It was completely understandable for the early Left to raise a banner against capitalism and predict that it would all end it immiseration. And it was worthy of the Left to protect and advocate for each new wave of migrants to the city. But it is also true that left politics has encouraged the migrants not to assimilate to the ways of the city and to surrender to the market as the bourgeoisie does. This has caused untold misery, from the death camps of communism and fascism to the predictable miseries of the Castro Brothers' Cuba and Chávez Venezuela, to the demoralization of the white working class where drug addiction and suicide are abroad, and the devastation of the western underclass where the women don't marry much and the men don't work much.

Capitalism and freedom are as inevitable as a Law of Nature. But it is also inevitable that people will fight being thrown into the deep end when they arrive in the city from the countryside, and it is inevitable that sauntering politicians will appear to lead those fighting against their dunking into the capitalist swimming pool.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is an attempt to make sense of this world. The People of the Subordinate Self are people that have not yet acculturated to the modern market economy. They look to a powerful patron or a strong leader as a means of support, and they get it. The People of the Responsible Self are people that has surrendered to the market economy and the radical idea that it is their job to find out how to be useful to the world, and then do it. The People of the Creative Self are people that have mastered the modern world and now they want something better. They want not just to adjust to the world but to amaze it. Thus art-for-art's-sake, progressive politics, the start-up culture, and, at the low end, work/life balance and "lifestyles."

If you are a creative person and you don't want the risks of the start-up culture and invent the next iPhone or the first viable nuclear fusion technology or work in some billionaire's space program, then advocating for those struggling to adapt to the market economy is a natural. The problem is that the creative people running things quickly learn to assume that everything they want for the marginalized is good and beneficial. They think of themselves as kindly librarians rather than ruthless power politicians. That is why AFL leader Samuel Gompers a century ago advised the workers to keep their distance from middle-class socialists. As a later politician put it: they are not interested in you, they are interested in your vote.

It is to deal with this issue, what we might call an instance of the "principal-agent" problem, that I have come up with my "little darlings" notion. If you are a member of a group favored by our current progressive ruling class and lovingly adored as little darlings, beware. One day the ruling class will tire of you, and it will find a new little darling to flatter with its favors. Once upon a time the progressives looved the working class, and lavished it with privileges and benefits. But then the progressives found a new love, African Americans and women, and so they left the working class out in the cold, even stigmatizing it as a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic Archie Bunkers. In the end, the progressives care about their power, not about the people for whom they advocate. You can see that in the tactics of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as of mid-February 2016. She thought she was going to cruise to the Democratic presidential nomination, but now that Bernie Sanders is showing form, she is resorting to race politics to stir up the African American voters in South Carolina.

So the white working class got left by the roadside, just like Joe Soptic. And far too many African Americans live in corrupt crime-ridden hellholes, fifty years after the Civil Rights Acts, courtesy of their liberal patrons that seem to be able to coexist with the murdering gangs that help them get out the vote. Women have been pitched out of suburban complacency into glittering careers only to find themselves hag-ridden by the impossible tradeoffs of the "work/life" balance.

Yes, but meanwhile the liberals are trashing the greatest country in the world and all we can come up with is Donald Trump! Isn't it time to take a page from the liberal playbook and crush them as they crush everything in their path?

We could, but I don't think it would do us any good. Our theory and our practice is built on the fundamental truth that the modern capitalist market economy cannot be run like a feudal estate. That is the meaning of Mises' argument for the impossibility of socialism, and Hayek's argument that the bureaucrat in Washington just cannot know enough to run the modern economy. We cannot resort to the bully-boy tactics of the left because that would destroy the economy and raise up a rebellion of people unjustly hurt by our bully-boy tactics. The argument for the market economy and limited government is not just that it is moral and right, not just that it works, but that it is both. The smaller the government, the less it is crushing its opponents and provoking them into a head of rebellion, and the more that nobodies get a chance to reinvent the world and surprise us with a new economic miracle.

If you are a member of the ruling class you almost certainly believe in power, and that means you worship the power of the state. So, how well is that working in Venezuela right now? There is not much glory and power in being the boss of a failing country. Now look at China. Mao Zedong plus the Communist Party plus socialism was a poverty-stricken wasteland. But Xi Jinping plus the Communist Party plus capitalism is growing into a global behemoth. Imagine what China could become if it junked the Communist Party bit.

So I am still keeping the faith. I believe that the progressives, far from preparing for their triumphal march at the Capitol breathlessly reported by TV personality Caesar Flickerman, are desperately patching up a failing dynasty. They thought they were going to sweep into power in 2009 and whip the economy into shape with a big stimulus, whip the banks into shape with Dodd-Frank, whip healthcare into shape with Obamacare, and save the planet with green energy. Oh, and clean up Bush's mess in the Middle East. They really did! Now they are like the Chinese mandarins around the emperor in the Forbidden City in the last decades of the 19th century. They don't know whether to double down on the progressive playbook, or...

Yes, just what do the progressives propose to do next? Free college? Free healthcare? $15 minimum wage?

That, and $7, will get you lunch at McDonalds.

Trust but Verify at the GOP Establishment

One fallout of the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to announce, right away, that the Senate would not be considering Supreme Court nominees this year.

This is a pity, according to Mark Kirkorian. Politically, it would have been nice to duck and weave a bit and so avoid antagonizing moderate voters.

The problem is that such an approach would presuppose a certain level of trust between conservative voters and the Republican leadership. Such trust does not exist. After serial sell-outs and surrenders, you can excuse a conservative voter for assuming that the Senate GOP would supinely hand the Court – and the republic’s very future – over to Obama.

Why is it that, according to polls, that only about 40 percent of the GOP party base view the party leadership favorably?  Something like 40 percent of Republicans don't trust the party leadership, whereas only about 10 percent of Democrats don't trust their leadership.

It's easy to say that the reason is simple. Democrats do what the base wants, while Republicans keep betraying their base. OK, but if you are a Democrat you ought to be mad as hell right now because the Obama economy has done nothing for its minority and female base. The Democratic base ought to be mad as hell and not going to take it any more. But it isn't.

So what's the GOP problem? Is it the donors, that keep the GOP doing free immigration and export of jobs despite the wishes of the voter base? If only it were that simple. There are other, more intractable, reasons that makes the GOP establishment betray its base, time after time.

Strange New Respect. That's a term invented twenty years ago by the American Spectator writer Tom Bethell to describe the fate of good kick-ass conservatives after they go to Washington. The problem is that they are human; they want to be liked. They want to be invited to Georgetown dinner parties. And so they succumb to the liberal ruling class culture, and one day the Washington Post or the New York Times writes a piece about the "strange new respect" that Joe Redneck now enjoys.

Politics is Downstream from Culture. The fact is that the ruling culture in the United States these days is liberal. As we conservative diehards like to say, the media, the schools, the arts, Hollywood, TV, the universities, they are all full-on liberal and they all take up the latest liberal fad without even thinking. Yesterday it was gay marriage; today it is transgender rights; tomorrow who knows. The GOP establishment does not have the power to push against the liberal national culture. The whole point of political correctness is to make it very dangerous to push back against the liberal agenda. If we want to reverse the numbers, and make 40 percent of Democrats mistrust their leaders, then we have to change the culture first, and frankly, I don't see that happening in half a century. On my Three Peoples theory it would require the People of the Creative Self to change their spots or the People of the Responsible Self to stage a full-on cultural rebellion, and I don't see that happening, not while the current ruling class is turning out a generation where 40 percent like capitalism and 40 percent like socialism and a large majority supports gay marriage.

Obama and the race issue. It's hard to oppose President Obama without being suspected of racism. So President Obama has had a pretty easy time of it. There are always second tier media types ready to roll out the race issue when anyone opposes the president, and all the media big shots need to do is vaguely refer to the groundswell of "concern."

Memory of government "shutdowns." Back in 1995 the newly elected GOP Congress went up against President Bill Clinton in a showdown over budget cuts. And the GOP lost the propaganda war. Speaker Newt Gingrich was seen as a beast kicking kids out into the cold.

Memory of the Clinton Impeachment. In 1998 the GOP thought it had a winning issue in the Monica Lewinsky issue and the Clinton impeachment. Instead, the Democrats managed to turn the whole thing around and characterize special prosecutor Ken Starr as a sex-crazed fiend. And the American people just didn't want to kick out a president. The result was that Democrats gained seats in the 1998 mid-terms. Ever since, the GOP establishment has feared that they will inevitably lose any propaganda war.

So here we are in 2016 and we have a candidate who has, so far, successfully challenged the conventional wisdom about how to deal with the ruling culture: Donald Trump. He has successfully trumped the culture of political correctness with the culture of insult. Who knew?

On my Three Peoples theory, Trump has energized a section of the People of the Subordinate Self, frustrated white working class folk that are looking for a leader, no questions asked.

Can Donald Trump roll back the dominant liberal culture all on his own and lead a new Republican coalition of the Responsible people with a rump of the Subordinate people?

One thing is for sure. After a century or more of the present liberal educated ruling class there ought to be a growing group of people that experience the rule of the liberals as injustice, straight up. That's on my theory that all government is injustice and all opposition to government is a fight against injustice.

But nobody should underestimate the power of the liberal ruling class to reassert its cultural power, and make Republican men into mice, and thus continue the frustration of the GOP base that keeps voting conservatives into office only to find that nothing changes.