What Trump Has Destroyed

It is pretty clear, now that he is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party that Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party that was.

Of course, he has not destroyed the Republican Party, only the basis on which the Republican Party has operated for the last 30-40 years. I mean the Republican Party informed by a Buckleyite conservatism that declared the John Birch Society beyond the pale and the Republican Party infused with Jewish neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, liberals famously mugged by reality.

The reason was explained by self-proclaimed reactionary Mencius Moldbug in his blog back in 2008-09. It is the fact of the Cathedral, the secular-religious church of secular liberalim in the media, the schools, the foundations, and the universities and the liberal activism culture. Their church orthodoxy defines what you are allowed to say and what you are not allowed to say in America. Further, the two political parties in the US, following George Orwell, are the Democratic Party as Inner Party, that gets to rule when it is in power, and the Republican Party as the Outer Party, which just gets to govern when in office.

I take the rise of Trump as the great Republican unwashed declaring that they just can't take it any more, being silenced, being tame zoo animals of the Outer Party when the Inner Party adherents get to do and say pretty well whatever they want provided it follows Inner Party orthodoxy.

The voters are saying that the politics of accommodation, of going along to get along with the Inner Party and its Cathedral bishops in the media and the academy, is just too humiliating. They just can't take it any more; they just have to break out. They feel, in other words, that they have nothing left to lose.

In this sense it is true to say that President Obama has destroyed the Republican Party. By going full partisan on his signature legislation and by humiliating Republicans in repeated clashes, he has destroyed the faith of the rank-and-file Republicans in their leaders.

In my view, the president made a strategic mistake. The fact is that, over the last century, the left has operated what Margaret Thatcher's associate Keith Joseph called a "ratchet effect." Every leftist reform ratcheted up the size and the power of government, and has never been pushed back to the status quo ante. If this is true, it is never necessary for the left to go flat out as if the next conservative government would repeal and reverse their agenda. The record is that the reverses are temporary and partial, and the left soon gets to turn another click of the ratchet.

President Obama could have implemented his stimulus, his Obamacare, his Dodd-Frank, with Republican votes. He would not have got as much passed, but the next liberal president would come back a generation later and crank the ratchet another step. Instead, he has encouraged his sluggers to hit it out of the ballpark, and humiliate the opposition.

President Obama is a man of the left and its mechanical systems. He ought to know that action and reaction are equal and opposite. And so the powerful thrust of his dominatory politics has created an equal and opposite reaction. The mass of white working class peasants, that were wandering around without a political home for a generation, have swarmed in desperation into the bourgeois citadel of the Republican Party and will probably have changed the Republican Party forever.

Really, we should thank the president. As conservatives we are hesitant to take a wrecking ball to the United States to implement our glorious conservative vision. We know, following Edmund Burke, that at the end of such a road is the gallows. But President Obama, with his narrow leftist world view, has swung the wrecking ball at America, trying to smash the opposition. Instead he got him a Republican House in November 2010, a Republican Senate in 2014 and now a populist rebellion in 2016.

This is folly, because the Democrats are the Inner Party, and liberals are the ruling class. A sensible Inner Party wants to keep things on an even keel. It wants to keep the Outer Party politicians properly docile, but not insulted. A sensible Cathedral wants to make sure that the proles are respectful of their betters, but wants to avoid humiliating them enough to get them angry.

So, provoked by President Obama, Donald Trump has kicked over the old three-legged stool of the Republican Party: national-defense, economic, and social conservatism. The new party will have to fit a new leg in, to represent the needs and the agenda of the much-maligned white working class. Put in terms of my Three Peoples theory, it means that the Republican Party will no longer be a party purely for the People of the Responsible Self. It will have to accommodate the white working class, and appeal more to People of the Subordinate Self.

That will probably force the Republican Party closer to the political center. Republicans dream of dismantling the big government structures of the 20th century, but the great mass of the American people don't. Grandpa wants his Social Security. Grandma wants her Medicare. Young mothers want their baby-sitting service. And so on.

Of course, eventually big government will run out of other peoples' money. But not yet. As Kevin D. Williamson writes, government learns nothing. All it knows is taxing the people to reward its supporters. Until the very moment that the money runs out. Hello Venezuela.

Then, and only then, will we learn. As we have to start over.

Surrender and the "Three Peoples" Theory

I think that the concept of "surrender" is one of the most important human attributes. It applies, I think, to the basic fact of humans as social animals, for I take "social animals" to mean animals that don't settle everything by fight or flight.

On that view, surrender means some sort of genuflection by the individual towards society, some recognition that, without society, we humans are dead ducks.

Of course, ducks are variable in their sociability. Some ducks seem to live only around their mates, like the Bufflehead. While others mass in flocks, like the American Widgeon.

Now, I think that surrender has particular application in my reductive Three Peoples theory.

It is obvious that People of the Subordinate Self surrender to their liege lord, their political boss, their union leader. Presumably this has gone on since the dawn of time when men were subordinate to the tribal Big Man. And all women were subordinate to all men.

What about the People of the Responsible Self, the great global middle class? We surrender not to a physical lord but to an abstract lord. It might be God; it might be the market, it might be an idea. Of course, the People of the Responsible Self also live under governments, in city states and nation states, and so they owe loyalty to physical lords and to national governments, but this loyalty is given provisionally, and the modern myth of society is that the people are sovereign and their magistrates are their servants, not their masters. People of the Responsible Self are citizens, we believe in civility, we measure ourselves not against our standing with some political or corporate boss, but against our own standards that we keep privily in our hearts.

OK, now we get to the real point of this exercise, the People of the Creative Self, and I think it is fair to say that the jury is out on this one. Nobody can tell you what the creative people owe to society. Except me. So try this one on for size.

Strictly speaking, the People of the Creative Self have made a cosmic bet. They have said that life means nothing unless it is creative, bringing forth something new and original into the world, something that comments truly about life, the universe, and everything, or that changes the human condition in some beneficial way. But suppose that you discover that you are not particularly creative, or that your idea is warmed-over nothingness? What then?

It is this conundrum that I believe is at the center of our world crisis. For the truth about life, the universe, and everything is that many are called to be creative, but few are chosen. That is great for the chosen ones, but what about the rest, the not-chosen ones? What are they to do?

The answer is obvious. They must admit their failure and resolve to be merely People of the Responsible Self, living a useful and social life if they discover that their dream of creative genius turns out to be a bridge too far. But many creative failures are unwilling to accept defeat. They turn around and demand that the world acknowledge their unappreciated genius.

The disappointed People of the Creative Self, that thought to be creative and weren't, are the scourge of the planet.

I believe that this Failed Creative syndrome is the truth behind the liberal "activism" culture. The "activism" culture says that we activists know the truth and we will demonstrate and peacefully protest and name and shame until you racist, sexist bigots submit. In other words, the disappointed creative proposes to resort to force.

Here is the great divide between the "for-profit" world of business and start-ups and corporations and the "not-for-profit" world including activist groups, NGOs, foundations and government. The for-profit world offers its ideas upon the market and if the market declines the offer, that's all she wrote. The not-for-profit world operates upon a different principle. Government, of course, operates simply on the force principle. It takes money from people for the right to buy and sell or to just to work, and then gives the money to its regime supporters. Activist groups take money from billionaires and hector and threaten society with shows of force, demanding that society should accept their "non-negotiable demands" or else. Foundations advance ideas irrespective of the acceptance in society at large. Their ideas might be good, such as Bill Gates helping eradicate malaria. Or their ideas might be bad, such as Bill Gates pushing the top down Common Core curriculum.

See, I think that surrender and its consequence are pretty simple. You surrender to your liege lord as People of the Subordinate Self and your life is in his hands, until he uses it up in his power project and you get left by the side of the road. You surrender to God or to the verdict of the market as People of the Responsible Self and rededicate your life every day to divine judgement and the judgement of the market and live a useful and responsible life. You surrender to the original act of creation as People of the Creative Self and if you are called but not chosen as a stand-out genius you accept that you are just an ordinary bourgeois who can at least aspire to a life of responsibility.

This Three Peoples theory is great. It explains everything!

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.