Politicians are Stupid

President Obama says that we cannot know the motive of the shooter that ranted racist catchphrases at Dallas police negotiators. So we are faced with deciding whether liberals are evil or stupid.

I vote for stupid. I'm reading a book on the German hyperinflation of 1913-1923, When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson, and it gave me a new appreciation of political stupidity.

It's all there, back in Weimar Germany. The crass political opportunists spinning lies. The false predictions that it can't get much worse. But above all, it seems to me, there is the fundamental inability of any government to take tough action in a crisis.

That's because usually it is the government's supporters that are the problem. They demand the rewards for their support of the government, and they refuse to permit a reduction in their benefits. Because they earned them.

My point is that when the government's finances get into a mess, governments will do anything rather than cut spending. Think Greece. The only reason that Greece has cut spending in the past few years is because the Germans held a gun to their head.

Venezuela? Their problem is simple. When oil prices were high they put all the oil revenues into Bolivarian socialist free stuff. Well, now that the price of oil has been cut in half there is no more money. But does the government say, Look, chaps, we screwed up. There Is No More Money, so you are all going to have to get jobs? Not a bit of it. They proceed to wreck the economy printing money and still fail to deliver the benefits to their supporters. Think about it. Who suffers most from the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in hyperinflation? The poor. Yet why does the ruling class not Do Something to fix the problem? Because it is afraid of the poor. It is afraid to cut spending on its supporters.

All governments are all afraid of cutting spending on their supporters. And that is why governments, time after time, get into a jam and don't do anything until they are forced to devalue or forced to restart the monetary system after a complete collapse. The reason the Germans are so rigid about money is that they have had two monetary collapses in the last century: after World War I and World War II. They know that you don't want to do that, not ever again. You may say that when a nation has lost a war it has an excuse to lose its monetary system, whereas a Venezuela has an excuse, given the difficulty of persuading its supporters to accept "cuts" or "austerity" absent a military defeat. But I think the opposite is true. After a military defeat, it stands to reason that the people are going to suffer, as in enemy soldiers occupying the country. So they are likely to accept that they must give up their goodies to save the nation.

So I don't think that our liberal friends with their corrosive identity politics and their divisive "peaceful protest" politics are evil. I think that they are like any faithful religious believers, sincerely repeating the rubrics of their faith. I was listening to NPR this morning faithfully repeating the liberal memes about racism and gun violence to their faithful listeners after the Dallas police shootings. I give them credit for believing in their faith, and their faith goes all the way back to the noble days of the Sixties when young liberals were risking life and limb as Freedom Riders in the Jim Crow South.

And I think the same applies to President Obama and Hillary Clinton. They didn't imbibe the dreadful doctrines of Saul Alinsky and his street protest à outrance out of cynicism, but out of faith that protest was the way to fight injustice and bend the arc of history towards justice. They really believe this stuff.

And they are stupid. They are stupid because they refuse to see that their politics of protest brings misery and hate wherever it is tried. That's because politics is violence and government is injustice. The less politics and the less government the more that people will be able to live in amity.

And the bourgeoisie is basically good, because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power. Yes. The first thing to be said is that the prophecy of Marx was wrong, as wrong as any second-rate millennial preacher prophesying the end of the world. The bourgeoisie did not inaugurate a second feudal era, because unlike the feudal barons whose trade was war and power, the bourgeoisie was interested in products and services, producing and trading and trusting and serving. Not fighting and exploiting.

The proof, as I like to say, is that the great "robber barons" anathematized by Matthew Josephson in The Robber Barons were men that were interested in business, not in power. Even the most famous titan of all, J.P. Morgan, was a banker, expert in railroad bankruptcies, of which there were a lot in the 19th century. And when they were finished with business, these robber barons invented modern philanthropy. Compare with the Clintons, whose Clinton foundation is merely a vehicle to fund their political operation.

President Obama and his movement are the residual legatees of the Educated Youth of 1848, when young chaps like Karl Marx, son of the top lawyer in Trier, Germany, looked at the misery of the Crash of 1847, when the working class didn't have the vote, and decreed revolution. Back then, it made sense. But as soon as the working class got the vote the political system started responding to their agenda. So they didn't need to riot in the streets.

But 2016 is not 1848. Let's look at the race problem today. We have pro-black government programs, we have pro-black government officials, we have Democratic politicians running all the major cities in America where the poor live. Just what is going to be achieved by protesting in the streets? Because cops are killing blacks? What about blacks killing blacks?

The fact is that we are coming to the end of the era of peaceful protest, the politics of "it's always 1848, always 1968." That's because politics ain't gonna solve the problems of African Americans. Politics ain't gonna solve the problems of women. Nor gays and trans and the rest. In fact, I dare to say, politics is the problem.

But liberals are going to be the last to know. That's because their world view, their faith, is that politics can be used to empower the marginalized, liberate the exploited, free the oppressed. Sure, they can, up to a point. Governments, all governments, are in the business of rewarding their supporters by marginalizing their opponents. For the last 50 years, in America, the ruling class has been marginalizing the white working class in order to empower and liberate and free various groups that they judged had been marginalized, exploited, and oppressed in the past. But all government is injustice, so by getting in the middle of things to help their little darlings they have just exchanged one set of injustices with another.

And now they are going to reap the whirlwind. Because they are stupid.

After Dallas: Are Liberals Evil or Stupid?

If you are a conservative the Obama years put you into a bit of a quandary. You have to wonder, did Obama and the whole liberal universe plan this, or are they, in the immortal words of Lina Lamont, dumb or something?

My personal opinion is Lina Lamont's. Only, you'll remember, when she would say: "What do you think I am, dumb or something," she was acting in a way that she thought was smart, but in fact sabotaged her interests.

That's what I think liberals do. They think they are really smart, but in fact they mess things up, especially for their own supporters.

Correction: Liberal politics is usually calculated to benefit liberal elite interests, and create lots of powerful jobs for liberal elitists, and get liberals political power. But the bottom line for Democratic voters is not so good.

That is why the sniper shootings in Dallas, July 7, 2016, demonstrate to me the folly and the stupidity of liberal politics.

Gosh, liberals, don't you think that all your race politics of the last 50 years, culminating in the Black Lives Matter movement, tends to encourage idiots like Micah X. Johnson who "wanted to kill white people."

Of course they don't. It's conservatives who are the racists. Liberals are the ones advocating for civil rights. Right?

I tell you what I think is the problem. It is the liberal "activism" culture. For liberals, the give and take of electoral politics isn't enough. There has to be something higher and fuller for politics than just elections and routine government. There has to be a movement. There have to be marches, and manifestos, and non-negotiable demands, and peaceful protests. Because injustice.

And sometimes there is a justification for the stylized violence of the street protest. Back in the 19th century, the workers were out of the system, and they rioted until they got the vote. In the 20th century African Americans in the Jim Crow South were denied the vote, and they marched until they got it.

But today every good little girl in college is taught about the moral virtue of marching on City Hall if you have a grievance. Every well-born youngster dreams of a life in "activism." That is what politics means to the youngster that has been carefully taught. What the good little girls are not carefully taught is that the street protest is a show of force. It is a threat of violence; it is the first stirring of civil war. So there is a question that ought to be asked before every campaign: is this issue really so important that the resort to actual violence is justified?

For the liberal, the answer is yes, because, as I have written, it is always 1848, when the working class had just arrived in the city and was suffering from the crash after the great railway boom, and it didn't have the vote.

Yes, but what about white cops killing young blacks, what about institutional racism, what about the militarization of the police, what about...?

Good point. Does that justify trashing Ferguson, Missouri, and inner city neighborhoods in Baltimore, Ohio, and driving jobs out of the city? Does that justify killing cops in Dallas?

Because that's where we end up with the activism culture. It's one thing when liberals use it to demonstrate decorously against evil fossil fuels and the Keystone XL pipeline. All very civilized, darling. But the civilized liberal activism culture gets translated on the way to the street. First of all the trained community organizer needs to use more vivid means to lead his street demonstrations in the inner city. And then there is the little problem that young men are wired for mayhem. The great challenge of civilized society is to reverse the instincts for violence in young men and divert them into career competition and sports.

Are you shocked and appalled that young men from the West are traveling to the Middle East to sign up with ISIS? I am not. Of course young men will march to the sound of the guns. That is what young men do. So it doesn't at all surprise me that a couple of young black men (or more) decided to shoot up the cops in Dallas. That is where the street rhetoric of Black Lives Matter leads. Liberals used to call it "escalation" when they were objecting to the Vietnam war.

I understand, of course, that the Democrats are playing on a bit of a sticky wicket right now. African Americans were promised a new era of Hope and Change in 2008. Instead they have suffered much more than most from the housing bust, and the subsequent slow recovery. (Remember, the whole point of loosey-goosey home mortgages was to benefit minorities, who ended up hardest hit in the crash). Imagine what would happen if African Americans don't turn out to vote in November. Imagine if instead of voting 90-10 for Democrats blacks only voted 85-15, or worse.

Now imagine what the other members of the Democratic Coalition of the Fringes are thinking about black violence, especially now that Asian and Hispanic officers are getting sucked into the meat grinder of blame and recrimination.

Like I said. I don't think that liberals are evil. I just think they are human, all too human. Like Lina Lamont.

And liberals don't seem to realize that when you let slip the dogs of activism you really can have no idea where it will all end up. Liberals have the idea that their "activism" is civilized and noble. But it is still a show of force. Its purpose is to threaten and intimidate, and you never know where any campaign of force will end up.

I Think I Finally Get Hegel

Ever since I read F.S.C. Northrop and his notion that knowledge begins with a problem, I have used the idea in everything. It's obvious: if you don't have a problem you don't need any more knowledge. Just keep on keeping on.

But if something is bothering you, if you have a problem, then you probably need to figure it out and add to the great inheritance of human knowledge.

So Hegel had a problem. But what was it? That is what I have been cudgeling my brain about. And I could never figure out Hegel. But now I think I have, thanks to Alexandre Kojève and his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. I read the book not to understand Hegel but because I read that every lefty who has half a brain has read it. So I read the book to understand lefties.

But the result of reading Kojève is that I now think I understand Hegel, and I think I understand the problem he was trying to solve.

Let's start with Newton. His equations of motion suggested that the universe was a billiard ball universe. Everything in the present and the future is completely determined by the past. Determinism.

Then Hume came along and said that you can't prove cause and effect. Just because Sir Louis Scatcherd fell off a horse and then died doesn't mean that the fall caused the death. This opened a crack in Newton's determinism.

Hume famously woke Kant out of his dogmatic slumber to construct his transcendental idealism. Humans couldn't know things-in-themselves; they could not look behind the curtain to find out what was really going on. Humans can only know appearances, how the world appears to them. So how can we humans know anything? Here is how I tackled it back in October 2012 when taking a course in the Philosophy of Kant.

We take formless sense impressions, view them with the forms of intuition about space and time, synthesize them with intuitions, and then own them as ours by applying the pure concepts of the understanding to our intuitions and finally applying judgments.

Or more crudely, we cook up a theory in our heads about the world, and interpret sense impression in the light of that theory. If it works it works.

But there is still a problem. How do we act in the world; how can we change the billiard ball universe and redirect the billiard balls?

That was Hegel's problem, and he solved it with the concept of Negation. When you come up with a new idea, when you change the world with a conscious act, you are negating the world, making it different. And so the whole history of humans is an endless series of negations, changing the flow of history. Until the End of History when the Scientist knows everything about everything, Napoleon has established his Empire, and that is that.

That's the way you have to think about change in a Newtonian world. You know that Newtonian determinism can't be the whole truth, so you have to conjure up something to make free will possible. And Hegel chose Negation.

But today we think this is rubbish, and not just because Marx and his pals made a complete dog´s breakfast of Hegel -- and a dog's breakfast of Russia and China as well. Why is that?

Because today we have quantum mechanics. It says, crudely, that the old Newtonian idea that it is billiard balls all the way down is wrong. At the base of the billiard balls is the quantum state function which is a statement of probability. We don't know what individual quanta are going to do next, and they don't know either, although we can have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen in the aggregate. So our basic theory of life, the universe, and everything says that, at the basic level, everything is contingent.

We know that quantum mechanics is pretty good because scientists, programming their brains with the ideas of quantum mechanics, have invented LED lights and smartphones, and LED lights and smartphones are constructed on the faith that quantum mechanics works.

Newton's theory works at the macro level on and around the earth, provided you don't go too fast. Kant's idea that we form concepts of understanding and intuition about the things-in-themselves that we only experience as sense impressions is right. Hegel's idea of Negation is sorta right: when we make a conscious change we change the universe forever, just like it says in quantum mechanics, only it comes out of the state function and all the other remarkable concepts of quantum mechanics, not Negation;.

Still, Hegel's idea was a good first try. Pity that his idea was so loosey-goosey that his adepts could use his ideas for their foolish and evil political conjuring tricks.

Because Hegel licensed crude ideas that capitalism is the negation of feudalism and socialism the negation of capitalism and so the world progresses along the arc of history towards justice.

And the result of that those ideas was not good. Still isn't.

But at least now I think I understand Hegel.

What Else Could the FBI Do?

Some people say it is the End of the Rule of Law. Others say that Hillary Clinton got a pass. We are talking about the statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on July 5 that "no responsible prosecutor" would prosecute Hillary Clinton for setting up a home-brew email server and then lying about never using it for material that was classified "at the time."

I think that in the Obama era you cannot expect any bureaucrat with a wife and children to go against Mr. Big. Because if you do "you will never work in this town again." It is not just that the media is Democratic. It is not just that bureaucrats are lifers. It is clear that the Obama people use "the Chicago way" to intimidate and to silence.

Still, Director Comey did basically lay out statements that Hillary Clinton lied about using her email system for classified communication. That gave the Trump campaign the opening to produce a video comparing Comey's words and Clinton's words. When I viewed the video the night of July 5 it had 3,4900,000 views; the morning of July 6 it was at 6,700,000 views. By 11:00am PDT it had been taken down by Facebook (Oh wait, here it is, now at 8,900,000 views). So somebody is paying attention.

So it's up to the voters in November. Do the voters think that, in the hack phrase, "law is for the little people," or do they want to send a message about that?  My guess is that voters will split three ways, according to my Three Peoples theory. The People of the Subordinate Self will vote for Hillary Clinton anyway, because they do not see the rule of law as dispositive. What counts for them is a powerful patron to protect them from the world and of course you can't expect a powerful patron to obey the law. What counts is that he (or she) gives you a cut of the loot. The People of the Responsible Self will vote against Hillary Clinton. In their responsible lives the important thing is trust, and trust depends on people following the rules and obeying the law.

But what about the People of the Creative Self? Do they take the attitude that classification and official secrets are part of a discredited nationalism implicit in the dominatory and imperialistic concept of the nation state? Or do they regard Hillary Clinton's lies as merely creative license, acceptable in anyone battling against the racist sexist bigots? Or do they take the position that the arc of history bends towards justice so no action is needed?

It's rough being a Person of the Creative Self. It is not easy to determine how you should think and feel.

Over at The Daily Beast Joel Kotkin is writing about the Great Rebellion against the neo-liberal crony capitalist order in Europe and in the US, from the Brussels bureaucrats to the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

But, of course, things aren't so simple, because even the rebels want the free stuff from the welfare state, the pensions and health care. They -- we -- just don't want to share it with immigrants and we certainly don't want them coming in and taking our jobs by working for lower wages that we are accustomed to command.

Meanwhile, the FBI did the best it could. It laid out the Clinton criminality for all to see. It just knew that the Obama Justice Department would never prosecute.

Storm Warning: To you lowly bureaucrats and members of the armed forces. Do not try this at home. You are the Little People, and the law still applies to you in full force.

Election 2016: Is It All Over Bar Shouting?

My grandfather had a couple of good lines. The first was "I like the cut of his jib." This is a nautical term, for you landlubbers, suggesting that you like the sails on a ship, a jib being a headsail out in front of the mast. Just what this means when you are talking about the "cut of her jib" I refuse to answer.

My grandfather's other saying was "it's all over bar shouting," which speaks for itself.

Based on what I am reading, a lot of people think that the presidential election for 2016 is all over. Bar shouting.

Here's piece by David Catron in the American Spectator about data denial syndrome. It's about the wishful thinking of Republican supporters in 2012, when they thought the media was undercounting Republican supporters in the polls before the election. Same thing is happening today as Trump supporters accuse the pollsters of undercounting their people. But data guy Nate Silver gives Trump a 20 percent chance of winning.

Then there is the Trump naive beginner syndrome from "Willis Fumbleton," again at the American Spectator, purporting to report a Trump staff meeting.

My guess is that these folks are right, provided that this election turns out like pretty well all elections since Ronald Reagan (2008 excepted). Those elections, from the first Bush to the second Obama were small-ball elections where below-the-radar commercials and turnout efforts won the day.

If 2016 is a small-ball election then the professional electioneering skills of the Democrats will eat Donald Trump alive. I'd say the professionals are betting on a small-ball election, which is the smart way to bet.

The way Trump wins is by transforming the general election the way he transformed the Republican primaries, by playing on the fears of the voters about immigration and the Muslim threat and an out-of-touch political elite that doesn't care about people like me. Then the Joe Soptic ads and the Big Data turnout machines and the elite media narrative don't matter.

That's how Ronald Reagan won in 1980. To the ordinary voter things were coming unstuck. Inflation, recession, gas lines, riots, and the Soviets seeming to advance all over the world.

(Yes, you young'uns. Back in the 1970s we had gasoline price controls and lines at the gas stations.)

In other words, the ruling class wasn't "keeping us safe." It wasn't accomplishing the basic (and really only) function of government, and the people were ready to try something else.

Is it 1980 all over again? There is a simple answer to that: We Don't Know.

But I'll tell you what I think. I think that at some point the political temptation to make a "keep us safe" issue out of Islamic terrorism is going to become irresistible. Why? Because keeping us safe is the only job that government can actually do: keeping us safe from enemies, foreign and domestic. Everything else is rewarding ruling-class supporters.

If you want to understand liberal politics you have to understand that politics must have an enemy. If there is no foreign enemy -- as liberals insist, because western imperialism and colonialism -- then the enemy must be at home, in our native born racists, sexists, homophobes, "haters" and xenophobes. There Must Be An Enemy.

But right now, for liberals, foreigners cannot be enemies, because historical imperialism and colonialism, and Muslims can't be enemies because they are a traditionally marginalized minority.

Now I get to be around quite a few nice educated liberal women. And right now they are still drinking the "hate" and xenophobia KoolAid.

At some point these liberal ladies will get frightened. I don't know what will do it; that's why I'm a lone wolf nobody crying in the wilderness.

The penultimate chapter of Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex is titled "The Independent Woman." That is a lie. There is no such thing as an independent woman. Woman's safety and security is dependent upon men with guns. It could be a husband or a lover. Or it could be the government and its men with guns. One way or another, women insist on being protected, for absent a protector, women are fair game; they always have been and always will be. If you want to understand more about that go read The Iliad. The whole thing revolves around a captured princess, Briseis, the spoils of war, and whether she belongs to Agamemnon or Achilles. And that's just the beginning where women are concerned.. If you don't want to understand about that, then don't read The Iliad and keep on keeping on at NPR and The New York Times.

Of course, there is no such thing as an independent man either. Men rely on society working as much as women. But not quite. The difference is, of course, children. A woman with a young child is uniquely vulnerable; she must have help and protection. And this is why feminism is so anti-natal; its fantasists imagine they can remove female vulnerability by avoiding childbirth. Sorry girls: whatever you think, There Must Be Children. Children are the reason that men are expendable, and women are not.

Meanwhile we have the presidential election of 2016. Will the "is it safe" moment arrive before November and transform US politics for a generation?

The answer is simple. We don't know.

What Do We Mean by "Empower?"

In my e-mail conversation with liberal Craig Greeman he proposes that progressives are interested in the empowering of people.

I'd be willing to bet that, if we defined "progressive" more narrowly in some ways -- as, perhaps, someone who *is* interested in power, specifically, the *empowering* of other people -- then conservatives might also agree with others.  After all, conservatives are interested in individual freedom and responsibility; and to enact that, individuals need to have the power to choose and accomplish, whether that's on a market or in a civil situation.  Of course, the question is how far to get the government involved in empowering people (as you said in your blog responding to my little piece, one man's "help" is another man's tyranny).  But I think that if we could agree on that, that both progressives and conservatives are interested in empowering of the individual, then we'd at least have a place to start.

I think that the key phrase that stops me is "how far to get the government involved in empowering people." I suppose Craig means that when the government enacts a Ten Hours law to regulate working hours that empowers people because employers can no longer demand that they work 12 hours a day.

But does that wage and hour law have anything to do with empowerment? The Lady Marjorie's mother presently lives in a retirement community where she is attended 24-7 by aides. Each aide works a 12-hour shift. But recently the State of Florida passed a wage and hour law requiring time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours a week. The response of Lady Marjorie and the agencies she uses to deliver these services was to cut the hours of the aides so they wouldn't be going over 40 hours per week. Is this empowerment or just jerking around?

If you ask me, wage and hour laws are not empowering people; they are protecting them, and mostly protecting them from themselves. The aides looking after Lady Marjorie's mother are immigrants that want to make money, and they are willing to endure considerable privation to do that. Working all night, from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am every day is not my idea of a walk in the park. Maybe "we" should prevent workers from working that hard; maybe we should limit their hours so that other people can get jobs. Or maybe out thicket of helping laws actually makes life harder for people.

Here's a story I heard recently. A 16-year-old high-school girl was sexually assaulted at her home by two boys from high school, but she did nothing about it until her parents found out. They went to the school, but the school basically did nothing about it, and meanwhile the boys and their friends were intimidating the girl with unspeakable verbal cruelty. Finally the 16-year-old girl heard that a 14-year-old girl had been assaulted by the same two boys and determined to go to the police. Today the 16-year-old girl belongs to a rape survivors group and gives interviews.

Now I would say that the empowerment in question occurred when the 16-year-old girl decided to take action and report her rape to the police. That's when she stopped relying on parents and school officials and actually took positive action. At that moment she achieved personal agency.

My problem with progressivism is that is often confuses empowerment with patronage. It is not empowering for liberals to enact social legislation. The workers protected by wage-and-hour laws are not empowered, they just have two masters, the employer and the government labor-law bureaucracy. It is an obvious conceit to imagine that when you are swanning around the world playing Lady Bountiful that you are empowering people.

I don't think so. The book, To Empower People by Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus is subtitled "The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy" and in its second edition "From State to Civil Society." Berger and Neuhaus define empowerment as the development of a civil society of institutions, "mediating structures" between the "megastructures" of government and industry. These mediating structures are not sponsored or patronized by the powerful. They are authentic self-governing institutions occupying their own space in the public square.

This is not to say that government has no role in the adjudication of power relationships. It is just to warn our liberal friends that we humans are capable of extraordinary conceits and delusions. It is to warn our friends that scientists say that humans developed reason in order to manage their social status, not to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

That's why I think that it is best to start with uncompromising ideas like Government is Force; Politics is Violence and go on from there. The whole point of social animals, I like to say, is the retreat of force. Animals within the group don't use force on each other.

The overwhelming fact of the modern industrial era, apart from the Great Enrichment by a factor of ten and more, is its reduction in violent death by a factor of ten. How did this happen? I suggest it is the market that is to blame. In the market you don't have to enforce your will to survive or surrender to a powerful patron to survive; you only have to surrender to the market and its prices: labor prices, product prices, service prices. For many people, liberals and progressives among them, this new surrender to the market is an abomination.

Maybe it is, but I suspect that the concept of surrender to the market is the most empowering thing that has come along since sliced bread.

Don't Forget: Liberal Pejoratives Keep Liberals in Line

After putting out my "hate" and "xenophobia" piece yesterday I suddenly had an idea.

All the liberal pejoratives -- racism, sexism, homophobia, "hate," xenophobia and the rest -- are not just there to shut non-liberals up and put us in fear of our jobs. They have another purpose.

They keep liberals onside.

Think about it. Politics is violence, civil war by other means. If you are running a political movement, you cannot start to take out the eevil white patriarchal racist hetero-oppressors until you have created a committed and disciplined political army. And that army must believe in the cause.

Now the first thing to note about armies is that you can't leave. When you sign up for a shooting army you enlist for a specific period, and until that period is over, you are the property of the army. Sometimes you are enlisted for the duration of the war. If you leave you are a deserter.

But usually armies prefer not to rely completely on the provost marshal to keep the lads in line. They use psychological techniques, from regimental tradition to the age-old male culture of looking out for your buddies, to indoctrinating the troops with the idea that everything is going well and victory is close at hand. The whole idea is to make it unthinkable for you to abandon your post.

Obviously, the same thing applies in politics. You want all women in the feminist movement to think like one on abortion and equal pay. You want all gays to be in line with "marriage equality" and "hate." You want all blacks to fear the return of Jim Crow. If you don't manage to create and enforce unity in your movement you are not going to win and enforce your agenda on the rest of the nation.

Now imagine what it would feel like if you were a liberal and someone said to you: "that sounds kinda xenophobic to me."

You can see why the dear old Tea Party wasn't such a stunning success. It wasn't just the kindly administrations of the lovely Lois Lerner. It was that the Tea Party wasn't a disciplined political movement like everything on the left. That's probably because conservatives are not that interested in power.

So, does that mean that we have to become like our enemies and develop disciplined top-down political structures to roll back the progs with every conservative heart beating as one?

Maybe. If you go back to the American Revolution there was a lot of ideological bullying going on, especially with the respect to the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of the loyalists. The revolution was chronically short of funds, and the loyalists were the easiest place to go and find money, as in triple taxation.

But I like to hope that we can turn things around short of actual civil war. The whole point of the Trump phenomenon, in my view, is that it represents a rebellion against the politically correct ruling class.

The reason that Trump emerged as the winner is that he was the one candidate that did not Cringe. Non-liberal voters are utterly sick of leaders that don't push back against the liberals; that's why a majority of Republican voters don't trust their establishment leaders. And I think that every non-liberal in the land is aching for a leader that will Cut the Cringe.

But that only deals with one half of the problem. We the People want to push back against the domination and the hegemony of political correctness. Good for us.

But what about the decent liberals that have been cowed and indoctrinated into becoming foot soldiers in the liberal political army, and don't even know they are too frightened to have an original thought, because they are just as cowed by those liberal pejoratives as the rest of us?

Yeah. Something to think about.