End the Cringe Now!

Back in 2014 Paul Krugman was happily celebrating the news that "Democrats have lost their post-Reagan cringe." And here I thought that the only problem was the conservative Cringe where race, women, and gays are concerned. Every conservative public figure knows that a clumsy word can end a career. So anyone to the right of Elizabeth Warren knows they better zip that lip, or the liberal speech police will zip it for them. And zip their job as well.

Now I can't say that the Cringe has hurt me, not too much. The CEO of the consulting firm i used to work for did ask "where did he come from" when I made a WrongThink remark at a diversity training session. But I did keep my job. So there's that. But then I'm a sensitive guy and am pretty careful to tailor my remarks to my audience.

And yes, Krugman has a point about the Democratic post-Reagan cringe. The Democrats realized after Reagan's Morning in America 1984 blowout election that their hippy-dippy days from the Sixties were over. They discovered, rather late, that Americans hated the fascist left of the Weathermen and the campus rebels. They hated riots in the cities; they hated inflation; they hated recession; they hated gas lines;and they hated being bossed around by liberal hypocrites.

So yeah. Democrats have lost their post-Reagan cringe. But I think that Krugman's assertion that it is "the craziness of the right in some ways empowers the moderate left" is clue-less. The point is that a new generation of "progressives" has arisen that knew not Reagan. Just like it says in South Pacific, almost, you've got to be carefully taught, K thru grad school, to believe in lefty rubbish, and they have. So the new generation of lefties has put the pedal to the metal, even though, since Obama's election in 2008, we have seen two Republican wave elections and the unusual 2012 election where a president running for re-election got a smaller share of the vote than when he was first elected. And now we have Donald Trump.

No the Real Cringe is the receiving end of the cultural hegemony of the left's racist, sexist, homophobic naming and shaming aggression. Do not, repeat, do not get caught making a remark that the left can use to accuse you of racism, sexism, or homophobia. It is laughable that Krugman does not get this, and imagines that the moderation in leftist rhetoric demanded by the election of Ronald Reagan is any way comparable to the relentless leftist cultural war that can cost a typical American his job for a careless word. You have to be a regime insider in the ruling class bubble to write as Krugman writes.

Notice that the cringe, for Krugman, has to do with losing elections. The Cringe, for conservatives, has to do with liberal cultural imperialism that seeps into every corner of American life.

The problem for Republicans and for conservatives in 2016 is that their voters are fed up with the Cringe. Fed up to the back teeth, as the Brits say. And the fed-upness extends beyond the rebel voters of Ted Cruz. Thus Donald Trump.

The point about Donald Trump is that he offers the hope of a possibility of the End of the Cringe. Even though he recently did a cringe on the Judge Curiel issue.

The problem for conservatives and Republicans is that the Trump tactics to End the Cringe rather go against our People of the Responsible Self culture of politeness and decorum. Not to go all Hegel on this, but the Trump tactics return to the hunter-gatherer Fight to the Death instead of the mutual recognition of the "other" that is required of the Slaves who Work in the global economy.

The question that should exercise the Trump skeptics and other #NeverTrump-ers is simple. Where is your plan to End the Cringe? If you chaps have a plan to reverse or outflank or double-envelop the liberal cultural imperialist army, let's hear it.

The fact is that Donald Trump is the only guy in town that has demonstrated the ability and the stamina to End the Cringe. He even has the cojones to call out The Washington Post on a blatant Democratic-operatives-with-bylines headline that monstrously misrepresented Trump. Imagine!

It doesn't hurt that just about now the whole ruling class agenda is crumbling around its ears. Its top-down regulation-by-experts model is crumbling; its buy-the-voters-with-their-own-money entitlements are tottering. And the immigration surge has provoked a terrorism surge rather like the anarchist surge of a century ago, recently discussed by Steve Sailer.

Did you know there were recent immigrants running around bombing people in the Good Old USA a century ago, and eventually, the government "did something" about it? Go read about it; it's fascinating.

And now an Afghan American gay has murdered a bunch of Hispanic gays in Orlando.

Mr. President, is it safe? Because some of us think it is time to End the Cringe Now!

We are not that interested in power

I admit, I was frustrated with Deirdre N. McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality. Five years and more since her excellent Bourgeois Dignity I was expecting something to wrap up her Bourgeois Trilogy with a bang.
But she already said it all before, when arguing that the bourgeoisie brought something new into the world, a rhetoric that celebrated the dignity of ordinary people, innovation, and the spirit of “having a go.”

But I admit that the disappointment forced me to do Heidegger’s thing of “what is called thinking.”
What is it about us, the bourgeoisie, the people that I call the People of the Responsible Self that encapsulated what McCloskey has been saying about the bourgeoisie, its virtues, its dignity, its equality? And then, Alger-Hiss-like, cudgeling my brain, I got it.

The point about the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the middling sort of person, is that we are not that interested in power.

And that is a very big thing. Because if you are not that interested in power then you can do things like surrender to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. You can say that you will inquire first how you can contribute to the world before you demand from it you cut, your share. And in that modest submission to the opinions of others develops the whole flowering of McCloskey’s Great Enrichment, the 200 year progress in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day and very likely more. There has been nothing like it in human history ever.

You can describe the people of the Responsible Self any way you like, but I like the notion of Robert Bellah that this kind of person emerged in the Axial Age when religion developed the idea that individual humans could understand the world and could therefore do something about it. And then, of course, they ought to do something about it.

How are we to symbolize this Person of the Responsible Self; who is its poster boy?

Thank you, senator, I can help you with that. But I am afraid that the poster boy is not a boy, but a girl. The poster girl of the People of the Responsible Self is Denise Baudu, heroine of Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, translated in English as The Ladies Paradise and available on Netflix as The Paradise. (But beware: The Paradise in Netflix is a BBC production and so it completely misses the point of Au Bonheur des Dames in exactly the way you would expect from a bunch of North London luvvies.)

Zola’s Denise Baudu arrives as a 20-year-old from Normandy, appearing on her uncle’s doorstep in Paris one morning in the 1860s, orphaned, with her two younger brothers in tow. But her uncle can’t help her because his mom-and-pop drapery business is in the toilet on account of the monster across the street, the growing innovative department store, Au Bonheur des Dames, run by Monsieur Octave Mouret, who has a genius for predicting what the ladies will adore.

OK. If Denise can’t work at her uncle’s shop she’ll work across the street for the monster, and so she does, thin and wan and chétive and casually abused by her boss and co-workers. She goes to work because, after all, Denise must be responsible and provide for her little brother Pépé and bail out her improvident apprentice brother Jean in his frequent bouts of girl trouble.

This being a novel, the boss of The Bonheur takes a shine to Denise in spite of her shyness and clumsiness, and he is right, for as she starts to find her sealegs in the ocean of the Bonheur she turns out to be an excellent vendeuse and really pretty. The day comes when she gets a summons to dinner with Mouret, at which, the according to lore, the invited vendeuse is herself to be the dessert. Only Denise is the perfect bourgeoise, a poster girl for the People of the Responsible Self. She refuses to become the mistress of the boss. She has responsibilities, brothers to provide for. This decision rocks the Bonheur to its foundations. She did what? It cannot be that she refuses the gifts and blandishments of M. Mouret on account of her honor and virtue; it must be her cunning that causes her to refuse the boss’s summons. Denise also rocks M. Mouret to his foundations; her consistent refusal haunts him. Again and again he propositions her, but the answer is always non, toujours non. Are you in love with someone, he demands? Yes, but… Finally she can’t take it any more and quits so she can take her brother and his new wife off to Normandy for a month of honeymoon. And then, on her last day at work, Mouret breaks down and offers to marry her. Oh no, says Denise, she cannot marry because she must care for her brothers. OK, sobs Mouret -- he is really a wreck at this point -- I give up: go to the man you love. So finally we get to the dénouement, as Denise breaks down and rushes into his arms. “Oh monsieur Mouret, c’est vous que j’aime,” she says, sobbing on his neck. Cue wedding bells and everyone lives happily ever after.

Now of course Denise Baudu is a woman so perfect that she never could have lived on this earth. She is so completely and devotedly responsible that she is super-human. But that’s what makes her a poster girl of the People of the Responsible Self. And she is not interested in power. Not at all.

Now, the rest of us are not perfect Paragons of the Responsible Self. So we live in a less exalted realm than a Zola novel. It can only be said of us that we are not that interested in power. Still, that is something.

But our liberal friends, and even more so their pas d’ennemis à gauche, they really are interested in power. In fact they believe in power: political power, cultural power, artistic power, administrative power, naming and shaming power, their power. It doesn’t matter whether they are Enlightenment rationalists, or Romantic artists, or Marxists, or modernists that believe in an overarching meta-narrative or postmodernists that swear on a stack of Power/Knowledge that they abjure all meta-narrative and hegemonies over the “other.” Rubbish. They all believe in power, political power. It is their religion.

But they are wrong. As the bacon billboard might have said: if you believe in power, YOU ARE WRONG.

The whole point about the bourgeois era is the astonishing discovery that if you ease up on the clunking fist of political power, if you allow moderate innovation and keep the established interests from killing innovation in its cradle, if you allow the middling sort of person to “have a go” then, if all the stars are in alignment, some nobody will invent a steam engine to pump out mines, another nobody will invent a machine spinner. Some clerk will develop the oil industry, some telegraph messenger will develop the steel industry, a couple of rural yahoos will invent the airplane, a mechanic will decide to assemble cars on an assembly line. Some rich kid will drop out of Harvard and sell another guy’s PC operating system to IBM. And so on. A Great Enrichment from $3 per day to $100 per day. All that without the vital and indispensable clunking fist of political power. “Inconceivable,” as the son of an iconic New Yorker editor gets to say again and again in The Princess Bride. Who would have thunk it?

But I have a question. I thought we were all postmodernists now. I thought that the whole point of the post-modern turn was the turn away from hegemony and domination of the single answer, the meta-narrative. It was supposed to liberate the “other:” women, minorities, LGBT, and formerly colonialized peoples.

So how come the first thing that gays did when they got “marriage equality”was to beat up on Christian bakers and pizza parlors if they were all postmodernists that would never “other”anyone? How come the crazed lefty Twitter mobs? How come the name-and-shame postmodern university?

How come Obamacare? Surely, in the postmodern era, with its new-found declaration against the one rational solution, the first thing you say is that the Single Payer health care idea is a crock. Because it is the one single solution, and that cannot be in the non meta-narrative society. There must be a diversity of health care provision to allow diverse communities to approach health care in their own way. How come our Democratic friends have not proposed to privatize Social Security because, of course, it is rubbish to insist that all lifestyes should follow a single Fordist trajectory of education, then work, then retirement. Suppose you are a lesbian quilter on your third “marriage equality” marriage? What does the Fordist monopoly government retirement program mean to you? Instead President Obama has proposed a unilateral increase in Social Security benefits. How would he know? Does he have an inside track on the one true answer to retirement provision? Or is he just a power-crazed politician pandering for votes? And is then the postmodern turn nothing but a lie, not merely a lie that our liberal friends have told us but a lie they have told themselves and ended up believing?

I think you know the answer to that.

It really is appropriate that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate for president this year. Because the Democratic Party, like its liberal culture, has descended into an endless swamp of lies. And so the Democrats, true to their last, have nominated a candidate that was first fired for lying when she was a young lawyer on the Watergate committee in the 1970s. Then she lied about cattle futures. Then she lied about the White House travel office. Then she lied about Whitewater. Then she lied to cover up her husband’s career of serial sexual harassment, telling us that the real story was a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Dear God, if only! But there’s a problem. We righties are not that interested in power. So we really wouldn’t know how to create a little conspiracy, let alone one so vast… And now she is lying about her stupid e-mail server, a truly Talleyrand moment that is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.
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Up to now, I have been dealing with the importance of the bourgeois ethos, we are not that interested in power, at the macro level of rich kids wanting to get into activism and politicians wanted to impose a top-down one-size-fits-all administrative cramdown on health-care, Christian bakers, what have you. But what does this mean to you and me, down on the street, where ordinary people try to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. I will tell you.

The gospel of we are not that interested in power requires of us a very small thing. It is that when things go against us in the normal course of life, we do not go to government and demand that government save our job by hobbling the innovators that are putting us out of a job. Instead the gospel asks us to be true to our last as People of the Responsible Self. It asks us, in the words of British politician Norman Tebbit, to get on our bike and take the loss and do the responsible thing and overcome our fear and disappointment and go and find something else to do that can provide a service that other people are willing to pay for.

This may be a very small thing, but it is very hard thing for people to do. We know that because of the intersection of the Trump phenomenon and the sudden discovery by the social-science experts that the white working class is dying of despair.

Of course, liberals are to blame for the despair of the working class as well as everything else. It was they that told the working class that they were horribly exploited, they that comforted the working class with a mattress of wage-and-hour laws, they that saddled the white working class with a boatload of payroll taxes payable in the future with wonderful entitlement benefits, they that helped the white working class infect their employers with the economic parasite called the labor union, that ends up killing its host, as well-ordered parasites in Nature do not do, they that turned on the white working class as racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers in the 1970s.

Back in the years of the French Revolution, Condorcet wrote that “a good law must be good for everyone.” That was easy to say, but hard to realize. We know better now, and so in the light of modern experience I propose the following catchphrase to check anyone proposing a new program: Government is Injustice. Of course, not all government is injustice, and occasionally a government does pass a good law that is good for everyone. Most of the time, alas, governments pass laws to reward their supporters, and the rest of the people, on the receiving end of the new law experience it as the clunking fist of injustice. And it stands to reason that the more government you have the more people are going to be on the receiving end of its taxes, its regulations, its men with guns, and will experience government as injustice directed particularly and with malice aforethought against them.

This truth is understood, I think, in the basic position of the postmodernist turn. No meta-narratives. No othering. The logic of the postmodernists would lead them to think that government action would often result in negative results for the “others.” And, moreover, if government power is deployed in the interest of the "others" then the ordinary "us" will get othered. And so the hills are alive with the sound of rage. So what went wrong?

What went wrong is that, for everyone except the bourgeoisie and the People of the Responsible Self who are not that interested in power, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

You can see where I am going with this. I am saying that the problem with our liberal friends is that they are interested in power. And like all regimes only interested in power, starting with the Soviet and Maoist disasters, and continuing with the Nazi disaster and all the other stupid human sacrifices to the god of power in our time, power ends in asphyxiation and strangulation, and not infrequently a pile of skulls. There is a simple reason for this, and it issues from the basic problem with a society dominated by power. It cannot adapt, and no wonder. The whole point of government is to stop change. The particular change that government is designed to sop is the attack on the homeland by foreign enemies. That is why government has the right and the power to mobilize the populace to fight the enemy, foreign or domestic, whether the people are a village, a tribe, a feudal realm or a nation state. In such an existential Fight to the Death all the populace must be enrolled in the armed forces or the war machine to fight the enemy and defeat him.

That is all very well, but what about the instances when the homeland is not facing an existential threat, but merely the disruption from some new technical innovation? This is the rub. Governments do not stop at fighting the change imposed by invaders and pillagers and plunderers; they also like to fight against any change, social or economic or cultural, that threatens their power and the status of their supporters. They find it hard to differentiate between real existential perils and mere threats to their regime supporters.

All this is, as Hegel says, about the Fight to the Death. Either you Fight to the Death or you will submit to Work as a Slave. That is what awaits the nation that does not repel the invader. So who would be a Slave and submit to the power of the Master?

Well, we all do, because we are all enslaved to the Masters of the ruling class. But all is not lost, because through Work we learn to overcome Nature, while the Master sits in his castle and learns nothing except more Fighting.

Of course, Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic is fanciful in the extreme. But Hegel is at least valuing the Work of the Slave above the Mastery of the Master, just as Deirdre McCloskey teaches us to value the virtues and the dignity of work celebrated by the middling sort of people, the People of the Responsible Self.

Eventually the world of Work finds a way to overcome the option of the Fight to the Death or Slavery. Eventually the two opponents of the Fight to the Death learn to replace it and Mastery and Slavery with mutual recognition. And in the overcoming, something happens. The supremacy of power begins to wane.

In the world of the Fight to the Death the only thing is power. But in the world of Work there is the possibility of recognition and cooperation. And in that world, it is possible to live by not being that interested in power.

Our liberal friends, alas, are primitives; they are still living in the old world of the Fight to the Death. That is what their sacraments of "peaceful protest" and "armed resistance" are all about, whether we are talking about Marxist liberals, modernist liberals or postmodern liberals. The only thing that matters to them is to be the Master, der Herr. And the rest of us are Slaves, die Knechte, who must submit to the Master and learn to Work, to obey the wage-and-hour laws and pay our payroll taxes. Because power is everything. And that goes for everyone, patriarchs, privileged whites, and victimized "others."

But we, the People of the Responsible Self, have a dream. We dream that one day the world will be peopled by humans who are not that interested in power. We do not imagine a fantasy world, totally emancipated and liberated, in which power has been banished and surmounted by a world of perfect responsibility and community. We do not believe, either, that there will ever be a world of perfect Denise Baudus, so utterly devoted to responsibility as to even deny themselves the joys of love until the last page. We do not believe in a Heaven on Earth.

We just think that things would be a lot better for humans if more of us were not that interested in power.

After Orlando: Socializing Young Men to Cooperation

I want to dissent from the outrage about young men up and killing people.

Everybody thinks it is a dreadful scandal. To me it is the most natural thing in the world that young men should delight in massacre and mayhem. The challenge, and it is a big one, is to socialize them to Work.

Young men are wired for their characteristic role in hunter-gatherer societies, which societies are, scientists tell us, always at war and losing about 500 per 100,000 of the population to violent death every year. (Our violent death rate is more like 5 per 100,000 per year.) The role that young men play in hunter-gatherer society is the dawn raid on the neighboring village, to kill all the men, and take the women and children into slavery. They are socialized to Fight.

But we in the western world are two revolutions removed from that. First there was the agricultural revolution, that reduced warfare to the marcher lords and their followers on the border of the agricultural realm, while everybody else went to Work on the farm. Then there was the industrial revolution that reduced the armed forces to a professional army, augmented from time to time with a mass draft army, while everybody else went to Work in the factory.

In the western world we want our young men to be socialized to Work, not to Fight. All in all, we have done a good job of it, and young western men mostly do their duty and obey the rules, go to Work, and follow the law.

But there are couple of exceptions, and we know who they are. First of all there are the lefty activists, that have a culture of "violent resistance." Yes I know. The left usually advertises its faith in Peace and Justice, but when you get into the lefty literature -- try the Hardt and Negri Empire trilogy -- they believe in revolution. Here's Huffington Post chappie Jesse Benn flying his true colors.

Violent resistance matters. Riots can lead to major change (*note the irony of that hyperlink going to a Vox article). It’s not liberal politicians or masses that historians identify as the spark underlying the modern movement for LGBTQ equality. Nor was it a think piece from some smarmy liberal writer. It was the people who took to the streets during the Stonewall Uprising. It was the Watts Rebellion, not the Watts Battle of Ideas, that exposed the enduring systemic neglect, poverty, inequality, and racism faced by that community. Similarly, it was the LA Uprising, not the LA Protests, that led to significant changes in the Los Angeles Police Department. More recently, the Ferguson and Baltimore Uprisings both helped prompt the Justice Department to investigate their corrupt police forces.

I love that guy. Hey kids! Let's all get into the violent resistance game. Personally, I think that conservatives should form their own protest group and practice violent resistance against the cruel and corrupt and unjust liberal ruling class and their bribed apologists in the universities and mainstream media, our present cultural hegemons and political masters. Not.

Sorry lefties. You've lost the plot. Violent resistance is one thing when you are the working class in 1848 and you don't have the vote. You are outside the political system and the only way you can get the attention of the ruling class is by street action. But once the working class got the vote it stopped its street action.

It was about 1920 that the left realized that this was a problem. Who was going to get into the streets for street action and revolution if the working class had lost its revolutionary fervor?

Perfectly simple, said the Frankfurt School chappies. They deployed the Eisenhower Doctrine before Ike had even thought of it. If you have an insoluble problem, said Ike, make it bigger. So Frankfurters expanded their class politics to identity politics. Anyone that they decided was marginalized and/or oppressed could now pour into the streets and demand their rights.  Yeah! Violent Resistance, baby!

This is all tremendous fun and it annoys the bourgeoisie something fabuloso. You can put your rent-a-mob into the street and hand our protest signs from here to eternity. And you can threaten, as our liberal friends did back in the Sixties, that unless Congress did something there would be a Long Hot Summer. Right now partly-funded-by-George-Soros Black Lives Matter is playing the same game.

Then along came the Muslims.

I feel sorry for the Muslims. They are playing on a bit of a sticky wicket. Their strike-first-and-ask-questions-later culture seems to be uniquely unsuitable for the modern global capitalist world which thrives on trust-the-stranger across the whole wide world. Why, proper Muslims don't even trust their women out of doors. They marry their cousins and they don't trust anyone outside the tribe, let alone outside their religion.

And it is clear that Muslims believe in power.

Now I believe that the crucial feature of the modern world is the bourgeoisie and its culture of dignity and innovation that is not that interested in power. But it is obvious that many people really have a problem with this. Lefties. Fascists. Tin-horn dictators. Liberal experts. Liberal activists. Muslim terrorists. And these chappies have spent the last 170 years trying to drive a spike into the heart of the not that interested in power culture.

Look at the German problem, in World War I and World War II. What were the Germans thinking? They didn't need to conquer Europe with their excellent soldiers. They were already conquering it with their excellent philosophers and physicists and chemists and Otto and Diesel cycles. And air conditioning. Did you know that the Germans invented air-conditioning so they could make beer in summer?

Look at the Soviet problem. The clueless Bolsheviks thought that the road to the future was worker power supervised by right-thinking lefties that believed in worker power. Wrong! Worker power and government force turned out to be a complete disaster and reversed the trajectory of the rising Russian Empire into a dysfunctional mess.

Now we have the frustrated Muslims of the Middle East thinking that the answer to their problems is power. No it isn't Muslims, but it looks as if we are going to have to teach you that the hard way.

But there is another problem. Liberals and Democrats. They have built their political machine on the Frankfurt School, by dividing the national community into a Coalition of the Fringes of identities, helpless victims that need liberal experts and activists to represent them against the implacable horde of typical Americans. Thus women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims all need the beneficent Oz to fight for them against the brutal bourgeois regime that has raised per capita income from $3 to $120 in 200 years. The horror!

Yes but what happens when young men start doing a spot of violent resistance in San Jose and beating up gay Hispanics Republicans? What happens when a young Muslim-Afghan-American shoots up a gay bar in Orlando?

I'd say that it might encourage some individuals in the Coalition of the Fringes to wonder which side their bread is buttered on. Maybe, just maybe, we should all think about ourselves as Americans, and not as hyphenated identity groups. Maybe, just maybe, gays and Hispanics and African Americans should think about what the Democrats have done for them lately.

Maybe, just maybe, we should return to our basic western menu, which is to socialize young men not to murder and mayhem in inner-city gangs and liberal activism and Muslim terrorism. Maybe we should socialize them back to Work.

That is after all what Hegel was suggesting with his tortured Master and Slave myth. Once you stop the kill-or-be-killed culture , the Fight of the hunter-gatherers, then you enter the world of Work. You start to learn how to dominate the world rather than other men. And you start to recognize other men as men and not as opponents in the Fight.

Yes, I've been reading Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel as every good lefty used to do, and I'm going to be using his analysis rather freely in the future.

Because if you want to defeat the left you must first understand the left.

And the key to the future is to deal firmly but kindly with the foolish people that believe that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is power. As some chappie said about 2,000 years ago. Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

Don't Call It Free Trade

There is a lot of noise going on right about now about "free trade." Donald Trump has come out against it. And here in The American Spectator Esther Goldberg is praising it with faint praise. The point is that:

When traders are purchasing and selling from different countries, the terms under which they may do so is established by Trade Agreements between their respective governments. These Agreements are complex because they have to accommodate a host of interest groups that have been lobbying for terms that will benefit their particular industry.

Actually, that is true about all economic activity. There are trade agreements "to accommodate a host of interest groups" wherever you look, only we usually call it regulation or consumer protection or labor law. Right now we are watching the battle of the special interests as Uber and Lyft elbow aside the taxi-cab industry and its bribed apologists in City Hall. In the middle of the ride-sharing vs. taxi-cab war there is an interesting question raised about fingerprinting. Uber and Lyft think that fingerprinting is unnecessary since their apps identify everyone, driver and customer. And former Attorney General Holder says that, anyway, fingerprinting is racist. But the taxi-cab drivers have been regulated and fingerprinted by City Hall, and they want, as the mom-and-pop shopowners in Zola's novel about department stores, Au Bonheur des Dames, wanted, to continue the ancien commerce. All the way to their eventual extinction.

But I think that the best place to start is with this argument. If you are not going to permit market pricing, just what is your brilliant idea, genius?

Let's look at the manufacture of iPhones, recently analyzed by MIT and announced in the MIT Technology Review by Konstantin Kakaes. Right now, iPhones are assembled in China and Brazil.

According to IHS, a market analyst, the components of an iPhone 6s Plus, which sells for $749, cost about $230. An iPhone SE, Apple’s newest model, sells for $399, and IHS estimates it contains $156 worth of components.

Assembling those components into an iPhone costs about $4 in IHS’s estimate and about $10 in the estimation of  Jason Dedrick, a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Dedrick thinks that doing such work in the U.S. would add $30 to $40 to the cost. That’s partly because labor costs are higher in the U.S., but mostly it’s because additional transportation and logistics expenses would arise from shipping parts, and not just the finished product, to the U.S.

So yeah. You could assemble iPhones in the US and they wouldn't cost that much more. Hey, what's $30 to $40 marked up to retail? (My $100 smartphone plus $30-$40 would cost a lot more, percentage-wise.) But you can see that you would immediately get into a regulatory minefield. That's because pretty soon you would be issuing regulations about how much of of the components in each iPhone could be manufactured abroad. And then you would need an inspectorate to make sure that nobody cheated. And what would happen when the smartphone industry switched to another business model that was not covered by the carefully regulated iPhone manufacturing accords?

The point is that you can talk glibly about free trade and protection and regulation and consumer protection but you are always really talking about how much clunking fist can the marketplace tolerate before it turns into Venezuela.

And then there is Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment. We are talking about per-capita improvement in 200 years from $3 per day to $100 per day and very likely more. How did it happen? It happened because the machine spinners put the cottage spinners out of work. And the machine looms put the hand-loom weavers out of work. And the oil industry put the coal miners out of work. And the diesel factories put the Baldwin steam locomotive workers out of work. Right up to the present day when the smartphones put the mainframe computer and the minicomputer and the desktop computer and the laptop computer workers out of work. And then there is Amazon.

All this happened, the enrichment and the extinction of ancien commerce, because innovators innovated and nobody succeeded in stopping them.

We humans have a dream of eternal life, of endless perfection in the heavenly arms of God. It sounds good, except that to try and implement it on Earth means government and force and the forcible prevention of innovation and young people "having a go."

And yet the fact of human life and of the institutions we create is that we and they are born, we and they grow, we and they may reproduce and bring our progeny to adulthood, and then we and they grow old and die. We can't live forever, and neither can our jobs. And neither can our corporations. And neither can our governments. And neither can our civilizations.

The ideology of protection and regulation and consumer protection and government is to regulate and limit everything by force. It is not the way of life. It is the march of death.

Breaking Out of the PC Box

Presidential candidate Donald Trump recently got in trouble for objecting that the federal judge in his Trump University case was probably biased, being a member of a La Raza associated lawyers group and all.

And the GOP elders all united to condemn Donald Trump for racism.

Come on, Americans, this circular firing squad has to stop.

Not that I blame the judge, Gonzalo Curiel. Getting on the bench is a political thing, and if you have Hispanic ancestry it helps to belong to a Hispanic group to demonstrate your racial bona fides to the Great Mentioners that get your name on the List.

But unhyphenated Americans have got to get with the program. We must stop the silencing, the oppression, the totalitarianism of leftist PC politics. Jonah Goldberg this morning has a piece on liberals wanting to start a "conversation," which usually means liberals getting set to shut you up.

And that means, following Vox Day, that we have to take the attitude of "We Don't Care" whenever liberals play the racist/sexist/homophobe card.

Let's give the liberals credit. The whole intolerant tolerance thing invented by Herbert Marcuse is pure genius. You set up a frankly racist sexist politics and then you accuse anyone that objects to your racist sexist politics of racism and sexism. What is not to like?

And liberals will go on doing this until we non-hyphenated Americans say: "Call me a racist, sexist hompohobe. I Don't Care."

And the time to start practicing this new and improved attitude is right now while Donald Trump is running for president.

It ought to be a scandal that a federal judge belongs to a group with "Raza" in its name. It ought to be a scandal that Justice Sotomayor can utter a racist catchphrase to suggest that a "wise Latina" has a special inside track on the law. It ought to be a scandal that liberals are packing public institutions across the land with knee-jerk liberals on the argument of "diversity." It ought to be a scandal that Reverends Sharpton, Jackson, and Wright have not been dispatched to Outer Slobbovia for their frank racism.

Look, I know why the Republican elite responds to a cry of racism by cowering in their bunker. It is because their experience is that you can't win, because The New York Times can put you above the fold for a month to make sure that you know your place, because their experience is that a misplaced word can cost you your career. And it's because Republicans are decent people that are not that interested in power and just want everyone to get along.

Trouble is that Republicans are dealing with people who are interested in power, very interested in power. The aftermath of the anti-Trump riots in San Jose, California illustrated that perfectly. A Huffington Post writer, Jesse Benn:

Violent resistance matters. Riots can lead to major change (*note the irony of that hyperlink going to a Vox article). It’s not liberal politicians or masses that historians identify as the spark underlying the modern movement for LGBTQ equality. Nor was it a think piece from some smarmy liberal writer. It was the people who took to the streets during the Stonewall Uprising. It was the Watts Rebellion, not the Watts Battle of Ideas, that exposed the enduring systemic neglect, poverty, inequality, and racism faced by that community. Similarly, it was the LA Uprising, not the LA Protests, that led to significant changes in the Los Angeles Police Department. More recently, the Ferguson and Baltimore Uprisings both helped prompt the Justice Department to investigate their corrupt police forces.

What this young man does not seem to understand is that once you justify violence for your side, the good side, then you have licensed it for the other side, the bad side. The whole paraphernalia of laws and institutions and elections and representation is to provide ample opportunity for people with a grievance to advertise their oppression and get the ruling class to pay attention without going into the streets.

That's why the liberal resort to shutting up their critics is wrong; that is why teaching young heads full of mush that "riots can lead to major change" is wrong. That's why the cringing GOP establishment is wrong.

If we shut down robust debate in the public square then we are setting ourselves up for trouble. If we practice racism and call it "diversity" then we are setting ourselves up for trouble.

The reason that Donald Trump is presumptive nominee of the Republican Party is that the professional politicians in the Republican Party have failed us. Not because they are evil and feckless, but because they have been cunningly herded into a box by the left and its Frankfurt School identity politics.

Well, now it is time to break out of the box. Frankly, I don't know how to do it. I figure that the professional politicians and activists are the ones that should know the techniques of changing the "conversation."

But somebody has to figure it out, and soon.

Conservatism is Dead. So What Comes Next?

There's a piece in the American Spectator today saying: sorry, neoconservatives, you were wrong, about Iraq and other things. Then there is Vox Day responding to SF novelist John C. Wright about what to think about "Who Killed Conservatism."

The point is that the conservatism that triumphed with the Reagan administration in the 1980s is dead. Who killed it? No, not the neoconservatives, and not the various sectors of the conservative movement, or the "cuckservatives."

What killed conservatism was the so-called "progressives."

The point of post-World War II conservatism was to amend soften the administrative state of the Roosevelt years, to bring back some semblance of the market and unbuild the corporative regulative state which was strangling America. And it proposed to continue the containment of the Soviet Union started by Democratic President Harry Truman. Oh, and it was on-board with the civil rights revolution. In the votes for the Civil Rights Acts the northern Democrats were most in favor, Republicans next, and Southern Democrats last.

This conservative movement had its finest hour in the 1980s when the misgovernment of the 1970s from both parties provided an opening for an "amiable dunce" like Ronald Reagan to implement a supply-side revolution based on lower tax rates, spending cuts, and deregulation, and a determination to win the Cold War.

The success was remarkable, and conservatives thought that liberals had got the message. The economy thrives best if the government keeps a distance, and the Soviet Union was an evil empire.

But it turned out that liberals merely hated the Eighties and the message it brought, and instead signed up for a hyped-up Marxism from the Frankfurt School, that switched the focus of leftist politics from the working class to racial and gender identity politics.

This completely changed the rules.

There really is no compromise between a free-market national conservatism and the left's gender identity politics. But the conservatism of Bill Buckley and the Jewish neoconservatives was not built to deal with that. So it had to be destroyed.

But nothing happened for a while as the two implacable sides faced off through the Bush and Obama years. However, we can now see that something was building, ready to blow the lid off.

But what everyone forgot about was the white working class, once the "little darlings" of the liberals but cast out to outer darkness when the liberals got race politics and gender politics in the 1960s, and now dying of despair.

The interesting thing about the new liberal politics was that it did not make ordinary white middle class Americans into the villains, although it did continue to harass corporate CEOs and "country-club" Republicans. Instead it made working class white Americans into its Emmanuel Goldstein. They were racists and bigots, like Archie Bunker. It is hard to know why liberals did this. My guess is that liberals could not square the circle politically if the white working class was to continue being its little darlings as well as their new hot numbers, blacks and women.

It has taken 50 years for white working class Americans to find a way out of their despair as the forgotten Americans. That's because the Republican Party and conservatives generally had nothing to say to working class Americans because Republicans and conservatives are People of the Responsible Self that think you should get off your butt and make things happen in your life rather than wait for a leader to lead you to the promised land. The white working class, then and now, is People of the Subordinate Self. It expects to be led.

Well we know what happened next. Donald Trump. Who knew that you could bring the white working class into the Republican Party by offering to build a wall with Mexico, and hammer the Chinese sending us all those cheap smartphones and making "politically incorrect" statements that would have sunk any other candidate?

And who would have thought that Trump's candidacy would have demolished the old conservative coalition? As Newt Gingrich has said:

You have a Trump -- this absurd amateur. I mean it's not technically possible -- all of us, men and women in politics -- it's not technically possible to announce in June for the presidency never having run for anything and then beat 16 people... And he just beat them all.

 Actually, there is nothing unusual here. The Republican Party is constitutionally incapable of fishing for votes. It has always been, in the words of Michael Barone, a party of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans." Thus, it has never had anything to say to hyphenated Americans. But it has never had to, because group after group has been thrown out of the Democratic Party: social conservatives, Christians, and they had nowhere to go but the Republican Party. Finally the white working class has finally given up on the Democrats and found a candidate to bring them into the Republican Party.

Now things will never be the same. And really, it's a good thing. That's because we have been waffling on with the old conservatism when the assumptions have changed.

We are no longer dealing with the old liberal ruling class that just wanted to regulate everything from Washington. We are dealing with a progressive cultural Marxist movement that wants to fundamentally transform everything in America. So now we need a different political and cultural movement to defeat and destroy the progressive left. We cannot continue with the go-along to get-along conservatism of old.

Is the answer coming from Vox Day and the AltRight? Day says that the AltRight stands for the following

1. Nationalism
2. Western Civilization
3. Winning

I imagine that is based on the idea that the national state is the best thing yet invented for creating a unified political community, a demos. And that western civilization with its markets and law and limited government is the best thing yet invented for humans to wive and thrive. And that the time has come to stop being the Outer Party that governs when in office, while the Inner Party rules when in office. (Compare the Bush and Obama administrations.)

But you can see that, whatever is going to replace the old conservatism, we really haven't a clue how the replacement will work out.

The White Working Class Was Once the "Little Darlings" of the Ruling Class

Another day, another WaPo article about "The incredible crushing despair of the white working class." And as usual it blames the white working class for its problems. Working class blacks are three times more likely to have an optimistic view of the future.

What's the problem?

Part of the optimism gap is indeed because of "a shrinking pie of good jobs for low-skill/blue collar workers," Graham said in an email. "Whites used to have real advantages (some via discrimination) that they no longer have ... they are looking at downward mobility or threats of it, while poor blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to parents who were worse off than they."...

If you're a working-class white American, in other words, it may seem as though you are stuck with a losing hand in a bleak zero-sum game: Minorities are getting richer. The rich are getting richer. They're all doing so at your expense, and it's difficult to imagine things being any different in the future.

Cue a plug for my "little darlings" theory. Don't become a little darling of the ruling class. Because when they are done with you they will throw you onto the ash heap of history. Like the medieval peasants.

Once upon a time the ruling class loooved the white working class and gave them lots of presents and gew-gaws, as Sugar Daddies will do: Union laws, child-labor laws. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Obamacare. So you learn to be a medieval peasant all over again and tug your forelock when the lord drives by in his private jet.

But then comes the day when the lord fancies a new bit of crackling. In the 1960s it was blacks and women. And so, rather quickly, working class whites became embarrassing. And then downright bigoted and mean. You got movies like In the Heat of the Night where the hero is a black man and the villain is not the racist white planter but the greasy white soda-jerk.

But never mind about the Washington Post and its articles written over the grave of the white working class. go read the comments under the article. Where's all that celebrated liberal compassion?

Yep. The comments that I read told the white working class to stop propping up the bar and go and get a job. Or words to that effect. Try this:

Why can’t poorly educated angry people who believe in conspiracy theories get jobs? Probably because those are the exact qualities employers DON’T want.. 

DON'T become the little darlings of the ruling class. I am talking to you, ladies. I am talking to you, African Americans. I am talking to you, Hispanics. Or you too will end up on the ash heap of history, just like the white working class.

I always wondered what happened to people thrown on the ash heap of history. Now I know. They do not die, they only fade away, from the death of hope.

You can see that the various means by which humans fortify hope are important. There is the charismatic leader, the tribal gods. There are the Axial Age religions that promise humans the ability to understand the world and work to live in it. There is the millennial hope of leftist movements for perfect community and equality. There is the revival of tribalism in fascism and Black Power. And of course there is the hope provided by the comfort of being the ruling class's little darlings.

You can see the advantage of the Axial Age religions. They do not get blind-sided by history, like the rise and fall of tribes. Or the vagaries of ruling class favors. They simply say things like: If you love God, God will love you back. Or: God sent his Son to die for you so you don't need to sacrifice any more.

Well, it looks like the white working class will have its revenge, as its support of Donald Trump has demolished the conservative-Republican coalition of the last 50 years. So conservatism and today's Republican Party might end up being thrown on the ash heap of history.

How do you like them apples?