Trump is Finished, says the Smart Set

I always use Peggy Noonan as the bellwether of received elite opinion. She always knows where the middle is.

So, Peggy's column this week in The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump is written off as finished. Peggy is probably right. Unless she isn't.

Then there is my friend that says she had a dream about Donald Trump and he seemed like a nice man.

All I know is that liberals seem to be in a hurry, pushing their power with executive action and regulations and "Dear Colleague" letters as if there was no tomorrow. Why are they in such a hurry?

So what does it all mean? The simple answer is that We Don't Know. All we know is the ruling class is facing a bit of a headwind on its legitimacy. Peggy Noonan writes that "there has been zero reflection on the part of Republican leaders on how much the base’s views differ from theirs and what to do about it." And she is right.

But what about the Democratic Party and its base? The answer is, of course, that the Democratic base's views never get a word in edgeways, if you mean blacks, Hispanics, single women, and young people. The Democratic Party, like the left since 1848, is a cadre of the intellectual elite. It wants to divert the development of the world from embourgoisment to its cult of the creative. It does not like the idea of a responsible people in the city working to make products and services for other people. It wants to create a world fit for cultural creatives to live in, and anyone that disagrees is a racist, sexist bigot.

Because this is a policy of conquest it can only end in victory or defeat. Either we the people will succumb to this secular establishment of religion enforced by the government's men with guns, or we the people will rebel and destroy it.

There is no doubt that Donald Trump is an imperfect vehicle for a movement of rebellion. Except for one thing: he has shown that you can break the taboos of political correctness and live to tell the tale.

But author Sarah Hoyt tells us the real story. We are living through a period in history where we are seeing the "factors contributing to" the 'causes leading to' before the map gets all arrowy and scary." In other words this is not the beginning of the end; it is not even the end of the beginning. We are at the beginning of the beginning of the end of the post-World War II world. And that means that you need to be alert and connected and flexible and ready for the unexpected and the unanticipated.

In other words, don't be a "little darling" of the ruling class. It never ends well for the little darlings of the ruling class.

And that, for me, is the one little problem with the enthusiasts for Donald Trump. No politician is going to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. Not Reagan, not Trump, and not Clinton. Politics always ends in tears. I look at the faces behind Trump at a Trump rally and see ordinary middle-class Americans. But Trump is not going to solve their problems.

But how do we solve our problems? It's a problem, because that the only way to dry the tears of yesterday's politics is with the heat of more politics, or the politics-by-other-means of civil war.

And whether or not Trump is finished, the extralegal governance of our liberal ruling class is going to throw up another Trump, because government is injustice and the more government, the more injustice.

And the more injustice, the more chance of rebellion.

Used to be that Men were Fighters and Women were Lovers

I just woke up in the middle of the night and realized, again, how topsy-turvy this world has become.

We all know that men are fighters and women are lovers. That's the way it is because in the good old days men defended the borders from the tribe next door and the women grew the food and raised the children.

Of course, in our modern era very few men are needed to be warriors; that's because the modern nation state is much bigger than the old hunter-gatherer or horticultural tribe, and its borders are miles away from the average person. Only a few specialized warriors are needed to protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic.

So men have had to change. Instead of being actual warriors, or even obedient soldiers, they are now "road warriors" and the obedient rank-and file in the factory or the office. So nothing has changed.

Now, also, women's lives are no longer completely consumed by growing gardens and birthing the four or so children that were needed to fledge a couple of children out of the nest. Nor are women dying like they used to in childbirth. So women have gone to work in the labor force, like men. They have tended to gravitate towards work that suits a woman's temperament: jobs with lots of human interaction and jobs caring for people in health care and such.

But some people aren't satisfied with this. They want women to be fighters and men to be lovers.

And so we have the notion of women fighting to take their place in the corporate suite, "breaking the glass ceiling" and stuff. And we have the notion floated by the gay mafia of "love conquers hate." I suppose it makes sense, because gays, in my personal experience, tend to prefer a life with a little less fighting and a little more caring.

And of course because liberals run the culture we are being forced to celebrate the idea of women as fighters and men as lovers. But this is rubbish.

Let us allow the camel's nose under the tent. In our modern world, it is not essential that all men be fighters and all women be lovers and carers. We don't need every man ready to run to the borders to stop the latest raid from the next tribe over. And we don't need every woman as a baby-making machine making up for all the perils of child-birth and child-raising in the dangerous world where, for example, a chimp might grab hold of your little brother while you weren't looking. We can afford to have men getting into loving, even getting out of heterosexual relationships and preferring the childless life of artistical black in the local artist district. And we can deal with women that want to step out into the world of business and its simulation of actual combat in the fight for market share.

Let's face it; men make lousy lovers. And women make lousy fighters. And I don't think it would be a very good idea if too many people started trying to do something they are not good at.

Back when I was working for an engineering firm I was put on a committee, in 1990, to recommend a corporate data network. But I found pretty quickly that I had to get up pretty early in the morning to deal with the top exec who chaired the committee. He was a real energy bunny and could beat me on just about anything. So I decided that I would just try and have my way on one issue, rather than oppose him across the board.

Play to your strengths, or you might lose everything.

Now I regard the present fashion to explore multiple gender identities as merely part of the whole culture of the People of the Creative Self. In this culture young people are expected to be creative, to break out of the mold and imagine something that nobody else has thought or done. Peter Thiel's interview question encapsulates this perfectly: What do you know that other people think isn't so? Do you have the germ of a creative idea, or the personality that can deal with being creative and breaking the mold?

It needs to be said that very, very few people have the chops to do this. They can, for sure, go with some fad or enthusiasm, join a movement that advertises itself as revolutionary and iconoclastic. But very few people have the courage -- and the anti-social chops -- to do something really different and hold out against the whole world. Take the guy that invented pseudo-random carrier data communications. The physicists said it was impossible. Imagine going against the physicists! But now every cellphone uses this technology.

So we have to accept that much of what is considered creative and iconoclastic is nothing like. It is conceit masquerading as creativity. But that's OK. We humans are social animals; we go with the herd.

What I find very hard to take is that the People of the Creative Self insist that their crowd-following culture is creative. No it isn't. Not when you are not allowed to criticize the creatives. Not when anyone that disagrees with the People of the Creative Self is silenced as a racist, sexist homophobe. That is not creativity; that is just bullying.

The way to be creative is to play to your strengths, and not to listen to the crowd. If you are running with the crowd, you are probably not being creative.

And the truth is that if you are a man, your creative side will probably have something to do with fighting; if you are a woman, your creative side will probably have something to do with loving.

Just saying.

Do the Rich Control the Politicians?

It is a received notion that ever since the dawn of capitalism "the rich" have had their way with things. They can exploit workers, bribe politicians, and as for women...

Of course banks and merchants have been in bed with politicians since the birth of the nation state. That's because kings and presidents need money and credit for their armies and navies, and trade needs protection from predators and pirates.

But when the Great Enrichment got properly started 200 years ago the notable fact was that the innovative businessmen that created the new products, from cheap cotton textiles to railways and oil, were not that interested in power.

When they were done with their businesses they went into philanthropy, even the notorious railroad baron Jay Gould. Today we can say that nothing has changed except that now no billionaire worth his salt is without his very own space program.

So it is really not surprising, when reading the hacked DNC emails, to learn that the political donors and bundlers are not giving in order to control the politicians. Oh no; their needs are much more modest. All they want is a bit of stroking, and to hear from a politician that he really likes their ideas.

Here's a donor wondering if she qualifies for elite status, "the premium package of hotel rooms and V.I.P. invitations at the party’s convention in Philadelphia." But what she really wanted "was getting access to an exclusive November gathering at the White House."

Walter Russell Mead comments that this is, in a way, encouraging. People are "willing to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to political campaigns if politicians and staff will pretend to take them seriously, even for a few minutes at a time."

I suppose it must be a bit humiliating to have made millions and billions in business and realize that you are nothing to the people with political power. You realize that business success is nothing to the power of the men and women that command the men with guns. So you try to get their attention with your money.

You realize what a stunning achievement it has been for the politicians, from Marx on down, to direct the rage of the workers against their employers.

Not only do politicians milk business with taxes on everything and also milk them for contributions, but they the politicians turn around and convince the average Joe and Jane that the businessmen that employ them and pay their wages are, in fact, scoundrels!

But we shouldn't be surprised. All the politicians are doing is activating the age old rage against the tribe on the other side of the mountain, and touching off the instinct in every young man for loot and plunder. What could be easier, or more effective?

And if, after a generation of "pro-labor" legislation the big manufacturers start to go out of business as their over-paid workers and their subsidized products no longer cut it on the world markets, why that is the fault of greedy corporations and their overpaid CEOs as well. It has nothing to do with crafty politicians that forced the corporations to give wages that were too high, and benefits like defined benefit pensions that assumed that corporate profits would go on forever.

I wonder if the voters will ever tumble to the idea that the politicians have screwed them left and right and that their employers are practically saints for working day and night to make sure that their employees have a job over their heads.

The Only Program Government Knows How to Cut is Defense

I've been staring at my charts on usgovernmentspending.com for a while now. And now I can tell you what they say.

They say that government is a dab hand at wars. It can crank up defense spending into the stratosphere, cover the oceans with ships and the the sky with aluminum. It can rout out the Kaiser and the Führer.

And then it can unwind the whole thing and send the surviving kids back to college and work and wiving and thriving. Look at the chart below.

But do you know something about that chart? It shows us that government seems to be constitutionally unable to say: you know what, this government child-custodial facility thing just isn't doing the job. It was a good idea while it lasted, but now it is time to give the whole thing back to the private sector. For the children. We'll create a Teachers Veterans Administration (TVA!) to take care of the demobilized teachers, and treat their post traumatic stress disorder, but failure is failure, and we don't believe in reinforcing failure.

Yeah. That graf reads like utter folly. Who would dare to propose that we shut down the entire government education system? And yet, what good is it doing? It does a fair to middling job of educating the children of the middle class. That's because the middle class insists on it. But it is utterly failing to educate the children of the poor, and we know why. On the one hand, most people in the inner city think of education as a jobs program. And then schools are forbidden to discipline minority youths, because disparate impact.

The same applies to all the big government programs. Social Security? Imagine the economic growth if people were saving at Fidelity and Vanguard instead of sending money direct to grandpa, do not pass go. Medicare? Imagine the economic growth if middle-class women were saving for end-of-life care, and imagine the health care prices if grandma was bargain-hunting for health care the way that she bargain hunts for deals at Stein Mart.

And welfare? How about bullying the 1% to "give a little more" the way we presently suggest tax increases on the wealthy and Wall Street.

I know. This is all pie-in-the-sky until the whole system collapses and maybe not even then. Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters with free stuff. It will be ever thus.

But the one thing government cannot do, is too afraid to do, is to cut spending when it runs out of money. Greece didn't have the balls to cut all the goodies to pensioners and university freeloaders. Venezuela has let the economy collapse rather than tell its supporters to hike it up and accept less free stuff from the state.

So I propose a new catchphrase for government. If you can't turn it off, don't turn it on. Don't start a program of new delicious free stuff unless you have the balls to turn it off when the nation can't afford it.

In fact, it is pretty obvious that the only thing that government can turn off is its war machine. Government is pretty good at ramping up spending for a war, and OK at paying for it without wrecking the economy. And it is pretty good at cutting spending to the bone when the war is over, provided it doesn't try to deflate to restore its inflated currency to the pre-war parity.

So I say that until government can show that it can cut spending on social programs as easily as it can cut defense, there should be no more social spending. This proposal is just common sense. Social spending is nice, and makes us feel that we are helping the poor. But there is one thing worse than not helping the poor, and that is going Greek or Venezuelan. When the poor are in danger of starving to death.

On Rattlesnake Mountain

A couple of days ago, on my 70th birthday, Lady Marjorie and I hiked up Rattlesnake Mountain, about 30 miles east of Seattle, to Rattlesnake Ledge, where you can look out at North Bend, Washington, and the trucks coming down I-90 from Snoqualmie Pass.

Naturally, when we reached the ledge we had lunch. As everybody knows, the whole point of hiking is: Lunch. Of course, I parked myself right next to a chasm in the rock where I had to give pretty girls a hand if they didn't fancy jumping across like a guy.

But we were both amazed at the people on the trail. Apart from the white guys out for a hike together and the white girls and the odd white family, there were tons of East Asian families on the trail. And a ton of South Asians too. Many were clearly immigrants, but their children were not. I suppose that Amazon and Microsoft had let out for the day.

Oh, and there were even some African Americans on the trail, which is unusual. And one Muslim couple -- you could tell because the man was dressed American while his wife wore a proper head scarf and associated paraphernalia.

It's helpful to see Americans and future Americans out on the trail, far from a political convention or a peaceful protest or an MSM camera. There they were living their lives, out with friends and family, and passing each other on the trail in perfect amity.

When we got back to the car we fell into conversion with three California girls who wanted to see a waterfall. And I thought that California girls went out with the Beach Boys.

The point is -- apart from lunch -- that we tend to forget that while some damn politician is hard at work dividing people, capitalism is hard at work mixing them up. That's because capitalism is about two things: innovation and trust.

Well, that's not quite correct. Capitalism starts with you trying to figure out how to serve the market so you can earn a living. If you are really smart you figure out something new, something you think can work but that other people don't. You innovate, and if you are really lucky you change the world and add to the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years. But it is still worthy and honorable just to find a job that pays a decent wage.

The other thing is trust. This is not merely because trusting is a good thing, and the basis of humans as social animals. Trust is a cost reduction device and a wealth multiplication device. The more people you can trust the bigger your market.

It makes me think about the amazing disconnect in the modern world. Here we have the Great Enrichment, the absolutely amazing 3,000 percent rise in per-capita income in 200 years, born and bred from capitalism, and all fashionable people think it stinks. So we also have the most amazing reactionary political movement: socialism, progressivism, fascism; that are all harking back to the old ways: the equality of the village, the hierarchy of the feudal estate, the instinctive ties of tribe and blood. And the most advanced thinkers are supposed to be the chaps advocating Back to the Future. What's wrong with this picture?

Here we are in 2016 with the glorious choice between Trump and Clinton, between back to Fifties when the white working class had good jobs at good wages and the race/gender poisonous politics of the liberal elite.

Yet, day by day, hour by hour, capitalism is bringing people together, in work, and in consumption, and in innocent sharing of the delights of a hike followed by lunch on Rattlesnake Mountain.

Maybe there is hope for the future, after all.

Hillary's Speech: One More "Big Push" for The Narrative

A lot of people seem to think that Hillary Clinton's speech accepting the nomination for president from the Democratic Party was second rate.

Obviously, it wasn't great, but it did what it needed to do. It needed to roll out The Narrative, one more time.

What is The Narrative? It has two parts, of course. One part is that government and progressive liberals have smashed one injustice after another to enable us to work at a decent job and be protected from injustice and hardship. The other is that if you don't agree with us you don't deserve a voice, because you are a racist, sexist homophobe.

Obviously the second part of The Narrative is what really gores conservative oxen. But the first part is the one that keeps 'em coming and voting for Democrats.

Last night The Narrative was clearly pitched to women, what with all the emphasis on glass ceilings and creating a world where women can be whatever they want to be.

But how?

If we pivot to the economic part of Hillary's speech it is about government creating good jobs and good wages for people.

My primary mission as President will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States.

But how?

Clinton will reverse Citizens United, fix corporate tax breaks, big bad Wall Street, clean energy jobs, allow immigrants to stay, kick China, increase Social Security checks, and build infrastructure.

Now, here’s the thing, we’re not only going to make all these investments, we’re going to pay for every single one of them.

And here’s how: Wall Street, corporations, and the super rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes.

The funny thing is that it is Wall Street, corporations, and the super rich that provide the funding for the Democratic Party, even as the Bernie bros supply the foot-power. And we are going to tax them more? I wonder how that will work.

In the same week as the Democratic National Convention we have seen a couple of news items that puts this into relief.

First, here's news item from Bloomberg about home ownership falling to the levels of the 1960s. Actually, if you look at the graph, it shows a flattish line from the 1960s to the 1990s, a huge increase from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, followed by a huge decrease from the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s that erases the gains of the previous ten years. So, the whole CRA/Fannie/Freddie effort to lower loan origination standards to help inner-city residents was a complete wash. What goes up must come down.

Then, here's an opinion item about the concerns of construction company CEOs and CFOs. Do they care about taxes and regulation? No, their big concern is the shortage of skilled labor, "welders, carpenters, HVAC technicians." The article goes on to talk about the lack of vocational training and the "boys adrift" problem.

So. What does this tell us. My point is that when government gets the bit between its teeth it can repipe the plumbing of the economy. But it cannot force outcomes.

The government can force money into housing. So it pushed a bunch of lower-income people into their own homes for a season. But now the poor bloody millennials can't afford a house and the lower-income people are back to renting.

The government can force money into favoring the education of girls and make them all into college graduates. But it doesn't think about what making education girl-friendly does to boys.

The speech of Hillary Clinton gave no nod at all to the damage government does. In her Narrative government is the wonderful beneficent Oz breaking down barriers and making us Stronger Together. Nothing about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

That's why I bang away with my talking points: Government is Force, Politics is Violence, System is Domination, Government is Injustice.

Until the ruling class starts to think seriously about the damage its rule has done, the only thing ordinary people can do is vote to tear it all down.

Because the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years was from innovation, not from government, and we have seen in the last ten years a perfect illustration of this. Government and the ruling class have forced "clean energy jobs" on us as a solution to climate change. It has been a disaster. Meanwhile, completely unheralded and unsung, the "fossil fuel industry" has conducted the innovative fracking revolution with hard work on horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of rock around well bores. The result of the fracking revolution is a 50 percent drop in energy prices.

Obviously the ruling class will not change its mind until it has been well and truly humiliated, again and again. Because until then the ruling class will not see that it has a problem.

The 2016 Election is a Test

One of my recurrent themes is that the Obama "fundamental change" strategy is not just wrong from a conservative point of view, because it re-feudalizes the American people and a lot more besides.

No, my argument is that, from the point of view of liberals themselves, you don't want to push the liberal agenda Obama-style, by a partisan vote on Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, by executive actions, by Dear Colleague letters on campus rape and transgender bathrooms, by Supreme Court ukases on gay marriage.

Why? Because government is injustice, at least to the people on the receiving end of government force.

Now when you are on the receiving end of force you have the options of Hegel's Master/Slave Fight to the Death. You can fight or you can surrender. But when you surrender you are not entering into consensus with the victor; you are just bowing to his superior force, for now.

That is why Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that to pass a program like Medicare you needed a 70-30 bipartisan vote in the Senate. The point is that to make a program part of America rather than just the Democrat agenda you needed the opposition, or at least a part of the opposition, to sign off on the bill. You needed the appearance of consensus.

When you pass transformative bills like Obamacare without a single Republican vote and you push your agenda with unilateral executive or regulatory actions, and you use your cultural hegemony to pass your agenda on abortion or gay marriage through the aristocratic branch of government, the US Supreme Court, you are pursuing a strategic policy of force. You are saying, whether you know it or not, that your power play is irreversible, that the peasants better shut up and tug their forelocks or else.

My theory is that all government action, particularly action that does not have the penumbra of "consensus," provokes a head of rebellion. Because government is force, because government is injustice. We certainly saw how liberals experienced government as injustice when the Bush administration was in power. It inspired them to rise up and elect the First Black President and the most Democratic Congress since 1964.

But now we have the most Republican Congress since 1928. Could that be because the Obama administration made no effort to cobble together bipartisan "consensus" for its marquee legislation? Could that be because the Obama administration weaponized the IRS against the Tea Party groups?

We conservatives have made much of the cultural Marxist strategy of the Frankfurt School, featuring Antonio Gramsci's march through the institutions and Herbert Marcuse's intolerant tolerance. We like to characterize them as unstoppable and inevitable. But the problem with them is that they are pure power plays. They can only work in the long term if the people just lie down and surrender in the Hegelian Master/Slave Fight to the Death. In the long term, though, it is also possible that the people will rise up against the Masters and rebel, or through the knowledge they have acquired through their Work demand that the Masters accord them recognition.

That is why I say that the 2016 election is a test. It is a test to see whether Donald Trump's social media savvy can upend thirty years of the cultural hegemony inspired by Marcuse. Up to now, if you disagreed with liberals on anything you were branded a racist, sexist homophobe. If you disagree with gays you are a hater. If you worry about immigration, you are a xenophobe. But Trump has turned the tables on the liberals, as no conservative has been able to do since Ronald Reagan. As Newt Gingrich keeps saying: he has never seen anything like it.

Because the basic question is: will the March Through the Institutions and Political Correctness fundamentally transform our western society, or will the people rise up and destroy it?

I was out and about yesterday in Seattle as my daughter and husband and grandchildren were in town. I looked around at all the ordinary white people and thought: did all these ordinary people deserve this abuse from their educated and evolved betters?

I don't think so. But I don't know if those ordinary people will stand up rebel against their Masters and Make America Great Again.

But that's why we have elections.