When Will Democrats Realize That Obama is Killing Them?

Government has only two things to do in this world. First, its job is to protect us against foreign enemies, pirates and plunderers and such. Second, its job it so protect us against domestic enemies, thieves and murderers and such. All else doth err.

But the whole program of the left is based on a denial of this. On foreign enemies they say that it is our aggressive foreign policy that incites anger across the world. Not the mention the precipitate of western colonialism. On domestic enemies they accuse the police of "brutality."

Hillary Clinton was playing that game a while back when she tweeted:

Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

President Obama was playing that game a week ago when he said the police could make their job safer by admitting their failures.

This sort of liberal jaw-flapping is annoying at the best of times, but when we have a Muslim global terror problem in the world, and a Black Lives Matter anti-cop program at home, it becomes unendurable.

At some point reality breaks through the liberal propaganda screen and people will start to demand that the government does its job, and protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. They will start to say that they don't care whether Muslims are peaceful and tolerant, just kill the terrorists; they will start to say that they don't care if the police have it in for young black men, just stop the cop killers.

At some point this election year, I predict, Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media are going to wake up and realize that they are losing the American people and losing the election. It will break through Hillary Clinton's skull that President Obama and his lefty rhetoric are enraging ordinary Americans and that they are going to vote for change over four more wonderful years of Obama.

By then, of course, it will be too late.

You may ask: why do the Democrats do this? The answer, I think, is that the Democrats and liberals want to use politics to fight a different war than the war against street thugs and foreign thugs. They want to fight inequality domestically and internationally. Not to mention save the planet from climate change. It stands to reason that nobody is going to allow them to do that while there are still street thugs killing people and foreign thugs mowing down French people watching patriotic fireworks shows.

So, in order to do the fun things that liberals want to do with their political power, they first have to say that there is no need to do the basic stuff of protection. That stuff is old hat, and anyway racist and colonialist and irrelevant.

Of course, they are lying about this, and worst of all, have come to believe their lies. The only thing that government is warranted to do in this world is protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. Everything else is just domestic loot and plunder, the armed minority of the ruling class taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters.

OK. I've made my prediction. Now let's see how it turns out.

President Obama's Divisiveness: What Does He Mean?

My question about President Obama is this. Is his divisive rhetoric just his inner leftiness? Or is it cynical and strategic, based on a hard look at the polls?

I would have thought that his speech in Dallas at a service for the five slain Dallas cops would have been not just in bad taste, but bound to stir up feeling against the Democratic candidate for president in 2016. Why lecture his opponents as racists and haters at a funeral service?

But David Harsanyi writes that, "like most people on the left these days, [the president] no longer bothers to make a distinction between a policy position and a moral struggle."

But, of course, the left's collapse of politics into a moral struggle is not the whole story. Politics is violence, so the moral struggle can only be effected by a violent struggle. Thus it makes complete sense for the left to escalate the struggle for civil rights into an armed struggle, as in Black Lives Matter.

Scott McKay writes about Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. After "rabble-rousing" in Ferguson, Missouri, he is how earning $165,000 a year as a community organizer for Baltimore's public schools, and living "in an 8,000 square foot house owned by board members of George Soros' Open Society Institute." Now he has been "feted for three hours at the White House."

See, I would have thought that Hillary Clinton, running for president, would want to damp down the lefty crazies for the duration of the campaign. I would have thought that she and Obama would have got together to keep the rowdies out of sight until after the glorious victory in November. After all, Hillary is the wife of the guy that ran as a New Democrat assuring us that there was nobody here except us moderates.

But maybe they have decided that the "we are all moderates strategy" can't win.

That leads to the other strategic idea, which would argue in favor of encouraging the thuggish Black Lives Matter. On this view you need to get 90 percent of blacks voting Democrat, and that means you need to get them frightened that Jim Crow is just around the corner and angry that the cops are killing their sons. If the Dems don't get 90 percent of the black vote and don't get a big turnout then they can't win a national election. As Steve Sailer puts it, the Dems need to "angry up" the various elements of their "Coalition of the Fringes" to keep them on the team.

I suppose the answer is: all of the above. The flaw in any conspiracy theory is to believe that the supposed conspirators really know what they are doing, and that the organizer of the conspiracy, the Mr. Big, also knows what he is doing. In reality Mr. Big is not as big as he seems. He is not master of all he surveys; he has to play politics with all the factions of his gang, and cannot just order them all into line for the good of the order. He has to temporize, and reward his hot-heads for their activism, and try to keep everyone happily fighting to bend the arc of history towards justice.

But there is a problem with the left's view of politics.

Let's think back to 1968. The New Deal wing of the Democratic Party just wanted to win the election on the old model of the New Deal coalition. But the New Left radicals and the peace faction would not agree to shut up, so they disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and represented that the police "rioted" against protesters in the park near the convention. In response the Republican Party became the party of "law and order" and won four of the next five presidential elections, and the Democratic Party had to claw back to the middle, using the astonishing political skills of Bill Clinton.

Stop press. Donald Trump just announced that he was the "law and order" candidate for president.

We racist sexist homophobes fail to understand that our liberal friends do not think like us. They really believe that their leftist politics is going to save the world, and they believe that the techniques of their politics, the division, the protests, the marches, the silencing of opponents are the right and proper thing to do. And above all they do not think that government is a necessary evil, on the idea that government is force and the point of social animals is to reduce the human and the material cost of force. They think that politics, emancipative and liberatory politics, is salvific.

So let's give President Obama the benefit of the doubt and accept that he actually believes the rubbish he spouts all the time. And the same for the rest of our liberal friends. What the president does not understand is that millions of Americans hate the continual division and hate the praise heaped upon low-rent community organizers. They just want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

And they want the government to protect them from enemies, foreign and domestic.

The only thing that will force the liberals to moderate their leftiness is defeat, repeated defeat, at the ballot box. That is all.

Learning from Haidt: Trumpism is the Natural Outcome of Ruling Class Failure

Yesterday I blogged a piece on Jonathan Haidt's analysis of Brexit and Trump and the confrontation of globalism and nationalism.

In Haidt's analysis, globalism is a little bit too far out in front and is provoking a nationalist and authoritarian backlash. I wrote that it was the globalists who were the authoritarians. After all, it is the globalists that have cunningly set up all kinds of global institutions from which there is no dissent and no means to petition for a redress of grievances. Can you spell Authoritarian?

But what really caught my eye was an analysis of how the world got here, looking at World Values Survey data. Haidt wrote that:

as they [countries] industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations.

This is rather obviously an analysis from the globalist elite; it feels a bit like a 19th century colonial governor in his magnificent plumed hat talking about the natives. Compassionate caring social engineers will raise up the benighted heathen towards the rational world of social programs and reason.

Of course, I think that this attitude is precisely what creates Trumpism. People carefully relieved of their religion and ritual their "deference to authorities" are being taught to defer to their globalist authorities and their social-engineering experts. So the only way they have to petition their global overlords for a redress of grievances is through Trumpism or its local affiliates. I don't call that authoritarian; I call it rebellion.

But beyond that I think that the globalist approach misunderstands what it takes for an individual to enter into the industrial world order and succeed in it. It is not a process of advancing from "religion, ritual, and deference to authorities" to "'secular rational' values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering." It is, I believe a process that must occur in every human heart to change from the rural subordinate culture of the peasant, with its deference to unpredictable lords and gods, to the responsible culture of the city, with its God that sets the world up to run by rules and divine justice, and its rulers that are accountable to the citizens. In other words, on my Three Peoples theory, the transformation occurs as people transition from being People of the Subordinate Self to People of the Responsible Self.

Trumpism, on my theory, is an inevitable result of a top-down transition to industrial capitalism where people are shuffled around into factories, promised life-time employment, kept shuttered up in labor unions, kept quiet with entitlements, educated in government child-custodial facilities, and protected from unemployment and de-skilling by social engineering programs run by the elite rather than by mutual-aid societies run by the people themselves.

Sooner or later, under the top-down system, the elite is going to make a mistake and will not have foreseen some social, economic, or cultural development, and the still-subordinate people are going to wake up and find out that their kind and compassionate political elite has not compassionately provided for them. In the particular case of the Trumpkins the white working class that was taught to expect a prosperous future by sitting back and following orders from its betters has woken up to find that their betters lied. The good old days of good jobs at good wages in the industrial sector are gone, never to return, and the skills that sustained the white working class half a century ago are no longer valuable.

Now, if the white working class had been raised to the culture of the responsible self they would never have got into this situation. They would never have believed in the lie of permanent lifetime employment. They would not have joined labor unions that ended up looting the companies they organized into bankruptcy. And when the world started to move on from Taylorist manufacturing the white working class would have moved on too. But they didn't. They believed the lies told them by the political left; they enjoyed their moment in the sun as political power forced prosperity on them for a season. And now they are angry; of course they are.

My theory of life, the universe, and everything, is that the old country way of "traditional values" was not in fact traditional values, because it was not self-conscious about values. People lived the way they had always done because that is what they did. They lived under a powerful lord as his serfs and underlings. And they worshipped terrible gods that might punish them for nothing. The worst thing was to change; that would almost certainly end in disaster. These people were People of the Subordinate Self.

But starting about 3,000 years ago, in and around cities and towns, people started to change. They started to live and work in a market economy, because that is what people do in towns. And they started to believe in a new kind of God, that ruled over an understandable world and dispensed not divine power but divine justice. They started to believe that to thrive they had to change and adjust to the changes in the market. They started to believe that they were responsible for their lives, and were responsible for doing something about it. These people were People of the Responsible Self.

Pretty obviously, these People of the Responsible Self are not going to wake up one day and say "we was robbed." Because they never would have gone to sleep. Of course they would not have done a lot of things. They would not have voted for politicians to loot other people to give them money for pensions. They would not have sat by while child education went from bad to worse. They would have voted out corrupt politicians on principle, never mind whether they were "ours" or "theirs."

But now our globalist leaders are shocked, shocked that the people they anesthetized a generation ago and more have woken up with a fearful headache. How could their rational secular governance have gone wrong? The science!

Yep. It's not just the white working class that has been living in the dream world. Hello ruling class! This is the future that you created with your top-down politics. You sowed the wind and now you are reaping the whirlwind. Get used to it.

And as for the science, it has been telling us for over a half century that top-down bureaucratic rule cannot work because there just isn't enough bandwidth in bureaucratic rule to fix problems in real time. Only the market can do that, and even then it typically does it with a nasty recession. But at least the recession is better than what they are experiencing in Bolivarian socialist Venezuela.

Jonathan Haidt's Nationalists and Globalists: Who are the Real Authoritarians?

In the turmoil of Brexit and Trump political intellectuals are trying to understand what is happening. So Jonathan Haidt writes in The American Interest that we must think of the warring sides as Nationalists and Globalists. He writes that

I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists.

I will propose that the opposite is true, that the problem is the authoritarian tendencies of the globalists.

Here is how Jonathan Haidt sets this up. He refers to the World Values Survey that tells a story about how people socialize to the modern capitalist global economy.

[F]irst, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.

Yes. Well. That's how liberals look at it, because it validates their welfare-state-run-by-liberals world view. And about that business of individual rights and protections "for everyone." Can you spell "authoritarian?"

And it is not true that people move away from traditional values as they industrialize. In fact they move from pagan and world-of-spirits religions to the Axial Age religions, most notably Christianity. Then, after they have mastered life in the city, then they start to shed their religion and the cultural traditions of Axial Age religion.

My world view says

First, as nations industrialize people start to move away from "subordinate values" where the name of the game is finding a powerful patron, from a pantheon of power-driven gods or a warrior lord or a labor union boss or a precinct captain, to "responsible values" championed by the Axial Age religions, where people are open to adapting themselves to the needs of other people and taking on the responsibility of serving others in order to serve themselves. Second, as they grow wealthier and move into the service sector they start to move from "responsible values"  to "creative values". In particular, many of these people of the creative self find in themselves a vocation to order around the people of the responsible self in order to force them to fund government programs to "emancipate" and "liberate" the remnant population of people of the subordinate self. Which they usually fail to do.

And when the plans of the creative elite fail to produce the requisite result the elite blames racists and xenophobes and redoubles its efforts to extend rights and protections through free-stuff government programs. And the elite encourages race-based divisive politics in the remnant population of the subordinate self and gender-based divisive politics in the creative elite in order to retain their grip on political power.

If the world view proposed by Jonathan Haidt above has relevance it would recognize that an evolved elite cannot really expect the middle ground of people that have come up from survival values to be enthusiastic about transitioning into "self-expression" and "emancipative values," and these folks probably should not be poked in the ribs about their backwardness and bigotry and racism and sexism and homophobia. The elite would realize that these people and their children would come to those values in due course and that it would be unjust and wrong to marginalize them for values that, for people in their stage of cultural evolution, are perfectly valid and appropriate.

But there is another thing to consider, one that the global elite really hasn't thought about. It is the old question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes -- who will guard the guardians? It is all very well to have an elite of creative caring experts busily extending emancipation and protection to everyone, according to their lights. But who will correct them when they make a mistake? And everyone makes mistakes. And who will punish them when they are corrupt? If you give people the power to emancipate and protect the world, but power corrupts, as the saying goes, and if you give people the opportunity to feather their beds with public funds they will usually do it. Look at the folks presently building and operating wind farms. Oh yes, wind and solar are going to save the planet. But meanwhile a well-connected elite is making a bundle in grants and subsidies and the average person is paying a bundle in increased energy costs. Is there anyone that can not see a problem here?

The way that the global elite has set things up there is really no way for the people to vote them out of office and change the rulers. There is no legitimate channel by which ordinary people can register their cultural dissent from the global elite, and no way to correct the global elite for malfeasance in office.

You can see that in the current flap over Brexit and Trump. The fact is that the Crash of 2008 was a failure of the global elite, however you look at it. If you take the official liberal line that it was greedy bankers wot done it, then the global elite is to blame. If you take the conservative line that is was liberal housing policy designed to emancipate minorities and women into homeownership by lowering lending standards, then the global elite is to blame. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Where is the banker that went to jail, if you are a liberal? Or, where is the political activist that went to jail, if you are a conservative?

Here's an issue. How come the global experts haven't been able to restart the economy at full speed in the eight years since the Crash? Is this "bad luck" or does it tell us that the global elite really don't have a clue?

Here's another issue. Supposing the World Values Survey approach is right and people move from "traditional values" and "survival values" to "secular rational" and "self-expression" values. Isn't it rather pushing it to import tens of millions of people into Europe and the US who are right at the starting gate in the values progression? Won'r this influx of people swing the cultural balance significantly towards the less advanced cultural context and "turn back the clock?" Do not the secular rationalists realize that this might be a bit of a problem, from their point of view?

Or, to put it less charitably, do not US liberals see a problem in importing a ton of Muslims with their traditional approach to women and gays? Let alone dealing with disaffected Black Lives Matter people that are regressing to a naked racist program (survival values anyone) and wanting to curb the police that ineffectively police the black areas of America's cities? Liberals tend to think of conservative Christians and right-wing extremists as the only thing between us and the millennium. But conservative Christians and right-wing extremists really only want to be left alone and not dragged into liberal plans to march in double-time along the arc of history towards justice, especially since this march to the future looks profoundly like straight-up injustice to them.

And that brings us to the final point. According to the liberal World Values Survey view, the educated cosmopolitans "embrace diversity." That is a lie. The educated elite demands that the rest of us embrace their particular cultural values and abandon our more traditional values forthwith. That is why my liberal friend muttered about "hate" and "xenophobia" last week. If you don't get on the team with gay marriage right now you are a hater. If you don't get on board with large-scale migration then you are a xenophobe. This doesn't sound like an embrace of diversity to me. It sounds like an authoritarian program of cultural imperialism, and you will be made to care.

But no. It is the nationalists who are the authoritarians. Sez the global elite.

Here is reality. Globalization is great for the global elite; they and their children get to traipse around the world from gig to gig, and for moral release, they get to help the marginalized and the underprivileged with other peoples' money. Globalization has brought billions of the world's poor out of indigence. Globalization is also good for people that have been able to migrate to western countries and pick up the work that ordinary western people don't want to do. But globalization is not so great for the people in the middle, because they are being forced to raise their game from being subordinate factory workers and office workers with lifetime tenure to become creative workers that must reinvent themselves all the time.

For some reason, the global elite has been blind to the effect of all this on the people in the middle who had become used to "good jobs at good wages" and all the thumbs on the political scales that helped them in the past. It stands to reason that the global elite should pay for their mistake, for they have been thoughtless authoritarians that did not consider the possibility of error. They did not consider that there might be glitches in their program, as would be natural in any human endeavor. And they certainly did not consider that their whole program might be folly.

As Dr. No told James Bond. You are a fool Mr. Bond, and a fool must pay for his folly.

My Solution to the Race Problem

So here we are, fifty years after the Civil Rights Era, and African-Americans are mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.

How is this possible? Kindly liberals have spent the last half century battling the racists and thinking about nothing except America’s race problem and its legacy of slavery and racism, How is it possible, after all the wonderful programs to empower people, to fight ordinary racism, institutional racism, hidden racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and every other kind of pejorative that liberals bestow upon the “other” with remarkable facility?

Is the answer that we must redouble our efforts, that racism is like a weed, that has still not died off after 50 years of the application of liberal weedkiller, and that now we need to increase the strength of the weedkiller?

Or is it possible that the problem is not the racist weed, but the very approach the liberals have used, the idea that the application of political force can change minds and lives. Could it be possible that apart from the most egregious situations of exploitations, oppressions, and marginalizations, political power and government force are not the answer, that apart from the removal of the most egregious obstacles to ordinary human flourishing, political power and government programs cannot raise people up from slavery to freedom?

Now I have just about finished a book that is a translation of a number of lectures on Hegel given in the 1930s by Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Some time ago I read that this books was once the bible of mid-20th-century lefties like Sartre and the rest of the Frenchie lefties like Lacan and Althusser. So I knew I had to read it. I don’t know what Hegel really wrote -- maybe I’ll read the Phenomenology straight from the horse's mouth and get a different angle on it and report on it. But I do think that I understand what Kojève has to say about Hegel, in particular about Hegel’s famous Master and Slave narrative.

In the original German, Master is “Herr” which is a word with multiple meanings, including lord. So when we talk about “Mastery” we are talking about the German “Herrschaft” which means lordship and very likely more. The German for Slave is “Knecht.” Again, this must have multiple meanings and connotations for a German. My own relation to the word is in Wagner’s Die Walküre, where Wotan dispatches Hunding, brutish husband of our darling Sieglinde, with a word: “Knecht.” You can tell from Wotan's tone that Knecht is not a good place to be.

Now Hegel’s Master and Slave narrative begins with two warriors confronting each other in the Fight to the Death, because that is the only way to compel Recognition from the other. Slavery begins with one of the fighters deciding not to fight to the death and accept Slavery instead of death.

Horrors, you may say, and you may be right. But all is not lost for the Slave. For now the Slave must work, and in his Work he learns how to transform the world, while the Master just reposes on his masterful power and learns nothing. And in transforming the world the Slave slowly attains to Freedom.

Now, the original Fight to the Death is a struggle not just for Mastery but for Recognition, and the Slave loses the initial struggle for Recognition when he loses the Fight to the Death. But as he works for the Master and learns how to transform the world he starts to earn Recognition from other Slaves and eventually from the Master. It is his Work that achieves this Freedom and Recognition.

Now look what has happened with African Americans. It is not a pretty story.

Let us go back to the Civil War. The African American slaves got their freedom, but not really through their Work or even their Fight to the Death, although Frederick Douglass gave a pretty good impression of it when he was sent to a slavebreaker and fought him to a standstill. The slaves got freedom handed to them on a plate by the North; they were, in my concept, merely the little darlings, the political favorites of the ruling class, or perhaps merely an excuse to beat up on the South. After the war the Republicans sent a bunch of carpetbaggers and scalawags down to the South to keep things honest, and the freedmen were grateful and voted for the Republicans, but didn't get to really experience Freedom. And ten years after the Civil War the Republicans abandoned the freedmen to the tender mercies of the South and Jim Crow. In the century that followed African Americans struggled and worked in near Slavery, and then rallied the non-violent politics of Reverend Martin Luther King.

The Civil Rights Acts were a stunning victory for African Americans, but was it a Recognition for a century of Work or merely a political victory that depended on a political alliance between white liberals and African Americans?

After the Civil Rights era, liberals told African Americans that the need for Work was over. All they had to do was plight their troth with the Democratic Party and all their worries would be over, as liberals would fight in their corner for peace and justice. Bad move. Because the struggle of the previous century, since African Americans were freed from Slavery, went up in smoke. You don’t get Recognition and respect from having a powerful patron, or Master. You get it because of your Work, your track record in transforming nature and understanding the world. At least that's what Hegel, interpreted by Kojève, thought.

So today we have African Americans in a fine rage, ready like the warriors of old to achieve Recognition through a Fight to the Death with the police, and Iḿ not surprised. All the promises and the hopes of 50 years seem to have added up to bupkis. Even the election of America's First Black President hasn't changed things. In the new black activism there is, alas, no thought of Work, of achieving Freedom by Work and understanding and transforming the world. And indeed out in the world we normals sneer at African Americans for their dependent status as virtual Slaves on the liberal plantation. What can there be of respect or Recognition for people that have relapsed back into Slavery after all the struggles following on their enslavement in the tribal wars of West Africa, their deportation beyond the seas to the Americas, their centuries of slave labor? At this point, what difference does it make? Oops. At this point, what was the point of all the struggle and the heartache if it ends as dependency as the convenient little darlings of the liberals providing the votes for them to acquire political power and boss everyone else around?

And how long will African Americans stay the little darlings of the liberals? Until liberals don't need African American votes any more, or liberals fall from power to the Trumpification of America? Or the money runs out and Social Security and Medicare get first dibs on the reduced revenues?

The solution to the rage and the anger of black people is obvious. All the politics of the last 50 years has done nothing for African Americans, except keep them cunningly separated from the rest of America. So African Americans must start over. They must escape from the liberal plantation and devote themselves to Work and accept that the last 50 years were wasted in dependence as little darlings of the liberals, and that Day One is right now, as the First Black President leaves office having conclusively proved that empowerment through politics and quotas and diversity and political dealmaking is no Freedom at all, but a renewed descent into Slavery.

And the time is running out. Already the South and East Asian immigrants of the last half century are thriving so well that they are demolishing the Jews when it comes to getting into non-diversity universities like Caltech. And meanwhile elite universities have to enforce an Asian quota to keep the Asians down. It is not African Americans that you see doing the dirty construction jobs around Seattle, but Hispanics. I don’t know how the Black Lives Matter movement is going down with Hispanics and Asians, but I suspect that they are coming alive to the fact that the evil policemen whose lives are ruined by supposedly wiping out African Americans are frequently Hispanics and Asians. It complicates liberal race politics when policemen are no longer the stereotypical Southern racists with cattle prods. He who lives by the race card will die by the race card.

But I don't believe that the anger of Black Lives Matter is the whole story of non-white America. That's because when I go to Florida to accompany Lady Marjorie on her trips to care for her mother I interact with the hardworking aides. These aides, non-whites all, are mostly Bible-believing Christians. The black security guard down at the front desk is reading a religious tract on his smartphone. These people are doing Work, and they are all on the road to the middle class, if we give them half a chance. If only we can stop the community organizers from angrying them up and turning them into political cannon fodder.

Of course, Hegel's Master and Slave narrative basically validates the bourgeois narrative, that the way to the future is by serving other people not dominating other people. But the Educated Youth of 1848 rejected the bourgeois narrative of service and Work and returned to the age-old narrative of the Fight to the Death and domination.

All I can say is that the Fight to the Death narrative has failed every time that the Educated Youth of 1848 has tried it. Usually, it has failed for the very people they were trying to help.

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.