Can Trump Win? We Don't Know

After pretty well clearing the board on Super Tuesday, Donald Trump will have to be the nominee of the Republican Party. Or else mayhem.

It does no good for Jim Geraghty to assert, in his daily email, that the GOP cannot be unified under Trump. That is what people always say at this stage of the game.

But that is why we have elections and conventions and speeches and all the froo-fra of politics. At the end of the process you have a winner, validated by the process.

It is time to stop worrying about who wins the nomination. It is time to start thinking about who wins the election.

On the one hand the polls tell us that Trump has big negatives. On the other hand we have people like the American Spectator's George Neumayr walking around New York City and finding that a lot of people you would think of as Democrats find him interesting.

A black man walking his daughter to school came over to me one morning and asked, “Where can I get that hat?” He was eager to pick one up and vote for Trump. He explained that he doesn’t typically vote Republican but liked Trump for his crafty business sense.

Trump's signature issues are immigration and trade. The Democrats like to frame immigration as a race issue: you are a racist if you oppose immigration. But any fool can see that immigration is an issue that divides voters mainly down the line of whether you have family that wants to immigrate. If your family has all immigrated then you probably think that immigrants compete for your job. If you still have family waiting for green cards then you want more immigration.

Up to now Democrats have framed immigration as a race issue. No doubt Trump will try to frame it as a jobs issue. He might also successfully frame illegal immigration as a rule of law issue.

Trade is probably a wash. Both Trump and the Democratic nominee will be against free trade, because as everyone knows, free trade outsources jobs to China.

The thing is that Donald Trump, because he is a celebrity, has a better chance to define himself for the election than any recent GOP presidential nominee. And he is pretty aggressive about defining himself. I suspect that Hillary Clinton will find it difficult to deal with him.

For instance, if I were Donald Trump I would say, every day from now to the election, that I couldn't understand any president doing a dumb thing like setting up my own email server. Anyone that knows anything about computers knows that a private email server is an open invitation to hackers. And I'd say that I couldn't understand anyone that would come up with such a tawdry lie over Benghazi. In other words I would be raising the issue that Hillary Clinton just doesn't love America.

But one thing is clear. Win or lose, Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party forever. That is the real beef of the #NeverTrump folks at National Review and the business and political elite at Sea Island. If Trump is nominated, and especially if he wins in November, the parties will have been shuffled from the 50-50 red-state blue-state standoff of the last two decades.

The point is that every ruling class like stability. They like to be able to control events and deal with the same people and manipulate the same political dials and levers. But every few years the old order gets shuffled. And obviously any shuffle means that the current ruling class is going to take a hit.

That's where we are in 2016 and nobody knows what will wash out in November.

Kevin Williamson is Wrong About the White Working Class

The chaps at National Review have gone pedal-to-the-metal against Trump. A recent example is my man Kevin D. Williamson's Father-Führer piece in the magazine. You can see the gist of the article here.

Kevin's idea is that it's the white working class's own bloody fault that, as Michael A. Cooper Jr. writes, and I agree, they are "dying of despair." Even the white working class has "moral responsibilities," according to Kevin.

Aha! There's that word: "responsibilities."

You see, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, the white working class are People of the Subordinate Self, like serfs and slaves down the ages. This means that individual working class people do not experience themselves as responsible to themselves or to God for their lives.

On the contrary, they believe in sheltering under the protection of a powerful lord, or politician, or union boss. For them, that is the way to survive in this world. And most humans down the ages have believed the same.

Here is what the goddess Fricka thinks about serfs and peasants in Die Wälkure. The word is "Knecht" in German.

But I bring you a miracle. About 3,000 years ago humans started to believe the remarkable notion that they were not merely "die Knechte Gottes" the slaves of the gods and the Big Man of the village but individuals that could understand the world and do something about it. In that case they were responsible for doing something about it. That's what all the Axial Age religions are all about according to Robert Bellah in "Religious Evolution."

Now, in my view, the transition from subordination to responsibility is necessarily intermediated by religion. You cannot advance from membership of the People of the Subordinate Self and graduate to the exalted realm of the People of the Responsible Self without becoming Judaized or Hinduized or Christianized. The point about the white working class is that they have not made the transition. They minds were never melted in the crucible of Christianity.

In my view the way to experience this truth for yourself is to read George Eliot's Adam Bede set in 1800. The hero Adam Bede is a carpenter (!) and a Methodist and the heroine is the transcendent Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris. So you can see that they come after the Great Awakening that stirred the masses in England and in colonial North America. My favorite quote about this is from Finke and Stark's The Churching of America. They quote a preacher active in the Great Awakening.

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

See what I mean? Just in case you don't get the point I have bolded the important words.

Now, what Kevin D. Williamson is saying that the behavior of the white working class is a "damning sin." But the problem is that the white workers are still dead to the world in the "sleep of ages." They have not yet woken up to see that they are "responsible beings." And until you have woken up and become a responsible being you have no clue that you are refusing "to use the means appointed." So Kevin is missing the point.

But that is not the end of the story. On my reading of society, every group that entered into the city used the means appointed to deal with the fact that the city demands that you act responsibly. It demands that you figure out how to contribute to the city economy rather than idle around on some great lord's estate until the steward comes around and tells you what to do. Yet somehow the white working class came to the city and didn't learn this lesson.

How come? The answer is obvious. Liberals. Well, not just liberals but the whole leftist movement from communists to socialists to progressives.

The left movement told the working class that it did not need to learn the culture of responsibility. It could continue to slumber in the sleep of ages as subordinate peasants, as the subordinate servants of the leftist avant garde. The promotion of labor unions meant that workers did not need to go forth themselves to negotiate with the world and keep updating their skills and work to excel. No, the union would take care of them. The enacting of social insurance legislation meant that the working class did not need to learn about savings and looking out for the future. No, a wise and evolved elite would do that for them, and all they needed to do was to vote for progressive politicians.

Only, of course, the day came when the progressive elite tired of the white working class and decided that the grievances of African Americans and women and gays and Hispanics were much more important. So they tossed the white working class to the side of the road and marched onward to bend the arc of history to racial and sexual equality.

This is the one little problem about selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. Eventually you lose both your birthright and your mess of pottage. The truth is that if you are one of the People of the Subordinate Self you will find, one fine day, that you have been abandoned by your lord, when you are no longer useful to him.

That, in my view, is the story of the English peasant. As late as the Wars of the Roses the peasants were useful to their lords because they could be used in their baronial armies. You can see, in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays, that each baron had "our powers" that he could bring to the battlefield. But then the Tudors disarmed the nobles and destroyed their castles. Instead they created a nation state and a national army. Correlation is not causation, but at the same time their armies were being disbanded the nobles got into the idea of "improvement," of improving their estates by drainage and enclosure. And they kicked the surplus labor force off the land. By the end of the 16th century the surplus population was enough of a problem that the political system decided to "do something" about it. The result was the Elizabethan Poor Law. For 200 years the poor slowly starved on this welfare program until the industrial revolution suddenly put them all to work.

Now we have the white working class in exactly the same position. Nobody needs their labor; nobody needs their votes. Sayonara, pal.

I am not a chap to be shy about reductive theories. Attached to my reductive Three Peoples theory, with its People of the Suborinate Self, its People of the Responsible Self, and its People of the Creative Self, is what I call the "little darlings" problem, here and here.

The idea is that once you become the little darling of the ruling class then you are toast. You lose the ability to live life without the fatherly assistance of the great lord. The English peasant was once the little darling of the warrior nobles, until the nobles didn't need him any more. The worker was the little darling of the educated ruling class until the educated ruling class decided that blacks and women were much funner.

So the white working class is toast, unless it gets religion and wakes up from the sleep of ages and realizes that each and every one is a responsible being. But that is not the end of the story.

What about African Americans? What happens to these current little darlings of the liberals when the liberals tire of them?

What about women? What happens to the special snowflakes in their safe spaces when the ruling class tires of them?

You can see the point. Whatever the rulers say, the rulers really do not care about people like you. They only care about your vote, or using you as a pawn in their games of power. Right now, people all over the place are shocked, shocked, at the way that Donald Trump is bewitching the white working class into believing that Trump cares about people like them.

So what's the difference between Trump and Obama?  Obama, who bewitched a generation with Hope and Change. Or Bill Clinton who promised, as the economy came out of a mild recession, to fix "the worst economy in the last 50 years."

The fact is that if you become the little darling of the ruling class you are setting yourself up for misery, like any hot young woman that sells her pneumatic youth to some sugar daddy.

To avoid the fate of little darlings down the ages, of People of the Subordinate Self that got left by the roadside, you have first to become like Adam Bede or Dinah Morris and join the People of the Responsible Self.

There is no shame, Kevin D. Williamson, in being a member of the OxyContin white working class. But there is no future in it, either.

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?