Republican Rebirth: Is It That Simple?

Jon Gabriel is the guy with the evergreen tweet: "My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing." He's head of Ricochet.

Now he has written that the Republican base has burned the party down and given it to a guy that isn't a conservative, let alone a Republican.

OK, pal, but what do you propose?

It will take an army of forward-thinking leaders to build a party that welcomes conservatives — an army motivated by clear ideas and concrete action. Unlike the recommendations of the 2012 autopsy, what’s needed is not a Beltway-centric push for round 932 of comprehensive immigration reform, but a full-spectrum return to the small-R republican ideals this nation was founded upon.

Now, I would say that the problem Republicans and conservatives have faced over the 25 years since the end of Reagan is that there just aren't enough people in America that believe in the small-R republican ideals this country was founded upon.

I'd say that the Republican debacle occurred because party leaders understood that small-government politics only gets you so far. Until you start talking about reforming Social Security around people that have been paying payroll taxes for the past 30 years. Until you start talking to sixtyish women with end-of-life mothers. Until you start talking to parents getting "free" education for their children. Then you are out to lunch because people are not ready to give up on Social Security, Medicare, and government education.

People will not give up on their Precious. Not yet.

On the other hand far too many people think about politics as a rational discussion of the issues. It is not. Modern politics is about the anger of the dispossessed against the power of the ruling class.

When the dispossessed get angry about the injustice they experience (real or imagined, it doesn't matter) they act on their anger. So the white working class is burning down the Republican Party. Just as Black Lives Matter is burning down the cities. Both groups are mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.

Now you can say to the white working class: Sorry chum, but the good old days of good jobs at good wages are over. Today you have to hustle for a buck. It's a global world and you have to figure out how to thrive in it. On. Your. Own. Your problem ain't gonna be solved by some chap promising to bring jobs to you, or to punish the Chinese or evil corporations outsourcing. But a politician cannot get votes by telling people the facts of life. He gets votes by telling people what they want to hear.

Now you can say to African Americans: sorry homeys, but the First Black President ain't gonna solve your problems. In fact all the civil rights and diversity in the world is not going to do it for you, not after the blatant Jim Crow laws have been washed away. It's a cold hard whiteboy world out there, whether the white boys are actual white racist cops killing homeboys or South Asians pouring into Amazon or East Asians taking all the places at Caltech. But a politician cannot get votes by telling people the facts of life. He gets votes by telling people what they want to know.

And so on.

That is why the world doesn't go from sensible reform to sensible reform, but lurches instead from revolution to conquest to disaster. People get angry and decide to burn the place down rather than compose their differences.

But usually burning the place down doesn't help, except by hastening the end. So the Ghost Shirt movement in the western plains didn't save the Plains Indians. So the Boxers didn't save China from the western imperialists. So the Bolsheviks didn't make a better Russia.

The Maoists burned down China, just to make it fair. But now China is exploding with economic growth, now that the Commies are permitting consensual capitalist acts between adults. Hmm, what a concept.

I don't like this. I don't think it ought to be that the way to solve the problems of a nation is to burn the old ways to the ground and then start to build, and finally succeed after a couple of failed tries.

Nobody wants to hear that, least of all voters at election time.

So, assuming that Donald Trump goes down to defeat, as "everyone" expects, we won't rebuild the party with a bunch of "forward-looking thinkers." It ain't gonna be that easy.

Before a new party can be built on the ruins of the old many conceits and hopes will have to be ground into dust. Only when people give up keeping their Precious will we be ready for a rebirth of freedom.

And frankly I don't have a clue what the new Republican Party will look like.

"I Would 'Twere Bedtime, and All Well"

This season conservatives feel like we are staring into the abyss. And there's a temptation to wish it all away, and say, as Falstaff said to Prince Hal right before the battle: "I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well."

It's a real temptation. To wish it all over. Think about it. The Republican base is angry. The white working class has come storming into the GOP with Trump. African Americans are angry that the First Black President turned out to be a complete bust. Feminists are determined to wipe out the rapists and the patriarchs. Gays are determined to wipe out the haters. Liberals are determined to stand against the xenophobes.

We moderns and globalists have a myth that everything can be resolved by rational discussion and the scientific advice of the experts. Alas, the experts are the bribed apologists of some special interest. And nobody can ever agree on the rational response to the current crisis.

So everything has to be determined by anger and force. This is hard to understand, but that is the way it has always been. in War Before Civilization the primitive tribes ran constant border wars featuring raids and massacres, but they didn't experience it as a rational way to maintain the borders and food supplies. Their wars were "caused" by cross-border insults, or the wrath of the gods.

So it is with us. We have our wars, that used to be about princely honor, then about national honor, and now about wars to save the world from fascism, communism, Islamism. That's when we are not fighting to save the world from environmental degradation, the ozone hole, or climate change.

And our local wars, that used to be between the king and his barons -- that's what Falstaff and Prince Hal were doing -- are now about class wars, race wars, and the various wars led by our modern barons of activism on behalf of marginalized people everywhere.

My point is that all the angry people here in the US want the government to put its thumb on the scales of justice for their benefit. The Republican base wants -- yes what do we want, exactly, beyond fighting back against Obama? The white working class wants the good old days of "good jobs at good wages" for graduating from high school, which are gone forever. African Americans want -- yes what do they want? We know what the elite Marxist lefty Black Lives Matter wants, but that will lead to nothing but misery. And African Americans got civil rights half a century ago. Feminists? They got what they want decades ago, only what they wanted didn't really pan out, so now they want more of it. Gender benders? They are swinging a lot of elite cultural weight but none of it will make them happy, because to get off the main stream of ordinary human sexual reproduction is to descend into a maelstrom of misery.

We conservatives can see, after a Trump failure, a Supreme Court that will roll back the First Amendment and make it illegal to criticize the Clintons and roll back the Second Amendment to make it illegal to protect your family. And more big government solutions to health care and education that will only make things worse.

But really, that's the way the world works. It doesn't get fixed by rational discussion and the timely advice of the experts. The world works with one mess followed by another.

We conservatives like to think that with some sensible reform and roll-back of big government excess we can return to a bourgeois world of responsible cooperation. We have been rehearsing this dream for half a century and more, but really, the world doesn't work like that. Instead the big government model will go on from one lurch to another until the whole thing collapses. And then something will emerge out of the ruins that nobody expected or planned for, something that completely confounds the experts and the activists.

Sorry, Jack Falstaff. Your hope for a quick fix and home by bedtime is not the way the world works. It is always much messier than that.

And we had better get used to the world as it really is.

Do You Want Your Corporate Employer to Pay More Taxes?

Aside from the the fun and games about whether Donald Trump told gun owners to cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war, there is the difference in economic policy between Trump and Clinton.

Trump has just released an economic plan that calls for a reduction in corporate income taxes to 15% -- although it sounds a bit more complicated than that.

This is probably a no idea. Most other first world nations have a corporate income tax rate more like 15% while the nominal rate in the US is 35% for federal corporate income tax.

Hillary Clinton claims that Trump's plan is "tax breaks for corporations."

I'd say that this is an argument we need to have, on the merits. Do the American people want corporations to be tax farmed by government or do they want corporations to be lightly taxed so they can make more money, create more jobs and pay their employees more?

Now maybe Donald Trump can make that argument or maybe he can't. But the science is settled. The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years occurred because of innovations that government failed to smother in their cradles.

The idea put out by progressives that government should pick winners and losers and fight inequality is economic rubbish. Everywhere that equality politics has been practiced it has resulted in more inequality. That's because whatever government says it is doing, or thinks it is doing, it always ends up rewarding its supporters. And that means that the supporters have to pay less attention to what the market is telling them to do in the way of producing for the consumers and more attention to what government is telling them in the way of signing up for free stuff.

The basic fact of our economic system is that government has succeeded beyond the dreams of the 1848 radicals in using corporations as government ATMs and tax collectors. And the corporate income tax is the least of it. Right now, in FY 2016 government, federal, state, and local, is collecting about 11 percent of GDP in individual income taxes and 10 percent GDP in social insurance taxes like the federal FICA tax. Nearly all of that money is stripped off the wages of US workers by deductions from worker paychecks. In other words the government uses employers as tax collectors to strip workers of about 20 percent of their wages before they even see the money.

By the way, the corporate income tax, federal and state, comes in at about 1.9 percent of GDP.

Now just imagine that the 20 percent GDP was not conveniently collected by employers for the government and was paid directly once a year to the government by taxpayers. What do you think would happen? I must admit that I just can't imagine. And I don't want to say what I think might happen because Democratic operatives with bylines might suggest that I am inciting violence and I wouldn't like that.

If you want to get mad at corporations why don't you get mad at them for acting as the government's tax collectors, where they are creaming 20 percent off the top to give to government. Because the 1.9 percent that they are paying in corporate income tax is just penny-ante stuff. But it sure keeps a lot of lobbyists trying to buy loopholes from the politicians.

I say let's abolish the corporate income tax and pray for jobs. That is certainly a lot more rational that electing Hillary Clinton, the crony capitalist enabler, and hoping for better times.

Mob vs. Snob: Let's See If I Understand This

Back in the post revolutionary period, writes Peter Lee, Alexander Hamilton was the guy that saw a critical need for the young United States. He needed to keep the loyalty of the economic elite bound to the new United States. After all, the rebellion of the colonies was based on the merchant elite becoming separated from the British homeland, and not backing the Brits 100% in the Revolutionary War.

Lee calls Hamilton's policy Mob vs. Snob.

So Hamilton's economic policy, from the Feds picking up the state debts at par to the Bank of the United States and the industrial policy, put the US government and the rich together like bacon and eggs.

It was the division of the southern and northern elites that led to the secession of the southern states, so that it took a Civil War force the southern states back into the Union.

These days the elite doesn't worry so much about secession as about runaway white populism. So the elite has formed an over-under coalition with non-white groups to form a united front against the disaffected middle class whites.

That's why the liberal elites have suddenly warmed to Hamilton, according to Lee. It was Hamilton that led the US forces against post-revolution rebellions like Shay's Rebellion. This was the elite putting down a troublesome mob.

A guy like that suddenly looks attractive to a liberal elite alarmed by the Tea Party and "Lumpenführer" Trump. Hey, the GOP elite thought that Hispanic-friendly Rubio, Bush, and Cruz would square the circle between Hispanics and whites. Instead they failed and:

White power, as I put it, was left lying in the streets…and Donald Trump picked it up.

Oops! That wasn't supposed to happen. It has scrambled the Baldrick's Cunning Plan of the US elite and reversed, at least for a moment, the elite plan to let the white working class die of despair while the elite bought the support of the rising non-white groups with pretty baubles while keeping its power and wealth and influence safe from the stirrings of white rebellion.

So that is why the elite wants to revive Hamilton's Mob vs. Snob politics on the theory that it should make the annoying Trumpian mob go away.

But there is a problem. The elite politics of Hamilton was founded on Hamilton's genius. He had worked in the world; he had seen a war financed; he knew about Dutch finance and how to tend to the health of the state.

But our current elite is soft and foolish. It sought to teach the Middle East a lesson and yet threw away its victory; it set on a foolish real-estate boom and bust based upon a faulty credit policy of insufficient collateral and unsound borrowers. It has failed to heal the economy broken on its cheap money policies. And yet, having "barely contained disaster for the last two decades," it dares to sneer at the populism of Donald Trump. These are latecomer fans of Hamilton that do not understand Hamilton.

The success of Hamilton's policy was that his fiscal bounty for the elite ended up enriching the common man as the sound state finance of his system turned the United States into an economic powerhouse.

The failure of today's elite is that its condominium with the financial elite is not the simple windfall of Hamilton's national debt that energized the whole economy. This new deal is more the protection policy of the criminal gang. Support us and our welfare state and identity politics if you know what is good for you. That is the message for the Warren Buffets and the techno billionaires, and nobody has got the message better than PayPal billionaire Elon Musk. He has built a crony-capitalist empire with NASA-assisted SpaceX and climate-focused and subsidized Tesla.

No wonder the middle middle class is getting restless.

The only question is whether there is a real Hamilton waiting in the wings with the magic potion ready to administer to the national patient and revive its flagging spirits with a new financial and political concoction, and whether Donald Trump would know him if he saw him.

For after all, everyone was amazed when Hamilton's system blew wind into the sails of the good ship United States and set it off on a prosperous voyage for 200 years. Would today's wise men recognize a Hamiltonian genius if he walked onto the national stage?

When Ronald Reagan strode onto the national stage 36 years ago the elite knew exactly what to think. He was an "amiable dunce," and a "bellicose Cold War cowboy."  Yet he was the guy that ended the "stagflation"of the 1970s and won the Cold War without firing a shot.

It isn't clear that the elite has learned anything useful in the last 36 years. Yet it still claims the right to rule.

Let us hope that God still looks after drunks, fools, and the United States of America.

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.