Self-Deceit at the Heart of the Liberal World View

Jonathan Chait, he of The Righteous Mind, takes a look at the Democratic Party as the 2016 nomination battle winds down. He finds that, while Hillary Clinton has the delegates, Bernie Sanders has the sentiment. And the reason is not that he is a lefty, but that he is "the candidate of good government."

Or, as I like to say, Nobody here but us kindly librarians.

Chait continues:

American liberalism contains a long-standing tradition, dating back to the Progressive Era, of disdain for the grubby, transactional elements of politics. Good-government liberals prefer candidates who make high-minded appeals to the greater good, rather than transactional appeals to self-interest. The progressive style of politics was associated with the middle-class reformers and opposition to urban machines, and was especially fixated with rooting out corruption in politics... These candidates often have distinct and powerful issue positions, but their appeal rests in large part on the promise of a better, cleaner, more honest practice of politics and government.

This is the basic self-delusion at the heart of politics, the idea that the other guys are corrupt, unjust, and evil, and that once our guys are in power all will be sweetness and light.

My version of the history of American liberalism is that while the Progressives certainly started out imagining themselves as disinterested experts, the sons of the "best men" that were sought out after the Civil War, and positioned themselves as the opponents of the urban machines, in the event Franklin Delano Roosevelt squared the circle and created a Democratic Party that was a coalition of the good-government types and the urban machines, with loot and plunder for all. In my Three Peoples theory this coalition is between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self.

It really is not very hard to understand. You appeal to educated types through the media; you appeal to workers and peasants through their segmental leaders, union leaders and precinct captains and black Reverends. And if the people are not already organized, you "organize" them with AstroTurf (i.e., not real grass roots but plastic) activist groups that pretend to be authentic voices of the people. That's why Nancy Pelosi immediately "knew" that the Tea Party was AstroTurf, organized by some of the richest people in America. It would have been, if it had grown out of the liberal world.

Writes Chait: "Candidates who have fashioned themselves in this earnest style have included Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama."

No kidding. But the candidates that actually got to govern -- Carter, Brown, Obama -- revealed themselves as true machine politicians. In the case of Barack Obama this goes double, for Obama came out of the Chicago machine. But the experience of Obama governance is that there is now another machine, the gentry liberal patronage machine.

This new machine is the corps of activists and administrators that come out of the liberal activism world, ready to dive into the bureaucracy and implement, by executive and regulatory action, the gentry liberal agenda on consumer rights and the environment. They even have a bit of bandwidth left over for the labor unions, using the National Labor Relations Board to strong-arm Boeing around.

And what is the result of all this gentry-liberal activism? The result is injustice for ordinary, average Americans.

This is why I bash away at my catchphrases: government is force, government is injustice, politics is violence, politics is division, politics is civil war by other means. The idea is to put front and center that government is, by its nature, the opposite of social cooperation.

The point of social animals is to reduce, even eliminate, the resort to force among "us" in our community. But government and politics let loose the dogs of war, not just on the dangerous Vikings skulking off the coast the their longships, but against neighbors and friends.

My point is that every government program, for all that it professes to right injustice and help the people, is always an unjust attack on someone, a cruel injustice that loots some people for the benefit of others. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the gentry liberal program of green energy, where rich Democratic campaign contributors get billion dollar contracts and subsidies that result in raised electricity prices and job losses for energy workers.

The only way to reduce injustice is to reduce government.

In my view, the way to understand the Trump phenomenon is the realize how the good-government liberal politics has wreaked injustice on the white working class. I tried this line on a retired professor, saying that in 1968 liberals switched from class politics to race politics. Of course, he disagreed. To a liberal all the race politics that has fallen like acid rain upon the white working class is "civil rights," redressing the injustices of 400 years of slavery.

The only problem is that all government is injustice. In righting the wrongs of African Americans liberals have unjustly harmed the white working class which was during the centuries of slavery getting "hurled" off the land during the agricultural revolution. And now the white working class is angry.

Really, we should all hope that Donald Trump wins in November. If he does, the subsequent liberal navel-gazing will be something for the ages.

And Then There Was One...

Let's jump the gun and predict that Donald Trump wins the Indiana Republican primary today. The writing has been on the wall for several days.

So why does Ted Cruz lose? After all, Cruz invented the anti-Washington meme this time around, and took the arrows in the chest for his out-front courage. And he has a fully-developed program behind his program, including a cunning tax program that takes the payroll tax off the people and puts it on business, so that there is no percentage any more in hiring people off the books.

The reason for his failure, I think, is that Ted Cruz lacks the common touch. He is a total brainiac that can't really talk like the guy next to you in the bar.

And that means that Ted Cruz fails the "cares about people like me" test. You may not like Donald Trump and his insults and his bluster, but the fact is that the Trumpsters feel that Trump cares about people like them. And if you listen to Trump at one of his rallies, he presents himself as taking his supporters into his confidence.

The fact is that political leaders are always leading people into the unknown and, like army leaders, they are often leading them to their deaths. So people need to have faith in their leaders. Even the leaders that lead them to their deaths. Especially the leaders that lead them to their deaths. Who knows where Trump will lead us.

A lot of people look down on the Trump campaign. In particular they hate its amateurism and its lack of a coherent ten point program to solve America's ills, and Trump's lack of political experience. All true.

But Trump has done something that no Republican has done in my lifetime. He does not tiptoe.

You know what I mean. Every Republican, and every conservative, is timid, conscious about walking in a minefield. You never know when you will step on a landmine, committing sacrilege against some liberal holy relic. And then your career is over. So you tiptoe around sensitive political topics for fear that you will end up being sent to Outer Slobbovia as a racist, sexist, homophobe. David French writes about how this applies to all of us in "Individual Cowardice."

The trouble about timid leadership is that it does not inspire people to follow. And even Ted Cruz is careful to avoid stepping on liberal landmines.

But Donald Trump, by hook or by crook, has managed to violate all the canards of liberal holy writ and live to tell the tale. And what does not kill me makes me stronger, especially to my supporters.

So, does Donald Trump win the Republican nomination to lead the party to almost certain defeat, allowing Hillary Clinton to put a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and implement single-payer health care?

Or does he confound the experts for another six months and win the election in November?

We don't know.

But we do know this. The conservative strategy of the last generation of developing good policy ideas to counter the ceaseless liberal push for big government has failed. And it has failed because the liberal cultural hegemony has always given liberals the cultural power to marginalize conservative ideas and policy. Nothing will happen, nothing can happen, until conservative cultural forces can win the hearts and minds of Americans away from the current liberal cultural offensive.

Of course, Donald Trump is going to be no help at all on that front, because culturally he is middle-of-the-road. But he makes a contribution. He shows how to push back tactically against the liberal behemoth.

It is up to the rest of us to develop the world view and the strategy that can actually push the liberal cultural juggernaut to the side of the road and advance the idea that cultural power and political power and government power should be limited.

Taking Our Conservative Dollies Home

A lot of conservatives are mighty offended by the rise of Donald Trump. We have #NeverTrump and now graybeard George Will is proposing that Republicans must keep Trump out of the White House, because Trump is a stain on conservatives' honor.

"Prudence..." he writes, " demands the prevention of a Trump presidency." But we must all work together to elect Republicans down-ballot.

Such a delicate effort of threading the needle, I fear, will not work. Politics is violence, civil war by other means. It laughs at such shilly-shallying.

And it fails to see the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

The Trump phenomenon signals the failure of conservatism to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans. You can see why. Whatever the honorable intentions of the Bush years, they resulted in a foolish war in the Middle East, and a nasty financial crash caused by government easy-credit policy.

Yeah, but Iraq regime change was Clinton policy, and mortgages for deadbeats was a Democrat wizard wheeze.

Too bad. The failures happened on Bush's watch.

Really, nothing spells uselessness better than a failed war and a failed credit policy. You can have all the stupid domestic policies in the world, but nothing fails like a mucked-up war and mucked-up money.

So conservatives should not be threatening to take their dollies and go home. They should be apologizing for their failure to deliver to the American people. All the American people want is peace and a stable economy in which to work and wive and thrive. Republicans failed to deliver.

In the words of many anti-Trumpsters I get the feeling that elite conservatives feel that they own the Republican Party. I don't think so, and my Three Peoples theory tells why.

On my Three Peoples theory the Democratic Party is a conspiracy between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self. The creatives offer to be the Big Man for the peasants and workers of the subordinate self. We will lead you, they say, and plunder the stuck-up bourgeoisie and the greedy 1% to give you loot and plunder. What is not to like?

But the People of the Responsible Self, who just want to go to work, follow the rules and obey the law, are not necessarily conservatives, or free-market enthusiasts, or adventurous entrepreneurs that just cannot sit still and work for the Man. They are not, you might say, conservatives by ideology but by temperament. They want the things that benefit them to continue, and the things that oppress them to be terminated. Like every other human.

They look at the world and see their kind of America coming to a close, and they want to stop it.

I have repeatedly said, following Ronald Reagan, that the post-war Republican Party is composed of people that feel that they didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left them. This is a cute way of saying that the Republican Party is not really in the business of searching out new recruits; the recruits keep showing up as they find the Democratic Party's neo-feudal approach to society unappealing.

In the case of the white working class, who seem to be the "base" of the Trump supporters, it is probably true to say that the Democrats threw them out, when the party changed from class politics to race politics around 1968. The bennies, and most important, the love have been going to women and minorities in the last 50 years, not to white working stiffs.

So Republicans should not be sneering at the Trumpers, but giving them love and understanding. They are just another group coming in from the wilderness. And the little girls threatening to go home and take their dollies with them should stick it out.

I suspect that the real impetus for the #NeverTrump movers and shakers is that they don't want to be associated with a campaign that they expect to be a blow-out failure.

Conventionally speaking, they are right. By all conventional yardsticks Donald Trump is heading for a rout, and a prudent member of the GOP elite should keep his powder dry, or even retreat to a nearby hilltop and wait for the smoke to clear.

And if Trump wins? Well, there will still be a need for conservative policy analysis and deputy under-secretaries.

In any case, I think that conservatives should be thinking the long game. The Bernie Sanders phenomenon should wake us up to the fact that our children get marinated in 20 years of lefty dogma so that 20 year old kids (and I know one) actually believe that socialism is the wave of the future. Talk about a war on science!

If there is one thing conservatives must do it is to break up the monopoly school system. We must teach America's mothers not to send their children into lefty government schools where, of course, children are taught ruling-class dogma. Vouchers, academies, home-schooling: let's push forward on all fronts. But don't let your kid be taught by a union schoolteacher.

And let's not pretend that teaching Trumpsters a lesson is going to do anything but give the Democrats another lease on Fundamental Change.

Who Is Conning Whom?

Paul Krugman has a typically annoying piece today on the "Wrath of the Conned," specifically the GOP conned.

Both parties make promises to their bases. But while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con.

While the Dems gave 20 million of their faithful Obamacare, Republicans just toyed with the base.

Their party has historically won elections by appealing to racial enmity and cultural anxiety, but its actual policy agenda is dedicated to serving the interests of the 1 percent, above all through tax cuts for the rich — which even Republican voters don’t support, while they truly loathe elite ideas like privatizing Social Security and Medicare.

Which raises the question, what do those "aggrieved white men" that the GOP strokes with "racial enmity and cultural anxiety" really want?

Well, you tell me. What does the broad middle class of married people with children, who obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, want from government?

Well, they want to Make America Great Again. They want to feel that the government honors them, and doesn't make it hard to get a job, get a home, raise their children, and doesn't bully them and hector them all the time. And when they have spent a working lifetime paying taxes they feel they have earned their Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The truth is that the GOP has monumentally failed to do this for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that the GOP is the Outer party and doesn't control the culture. And followed by the fact that the GOP went down a rat-hole in Iraq after 9/11, and let the housing bubble pop on their watch.

But what about those "aggrieved white men" and their "racial enmity and cultural anxiety?" Well, I'd say that the GOP has been pretty embarrassed by aggrieved white men over the years. That's why Donald Trump has run the tables in the GOP primaries thus far. The Democrats have been running down white males for 50 years, and nobody until Trump stood up for them. The GOP has been frozen in the headlights by race for 50 years, and utterly discombobulated by the LGBT rights movement and the general left-wing "activism" culture. The GOP faithful know there is something wrong with this, but their party leaders have been unable to draw a line against the race politics of quotas and diversity, and unable to defend ordinary bourgeois marriage-and-children culture against the anti-cisnormative brigade.

So I'd say that the wrath of the GOP voters is not so much the wrath of the conned as the wrath of the badly-led. The job of GOP leaders and their cultural supporters is to promote and defend the culture of the People of the Responsible Self and they have done a pretty bad job of it. The reason for the failure is that conservative cultural and political leaders have been playing the game according to the rules set by liberals, in which, e.g., the racist Al Sharpton is invited to the White House while Republicans are racist for not excoriating David Duke and the KKK on demand. Obviously nothing is going to happen until the GOP grows a pair and kicks over the liberal chessboard and says: we ain't gonna play that game any more, pal.

The other wrath on display is the wrath of the abandoned. We may say that the GOP faithful are badly led, but the white working class that is rallying to Donald Trump was once the Democratic faithful that the liberal elite led, only too well, into the New Deal and powerful unions and payroll-tax-fed retirement benefits. It worked beautifully, and the Dems led the working class from victory to victory for years and years.

But then the Democratic leaders dropped their working class supporters off by the side of the road and recruited a new political army of minorities and women. Now the abandoned are rising up, and -- surprise  surprise -- they are rallying to the Republican Party.

Lots of people still don't realize that the New Deal and the Great Society were all a big con, buying peoples' votes with their own money. But the marks instinctively feel that something is wrong and they are finally revolting.

Free Trade and the American People: It's the Science, Donald

Everyone is against free trade, except an occasional economist, and you can see why. Free trade, in domestic affairs or foreign affairs, means that everyone surrenders to the market, and does not try to use force to alter the verdict of the market.

So when Donald Trump announces that

The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down, and will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.

That sounds good, because it is dealing in power, which is what politics is all about. But then there is this:

NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S. and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. Never again. Only the reverse will happen. We will keep our jobs and bring in new ones. Their will be consequences for companies that leave the U.S. only to exploit it later.

Well, no president can promise to "keep our jobs and bring in new ones." Why? Because capitalism is innovation, it is a constant process of creative destruction of old jobs and their replacement with new ones. Put it this way. First the jobs in the candle industry were demolished when the candle industry was replaced by the illuminating oil lamp industry. Then the jobs in the lamp industry were destroyed by the electric lamp industry. Then the government decided to destroy all the jobs in the incandescent lamp industry and replace them with the CFL lamp industry. And now it looks like the CFL lamp and its mercury poision is going the way of the buggy industry to be replaced with the LED lamp industry.

The point is that nobody can promise to "keep jobs." In fact, I would suggest that anyone that uses government power to "keep jobs" is probably destroying a lot more jobs that he keeps. Because the kind of jobs that get kept are usually the jobs of politically powerful interest groups, such as union jobs or Florida sugar plantation jobs.

Under a Trump Administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of foreign countries.

Well, I'm all in favor of that.

The question is: what can the government actually do to deliver on the promise to make the needs of America come before the needs of foreigners?

I'd say that the first thing to do is to get the government out of crony capitalism and "saving" jobs. Then, I'd say that it would be a good thing to limit unemployment benefits and welfare so that people cannot molder away for years in a town where the industrial plant left and the jobs with it. It is a lie to say that "good jobs at good wages" can last a lifetime.  Good jobs last as long as a product or an industry lasts. And then they are gone. That is the way of capitalism, or "innovism" as Deirdre McCloskey calls it. The basis of our prosperity is that, time and time again, the old ways have been disrupted and replaced with new ways that have radically improved our standard of living. But not for the folks displaced by the new ways.

So what do we do for the folks displaced by the new ways?

First, I'd say that we have to propagate a new national meme: no job is forever. There are no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed pensions, no guaranteed anything. When things turn south, as they do in any life, then we have to get on our bikes, or get in our U-Hauls, and go find another job in another city.

Second, let's stop blaming foreigners. The reason we are losing jobs to China and India is that China and India finally got a clue and started going capitalist. So, just like Britain 200 years ago, and the US 140 years ago, people are coming off the farms and working for low wages, starting with simple assembly jobs. Your fancy iPhone costing hundreds of dollars was made in China. But Apple's for the 1%, not for the likes of me. My modest Motorola Moto G 2nd Gen cost $100. Also made in China. It is just not possible to make iPhones for a few hundred dollars a copy in the US at US wages. And for the rest of us, those outside the magic circle of iPhones, what about our $100 knockoffs?

Third, let's not pretend that government can help. The question is not whether free trade works or whether the US is being taken for a ride by foreigners. The question is rather whether government could possibly help, or more likely, screw things up. A lot of the things that government does screws things up. That's because force is very rarely the answer to our problems. Social Security? A system of generational injustice. Welfare? Condemns generations to drink and drugs. Education? A disaster for poor Americans. Tariffs and regulations? End up benefiting powerful special interests at the expense of ordinary people. Labor unions? Benefit a few aristocrats of labor for a while at the expense of workers in general. Affordable housing? Crashed the global financial system with bad loans at Fannie and Freddie.

The thing about capitalism, or innovism, or "trade-tested betterment" is that we barely understand it, even now. It seems to be based on the paradoxical idea that, in order to prosper in the future, you have to have the courage to step away from the past.

But most of us insist of holding onto the past with a death grip. Until we die.

But Can Trump Beat Clinton?

My man Steve Sailer took one look at the Trump 5-state sweep of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Delaware, and predicted the Democrats' race-based general election strategy, based on the six states that were closest to flipping in 2012: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan.

The Democrats are going to go to Florida and Nevada and tell Hispanics that this is Race War: Trump has insulted your illegal alien Mexican compadres and therefore has insulted Florida’s Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hispanic Miscellaneous, who must stand shoulder to shoulder with Mexican illegal aliens and tell the White Man (i.e., Donald Trump) where he can put it. Similarly, Nevada’s Filipinos will be told over and over by Hillary’s people that they are Honorary Hispanics and Official Nonwhites.

The thing is that if the election is conducted upon such lines then Trump is just the candidate to counter it. The point is that for 50 years Republicans have been terrified, not just of touching the Third Rail of Social Security, but the radioactive Kryponite of race.

I say that Trump is the only guy with the cojones to appeal directly for black and Hispanic votes and accuse Hillary Clinton of racism and worse when her minions gin up the Race War.

This sort of fish-market behavior is tough for regular Republicans to do, because we are all socialized to be good bourgeois responsibles. The whole point of middle-class morality, the bane of Alfred Doolittle, is to get outside your tribe, get along with strangers and not insult them.

But politics is war by other means. And as long as the race card works Democrats are going to play it. They will play the race card until one day some brash guy Trumps it.

Can Donald Trump do it? Nobody knows. But if anyone can do it, he can.

Let us rehearse what Trump has done this election season. He has revived the white working class and brought it in from the political wilderness where it had been left to die -- and is in fact dying of drink and drugs and despair -- by a Democratic Party that had graduated from class politics to race and gender politics and a Republican Party that had nothing to say to an abandoned working class.

Obviously the Democrats will be going after Trump hammer and tongs, starting no doubt with the miserable Trump University. The question is: can Trump dominate that battlefield? If he can, he can win; if not we get Hillary Clinton and a 5-4 liberal Supreme Court and a bigger clumsier administrative state.

But there is hope. I expect that African Americans are sadder and wiser after the existential disappointment of Obama. And I dare say that Hispanics and East Asians are a lot less Democratic inclined than they were. After all, if America's First Black President can't bring on the millennium, how can Hillary Clinton be anything but worse?

For those disappointed that 2016 will not see a glorious conservative renaissance, the old saw still applies: Put not your trust in princes.

The Bigger Task for Conservatism

Powerline contributer Steven Hayward asks today "How Did the Left Get the Drop on Us" after the resounding conservative victory of the Reagan years? His answer is that we conservatives assumed we had won the victory of the big ideas and just needed to work out the details.

And it was easy to argue against socialism and its totalitarianism during the Cold War rather than against the amorphous and contradictory mess of the welfare state.

I would disagree with this line. I have always felt, going back to the Reagan years, that conservatism needed a much broader and deeper foundation than the Reagan revolution provided. I felt that, without a strong moral/cultural movement, the Reagan revolution would lack staying power. Even so, I have been surprised by the ease with which the left has rolled back the culture and economics of the Reagan years.

In retrospect, the success of the revanchist left is not so surprising. Educated people, the ones that write and talk, are all raised in a liberal culture and really know nothing other than the platitudes they learned in their student years and that roll forth from the media and the New York Times and NPR. The average educated person has never encountered "conservative" ideas and has no basis for critiquing, e.g., the politicization of mortgage credit that led to the Crash of 2008 and the conversion of the banking industry into a regulated industry by Dodd-Frank. Nor could they possess the knowledge that an administrative-bureaucratic initiative like Obamacare would be bound to fail, because Hayek.

Also, the collapse of conventional Christian religious belief has left a hole that had to be filled by something. People that don't believe in God don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

That is why I have been interested in books like Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform by William G. McLoughlin, who argues that every period of political reform in the United States has been preceded by a religious revival or Awakening. That is why my bible is The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak, which argues for what I call a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector of society. That is why I believe in the late Andrew Breitbart's dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

That is why I have written my American Manifesto, to imagine the possibility of an America after the collapse of the welfare state.

But what I have not been able to imagine is a religious movement to counter the secular religion of political correctness that has rolled over America and the west since the end of the Reagan years. We all know what political correctness is about; it is a reformulation of the totalitarian culture of Marxism based on race, sex, and economic identity rather than the pure economic class conflict of the original Marxian program. It uses all the tools of religion, from the building of an orthodoxy of correct opinion to the hounding of heretics with its Social Justice Warrior Inquisition; it is religion in everyting but name.

I have analyzed society into three parts, with my Three Peoples theory, and I have posted a dire warning to all those that trade their birthrights for a mess of pottage as the "little darlings" of the ruling class. But what I do not see is the moral/cultural or religious awakening that could challenge the PC culture and then move into a great reform era to end the cruelty and injustice of Big Government.

Obviously the Trump phenomenon in the US and the rise of nationalist parties in Europe reflect the bankruptcy of our current transnational ruling class with its foolish conceit that it can rule without the political advice and consent of ordinary people and can mix the world's peoples together and remain in control of the ensuing cultural mashup. But this neo-nationalist movement seems to be political rather than cultural, so it ignores the Breitbart dictum that politics is downstream from culture. Indeed, all observers agree that the Trump phenomenon is populist, a mere rebellion of the people against the ruling class, rather than a revolution in thinking.

Possibly the moral/cultural movement is already aborning, and staring us in the face, and we cannot see it because we are blind to it, being old and set in our ways.

And probably nothing will change until the present ruling class runs out of other peoples' money. After all, the French Revolution could never have happened without the Bourbons running out of money to fight against the Brits in the Second Hundred Years War. And the Bolshevik Revolution would never have happened without the Romanovs running out of money in World War I. And the Reagan revolution could never have happened without the stagflation of the Carter years.

But who can wish for revolution? It is grand to imagine the humiliation of today's rulers, but not to experience the reality of revolution and armed teenagers in the streets.

So there is no alternative to plugging away, trying to imagine a cultural and moral and religious awakening that will inspire the American people to reject the soft totalitarianism of Obamism and the conceits of left-wing activism.