Shoulda Woulda Coulda Avoided Trump

Now that Donald Trump, with a 3 out 4 win on Tuesday March 8 primaries, is looking like the Republican presidential nominee it is easy to start the Monday morning quarterbacking.

The Republican Party shoulda woulda coulda focused on the injustices suffered by the white working class instead of ruining the political career of Marco Rubio by pushing the rookie senator into a nasty Gang of Eight to push through immigration reform.

The whole notion of the GOP establishment's minority outreach was folly, because appealing to minorities as minorities is the Democrats' game, and they are way better at it than Republicans will ever be.

We can now see what the Republican establishment should have done. It should have started outreach to the America-wide working class, white, black, and brown, appealing to them as typical Americans getting a raw deal from the top-down globalist world view of the global ruling class.

But they didn't, and now we have Trump.

Reading Jim Geraghty this morning got me to thinking that the problem is GOPers and conservatives that approach politics as policy. We conservatives all approach politics as ideology, as putting together a set of ideas to improve the nation.

But politics isn't policy. Politics is violence; it is angry people shouting that they have been screwed by the unjust ruling class and they are not going to take it any more. Democrats and liberals understand this; that's what their activism culture is all about, with its marches and its slogans and its demands and its protest signs. It is political violence by other means.

Now Donald Trump has tapped into the injustice roiling middle America. We should have known it was there, because Charles Murray showed it to us in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. Remember, he wrote the book exclusively about white America in part because of the trouble he got into with The Bell Curve and in part because he wanted his message to be free of racial cant. It's not just minorities and women that are hardest hit, it's ordinary white Americans below the magic 25 percent of the educated elite.

I'm as rigid and severe a libertarian conservative as any in Illyria. I want to dismantle the welfare state and give the money back to the workers and the middle class from whence it came. Not because I want to beggar the workers but because I believe that social insurance programs sequester the savings of the workers and give them to activists and bureaucrats to play with and to waste. And that is unjust. I want an untrammeled creative destruction economy not because I have it in for workers but because I believe that when you start handing out economic privileges like tariffs and pro-union legislation you are setting yourself up for Detroit. Protectionism lets companies coast instead of compete, and union legislation lets workers price themselves out of the market. And when the crash comes it is not just a correction but a Detroit-type meltdown that ends with grass growing in the streets.

But I recognize that not one person in a hundred really gets this. So I understand the point of a non-ideological Trump candidacy that just rubs the magic lamp with incantations about making America great again. Instead of listing out a terrifying agenda of reform and retrenchment we need a center-right presidency that sugar-coats the medicine and doesn't scare people.

The liberals and the New York Times  are breathlessly arguing that Trump appeals to the darkest forces in the GOP. They mean white racists and white militias. You can't really blame them; the liberal race shaming game has allowed liberals to dominate the culture for 50 years. But that doesn't mean that white working class males don't have genuine grievances that a just ruling class should, would, and could try to ameliorate.

And the big upside potential for Republicans is that the sorrows of the white working class apply also to minority working class folks. Blacks and Hispanics got hammered by the Great Recession because they were the "fortunate" recipients of the liar loans that got them into houses they couldn't afford. And the Crash wiped them out. I'd say that there are millions of blacks and Hispanics ready for the Trump message and anxious to make America great again so that they can prosper.

Can Trump do it? Can the Republican Party do it? Can anyone blunt the race and gender politics of the Democrats and get Americans to vote as Americans and not as a tribe?

Stay tuned. because things are just getting interesting.

A View of Trump from the Left

I've been writing for a while that if you want to understand the Trump phenomenon you need to grasp that, since the 1960s, the left has abandoned the class politics of the New Deal and replaced it with race and gender politics. No longer would the left blame America for the plight of the suffering working class, therefore more government, but instead it would blame America for the plight of minorities and women, therefore more government.

Moreover, I have suggested, it is a little rich to make the white working class pay for the sins of the slavers and the planters, when most of them were suffering as workers and peasants in Europe at the time of high plantation slavery.

But if you are a liberal, like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (H/T Paul Mirengoff), things look a bit different. The passive voice is needed.

TPM Readers are entirely familiar with that the fact that a large segment of the American right is animated by a belief that 'their' world, their America is being taken away from them - this includes everything from declining white racial dominance, having to choose whether you want to hear the phone tree message in English or Spanish, changing cultural mores.

But Eeyore didn't just fall into the water; he was pushed. Starting in the 1960s, liberals decided to stop pushing government policies that benefited the white working class, but instead started developing policies that benefited minorities and women. It wasn't "changing cultural mores" that did it; it was deliberate use of government power by the liberal educated ruling class, on the theory, explicit or implicit, that the white working class weren't going to be reliable Democratic votes in the future.

[Then there] is the appeal to power and force. Trump is the master of GOP 'dominance politics', the inherent appeal of power and the ability to dominate others.

One is tempted to ask: what in the world is Josh talking about? Is he talking about the cunning GOP plan to dominate the universities? The cunning plan to take over the public schools? The cunning plan to dominate the media and Hollywood? The cunning plan to privatize Social Security and thus free Americans from being forced to pay FICA tax and then suck on the government teat in their retirement?

Whatever may be the evils of the GOP it does at least begin with the idea of limited government, the crazy idea that a little less "power and force" from the government would be a good thing. Like I say, the central conceit of liberals is that they are just kindly librarians helping people out with their problems, rather than ruthless authoritarians seizing 30-40 percent of GDP to reward their supporters.

On the radicalized, revanchist right, provocation and transgression of norms isn't simply indulged. It functions as a positive good. It is a feature, not a bug, to use the tech phrase.

No kidding, Josh. I thought that the hit on the right was its slavish attachment to tradition. I thought it was the left that celebrated the smashing of cultural icons, the rolling back of the patriarchy, the dethroning of heterosexual hegemony. And what is the whole culture of left-wing "activism" if not the celebration of provocation and transgression in the service of revolution and fundamental transformation?

All of this goes to show the value of my notion that everyone is sensitive to "incoming mortar rounds" crashing around their firebase. But when "our" troops fire off rounds towards the enemy the result is merely experienced as interesting puffs of smoke a mile or two away.

To a liberal like Josh Marshall the whole left cultural program to devalue the bourgeois family and the free market and limited government, the whole "long march through the institutions," the relentless naming and shaming of "racist!" and "sexist!" at anyone that disagrees with the liberal agenda, the massive resort to regulation and administrative government power, all these are nothing. The real threat is the right's lust for power and force, provocation and transgression, its feeling of declining white dominance.

I will tell you what is wrong here. Josh Marshall cannot think out of the box of his liberal world view. Like hegemons everywhere he assumes that the people are grateful peasants that tug their forelocks when their betters drive by.

He cannot grasp the simple truth that all government is injustice, and all ruling classes eventually provoke a head of rebellion in the people over which they rule. He cannot perform the hardest thing in the world, to put himself in the place of the "other" and imagine how it feels to be on the receiving end of liberal cultural and political power.

But then, what ruling class ever did, until the tumbrils started to roll?

Oh, and by the way, Josh, if the American right is upset right now that "their" world is being taken away, remember how you chaps felt in the high Bush years of the 2000s? If I remember right, you chaps were beside yourself with rage that Bush was stealing the country away from you, starting with the notion that Bush "stole" the election of 2000.

What is it that they say about turnabout is fair play?

Is The Democrat's Identity Politics Reaching Its Limit?

There is a contradiction at the heart of the identity politics that the Democrats have been practicing for the last half century.

Using the white guilt that helped pass the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s Democrats have cowed middle-class white Americans by accusing them of being racists or sexists or homophobes. The idea is that whites have benefited from centuries of "white privilege"; men have benefited from millennia of the "patriarchy"; and heterosexuals... Well, that's where things begin to break down, because homosexuality was only invented in the 19th century.

But you can easily start to peel back the other privilege notions. Patriarchy? Well, the fact is that men back then were needed to protect women from harm in a world before modern police forces. And if you can get your head out of the feminist mind warp you notice that women rather prefer protection issues to be taken care of by somebody else while they concentrate on the important part of life, caring for loved ones.

Then there is white privilege. I can see the point of white privilege for a guy like me, born to a professional engineer, loved by a devoted mother, sent to private schools and then university and then getting a job through my father's business contacts. But I don't see it for the mass of middle-class and working-class Americans, who are mainly the descendants of the great immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century.

When the Democrats, with the help of Richard Nixon, developed the notion of Affirmative Action and later blurred it into the euphemism of diversity, they invoked the noble idea of making up for decades, centuries of racial injustice.

But the fly in the ointment is that the people that were asked to pay for the injustice were not the descendants of the oppressors. They could not be, because the oppressors were the planters and the slavers that ran the slave machine, and there weren't that many of them. In fact, back in the slave days, ordinary workers felt exploited by the system, because the fact of slavery devalued work and undercut the wages of working people.

So the burden of the Democrats' identity politics is falling not on privileged whites, but on unprivileged whites, not on patriarchs but on ordinary working stiffs. And those folks are getting pretty mad.

That is why I make my point that government is injustice. Sure, government and society unjustly differentiated between the races in the bad old days. and burdened blacks with Jim Crow laws to disadvantages non-whites. That is what you call injustice. But now the government burdens white working-class people with what John Derbyshire call Jim Snow laws that disadvantage whites. That is what you call injustice.

The point of the Democrats' identity politics, with its naming and shaming of racists, sexists, and homophobes is to prevent the emergence of a backlash against their racist, sexist, homocaritic policies. All things considered, it has worked pretty well for them, up to now.

In fact, part of the rage in conservatives circles is that our leaders have failed to deal with the Democrats' identity politics, and failed to find a way to counter it. We don't feel like oppressors or patriarchs and we resent being sent to the penalty box for crimes against identity.

To the strategic mind, this great political offensive was bound to run out of momentum and power, sooner or later. In military jargon, the advancing forces get further and further away from their home base, lengthening their lines of communication and exposing flanks to attack. Meanwhile the retreating opponents are forced back upon their home base that they are likely to need to defend with a desperate enthusiasm.

Perhaps the Trump phenomenon teaches us that we are reaching that limit. The point is that the liberals' race and gender identity politics, although noble and just to them, is experienced as injustice by the folks on whom its shadow falls. Eventually they rise up and rebel against this injustice.

That is why the wise ruler limits government. He knows that government is injustice and the more government, the more injustice. He tries to blur the incidence of government and represent the actions of government not as the punitive actions of a ruling class or an avenging majority but as the benevolent action of a bipartisan consensus. Our liberal friends have forgotten all this, and they are probably about to pay for their forgetfulness.

OK, So Trump's a Fascist

In the American Spectator, writer Jon Cassidy puts out a ten point plan that he suggests amounts to the Trump platform. It includes points on stupid treaties, borders, sending home immigrants during a recession, more sports in school, better pensions, loopholes, shadowy forces, etc.

Then he tells us that he´s just given us Hitler's agenda, minus the Jews.

Well, of course. Hitler's politics asked if you are for or against the nation. It is a narrow and bigoted world view.

But then the liberals ask: are you for or against the workers. Wait! They changed that. Now it is: are you for or against women, or gays, or African Americans. Or Muslims.

Hitler was all about national identity politics; liberals are about race, gender, class identity politics. You tell me which is the more narrow and bigoted.

Actually, I will tell you. National identity politics at least has this virtue; its principle is the fiction of the united nation within its borders. Liberal identity politics sets class against class, race against race, gender against bender, within the national borders.

And I think that's contemptible.

Oh, I get it. Every government lives on war. Without a war, there is no need for government. So the Hitlerian government must imagine a conflict between the nation and the rest of the world, and in the meantime a war with the Jews inside the nation. But the liberal government is no better. It starts out with a war between the employer and the worker, between men and women, between white privilege and black slavery. There must be a war, otherwise no government is needed.

Back in the old days, the perpetual war made sense, because land was life and food, and the more land the more food. You had to defend your land to the death, or lose life.

But now, despite the rhetoric of nationalists and liberals, land doesn't matter. Today wealth doesn't consist of land, nor does it consist of the Marxist's labor power. It consists of the intangible wealth in the minds of the people: their skills, their ideas, their enterprises. And everything is negotiable through the market and through exchange.

But no! That cannot be! There must be a need for war, against greedy bankers, or cunning CEOs, or conniving Chinese, against sexist employers, against institutional racists, against bigoted bakers. There must be a need for these wars, otherwise there is no need big government, its taxes, its power, its patronage.

It has been said, by Michael Barone, that the Republican Party, throughout its history, has been the party of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans." Another way of saying this is to say that Republicans think of America as a nation and themselves as undifferentiated citizens.

So a group of people that think of themselves as the typical citizens of a nation are going to warm to a ten point program that favors the nation and its citizens over the rest of the world. You could call it nationalist; you could even call it fascist.

Now, nationalism, according to my theory of the modern world where land is no longer life but just a convenient territory from which people produce and exchange with the world on peaceable terms, is superfluous.

It is superfluous except for the little problem that there are still people in the world that resort to force rather than exchange. Nations still war against nation, thugs still hold up people and rob them, and politicians still rile up "us" against "them."

But the people that rage against the mote of the national idea had better look to the beam in their "supranational" train wreck, and the utter poison of their intranational identity politics.

For my money, the nation state is a much better idea that the poisonous brew of modern race and gender politics.

Now Brazil Runs Out of Other Peoples' Money

My man Kevin D. Williamson is writing about America's Big Problem. No, it's not Trump, it's the Budget. As Kevin is a focused guy, he always asks visiting politicians about this at National Review's coffee and conversation meetings.

I have put the question more or less identically to many of them: “Given that almost all of our spending is on popular programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national defense) or effectively non-negotiable spending (interest on the debt), how would you balance the budget?..."

Of course, the visiting pols always answer with fudge, or, as Kevin puts it "hogwash." Nevertheless, he writes, "somebody is going to have to answer that question, someday."

No they won't. The question will be answered, instead, by national debt default. As in Brazil, which is facing a financial crisis as its debt spirals out of control and the government sits there frozen in place. Here is The Telegraph's resident financial Cassandra, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He quotes a former state secretary of planning.

"There is a loss of confidence in the ability of the government to manage its debts. We face the risk of default," he said. Three quarters of the budget is effectively untouchable, locked in by a web of welfare payments and regional transfers..."

 In Kevin-speak, talking about the US, we could say that:

About than [sic] 80 percent of federal spending is on Social Security, medical benefits, the military, and interest on the debt.

But politicians dare not speak about cutting any of that. Not until the nation "goes Greek" or, in this case, Brazil. At that point, it's like the popular song "Comes love, nothing can be done."

Nothing can be done about the entitlements when things are great; nothing can be done about the entitlements when the economy is spinning out of control. Nothing can be done in the wreckage of the economy after hyperinflation and sovereign debt default, except that the entitlements, whatever they were, are now unaccountably worth a lot less. It must be love. But, since "nothing can be done" it is just too bad.

It's easy to say that there has to be a better way, but the fact is that there has never been a better way. That is why I have developed my General Theory of Government.

A government is an armed minority occupying some territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its regime supporters.

Notice that there is nothing here about cutting rewards to regime supporters. I wonder why.

In the old days the supporters were marcher lords and the central government had to keep those obstreperous lords semi-happy or they would march from the border marches to the capital city and know the reason why. Think Henry IV Part One and Harry Percy, son of the marcher Earl of Northumberland.

But these days the regime supporters are you and me, the voters that elect politicians like Barack Obama to give us Hope and Change or Donald Trump to Make America Great Again. And what we want is loot. We want our Social Security, our Medicare, our veterans benefits, our free education, our affordable housing, and so on. And woe betide the politician that dares even to mention the word "cut."

My little contribution to this is my website usgovernmentspending.com. Its Breakdown page shows pretty well exactly what Kevin shows. The only difference is that I show the next big thing, after Social Security, health benefits and defense and welfare. Education. Most of education is taxed and spent at the local level. Free, dontcha know.

But the worst of it is that, even after a nation goes Greek, or Argentina, or Venezuela, or now Brazil, people still don't get it. They still want their free stuff as regime supporters. Or else.

That's why I call it my General Theory of Government.

Trump Hauls White Working Class into the GOP Boat

For years, conservatives have been bemoaning the GOP's inability to expand the party. But now that Donald Trump has done it, we conservatives are complaining, because Trump has done it the wrong way.

Of course, the idea was that the GOP would expand by appealing to Hispanics, not the white working class. But who's keeping score?

In the cold light of day, after Trump clearly won the SEC primary over Ted Cruz, whose strategy centered on winning those southern states, we can say this.

What is so shameful about a more restrictive immigration policy that limits low-wage competition from low-skilled immigrants? The fact is that, for over a generation, liberals have used the immigration issue to import boatloads of potential Democratic voters, and named and shamed anyone that objected as a racist and a bigot. Moreover they have eroded the rule of law with their sanctuary cities and their virtual retreat from enforcing the law on illegals by burdening police with onerous reporting requirements.

Donald Trump has smashed the liberal immigration racket to smithereens.

The reason I say that Government is Injustice is that anyone wielding political power should think about how their power politics looks to the other side. There is actually no need to think about it. The other side always experiences the deployment of political power as injustice. Of course they do; government is force, taking money from some people and giving it to others, because we can.

The white working class has been on the receiving end of government for quite some time now, and like most people, they don't like it up them. For some time now, Republicans have wanted the white working class to join the Republican Party, but nobody had a clue how to do it. So Republicans and conservatives defaulted to the position that the white working class should just vote Republican if they knew what was good for them.

Yeah, we have seen how well that has sold over the years, President Romney.

Last night, Donald Trump was at his Mar-A-Lago resort trumpeting the idea that he was expanding the Republican Party. And "I'm a unifier."

That, of course, is the $64,000 question. Does Trump end up destroying the Republican Party or does he end up pulling every remaining working-class white out of the Democratic Party into the GOP column. And what about blacks and Hispanics? Conventional wisdom says that immigration politics is a third rail to Hispanics. But blacks are not at all happy with immigration, and Hispanics are said to turn anti-immigration once their family has all immigrated to the US.

Is Trump kryptonite to Republicans? Or is he a unifier that expands the party? George Neumayr of The American Spectator did an experiment, wearing a Trump hat around Manhattan earlier this winter. He kept running into people that had never voted Republican in their lives, but now...

“I like your hat,” said a bellhop to me at a boutique luxury hotel a block or so off Times Square. I had taken the hat off inside the hotel but placed it next to me on a seat. The bellhop, who described himself as “half Italian, half Hispanic,” made a point of walking over and complimenting me on my Trump hat. “I have never voted Republican in my life,” the bellhop said to me. “But I am going to vote for Trump.”

Yesterday I heard a Trump supporter tell Rush Limbaugh that Trump has actually done something, while all the other candidates have done nothing in their lives but talk. He had a point.

The story of the Republican Party since 1960 has been the story of Ronald Reagan, who said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left him. Again and again, it wasn't that the Republican Party went out and corralled a new bunch of voters. Instead the voters found them, after being cast out of the Democratic Party into the political wilderness.

If we mark the debut of All in the Family in winter 1971 as the date that the white working class was cast out of the Democratic Party, branded as racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers, every one, then the white working class has been wandering in the wilderness for about 40 years, just like the Israelites. Nobody is saying that Trump is a Moses, but he has clearly found some tablets up in them thar hills.

And really, would it harm the Republican Party to adapt itself to the political needs of the white working class? A little less immigration, a little less racial spoils, a more moderate reform of entitlements than hardcore libertarian conservatives like me would like? Is that so hard to swallow?

And really, what better time to test all this out than against the hopeless Hillary Clinton, the politician without a clue?

The Racist KKK and the Racist BLM

Presidential candidate Donald Trump got into trouble over the weekend by not reciting the proper liturgical text about apparent support by the Ku Klux Klan. Apparently every media personality in America knows how to pose the question when the KKK uses the political moment to get some publicity by endorsing some Republican.

You are supposed to say that you utterly reject the endorsement of the KKK and everything it stands for. Anything less is a scandal.

(But I wonder if Donald Trump is crazy like a fox and understands that he gets the attention of disaffected whites by equivocating on the KKK).

OK, so what about Black Lives Matter? Where's the ritual requirement to disavow this racist hate group and everything it stands for? From where I stand, the KKK and the BLM are eerily alike.

The Ku Klux Klan was part of an infrastructure of quasi-military groups opposing federal power in the post Civil War South. Its job was to intimidate uppity blacks and any whites that supported the federal government and its reconstruction policies. Its job, in the immortal words of left-wing activist Melissa Click, was to apply "muscle."

Black Lives Matter is part of an infrastructure of left-wing activist groups that push left-wing narratives and works to intimidate anyone that opposes left wing ideas.

The difference between the KKK and BLM in 2016 is that the KKK has absolutely no support from the ruling class whereas BLM obviously does.

So which group should we worry about? The group of what the Brits call "no-hopers" marinating in their cultural decay? Or the group of regime-supported shock troops, funded in part by billionaires like George Soros?

Personally, I think there's a Dirty Harry "Make My Day" aspect to left-wing activism. Ordinary middle-class people just hate it, and run away from it as fast as they can. Because the whole point of left-wing activism is that you will be made to care, about climate change, about race, about rape, about gender bending. And the whole point of the middle class is that its people don't want to be made to care about anything.

But in the Obama era liberals have kinda run wild on the activist front, just like they did in the Sixties. Back in the Sixties liberals woke up one morning and found that Richard Nixon had been elected president, and Nixon went on to energize the Silent Majority that hated the left-wing activist cuture.

It was only after the evil Nixon had been followed by the amiable dunce Reagan that liberals decided it was time to bury the activism thing and pretend to be New Democrats and crime fighters and moderates, every one. That's how Bill Clinton ran for president and had his Sister Souljah moment.

But Barack Obama is a true movement liberal, and he has not felt the need to keep his lefty crazies under a wrap. In consequence the lefty crazies have run riot across the fruited plain. Now we have Donald Trump, the unguided missile, who makes a point of trashing liberal activism narratives, to rapturous applause. Who could have seen that coming?

To my mind, the left movement of communism, socialism, fascism, and its spawn, that makes a fetish of political power, is the most poisonous human cultural meme since, oh, Islam.

But what do I know.

Here's an idea. How about we start demanding of Democratic politicians that they disavow the racist hate program of racist hate group Black Lives Matter?