Yes, What Is a Conservative?

In NRO today Rachel Lu has another of those articles on why conservatives can't make it anywhere in academia. A commenter, Craig Greenman, asks NRO people to define a conservative. He proposes two versions.

One way to define "conservative" seems to be to do, believe, and value what has been done in the past...

The second way to define "conservative" that I find in these pages is, "a classical liberal," that is, someone who has a vision of the world that's broadly speaking from 18th century Enlightenment values, with an interpretation of the economic thought of Adam Smith that focuses on free markets and trade, and free thought in general.

Notice that a Manifesto-believing Marxist is a conservative of the first type. No need to engage with non-Marxist ideas. Marxist economics is stuck forever in Smith and Ricardo, and cannot deal with the 1870 marginal revolution.

I would say that a conservative in the American sense is a Burkean, someone that is self-conscious about the fact of tradition. This is parodied in The Fiddler on the Roof in the song "Tradition." Eastern European Jews in the shtetl are represented as realizing that their orthodox Judaism actually is a "tradition" and not just the unconsciously accepted way of the ancestors and the truth of the Torah. Most of all, "Tradition" experiences that the young generation are breaking with tradition, and that is, almost, OK. A real traditional society just kicks out rebels like that.

In the old days, people just lived the way of the ancestors or the religion or way of life they were born into and never thought there was anything else. A peasant was a peasant, a lord was a lord. A slave was a slave.

But with the Enlightenment (at the latest) it became clear that there was a decision between something now defined as "tradition" and the innovation of the Enlightenment: principally Reason and Science. Should we stick with "what worked" or should we innovate -- or more exactly, allow innovation -- instead of stopping it as a dangerous upset of the immemorial order of things?

Notice that the idea that slavery might be a problem starts in the 18th century.

We tend to think of Edmund Burke as the "First Conservative" but Burke was a guy that supported Catholic emancipation in Ireland, that supported the independence of the British North American colonies, that ran a ten-year impeachment of Warren Hastings, the colonial governor of Bengal, for his looting and pillaging, that predicted that the French Revolution would end in the gallows. That is conservative?

If you look at the six types of conservatives proposed by Ken Blackwell, they are all self-conscious conservatives:

Social conservatives
Christian conservatives
Second Amendment conservatives
Economic conservatives
Philosophical conservatives
National Security conservatives

And then, I proposed back then in 2008, there are Palin conservatives. What do we call them? We know now. They are Trump supporters. You may ask: what is the common denominator? I will tell you. All these different kinds of conservatives are anathematized by liberals.

And how did all these conservatives become conservatives? I think the Reagan dictum applies. St. Ronnie said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. That's the point. At one time, liberalism could countenance social conservatives that believed in marriage and family. Not any more. At one point you could argue political philosophy with liberals. Not any more. Etcetera.

So what is going on? I'm glad you asked, because that is why I came up with my reductive Three Peoples theory.

All the conservatives in the list above, and Edmund Burke and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, are People of the Responsible Self. On the theory of Robert Bellah, conservatives are people that believe they are responsible for making their way in life, and that notion goes back to the birth of modern religion in the Axial Age.

Now liberals are People of the Creative Self. They believe in the religion of creativity, and the imperative of each person making a creative journey, rather than a responsible journey, out of life.

If we pick up Hegel here, as I interpret him following Alexandre Kojève in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, my Three Peoples theory can be compared to Hegel's three types of God. We start, as People of the Subordinate Self, with a real lord who is our Master (Herr), as we are his Slave (Knecht). Then, in the bourgeois era, the lord becomes an abstract lord, God. The bourgeoisie is still Slavish, but not to an actual physical Master: instead a Master who is in Heaven. Finally, man, as a person of the creative self, becomes himself a man-god, a creative artist remaking the world.

Unfortunately, our liberal friends have interpreted their role as People of the Creative Self as a warrant to gin up creative ideas about life, the universe and everything with which to rule the world, and I think that is a fundamental mistake. It is a mistake that drowned the 20th century world in blood, particularly in Russia and China.

The real culture of the creative person is the culture of the capitalist entrepreneur. He comes up with an idea, what Deirdre McCloskey calls a "betterment," that he hopes other people will want to buy. But he does not get to impose his idea on the world. He only offers it, and submits to the verdict of the trading system and the market. That is why McCloskey calls capitalism "trade-tested betterment." And it is, having bettered per capita income by 30 times over the past 200 years from $3 per day to $100-120 per day.

What is a conservative? I have an even better idea that the ideas above. He is a person who is not particularly interested in power. He is, in fact, prepared to submit his brilliant ideas to the verdict of other people. And that is the story of the last 200 years. The people that thrive are the people who can let go of the fantasy of power, the world designed and controlled by Me, people that can let go and let the world decide.

Because the first step towards wisdom is the recognition that life, the universe, and everything is not just about Me.

I emailed Craig Greenman about this blog post and he kindly responded to my post. His response is here.

Tocqueville's Other Book: Why Administrative Centralism Doesn't Work

Last week I posted an enthusiastic piece about Alexis de Tocqueville's other book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. The end of the book looks forward to Volume 2, about the Revolution itself. But Tocqueville died, at 53 from tuberculosis, before writing it.

But never mind, because his Old Regime is a masterpiece. It says that top-down centralized bureaucratic administrative government can't work. Let us rehearse the three reasons why.

The first reason is the one we know as the knowledge problem, after Hayek. In Tocqueville it is illustrated by the insanity of the central government in Paris having to OK the expenditure of funds to repair a church steeple in some tiny village. You just cannot direct the details from the center; there simply isn't enough bandwidth and the bureaucrat in the center just cannot know all the details specific to a problem in a little village way out in la France profonde.

The second reason is the natural tendency of any government to divide and conquer. The last thing the monarch or dictator wants is the squabbling groups and clans to unite against him. The French king did it by handing out privileges and tax exemptions to the nobles with one hand as he took away their powers with the other hand, and he handed out jobs in the bureaucracy to the middle class. Everybody hung on like grim death to their privileges, and everyone hated everyone else for their privileges. So when the French king needed the nation to be united, it wasn't. We can understand why US presidents all talk about "we are all Americans" right after winning a hard-fought election. They all know that the divisions and the enmities of a hard-fought election make it much harder to govern. All of them except Obama.

The third reason is that, when people are drawn into a legislature as representatives of the people, they have to compromise to get things done, and they get to know about other peoples' views and problems. So they compromise; so they buy the support of fence-sitters. That's what the social scientists tell us. When you put Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do it by trying to deal with everyone's objections and needs.

Obviously, the way not to do it is the Obama way, of passing Obamacare so we can see what is in it. Of fiddling with immigration law using executive action. Of just telling schools to come up with gender-neutral bathrooms. Never mind whether Obamacare is a good idea, or unlimited immigration, or transgender-friendly bathrooms. Edicts from the top just won't work; they make people mad. The way you do it is by slow and painstaking negotiations by representatives of the people so that, as much as possible, everyone's needs get addressed.

Obviously, if you govern a country through legislatures all the way down from nation to village there is not a lot of stuff you can do, because of the limited bandwidth of all deliberative assemblies. Maybe that is an argument for limited government, rather than an argument for replacing the inefficiency of deliberation with the efficiency of administration.

Even if administration were efficient, which it is not.

Because there is another way of doing things. It is called the market system.

Today Jonah Goldberg has a piece longing for a new constitutional conservatism. No doubt.

But the time to talk about the constitution and the meaning of conservatism is after the election. We are sitting here in the ruins of the previous constitutional conservatism, so it's going to take a while to get it going again.

And really, there was nothing wrong with the old constitutional conservatism except for one thing. We conservatives thought, after Reagan, that we had won the argument for limited government and low taxes and deregulation. But we were wrong. Barack Obama represents a strong current in the educated elite of this country, and he and it really believes in its divide-and-rule identity politics, and really thinks that the way to govern is through national edicts on everything from sexual conduct in universities to bathroom policy in schools.

Obama and the left are wrong, but we are in a mess, and it will take a generation to build a conservatism to sweep it away.

We should have realized that you never win the argument, not forever. We conservatives, we bourgeois, are people that are not that interested in power. But there is always a new generation coming up that is very interested in power.

The trouble is that it takes power to push back against the devotees of power, so it takes a while for the limited-power people to get woken from their slumber and get on the job of pushing back against the latest movement of power worship.

And you have to keep up the rhetoric for freedom, for accepting the decisions of the market, for limited government, and you have to keep it up every day, forever.

McCloskey Again: The Bourgeoisie is not That Interested In Power

I've been blogging and writing about Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality for the last week. It was a disappointment to me because it didn't take the argument beyond The Bourgeois Virtues  and Bourgeois Dignity.

McCloskey's big idea is that the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years, from $3 per day to $100 per day, did not come from capital accumulation and/or institutions but from rhetoric. People started to dignify the occupation of trader and innovator and refrain from smothering innovations in their cradles. And the result was what we see around us.

But I wanted something more, and I didn't get it. So I blogged my complaint here and then wrote about it in today's American Thinker piece: "Attention Deirdre McCloskey."

But the McCloskey dead end forced me to think. What is it about the bourgeoisie, you and me, that McCloskey is missing? And then I got it.

The bourgeoisie is just not that interested in power.

So I wrote in the AT piece:

When you are not that interested in power, you find that the whole world opens up to you. Now the way is clear to get into “virtue” and “create a rhetoric” to “dignify” innovation and “having a go,” and watch the Great Enrichment sweep across the world. Now the way is clear to free the slaves and enfranchise the working class, and even indulge upper-class women and sexual adventurers in their shallow enthusiasms and conceits. All because you are not that interested in power.

All down the ages, rulers have been obsessed with power. In Nicholas Wade's memorable words: "men like power and will seize it if they can." And so, down the ages, men have been at each others' throats, and mankind has been half throttled.

But what if a race of men arose that were not that interested in power? They would be men -- and women -- that did not feel the need to slip the stiletto in the other guy's ribs first, just to be on the safe side. They might be men that lived according to the iterated Prisoners Dilemma, and believed that you generally offer trust and reciprocity to other people, on principle. But if they show they are untrustworthy then you stop dealing with them right now. This new race might be men that thought about what they could offer to the world before they started to think about what they wanted from the world. They might be men that surrendered to the verdict of the market and did not, like union workers and crony capitalists, go running to the government for a sweet use of force whenever things went against them. They might find, to their amazement, that such behavior would result in a Great Enrichment, as per McCloskey, that increased per capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day in 200 years while also increasing human population from one billion souls to seven billion souls.

Then we get to understand the fatal mistake that our liberal and lefty friends have made. They think that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is power. Power to the people. Power to educated evolved people like us. Power to government. Power to the experts. Power to peaceful protesters. Power to traditionally marginalized groups. Power to suppressed voices. Power to silence "hate speech." And so on.

And it is not just wrong. It is folly. Worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

You can see where this faith in power comes from. It comes from Nicholas Wade's words, that men like power and will seize it if they can. It seems to be the answer to everything and maybe it was in the old hunter-gatherer days. If you want food, you better grab it before someone else gets it. If you want to eat you must defend your territory, to the last man.

But the market system changes all that. Because all of a sudden, things aren't a question of life and death, of kill or be killed. Now everything is negotiable. Now the question is what you can make that other people want to buy. Maybe it is a product, maybe it is a skill. Maybe it is just labor.

Hegel in his dialectic of Master and Slave has a parallel analysis. When two men meet in the wilderness, it is a question of kill or be killed, a Fight to the Death, unless one of the combatants surrenders and becomes a Slave. What humiliation! And yet it is the Slave that benefits from the relationship, because he learns how to master Nature in his Work for the Master, and then he begins to desire freedom. Yet that will be achieved not by another fight to the death, but by getting the Master to recognize him, the Slave, as another person, not just as a subordinate Slave.

Our lefty friends, unfortunately, cannot seem to escape from the dead end of Mastery. They must be Masters, that is all.

We are seeing, at this very moment, the problem with Mastery. Nicolás Maduro is Master of Venezuela, and a lot of good it is doing him and the Venezuelans.

Imagine what Venezuela and even the United States could become if the rulers and their supporters just weren't that interested in power.

Just like the bourgeoisie.

How to Put Conservatives Back Together Again

After all the division and the tearing-apart of the 2016 election what happens next for conservatives and Republicans? John O'Sullivan gives us a tour d'horizon that reminds us that we are always arguing and divided.

But he makes important points about the Trumpites that need to be shared. Especially the question of entitlements.

Conservative writers have long pointed out that the present structure of such payments is fiscally unsustainable, destructive of self-reliance, unrelated to the contributions beneficiaries have paid in over years, likely to undermine the dependent–worker ratio on which the entitlements depend, and much else. 

Easy for us to say. But the ordinary voters are on the sharp end of entitlement reform and they see things differently.

Most suburban conservatives don’t see it that way, however, and in particular they distinguish morally between different kinds of transfer payments. As Rod Dreher found when talking to his father, they think that welfare payments going to idlers are quite different from Social Security payments going to retirees. In the first case, they reward vice and/or encourage dependency; in the second, they are the return on their investment in America as hard workers, good providers, helpful neighbors, potential draftees, and patriotic citizens.

Hmm. The way I've read about it, suburban Americans argue that they paid their dues, and by God, they are going to demand they get their reward. It's in the Trust Fund, right?

My own view is slightly different. Ordinary Americans are taxed up the Wazoo with payroll taxes, which is profoundly unjust. So they are right to have a bloody-minded attitude about getting back their contributions with interest.

So then John O'Sullivan comes up with his reality check, borrowing from James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus in America 3.0, and their prediction of the "Big Haircut."

"Haircut" is the term generally given to the treatment of bondholders when a government entity won't pay its debt. Nothing will happen to entitlements until a government debt crisis that forces everyone, even Democratic politicians, to agree on a solution in which everyone shares in the haircut.

In other words, big changes are afoot, but the times are not yet ripe.

In the short term, I can't help feeling, the action is going to be the growing rage against the injustice and the oppression that the Obama progressives have been dishing out to the people that think of themselves as "typical Americans."

So if conservatives and Republicans want to do anything they should be doing stuff that helps more people identify as typical Americans. One recent suggestion was to start hearings in Congress about the Asian American quota at Harvard and other selective colleges.

By the way, I just finished Chapter Ten in Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution and he talks about the disaster of the old regime's policy of divide and conquer and of concentrating all power at the center. It ended up that the whole nation was divided against itself, nobles against the middle class, middle class against the peasants and everything in between. So the French ended up with the Hobbesian war of all against all.

It really is better to avoid a top-down government of experts, and a divisive identity politics that sets every group against every other. You never know when you are going to need the nation to be strong and united.

Tocqueville's Other Book: The Old Regime Before the French Revolution

I finally got to the end of Deirdre McCloskey's overmannered Bourgeois Equality, and then lightning struck. I just happened to stumble over a copy of Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution in the remainder stacks at HalfPriceBooks. For $1.00. Plus tax.

OMG.

Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution changed nothing in France.

Really. The most famous event in European history and it changed nothing? Surely you are joking, Mr. T.

Here is his argument in two lines:

1. Before the Revolution, France was a centralized top-down administrative monarchy. 

2. After the Revolution, France was a centralized top-down administrative monarchy/republic, whatever.

Yes, but what about them aristos, the nasty chaps that got sliced up by Madame Guillotine unless they were saved by Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pumpernickel?

Good point. But the nobility under the ancien régime was no longer a feudal aristocracy. Its power had been sapping away for centuries. In the years before the Revolution France was governed by the Royal Council, le Conseil du roi, and the council was headed by a Controller-General. The Controller-General governed France through Intendants in each généralité, all across France.

France used to have authentic popular governing institutions. But the absolute monarchy, operating
through the Royal Council, slowly sapped away all the popular and feudal institutions, replacing them with a pure bureaucratic organization through which everything in France, from the fall of a sparrow to the conduct of war, was controlled by the center in Paris.

By the time of the revolution the nobility had no power, but it did have privileges, and especially exemptions from taxation. So everyone hated the aristos, because of their privileges. The middle class hated the stuck-up aristocrats, but they moved heaven and earth to buy some official position, which provided them with an income and an exemption from taxes.

What about the workers? Well, in 1789 we are talking about farmers, and they mostly owned their own farms because the aristocracy had been selling their land off for a while and the peasants were buying. The peasants, of course, hated the fact that they were the ones stuck with the short straw, paying the taxes and supplying the cannon fodder for the militia. So they hated the middle class.

Everyone hated everyone else and they were ready in the old Paris brickyard, you might say, to settle scores with a vengeance once the starter bellowed: gentlemen, start your engines.

But did these warring tribes demand independence from the center? Not a bit of it. Tocqueville writes about various schemes for improvement and reform.

The ends proposed by the reformers varied greatly, but the means were always the same. They wished to make use of the central power, as it stood, for shattering the whole social structure and rebuilding it on lines that seemed to them desirable.

Everyone looked to a strong central government to solve their problems.

The comparison with our own times is chilling. Tocqueville argues that in the old feudal times people got on pretty well. There were parlements and the Estates worked together, middle class and nobility, to solve problems. People up and down the social scale had the power and they used it sensibly to work out their differences. The towns were mostly self-governing, and so they governed themselves.

But by the time of the revolution nobody had any power except what they could wheedle from the Intendants and their subdelegates. So they retreated from politics and governance and argued about precedence. The guild of lawyers demanded precedence over the plumbers, and so on. And they schemed to win privileges and exemptions and government jobs.

By the time of the revolution, according to Tocqueville, France was already pretty equal: there was not much to tell between a noble and a bourgeois: they walked and talked and thought the same. But they imagined enormous differences in blood and in the quarterings on their escutcheons.

Enough said for now. Here is the heading for Chapter Ten, next up.

How the suppression of political freedom and the barriers set up between classes brought on most of the diseases to which the old regime succumbed.

Hello liberals! How is that divide-and-conquer race, class, and gender politics doing for you today?

Because I wonder. I wonder if one day your divisive politics might throw up a man on a white horse promising to Make America Great Again.

Click here for Part II of Tocqueville's Other Book.

McCloskey Again: Why Not Call The Book "Bourgeois Rhetoric?"

Deirdre McCloskey has finished her magnum opus Bourgeois Trilogy with Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. And now I've finished the book, all 787 pages.

Start over: Conservatism's Big Problem.

I'm afraid I have a problem. What was the point of the third volume? McCloskey has said it all already. Here is how I understood her message five years ago after Volume Two hit the stores, in answer to the question What did it? What made the Bourgeois Era?

The key thing that changed, according to McCloskey, was not technological change, but a cultural, rhetorical change. About three hundred years ago, around the North Sea, societies started to respect the commercial bourgeoisie and the things that it did. It allowed, for the first time, the bourgeoisie to do what comes naturally, to innovate and change things.

I already went through saying that I didn't think she had anything new to say a couple of days ago. But I hadn't quite finished the book, all 787 pages, back then.

So when I got to the end of the book, I read that the Bourgeois Revaluation "came out of a rhetoric that would, and will, enrich the world." You mean, just like she said back in 2010 in Bourgeois Dignity?

OK. So why not call the book "Bourgeois Rhetoric: How I am right and the Guys That Say It Was Capital or Institutions are Wrong." Because that's what the book is all about, picking fights with other academics and going into the long grass with the Oxford English Dictionary to show when "innovation" ceased being a pejorative.

I tell you what I am looking forward to. I am looking forward to the day when racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe is no longer a liberal pejorative, but a pathetic joke.

McCloskey invokes Edmund Burke as an enemy of innovation, which I regard as a bit of a low blow, perhaps intended to hit the nostaglic Russell Kirk. Burke wasn't opposed to innovation so much as opposed to "sophisters, economists, and calculators," the Newtonian mechanics of materialism. As an opponent of mechanism and materialism he was on McCloskey's side. And his life centered around four great campaigns that fit right into the Bourgeois culture: for Catholic emancipation in Ireland for which he lost his seat in Parliament representing the slave port of Bristol; for the anathematization of the plundering imperialist Warren Hastings; for letting the North American colonies go their own way; and for predicting that the French Revolution would end in the gallows. Nothing very innovative there, of course, just Russell Kirk presiding as a loving lord over his neo-feudal estate at Piety Hill.

Throughout the book McCloskey is likes to equate right wing with left wing opposition to her "trade-tested betterment." I suppose there are righties down the last two centuries that have pushed against the Great Enrichment, chaps like Carlyle and, in the last century, Russell Kirk of Mecosta, Michigan. But their influence has been minuscule compared with the influence of McCloskey's "post 1848 clerisy," the Left. To keep asserting "balance" by hitting the right and left equally is distracting, and pandering to the New York Times set ("My people" in The Bourgeois Virtues).

And here are some more problems that I have with McCloskey. She represents Zola's Germinal as anti-capitalist. So it is, perhaps, in a superficial reading. But in Germinal Zola humanizes the bourgeois owners of the coal mine who know and hate that they are hurting the miners. But prices are down, so what can they do? And Étienne, the community organizer that leads the miners in the strike that destroys their livelihood, leaves the miners at the end of the book and sets off for his next community organizing gig in another town. Did Zola nail the nascent left-wing "activism" culture or what? Maybe I am reading too much into it, for after all, Zola must know that bashing the bosses sells books.

In The Ladies Paradise (now a BBC TV series) McCloskey is equivocal, quoting a bit of anti-Semitism that may or may not come from Zola himself. The hero, M. Mouret, is a counter-jumper brimming with innovative ideas for bringing retailing into the 19th century and inventing that ladies' paradise, the big department store. Among other things, Mouret learns how to use the haute bourgeoisie, including a a rich-bitch mistress and a financier, to grow his business. The heroine, Denise, is the compleat bourgeoise, utterly principled and virtuous in the full seven virtues celebrated by McCloskey in The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey equivocates, but I experience The Ladies Paradise as a celebration of innovation and everything bourgeois even as it does not shrink from showing the miseries of the small shopkeepers, that Mouret sees as fools, driven to bankruptcy by the innovations of the big department store.

Another thing. The aristocracy 500 years ago was starting to move away from Hegel's pure Herrschaft. In England, once the Tudors had stripped them of their castles and their private armies, the aristocrats got interested in "improvement," making money by improving their agricultural estates and advancing the agricultural revolution that "hurled" the peasants off the land. So, by 1600 at the latest the landed warriors started to compete in the market economy for the wealth they needed to win at competitive social events in the courts of the absolute monarchs. So the rise of the bourgeoisie did not take place in a vacuum. The king's monopoly on armies meant that the warrior class had to diversify away from war-only. And it did.

But enough of cavil and calumny.

Even though Bourgeois Equality is heavy reading, and does not advance the narrative beyond the first two books, it does not subtract from McCloskey's overall achievement. The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, that has brought each individual from $3 per day to $100 per day and more, is a stunning achievement, never seen before in history, and the bourgeoisie did it. This astonishing and unique event rests on bourgeois virtues and the culture of the bourgeoisie, that people should have a go at innovation and improvement, and that the established interests should not stand in their way, at least not much. That is something that needs to be said, over and over again, and McCloskey is not too shy to do it.

But what I was hoping for, as I read Bourgeois Equality and its occasional swipe at the lefty "post 1848 clerisy," was an analysis of the clerisy, some theory or depth of understanding that could help us all make sense of the left's negativism and its war on "trade tested betterment." I didn't find that, so I am still pushing my Three Peoples theory, with the People of the Creative Self descending into violence and compulsion to exercise their taste for creativity.

You see, if you have a yen to be creative you have two options. You can innovate and submit your innovation to the trade-testing of the market. Or you can declare war on society and force it to bend to your brilliant ideas. There are two ways to get to Scotland, the high road and the low road. The "post-1848 clerisy," the People of the Creative Self, chose the low road, and for sure, they got to Scotland before ye. But millions of people have suffered and died for their sins by the bonny banks of Loch Lomond.

Sorry, Charles Murray, You Don't Get It

I revere Charles Murray, who has written books about politics that, I hope, will stand the test of the ages.

We are talking about Losing Ground, which told us that the liberals knew that their Great Society welfare programs weren't working. But they did nothing to fix them. Then we are talking about Coming Apart, a look at White America from 1960 to 2010, which told us that the bottom 30 percent of white America was not doing well. In fact, the men tend not to work and the women tend not to marry. Now, of course, we are learning that the white working class is dying of despair.

But today National Review is publishing Murray's #NeverTrump piece, "Why 'Hillary is Worse' Doesn't Cut It."

Barring a startling turn of events, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. There are good reasons to question his fitness to occupy the presidency, because of both his policy positions and for reasons of character.

Perfectly true, but it misses the point. It assumes that the US is in normal mode, where we want a solid citizen on the bridge to watch the dials and suggest a course correction or two.

Yes, Trump's policy positions are a mess, and his character is questionable. And he lies. But that's not the point.

Let's trot out my catchphrases.

Government is force. That means that people on the receiving end of government aren't going to like it. At some point they are going to do something about it.

Politics is violence. It is not about choosing a guy with the best policy positions and who has never lied to us. It is about choosing a leader who will fight for us. That's what Hillary Clinton says in her slogan "Fighting for Us." The fact is that we conservatives and the GOP have done a lousy job of fighting for the typical American that votes Republican. We have allowed liberals to blame the white working class for the sins of racism and sexism, and the white working class has been dying of despair until Trump came along and spoke their language. And how. Have you heard him speak at one of his rallies? He doesn't make grand gestures, he just speaks in a low-key way that sounds like he is letting his audience into his confidence.

Government is injustice. It doesn't matter how the ruling class justifies its rule, to the people on the receiving end it looks like injustice. And sooner or later they are going to get really mad about it. On top of this the activism culture of the Obama years believes in government action as a founding principle. It thinks that un-negotiated administrative and regulatory action to implement the agenda of its supporters is politics as usual. It is not. It is injustice, straight up, and it is making people crazy with impotent rage.

System is domination. All the wonderful programs that liberals have been pushing for the last century have this one problem. They are administrative systems, on the Newtonian mechanical model. They treat humans as billiard balls to be knocked around a pool table. System is domination, and humans don't like to be dominated.

Politics is civil war by other means. Politicians like Barack Obama and the whole liberal culture like to think of government as helping people. It is not. Government is forcing people. And then they get mad.

Government never learns. This is baked into the cake of government. If government is force, then the whole point is not to listen to people saying "this doesn't work" or "this hurts people like me." Government is a bulldozer. It pushes through to victory, no matter the casualties. Victory isn't everything, it's the only thing. And anyway, as any leader knows, if you admit to mistakes then people are likely to start looking for another leader.

The bottom line is that conservatives and the GOP have failed to protect its voters, the people that think of themselves as typical Americans. So to complain that Trump doesn't have coherent policies, or the right character, misses the point.

And anyway, when did any party have coherent policies? All political platforms are a sludge of bad ideas gussied up for the ball. And as for character? Eisenhower was bonking his driver through World War II. Kennedy was bonking everything in sight. LBJ, nuff said. Ronald Reagan got divorced. Clinton, as a Democratic friend delicately told me in 1992, had a silver zipper. George W. Bush was a drunk. And so on.

Nations get lumbered with men on white horses when the regular ruling class has failed to do its job. And then things get worse before they get better.

But I will continue reading your books, Charles Murray, because you are a national treasure. And this one parting shot. Doesn't your By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission kinda tell people to kick over the traces and start disobeying administrative government, because injustice?