Progressive Culture vs. Conservative Politics

In National Review David French makes the point that conservatives have made a decent fist of politics, but  have failed in the culture wars. Yes, the SJWs are a pest, snarling at everyone in the public square.

But the most effective progressives also happen to be among the friendliest, most engaging people you’ll meet. Even apolitical colleagues find their idealism infectious.

That’s how you get local bar associations celebrating Earth Day, or third-grade classes doing a whole semester’s worth of art projects on climate change, or corporate HR departments running extended, celebratory profiles of transgender employees. It’s the agenda, always and everywhere.

Well, yes, but.

The problem is that conservatives, or people of a conservative persuasion, do not experience their culture as a world-saving movement. We do not expect to transform the world with our conservatism. But the progressives do. They believe in saving the planet as a moral necessity. They believe that what we do to transgenders right now is hate. And they are driven to transform the world to make it safe and ethical.

Indeed the whole point of conservatism, going back to Burke, is the turn away from the idea of culture or religion or politics having a use in healing the world. The conservative idea is to heal yourself, and let the rest of the world learn from your example. The whole point of limited government is to limit the ability of government to embark on millenniarian crusades like saving the world with environmentalism and climate change.

French ends his piece with a theme from The Shawshank Redemption, the idea of "get busy living, or get busy dying." Yes, that certainly applies at the personal level. But what about at the cultural level?

The fact is that conservatives are not cultural innovators. We are the people of the responsible self and what we do is live ordinary lives that do not try to scale the heights. So the limit of what can be expected of us is to doggedly keep on living and resisting the attempts of liberals to marginalize and oppress us.

It is from the ranks of the people of the creative self that we should hope for a cultural movement away from cultural Marxism and its totalitarian combination of culture and politics.

And maybe the only way to get beyond progressive culture is for progressive culture to win and impose its totalitarian ways upon the American people so that, at some point, a genuine movement, not just of rejection but of affirmation, arises.

This movement of creative culture would start by rejecting and marginalizing the petty nabobs of progressive culture. But then it would start to celebrate something higher and better, and it would not try to do it with totalitarian methods learned from the then-modern equivalent of the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse.

This movement would rediscover my catchphrases. It would understand that government is force, and government spawns injustice with its force. So it would want to dial down government. It would recognize that politics is fighting and division, and a true creative culture could not thrive if it was based on a political movement to conquer and divide. So it would want to dial down politics. And it would understand that system is domination, and any bureaucratic system, governmental or corporate, is essentially trying to put humans into a straitjacket. So it would want to dial down big systems.

For two hundred years, conservatives have been saying that progressive enthusiasm leads to the gallows, just like the French Revolution. But progressive enthusiasts keep coming up with the idea that This Time is Different.

We are not going to solve the progressive problem by naming and shaming the progressives as they always do for us. We are not going to solve the progressive problem when the progressives wake up from their progressive dream. Because that is something they will never do.

We must wait and hope for a new movement, a new generation like the generation of 1848 that rejected the culture of their fathers and dreamed a dream of a new world. We wait for a generation that will reject the progressive dream as a nightmare, and start to build something new finally free of the stupidity of imagining that you can build the future on the basis of force and political will.

White Privilege or White Lights-Out?

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal doesn't like the idea that Donald Trump is turning the Republican Party into a "white privilege" party.

Of course, he has a point. Donald Trump has galvanized the white working class that, according to the Washington Post, is dying of despair.

It started 50 years ago when the Democratic Party stopped being a white working-class privilege party, with union-enabling laws and social benefits for the working class, and became a race-and-gender party, pushing privilege for blacks and women with Affirmative Action, now rebranded "diversity."

And working-class whites don't like it. Here they were, the darling "working stiffs" of the FDRs and the HSTs, praised and boosted by everyone. Now the white working class is about as out of favor as white Christian conservatives or white hillbillies in Appalachia as far as the ruling class is concerned.

But "white privilege?"

Of course, nobody really knows what "white privilege" means. Its purpose is to be a left-wing pejorative that can be used to shut people up that don't agree with the liberal ruling class.

And this game has been going on, as I like to say, since Norman Lear invented Archie Bunker, the working-class white, as the poster boy for racism, sexism, and bigotry -- and "white privilege," although nobody had invented the phrase back in 1971. Or if they had, it was locked away in a drawer at Liberal HQ waiting for the right moment to be mobilized and deployed onto the front line of the political wars.

Now, I happen to think that the white working class is wrong. It's not going to be revived by Trump politics that beats up on corporations that send jobs overseas. Or that beats up on Mexico and China.

Although I do think that a sensible, limited immigration policy with no nullification for liberal sanctuary cities wouldn't hurt.

My line is that our glorious Great Enrichment is based on ruthless innovation, coming up with new ideas for products and services. And the one thing that makes it all work is to stop the government from stopping innovation by protecting the taxicab cartel from Uber or the hotel cartel from AirBnB. Etcetera.

But the Great Enrichment means that everywhere, all the time, people are finding that their skills are losing value. There is no safe harbor, no guarantee of a job for life. Not unless you have access to the sweet use of government force.

It's natural that people would try to get the government to beat up on the emerging competition. That's the natural instinct of humans facing a threat since the dawn of time.

But our modern economy is based on the idea that you don't fight the market. Because the market is the collective will of millions of producers and consumers, far more authentic and honest than the lying words of politicians and activists.

So yes. Trump does represent "white privilege." Just as Obama represents black privilege, using government force to privilege African Americans. And Clinton represents female privilege, using government force to privilege female Americans.

And their supporters are all asking for something that they should be not asking for. They want government to put its thumb on the scales of justice to favor them and their kind.

And that is wrong. Whether the white working class does it or liberal SJWs do it, or anyone else does it.

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.