Derb's Four Party System is Missing a Party

Brit immigrant John Derbyshire is a Brit immigrant just like me, and far from being horrified at the Demolition Derby of the 2016 election thus far, he writes that it is "fun." He is right. But then he steps out, and proposes that the current election season has exposed four political parties in America.

It looks to me as though the two-party system has been an illusion. We actually have four parties:

• The White Gentry Liberal Party, as represented by Bernie Sanders.
• The party of labor unions and NAMs—that’s Non-Asian Minorities— led by Mrs. Clinton.
• The Donorist-Capitalist-Neocon party, which rallied behind Jeb Bush and is now staging a desperate, and surely doomed, rearguard action under Marco Rubio.
• The White Prole Party, under the leadership of Donald Trump.

The first two parties are obvious, because they show the over-under coalition that surely is the Democratic Party. It would be cool if that would break up, but I doubt it. The point is that the government labor unions and the non-Asian minorities need gentry liberal leadership, because they are People of the Subordinate Self.

But when I look at the other two parties, I have to ask: where do I fit in, Derb? Where does a small-government libertarian conservative fit into this matrix?

Let's say that, in the Nineties and the Oughts I followed the neo-con line and accepted the idea of intervening in the Middle East. I'm certainly capitalist, though definitely not crony-capitalist donorist. I'm sympathetic to the sufferings of the white proles, but in my heart I'd like to eviscerate the social insurance programs they support.

Surely there is room for a party in America that stands for people that think of themselves as typical Americans. Yes, of course there must be, and what is more typical than an American-loving, rock-ribbed immigrant like me?

And it's obvious what that party should be called. It should be called the Typical American Party, led by Ted Cruz.

But if, in fact, there are five political parties, then you can see why the Democrats keep coming out on top. They just have to stitch together two factions, and how hard can that be when one faction is the leadership faction and the other is the subordinate faction?

But things are much trickier in the GOP. How do you stitch together the Sea Island folks with the Proles and the typical Americans? It sounds like a challenge to me, because there are two leadership cadres and one subordinate faction.

And, the biggest question of all, can the Sea Islanders and the typicalers bear the humiliation of the Trumped-up schlock  of the Prole faction?

It Ends Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

Here's a moving piece from a small-town lawyer who's waking up to the misery of "Trump's America, where working-class whites are dying from despair." He's Michael A. Cooper, Jr., from North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, where the manufacturing and the furniture factories got up and left.

He sounds like a Democrat trying to be fair. Here's what went wrong, according to Cooper.

As productivity climbed, working-class Americans wanted their wages to rise also. Instead, Republicans gave them tax cuts for the rich while liberal Democrats called them racists and bigots.

Actually, the Reagan and Bush tax-rate cuts lowered tax rates on everyone and removed a ton of middle-income taxpayers from the rolls.

But I get what Cooper is saying. Neither Republicans nor Democrats did anything to help the good-jobs-at-good-wages workers of the 1950s adjust to the new world of rising East Asia.

No doubt the white working class has suffered from the move of manufacturing to East Asia. But the political class could not have provided absolute protection from this economic tidal wave. You can do a bit of tariff protection; you can limit immigration. But workers in the First World have to learn First World skills if they want to earn First World wages.

The tragedy of the white working class is not that the Republicans and the Democrats betrayed them in the years since 1973, either by immigration to lower their wages or by globalization to outsource their jobs. The tragedy is that the 20th century ruling class offered the white working class a lie, that they could graduate from high school into lifetime jobs at unionized corporations at good wages. The lie was that their social insurance programs actually delivered social insurance.

The truth about our modern economy is the truth of Schumpeter's "creative destruction." The Great Enrichment of the last two centuries is built on creative surprises in a succession of economic revolutions. The good news is that the revolutions lifted all boats. The bad news is that there were victims all along the way. First there were the peasants thrown off the land by the enclosures. Agricultural prices came down, but the peasants lost everything. Then there was the textile revolution that in stages destroyed the cottage textile industry: first hand-spinning, then hand-weaving. Then there were the railways that demolished the coaching industry and the horse-and-cartage industry. Now we have smart manufacturing that has taken the jobs of the rust-belt manufacturing workers.

In each revolution the political system had nothing to offer the revolution's victims except welfare. The Elizabethan Poor Law was a pathetic effort to respond to the agricultural revolution. When the machine weaving came along, its victims like Andrew Carnegie emigrated to America. But we don't really know what happened to the carters, like Barkis in David Copperfield.

The awful truth is that politics is clueless. It knows nothing except rallying people with words, and anesthetizing them with money. President Obama didn't have a clue when he uttered his famous "bitter clingers" riff in 2008. Let's reprise his fundraiser speech.

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama understood the problem. But he had nothing to offer. Conservatives have sneered at his detached attitude, but the truth is that neither party had anything to offer.

Nor can they now. The truth is that when people get into their 40s they lose their get-up-and-go and when things go wrong they try to live by gaming the system. They live off their families, or off welfare, or off disability, and they slowly spiral down into oblivion.

If there is a villain here it is the conceit of the educated ruling class that they could manage economic change with politics: with education, with training, with economic manipulation. But tax cuts don't solve it, naming and shaming of bigots doesn't do it; education doesn't do it; minimum wage doesn't do it.

Just look at the ruling class misjudgments of the last ten years. They said that the earth was burning up; instead we have had a "pause" in global warming. They said we could give mortgage loans to people with low credit scores; instead we got a financial meltdown. They said that we were running out of fossil energy. Instead the fracking revolution has mad energy cheap again. They said they could reform health care to give affordable care to the marginal people between Medicaid and employer health insurance. Instead costs have gone up for everyone.

This is not the incompetence and the corruption of the ruling class.  This is the ruling class doing things using political and administrative power that cannot be done with political power.

There are things we can do to help the white working class. We can enforce the laws on illegal immigrants. We can limit legal immigration. We can reduce regulations on corporations so that it makes sense for them to locate in the United States. We can probably stiffen up welfare and disability so that more people choose work over idleness.

But we cannot save the white working class from its despair. Only the white working class can do that. Maybe Trump can raise its morale. But how much did Obama's Hope and Change help the Democratic faithful? We can only do what government has always done, and put the victims on the dole.

But for you and I, the misery of the white working class is a warning, for there but for luck and pluck goes each one of us. Lee Iacocca's dictum still applies. You can lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Above all, everyone of us must surrender to the market. All the market asks of us is to offer a product or a service that other people want to buy, and if at first you don't succeed, then try, try again.

All it asks of us!

But the alternative is despair and oblivion.

Why Do Liberals Always Need a Therapist?

Back in the ancient world of World War I they called it shell shock. Then in World War II they called it combat stress reaction. Now we call it post-traumatic stress disorder.

Not to be outdone, the liberals of 2000 went to their therapists and were diagnosed with stress disorder because of the trauma of the Republicans winning an election. Therapists mobilized all across Florida to minister to the combat fatigue of distraught liberals.

And that is to say nothing of the notion of "stress" that women all over the Anglosphere talk about with their friends.

Of course, when Barack Obama was elected president there was no need for a therapist mobilization. Because Hope and Change.

But now that the era of Obama is coming to a close we have "Trump anxiety" rearing its head among the faint-hearted.

Now, I fully endorse the notion of post-traumatic stress disorder in the case of combat soldiers. It is said that the human male can only stand about 100 days of combat stress. After that he goes mad.

Think about what that means. After 100 days of constant exposure to death and terror, the average male consciousness closes down into madness. It is the only sensible thing to do.

At the other end of this, of course, is the notion, now regnant on college campi, that white professional-class female students should not be subject to any disturbing event, and that safe spaces should be provided for those traumatized by exposure to ideas that challenge the normal 95 percent liberal-feminist-secular-activist monoculture on campus.

(Notice that there is no attempt to provide stress therapy for, e.g., enthusiastic white male Christians, when they arrive at an elite university. In fact the opposite occurs, as students are subjected ruthlessly to reeducation camps on "white privilege." In these cases, the application of stress is considered a positive virtue.)

Since we have established that liberals consider stress a positive good, at least for the character building of conservatives, let us consider the words of would-be typical American Sarah Hoyt. She notes the remarkable absence of stress in our modern lives. But, she writes, we shouldn't expect things to continue like this.

ALL of us, even the most protected of the special snowflakes, are descended from war and disease, famine and strife, and an insane amount of work.  Because those were the conditions that led to survival in most of history, and we’re descended from the ones who survived, or at least from the ones who survived long enough to have children.

We seem to think that we should be able to live free from stress.

The question is: are humans supposed to go through life untraumatized? Is there some ideal state of humanity where we never encounter anything unpleasant, are never frustrated, never hurt?

Answer: NO!

And I wonder. I wonder if this radical experiment of raising kids without any traumas, any hardship is not the worst thing you could do to kids.

It used to be believed — and it was a popular theory in the sixties and seventies — that if you raised kids with absolutely no hardship they would be perfect; that if you raised kids with no violence they would be peaceful; that if you raised kids with self-esteem and praise, they would be confident and productive.

Hoyt's point is that things are going to get worse, at some point. And when they get worse, only the strong will survive, only the people that went against the conventional wisdom of a living a stress-free life, and raising your kids to be free from stress.

So how tough should we be on ourselves? How tough should we be on our kids? Should we advocate "firmness" as the Murdstones advocates for little boys like David Copperfield.

The answer is, of course, that nobody knows, because nobody knows what is coming in the future. It's like buying a stock. It's easy to say: buy low, sell high, but nobody knows the future.

Right now I am reading a Trollope novel, Doctor Thorne. And Trollope raises the question of toughness. Should you be as tough as Roger Scatcherd, the stone mason that rose to be a railway contractor and a rich man, that killed himself with drink? Should you be tough like Lady Arabella, the mother that wants the money-less Mary Thorne out of the way of her son, Frank, who must marry money to clear his father's financial embarrassments? Should you be tough like Frank, that horsewhipped the man that jilted his sister?

Trollope's answer is obvious. You should be as tough as Mary Thorne, principled and honorable, but kind and generous. Yeah, Tony. Easy for you to say.

All I can say is that liberals are heading for a fall. They are very solicitous of their kind, providing them with therapists, safe spaces and all. But they are utterly cruel to people outside the magic circle of liberalism. They pamper themselves and practice Murdstonian firmness on people suspected of white privilege.

I think that the way to live is to be tough on yourself, and kind to others. If only I could practice what I preach. 

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.