The Fundamental Reality of Our Times, Four Ways

It's an insider's joke that politics is all about Four Point Plans, as in "my four point plan will reduce inequality by 50 percent. Why do the politicians do it? Because we are all Slaves, and we want our kindly Masters to save us from the Persians and tell us what to do. But the basic reality of our times is this.

Point 1: Per capita income has gone up from $3 in 1800 to $100 right now. There has been nothing like it in human history. Ever.

But why? Why did it happen now and now in Roman times? Or Babylonian times? Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in her "Bourgeois Trilogy" writes that the reason is that only in the last five hundred years have individuals been allowed to try out their ideas for "betterment" without being stomped on by the ruling class.

You can see how the normal way works, because any time someone comes up with a new idea everyone stomps on them for a fool or a knave. And the established interests run to government to stamp it out. Right now we have the established scions of the educated ruling class running around trying to frighten people about "fracking."

Yes, but unregulated capitalism created cruel and unjust inequality. So government had to step in and fix it.

Point 2: Go and read Point 1.

Really, what difference would a war on inequality make? Let's say that, in the days of $3 per day we could have helped the poor. Actually we did, starting in 1598 with the Elizabethan Poor Law. But it didn't make a blind bit of difference to increasing overall prosperity. Not until advances in textile technology in the 18th century made it possible to make cheap textiles for the poor. About that time population started increasing and people started expecting to live better than their parents -- when the Poor Law was being eviscerated. So you tell me, what possible contribution could helping the poor and reducing inequality do in helping get from $3 per day to $100 per day.

Yes, but what about slavery and feudalism and all that?

Point 3: Go and read Point 1.

It is interesting to me that anti-slavery agitation began at exactly the moment that capitalism and the Great Enrichment began to take off. Before that nobody seemed to have any problem with slavery. Merchants of Venice and Genoa had no problem transporting Circassian slaves from the Crimean port of Kaffa to the harems of the Middle East. Dutch and Anglo-Saxon had no problems transporting West-Africans to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Vikings had no problem carting Brits off to the slave markets of Dublin, Ireland. Also, nobody seemed to have any problems with slavery in the Soviet Union or in Maoist China. Or in Castro Cuba. Or in Khmer Rouge Cambodia. And US liberals don't seem to have a problem in taxing ordinary labor about 25 percent so they can play Lady Bountiful and give it back after buying a few votes.

My feeling is that the war on slavery was not so much a great moral crusade as a slow realization that slavery didn't pay. That's what the West Indian slave-owners decided. They found it better to relax their slave-driving to encourage the slaves to work more creatively.

At any rate, it is clear that leftist societies require a vigorous and ruthless neo-slavery just to keep operating in the economic basement. Just look at Venezuela right how.

Yes, but without wage and hour laws and safety regulations and labor law where would we be?

Point 4: Go and read Point 1.

What part of wage and hour laws got us from $3 per day to $100 per day? Back in the day of $3 per day, human lives were pretty cheap. You could easily get another starving hod-carrier when the last one wore out. But when you are inventing department stores in Paris in the 1850s you start to think that you need to pay your good salespeople a cut above the rest, because a good salesperson is hard to find. When you are Henry Ford expanding Model T production you advertise $5 per day because you need to attract labor to Detroit. And now the giants of the internet want the sharpest minds in the world working for them.

And as for labor law, you only see labor unions in a fight against decline. What about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877? The workers were striking against wage cuts. And why were the railroads cutting wages? Because of the Depression starting in the Crash of 1873. The railroads were broke. Same with the industrial unions in England in the late 19th century. They went on strike against wage cuts issuing out of low prices and heightened competition on industrial goods in the international market. So what part of union agitation got us from $3 per day to $100 per day?

The fact is that government always and everywhere responds to the demand for protection. From foreign invaders, from domestic criminals, and from the vicissitudes of the creative destruction of the Great Enrichment from $3 to $100 per day. But usually its protection doesn't make a blind bit of difference except to confirm the privileged in their privilege.

So whenever ruling class activists come up with new ways to increase their power there is only one question to ask.

How would this have got us from $3 per day to $100 per day? Let alone get from today's $100 per day to $1000 per day?

In the last 200 years of the Great Enrichment we have gone from $3 per day to $100 per day and more. There has been nothing like it. Ever.

Trump. That's What You Get After a Lefty Mini-Reign of Terror

Yesterday I suddenly woke up out of a sound sleep, where Trump is concerned, and here is what I realized.

Trump is Thermidor.

Thermidor? That's the name for what came after the French Revolution and its culminating Reign of Terror. It is the moment when Maximilien Robespierre, "the incorruptible," was kicked out and, in a while, Napoleon Bonaparte took over as the man on the white horse.

In Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution this is perfectly natural and physical (and not the holy horror that the left insists). Here is how I described Crane's theory of revolution in a blog post a year ago. It is well worth reading, if I do say so myself.

Fall of the Old Regime The old regime is discredited, and probably running out of money. But there is hope, for that is what the revolutionaries are selling.

Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power Typically the old regime is succeeded by a regime of moderates, but the moderates soon find themselves in conflict with extremists who act illegally and independently of the moderate regime.

Reign of Terror The extremists win for a bunch of reasons, including that they are more ruthless and better organized. Then they embark on a campaign of terror and virtue, ruthlessly purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.

Thermidor Humans cannot live forever in a fervor of holy rage; eventually the tension breaks and they fall back into a more normal life. But the solution typically involves a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

 I concluded with this:

Whether the collapse (or "reaction") ends in a Republican president and Congress with a mandate to do serious reform of the administrative welfare and regulatory state is another question.

What a wimp. I didn't have the depth of understanding to predict that the next president would be a Napoleonic character running to Make America Great Again.

But I did make the point that Obama and his acolytes saw themselves as conducting a revolution (with fundamental transformation) and the whole left activism culture sees itself as fighting injustice. When you let the moralists have full rein they conduct a reign of terror and virtue, as in "you will be made to care."

And ordinary people hate it. And fear it.

You can easily fit the Sixties into this mold. After the kids and the African Americans got into the streets for several years the "silent majority" wanted peace and quiet and Nixon for a few years.

There will always be plenty of kids to enlist as the foot soldiers in the reign of terror and virtue. Hello Bernie.

The thing about Donald Trump is that he doesn't seem to care about the activists and the virtuecrats on the left. That fits Vox Day's idea that the only way to deal with the left is to say: "We Don't Care." Vox Day also says that conservatism has failed because its strategy is defensive. Rule One of strategy is that defense fails, and the conservative approach to the left's cultural domination has mostly been to cower and hide to try and go along so that they won't single you out for humiliation.

Say what you like about Trump, but one thing he doesn't do is cower and hide. Now, the whole point of political leadership is that the world is a dangerous place and we need a fearless leader to confront the dangerous world and fill our hearts with courage and determination. Golly. I wonder why the white working class, now reported to be dying from despair (yeah, in The Atlantic!), has rallied to his banner.

I've said all along, from an incoherent burble in the 80s when I felt that conservatives weren't ready to exploit the tactical Reagan successes, that we can't turn America around until we have a religious/cultural movement that captures the hearts and the minds of a significant cohort of Americans. And I still don't see it.

What we do see, every day, is the ubiquitous presence of the left-wing activism culture and its reign of terror and virtue that is "peacefully protesting" into every corner of American life to insist that you be made to care.

Yes, Let's Think About the First Principles of Capitalism, Rana Foroohar

Over at Time magazine, one of their managing editors, Rana Foroohar, has penned a long think piece about "American Capitalism's Great Crisis," and ends up with a typical non-ending:

Crises of faith like the one American capitalism is currently suffering can be a good thing if they lead to re-examination and reaffirmation of first principles. The right question here is in fact the simplest one: Are financial institutions doing things that provide a clear, measurable benefit to the real economy? Sadly, the answer at the moment is mostly no. But we can change things. Our system of market capitalism wasn’t handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets. We wrote the rules. We broke them. And we can fix them.

The article is based, presumably, on Fohoorar's book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. But the article fails to address its subject in the same way that the AP's Seth Borenstein fails to address the question of climate change. When you are a media hack you really can't move too far from the conventional wisdom on your beat. It's not just that journalists are "Democratic operatives with bylines;" it is just a fact of life for a beat reporter that if you move too far from the conventional wisdom you will lose your audience and you will kill your access to powerful people.

So what do we learn from Foroohar?

There is, she writes, a crisis of faith in capitalism. In a poll, only 26% of millennials "considered themselves capitalists." Indeed, "Americans have plenty of concrete reasons to question their system." And it's not just a question of breaking up banks or raising taxes on hedge-funders or more or less regulation. The problem is bigger than that, as Foroohar's book explains.

In the old days from "the late 1790s to the early 1970s, finance took individual and corporate savings and funneled them into productive enterprises, creating new jobs, new wealth and, ultimately, economic growth." But now "only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses." And that goes not just for the US but across the world. "Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds."

America’s economic illness has a name: financialization. It’s an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business.

We are talking about everything from the size of finance to "debt-fueled speculation" to "risky, selfish thinking," public and private, the "increasing political power of financiers and the CEOs they enrich," and the ideology of "markets know best."

The rot started when post-WWII growth started to slow in the 1970s.

[Instead of making tough decisions] politicians decided to pass that responsibility to the financial markets. Little by little, the Depression-era regulation that had served America so well was rolled back, and finance grew to become the dominant force that it is today. 

So we got the "Carter-era deregulation of interest rates," Reaganomics "that favored Wall Street," then Clinton era deregulation to get out of the late 1980s doldrums, and Greenspan era loose money that led to today's "near-zero interest rates to keep from falling back into recession." We have a financial policy that amounts to "let them eat credit," a "palliative" to medicate the "downward mobility in the middle class" instead of facing the nation's problems.

Of course, there are many reasons for America's "low-growth economy," from "globalization to technology-related job destruction."

But the single biggest unexplored reason for long-term slower growth is that the financial system has stopped serving the real economy and now serves mainly itself. 

And now small business formation is down and big corporations buy back their stock rather than invest in R&D. Apple borrows money so it doesn't have to repatriate profits and pay taxes on it.

But hey, help is on the way.

Remooring finance in the real economy isn’t as simple as splitting up the biggest banks (although that would be a good start). It’s about dismantling the hold of financial-oriented thinking in every corner of corporate America. It’s about reforming business education, which is still permeated with academics who resist challenges to the gospel of efficient markets... It’s about changing a tax system that treats one-year investment gains the same as longer-term ones, and induces financial institutions to push overconsumption and speculation rather than healthy lending to small businesses and job creators. It’s about rethinking retirement, crafting smarter housing policy and restraining a money culture filled with lobbyists who violate America’s essential economic principles.

This is, of course, mainstream conventional wisdom, as it should be, coming from Time magazine. It's full of standard liberal memes, from the good old Depression era regulation to the crazed Reagan era to the greedy banker stuff to short-sighted CEOs. It is the view of someone "in the arena." And it assumes that the answers come from the usual experts "crafting smarter" policies. Oh yeah.

But maybe there is another way to look at Capitalism 2016. Maybe we need a whole new narrative.

The first thing to establish is that government and finance are joined at the hip. To understand that, go and watch The Tudors on Netflix. In an early episode, Henry VIII proudly points out of his window to a warship at anchor. How do you think that warship and its heart of oak got built? On the profits from Henry's royal estates? Or watch Admiral on Netflix, and then go and read up on Dutch national hero Admiral Michiel de Ruyter on La Wik. In the mid 17th century the Dutch merchants had to do something about the Russian and the Brit and the French monarchs mucking about with their trading system. For that they needed a navy to protect their argosies and teach the monarchs a lesson and for that they needed to give money to government to build a navy to make the world safe for capitalism.

That is the story of capitalism from that day to this. Capitalism can't bring us fabulous goods and services unless government keeps the peace. So merchants have provided credit to governments so that governments could finance navies and keep the trade routes open.

But things never stop just there. After inventing the central bank and national debt and financing their war of independence from Spain, the Dutch launched a 500 ship invasion force on the Brits in 1688 and then installed Willem of Oranje as King William III and set up the Bank of England and the National Debt and used Britain as a base for a Second Hundred Years War against the French, won in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. British national debt went from nothing in 1688 to 250% GDP in 1815.

National debt won the US Civil War, and World War I and World War II. And probably the Cold War too. The point is that the incredible wealth of capitalism allows government to borrow and spend. On wars, on education, on entitlement programs, on anything that buys votes.

For over a century, from 1848 to 1990, high-minded intellectuals tried to bury capitalism with the romantic idea of socialism and a money-free administrative system, but by the 1980s even socialists realized that a much better system would be to use the wealth of capitalism to finance their agenda rather than replace it with administration and bureaucracy. So now government is busy using the credit system for all sorts of projects. Most notably it subsidized home mortgages, first with the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, and lately with mortgages for people that couldn't service them. What could go wrong?

According to Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street, the credit system needs two things. It needs loans that are properly collateralized, and it needs borrowers that can be relied upon to make their payments. Looking back at the sub-prime mortgage era, what could go wrong? In fact, looking at everything that government does with borrowed money, what can you expect but mayhem?

You can see that the problem is mission creep. It's one thing to finance old Grandad de Ruyter to teach the absolute monarchs a lesson on the North Sea, or put the French in their place at a little town in Belgium. That is national debt serving the interests of commerce. But when government becomes 35% or more of GDP and the whole economy is riddled with government credit subsidy schemes, then something has to give. And don't forget that all the time the financiers are joined at the hip to the government. That's because, as I read years ago, the most important government program is the selling of the debt to the financiers. It misses the point to talk about breaking up the banks, or jiggling financial regulation. The elephant in the room is the government and its finances, and the various shifts and tricks it uses to get itself out of the latest jam.

It misses the point to complain that the finance industry doesn't finance growth. It never has. Credit and debt are for solid, no worries, ongoing operations, like financing a store's inventory, or lending money to get goods from where they are to where they are wanted. Financing growth is about startups and private equity and mad money.

It misses the point to complain about CEOs shorting R&D for buying back their stock. Big public corporations are usually reaching the end of their growth phase. They are just money machines until the inevitable day when some little startup puts them out of business.

It misses the point completely to write about American Capitalism's Great Crisis. Capitalism never had a crisis and never will. Capitalism uses credit as it is supposed to be used, to finance ongoing operations. And it can supply, from time to time, mad money for startups and other risky ventures which is the real engine that gets us from $3 per capita per day in 1800 to $100 per capita per day in 2016. The problem is the intersection of capitalism and government. When government grabs all the credit to fight a war, it really bollixes up the economy. When government encourages deadbeats to borrow money to buy a house, it leads to a Crash of 2008. And when government goes the easy money route to get out of a jam, the money sluices into all kinds of cracks and corners and encourages financial shenanigans from all sorts of shady characters.

But don't expect a Rana Foroohar to say that. A mainstream journalist has to stay mainstream. Just like Seth Borenstein, the AP's climate change guy. Really, how could an AP reporter on the climate beat do anything but breathlessly retail the latest wizard wheeze from the $1.5 trillion a year global climate community?

And how could a reporter on the finance beat do anything but retail liberal blame-the-bankers scapegoating?

Liberals Don't Bother to Pretend Any More

The great con about welfare state government is that the free stuff is really "social insurance." That was the idea when Bismarck opened the game in the 1880s. And when Social Security was passed in 1935 it was decorated with all the paraphernalia of insurance, with Trust Funds and Boards of Trustees. If you look at the UN's government spending categories, there is a item for "Social Protection."

But when Medicare passed in 1965 only the Hospital Insurance, Part A, was funded by a Trust Fund. The rest of it came out of regular revenue.

Looking back, we can see that the Insurance scam was just a way of hiding the taxes. That FICA tax wasn't a tax; oh no, it was really an insurance premium. Don't believe your lying eyes, and all that.

But Medicare Drug in the Bush administration didn't bother about Trust Funds and such. It was just a new entitlement. And the level of lying ramped into the stratosphere with Obamacare that would let you keep your plan and your doctor. I don't think.

So Mytheos Holt's piece on "ObamaDontCare" about "Andy Slavitt, acting Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies (CMS), willfully misle[a]d[ing] Congress on the amount of money spent on Obamacare’s exchanges" is par for the course. Who cares what was spent on the exchanges, "the program’s true legacy appears to be nothing less than pure graft and payola for administrations in safe blue states."

Here's Chris Jacobs warning us that Medicare is broke, even as Democrats are proposing an expansion. to 55 year-olds. Well, yes. But Medicare will keep on keeping on until the government runs out of other peoples' money. And then, really, who cares? It's not as if seniors are valuable workers that are integral to the nation's economy, or bringing forth babies to enroll in the next generation of taxpayers. We are just a cost.

Here's George Will worrying about Amtrak. Is is a government entity or a private corporation? The courts can't seem to figure it out. Well, yeah. Amtrak is a shabby racket. Next question.

Let's clear the air here. When the government proposes some new program it may feel the need to talk about insurance, or clearing up the mess on drugs, where surgeries for seniors were covered but drugs were not. Or it may sell an Obamacare that will make things worse for most Americans while benefiting a few. Or it may sell some crackbrained idea of Amtrak as a private corporation that is supposed to make a profit.

But that is all bullshit. In the end it all comes down to betting the nation on the ruling class's wars, which may be wars against communism or wars on poverty or wars on climate. And it comes down to rewarding the government's supporters. So Hillary Clinton is proposing a child-care initiative which will provide that nobody has to pay more than 10% of their income on child care. Golly, I wonder who will like that program?

The bottom line is, of course, at what point the government starts to go Greece, or Argentina, or Venezuela, or Brazil. You can give out all the money in the world, but every dollar that you give out to your supporters reduces the private sector -- the social organism that makes products and services that people are willing to spend their own money to buy -- by a dollar.

Back in the day, liberals used to pretend they were moderates that cared about the middle class and its responsibility culture. These days they don't seem to care; they just propose more free stuff, because that's what they do.

Is this because the American people don't care or because liberals are just going for broke? It is hard to tell in this era of political correctness where you are not allowed to disagree with the ruling class without losing your job.

All we know is that since Obama was elected the opposition has been getting angrier and angrier, to the point where the opposition voters have fired the opposition politicians in the Trump effect!

Nobody knows what will happen. But I suspect that we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Government by Executive Action is Not Just Wrong, It's Evil

If you want a sign that the current era of expert-led top-down administrative government is dying of its own internal contradictions, look no further than France.

The Socialists are going to bypass parliament in order to force through labor reforms administratively. From a BBC report:

The French cabinet has given the go-ahead for Prime Minister Manuel Valls to force through highly controversial labour reforms.

An extraordinary cabinet meeting invoked the French constitution’s rarely used Article 49.3, allowing the government to bypass parliament.

It came after rebel MPs from the governing Socialist party had vowed to vote down the bill.

The reforms will make it easier for employers to hire and fire workers. […]

The government says relaxing workers’ protection will encourage businesses to hire more people and help to combat chronic unemployment.

And, of course, the French are striking and protesting against the government's administrative actions.

Here in the US Hillary Clinton is proposing to go around Congress in order to enact her child care subsidy plan.

Just between you and me, I'd say that this represents a systemic failure. If you can't get to do the right thing through the normal political process, then maybe you shouldn't do anything at all.

Yes, I know. The normal labor law in the West is a foolish mess, because it gives workers property rights in their jobs that cannot be sustained in the market.  Yes, I know, child care costs are a huge burden, especially if you are a single mother.

But I say that if you can't get a majority in parliament to pass a law easing labor law rights and restrictions then you gotta wait until you can persuade the people to support a change. That's the idea of democracy, right? You run for office on a platform and that platform gives you a mandate for change, which you execute in the legislature. Consent of the governed, and all that.

And France got in this mess by pushing the poisonous idea that the woikers was bein' robbed! They got their rights! Actually, they don't, not unless they can force the costs of labor regulation off on consumers or "the rich." And now France is having to pay the piper for giving people rights that would gum up the economy.

You are outraged that families spend too much on child care? Then you run for office and try to persuade Congress to change the law. If Congress won't change it, then too bad. You better get out and persuade the American people to change Congress so you can change the law.

But wait, you say. We can't wait. People are suffering right now! The president needs to act. Well, you should have thought about that when you pushed the sexual revolution, when you made it OK for men to desert the mothers of their children, when you enacted welfare programs that made it easier for women to marry the state than to marry the fathers of their children, when you jacked housing costs into the stratosphere with subsidized mortgages and restrictive zoning.

I don't know how we are going to retreat from the gummed up mess of the big-government administrative state. I suppose that we won't until the whole structure literally freezes up and fails to deliver anything, so that people are forced to look elsewhere for the services that government presently monopolizes.

Of course, the Trump phenomenon feeds into this. Lots of people think that the government doesn't care about people like them; it only cares about out-and-proud liberal activist groups that grab the national bandwidth with their peaceful protesting and their march through the institutions.

But the Trumpers haven't looked around the corner. The problem is that all government is a waste and an injustice. It is pure power play, smashing down the clunking fist, and forcing them to pay for your goodies because you have the power. Don't forget that if you have the power today, you may not have the power tomorrow. If you really want to wive and thrive, then cut loose the government, its taxes and its injustices its administrations and its regulations, get a job, and don't ever think that you've got a job for life.

We Are Not In Kansas Any More

Looking back, it's obvious we were going to get here. At some point the American people were going to rebel against the globalist cultural Marxist insanity. They would eventually reject the rule of the People of the Creative Self, for the People of the Creative Self, by the People of the Creative Self.

See my Three Peoples theory for details.

What do they want, these People of the Creative Self? They want to be creative, and they want the political power to make America a land fit for creatives to live in.

They want All Power to the Creatives, and that means a full-court press against the Bourgeois Ethos of the People of the Responsible Self: work, marriage, family and children.

It is perfectly obvious why this should be so. If you have a job, you don't have much time left to write that great American novel. If you get married, you won't have much time left to create an edgy art installation. If you have children you won't have much time to advocate for global health. And as Henry David Thoreau wrote over a century ago, the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. They work and breed and don't have the means or the time to pop out of Concord, Massachusetts, a mile and a half to Walden Pond to meditate about life, the universe and everything. Yeah, and you thought Walden Pond was out in the wilderness. Check out Google Maps.

If you are wondering whether the world has gone crazy, arguing about rape cultures, about gender-bender bathrooms, about cops on a rampage against blacks, about the crisis of climate change, the answer lies in the needs of the People of the Creative Self, and their need for what Charles Taylor calls "expressive individualism." Creatives must express themselves. All else doth err.

But there is one little problem with all this. It is simply that unless the mass of men go to work, marry, and have children, there won't be anyone left. For the one thing that the People of the Creative Self don't seem much interested in is creation -- of the next generation. I don't want to be too judgemental here, but if gentry liberals don't get on the stick and produce more little gentry liberals there won't be any gentry liberals any more. This process is already far advanced in countries like Germany, Japan, and Italy.

I wonder if it is just a coincidence that most religions seem to be strongly pro-natal. I wonder if humans have always wanted to wander a mile and a half out of town and contemplate the infinite, and that a strong nudge is required to bring us back to the job at hand, the real job of creation, which is making babies.

Yes, you say, but how come we have got to this crazy place?  The answer, I believe, is told by the blogger Mencius Moldbug in his narrative of The Cathedral, the universities and the press (and also the NGO activists). Then there is the Inner Party of Democrats which get to rule when in power and the Outer Party of Republicans which just gets to govern when elected.

In the culture of the Cathedral conservatives and Republicans only get to object from time to time as the arc of history bends them into pretzels. The agenda of the activists, from feminists to environmentalists to LGBT rolls ever onward. Because history. An example of useless objection is this National Review article by conservative Christian lawyer David French objecting to the arguments put forth by the Obama administration and a couple of Obama judges who are putting the screws on North Carolina about bathroom accommodations for the transgendered. This is a typical lay objection to the holy writ of the Cathedral. What good will it do? None. There may be a hiccup, but LGBT rights are sovereign, because they are engrossed in the Articles of Faith of the People of the Creative Self.

That is why Donald Trump is important. He has run for president by kicking over the established rules of polite society as defined by the Cathedral and the People of the Creative Self. That is why he has rolled over the polite and well-behaved conservative candidates in the Republican primaries. That is why he is drawing multitudes to his rallies. That is why just today a new Quinnipiac poll has Trump dead even with Clinton in three battleground states.

Trump is winning because ordinary people instinctively understand that nice polite conservatism isn't going to get the job done any more. Because the activism culture wins that game every time. Because its votaries sit in the stalls in the Cathedral. Because its people own the Inner Party.

What comes next is anyone's guess. It depends on whether the ruling class of the People of the Creative Self use their powers to crush the Trump Rebellion or whether they realize that they should sit down and negotiate in good faith with the rebels.

The key point to me is something I learned from Michael Mann and his Sources of Social Power. Once the political establishments of the European nation states extended the franchise to the workers in the 19th century, he wrote, the workers stopped rioting in the streets. They didn't need to riot because the political establishment was now taking their grievances seriously and they could negotiate in good faith with the ruling class to start to get what they wanted.

Compare that with today, where we have the Obama administration deliberately advancing its agenda outside the formal channels of political negotiation, the legislature, and pushing things through adminstrative diktats and "Dear Colleague" letters and legal ambushes. It's all tremendously cunning, but it misses the larger point. The point is that politics is civil war by other means. Politics is the means by which we negotiate our differences without going to civil war. When you game the system, as the activism culture does, with its Alinskyite practice, you prevent good faith negotiations and compromises of different world-views and interests.

And that leads to Trump and kicking over the traces because the "rules" imposed by the Cathedral and the Inner Party prevent good faith negotiations and compromise.

If Trump doesn't work, of course, it leads to something worse.

The Problem is Not Just Political Correctness

Writing in Forbes the lion of history Paul Johnson argued recently that Donald Trump is a natural excessive response to the "mental infection" of political correctness.

When dons and professors "show the white feather" to the crybullies, then something has to be done, especially in a nation that got its start in the 17th century "when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them."

[So] it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous. He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

Yeah, and I will believe that Donald Trump is a true foe of political correctness when his Department of Education starts writing Dear Colleague letters to the nation's universities telling them that any university with a speech code or a presumption of guilt in sexual harassment regulation can say sayonara to federal funding.

The problem for me is that pushback against political correctness doesn't really do the job. It is a pushback, not a declaration of independence like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that men and women shall be free to express ideas in the public square without fear or favor, and that the power of government shall not be used to intimidate or to silence unpopular voices.

Of course, in the course of human events, it is very seldom that anything prevails but a crude orthodoxy of the powerful, because the arc of human authority tends towards imposed agreement and stasis.

But the story of humankind over the last two hundred years is that the freedom to think new ideas, and especially to implement useful ideas into concrete products and services, has created a Great Enrichment of all the people on the Earth.

The key factor, according to Deirdre McCloskey in her "Bourgeois Trilogy," is that this enrichment requires one key thing. It requires that the powers-that-be do not strangle the babies of new ideas and new material improvements in their cradles.

But the more power that government has the more that it does exactly that. Because people go to government when their traditional way of life is threatened. And from the point of view of the people, it makes no difference whether the threat is from an army of invaders or from a new technique that puts them out of work. They want it stopped, and they want it stopped by force before it marginalizes them forever.

Therefore, it seems to me that the key objective for people that want to encourage ordinary human flourishing linked to a search for something higher is this: How to limit the natural instinct of humans to use force to prevent their current material advantages from being reduced?

We can see this in the argument over immigration and imports. People want to enjoy their current wage rates without having to compete with an immigrant that will work for less. On the other hand, the US must compete on the world economy, so its wages and prices must compete on the world exchange. Special interests must not have the power to jack US wages and prices out of whack.

It is folly to give workers the power to jack their wages up above market rates; sooner or later their high wages will run their employer out of business. It is folly to give industry, e.g., Florida sugar plantations, subsidies and quotas that allow them to price their product way above world prices. Sooner or later those prices will have to come down to earth.

It is folly to set up government pension plans that make assumptions about the future. Most likely they will make the wrong projections and then expect taxpayers to make up the difference. It is folly to put government in charge of education, for the government lifers in charge will slowly turn the education system into a process that serves the interests of the lifers and not parents and students.

We have seen, in the Obama era, the utter cruelties that political correctness metes out to ordinary Americans, and the absurdities of the agenda of the Democratic coalition of the fringes that deny women the safety of women-only bathrooms and deny the right of police to arrest malefactors. We shouldn't be surprised. That is what power does to people. Give them the power to implement their follies and the power to humiliate and to name and shame, and they will take it.

The challenge for humans as social animals is to turn the instinct to dominate into the kindly sentiment to share and serve. And the challenge only starts with the vice of political correctness. There are people everywhere eager to make the shortcut to solving their problems with the clunking fist of government. The job of people of goodwill everywhere is to turn their twisted swords into cooperative plowshares.