The Spectre of White Identity Politics

When the young rich kids Karl Marx (son of the best lawyer in Trier) and Friedrich Engels (son of the textile firm of Ermen & Engels) wrote their Communist Manifesto they began:

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?

And so on.

But are we not now facing the spectre of white identity politics? The reason is not hard to find. Back in 1930, according to La Wik, the US was 89.8 percent white. As late as 1970, it was 87.5 percent white. But the 2010 census put whites at 72.4 percent.

Of course, this change is mainly a result of the 1965 immigration act that opened up the gates to immigration from areas other than Europe. Not to mention the elite benign neglect of illegal immigration.

Back in the 1960s, when the US was overwhelmingly white, it seemed to be a small thing to give blacks a helping hand in the job market with Affirmative Action. And anyway, as it turned out, the folks that paid for Affirmative Action were not upper-class white tolerant liberals but working class whites.

In the decades since, of course, liberals have discovered, thanks to Frankfurt School types like Herbert Marcuse, that race and gender politics is electoral gold. If you scare up blacks enough they will vote Democrat by 90-10. If you create a racial and gender spoils system, people will vote for race and gender loot. And who cares about the racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers left behind?

The answer is, of course that when the Archie Bunkers are hurting enough, from years of de-industrialization, and embattled enough, because the Democratic Coalition of the Fringes starts outvoting them, they start to see the point of identity politics. After all, blacks do it; Hispanics do it; Jews do it; women do it; gays do it. Why not us?

This is something that our liberals friends have not really thought about, bless their hearts. They think of themselves as enlightened activists battling against the patriarchy and the white-archy, just as haut bourgeois Marx and Engels saw themselves battling against the bourgeoisie for the liberation of the working class.

Liberals do not think, cannot think, that, just as Marx and Engels proposed a politics that would rain misery upon the working class, so liberal encouragement of racism in blacks and sexism in women, mixed-gender bathrooms for transgenders, would rain misery on just the people they pretend to help.

And so the result of a half-century of race and gender politics is to create a movement of white identity among people that used to think of themselves as Americans of German, Irish, British, Italian, Jewish origin.

Yes, did you know that German-Americans are the biggest US white ethnic group, at 50 million? and then Irish at about 33 million, and British merely in the 20-something range? Who knew?

Now you know the reason for my catchphrases: Government is force, Politics is division, Government is injustice. It's easy to play politics and divide up the electorate imagining that you are smart enough to manipulate all the divided groups with your superior intelligence. But government is force, and is experienced by the people on the receiving end as injustice. The more politics divides people by race and gender and the more the victors force injustice on the losers the more that the losers get angry and start to coalesce into a rebel coalition.

It is going to be much harder to put America back together again that it was to split it apart. I don't believe in the alt-right argument that America was to be willed to the British Posterity of 1790 America. It's too late for that. The slaves are here, the Germans are here, the Irish are here, the Italians are here, the Mexicans are here, and now the Chinese and the South Asian Indians are here.

Yes, but what happens next? Really, nobody has a clue. But I think we can guess that the political parties will realign along a different axis than today. And we will still have Big Government at the end of it.

Despite Univ Chicago Move, College PC Will Get Worse

Everybody is encouraged by the statement on freedom of expression sent out to entering freshmen at the University of Chicago this fall.

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

But I do not think that this will make a difference. The reason is that colleges are transforming from institutions that were primarily male to places that are predominantly female. According to the Washington Post in 2014,

Federal data show that female students became the majority in 1979 and for the past decade have accounted for about 57 percent of enrollment at degree-granting institutions. 

And that says nothing about the administrative staff at universities that appears to be predominantly female.

Conservatives like to complain that the culture of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions is all a leftist plot, yet another attempt to bury the bourgeoisie. And I am sure that it is all of that.

But I believe that the PC university is also a reflection of its femaleness.

The fact is that men are fighters; women are lovers. Men meet each other at the drinking den, and relate to each other in what I call an insult culture. The normal way of interacting with other men is to banter and verbally spar with them. An acquaintance that grew up in Worcester, Mass., implied to me that the normal man-to-man form of address back there was "yer bastard," said with the proper Boston accent.

Women relate to each other in the kaffee klatsch, where never is heard a discouraging word, except about women not present. Women have a niceness culture, even though they are as socially ruthless as men. There is no "yer bastard" between women in the kaffee klatsch.

This means that the idea of a rough-and-tumble of ideas makes complete sense to men, but not to women. To a woman safe spaces, trigger warnings, and the avoidance of controversy are just the way that things ought to be done. So it is no surprise that three women teaching a course in "Medical Humanities in the Digital Age" at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs would announce "We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change." Of course not. Good little girls do not debate; they share.

Men go to college to get credentialed, so that they can earn good money and win a high-status woman as a mate. If university becomes a kaffee klatsch, a safe space for sharing, then it won't be much use for men.

What will replace university? I suspect we already know. It is the startup culture. I know a bright young man that dropped out of college to join a Bitcoin startup. Now he's working with his buddy as a contract software developer in a "co-working space" in New York City. Startups, with their promise of fabulous loot and the fear of catastrophic failure, appeal to the warrior mind. They do not appeal to the feminine mind, and that is why women, well represented in corporate software in the days of COBOL and mainframe IBM, were not too interested when the software startup culture started in the 1980s.

The university started out as a seminary preparing second sons for the priesthood in the established church. Then the Germans turned it into a vehicle for national greatness. Then the left turned universities into secular seminaries, turning out well-born political activists.

I wonder what comes next. 

Trump Starting to Look Like a Leader

I watched some of Donald Trump's stump speech made up the road in Everett, Washington, where they make Boeing airplanes.

If you are passing by Everett, be sure to visit Boeing's Future of Flight museum and take the factory tour. You get to see the 747, 777, and 787 assembly lines, and look at the difference between 1960s manufacturing processes and 2010s processes.

You have to say that Trump has got the cojones. Imagine any recent GOP presidential nominee talking frankly about the horror of life in the black inner city. About lives wrecked by gang violence. About how the Democratic Party is the party of slavery, and the Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow. About the Republican Party being the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Oh, and Trump's going to bring jobs to the inner city and school choice too.

Yes, why haven't Republicans been saying this for the past 30 years? And why haven't Republicans been calling out black racists on race the way that Democrats like to suggest that the few cranky KKK groups are representative of the whole party? Why has the GOP spent the last 30 years cringing on race?

That's why dear old Jonah Goldberg is wrong to want to write the alt-right out of decent conservatism. Sorry Jonah, but decent conservatism is dead, because of the cringe on race. No doubt William F. Buckley, Jr, was a gentleman and was right to read the John Birch Society out of the gentlemanly conservative movement. But the proof is in the pudding. What good did it do to write the whacko-birds out of the movement?

The left has never written its whacko-birds out of the movement. Indeed, actual terrorists like Bill Ayers were rehabilitated to become the mentors of chaps like Barack Obama. And actual racists like Reverend Al Sharpton flourish and have their own TV shows.

And now Donald Trump has amazed us all by going to Mexico to meet with the president of Mexico. Who would have thunk it? Didn't Trump so infuriate the Mexicans with his meme about Mexico paying for the wall that dialogue would be impossible? Hmm. Apparently not. I dare say that we might find a clue about all this by perusing Trump's Art of the Deal. You start a negotiation with a bit of braggadocio. Then you get down to serious negotiating.

The more we see of this the more we unconsciously realize that Hillary Clinton is not a leader. She can go through the motions of being a leader, but she just isn't one. That's why she lost in 2008 and nearly lost the presidential nomination in 2016. She just isn't a leader.

Look, there is nothing wrong with not being a leader. Most people aren't leaders. They don't have the cojones to risk and threaten, and "boldy... outdare the dangers of the time." It is perfectly obvious that Hillary Clinton is not a person that is constituted to do such a thing. That is what Benghazi should have taught us. Her instinct is to hide in the bunker and then lie about it. I dare say that is true of most of us.

But hiding in a bunker and lying about it doesn't compute for a political leader.

When you watch Trump's stump speech it seems pretty over the top. I don't think, for instance, that we will revive manufacturing like it used to be.

But think of this. Suppose Trump brings corporate income tax down to 15% and proposes a profit repatriation amnesty. I dare say that Apple might bring home that $200 billion they have stashed in Ireland and that the Eurocrats want to grab hold of. Suppose he frees energy from the renewables racket. Suppose he replaces the administrative juggernaut of Obamacare. Suppose he frees up all kinds of other administrative stupidities of the Obama administration.

I dare say that with all that we might see two or three years of 3-4% GDP growth. Wouldn't that make a difference to the US?

What is George Soros' Game?

There are still a number of things in this world that I don't get. So I have a trigger in my mind looking for explanations.

For instance, I have been wondering about Karl Marx's famous phrase from Das Kapital.

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.”

What was going on, I wondered? Then I got the answer. The absolute monarchs were disarming the nobles, ending their private armies. So the nobles "hurled" the peasants off their lands. If the peasants couldn't be used as soldiers, who needed them?

One of my questions is: What does George Soros want? Why is he funneling money at the Democratic Party in the US? In the American Thinker today editor Thomas Lifson calls Soros "a brilliant mastermind, the closest thing to a real-life Bond villain in human history." Soros is trying to influence the election of district attorneys.

I am willing to judge Soros a mastermind as a speculator and investor, but I doubt if he is a political mastermind. Actually, he seems merely to be pouring money into the global elite's program for global, supranational governance. And the central drive in that program is to delegimitize nationalism and the nation state.

I get this. I understand that the global elite is trying to save us from ourselves, we poor deluded rubes, from the evils of aggressive nationalism, and trying to substitute rule by a wise and educated global elite that knows what's what and what is good for us.

So the global elite is building supranational institutions like the European Union to undermine the nation state and fostering sub-national identities to undermining nationalism and national identity, substituting race and ethnic and gender identity for national identity.

The supranational project is foundering because, in the words of British anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell, he of the Rivers of Blood speech, the EU could not work because there was no European demos, no European people.

Powell was arguing that a wise and providential elite needs to foster a popular identity that matches up with the political identity. If you are going to have a nation state, then you need to create a national myth that creates loyalty in the people to the nation. If you are going to have a supranational state then you need to teach the people to love the supranational identity.

How do you do that? You start a war. That's how Bismarck unified the German peoples into a single nation state. That's how the patriots of 1776 created the American identity, by making war on the Brits.

Our leaders and betters understand this perfectly when it comes to their sub-national race and gender politics. You gin up wars on women, police wars on young blacks, evil Christian wars on gays and you inspire young mixed-race quarterbacks to snub the national anthem.

And Soros is in the middle of all this, with his support for Black Lives Matter. His strategy seems to be to support anything that weakens the nation state. This is because, for him, coming to adulthood as a Hungarian Jew in the mid 1940s, aggressive nationalism is the worst thing ever.

Only I'd say that aggressive progressivism, aka the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Pol Pot, is worse by an order of magnitude.

Personally, I think this is all a dreadful mistake. It is a mistake to push supranational states until you have a supranational demos. And I don't just mean the educated elite. You have to get the ordinary people identifying as Europeans if you want to have a European state. Problem is that the only way this worked in the past is to have a war.

It is also a mistake to weaken the national identity with race and gender and localist identity politics. The global elite thinks that its support of race and gender identity politics is a cunning way to dislodge the nation state. But I think that they are mistaken. I think that the race and gender identity politics will lead in the end to civil war, because at some point the wise and accomplished ruling class will lose control of its identity groups.

I don't think that George Soros, brilliant mastermind, has really thought this deeply about things. He just thinks as his globalist clique pals think, that they must stop the slide to fascism.

But fascism arose out of the chaos and governmental ineptitude in the years after World War I, in response to the first big failure of the educated and wise European elite. It is a conceit to imagine that today's educated and wise elite is any better than the elite of a century ago. Governments and ruling classes always blunder from one disaster to another, because they really don't have a clue what they are doing; they only think they do.

It is pretty obvious, to me, that today's ruling class is blundering into a new disaster, right now. That's because, like all humans, the ruling class doesn't have a clue. That's why we have religion, to persuade ourselves that we really do understand life, the universe, and everything.

Only we don't. We don't understand life, the universe, and everything, and we probably never will.

And that includes George Soros.

J.D. Vance's American Victims, Black and White

Guess what. The US has long had two underclasses, one white and one black. The white underclass has always been the Scots-Irish that settled in Appalachia, the southern uplands. The black underclass are the west Africans brought to the Americas in the slave ships.

Here's the difference, according to former hillbilly J.D. Vance.

[T]he two groups took different approaches to politics. The white poor, unencumbered by legal discrimination, focused on a politics of class... Black people, meanwhile, understandably voted the color of their skin, putting their trust in whoever promised to tear down the most legal barriers. 

Really. Now let's analyze this using my reductive Three Peoples theory.

These two groups didn't take "different approaches to politics" because, as Eeyore said, they was "pushed." As People of the Subordinate Self they do not act upon the political stage, they are the chorus, the rank-and-file in somebody else's power project. And both groups have had a pretty hard time of it, because their leaders have not been too careful about the interests of their followers.

I dare say the white upland farmers of the South were attracted to a kind of class politics. That's because the South, before and after the Civil War, was run by a planter/merchant elite that ran the place in their own interest as planters and merchants. But there has been plenty of race politics too, whenever the ruling class needed to rile up the bubbas.

I dare say that African Americans have tended towards a racial solidarity politics. In the Jim Crow era, it was natural to vote for the Republican Party that had freed the Negro slaves, even if it had abandoned them to Jim Crow in 1876. In the quotas and diversity era is is natural for blacks to vote for the party that offers them free stuff by virtue of their race.

But here's the point. You really don't want to become the rank-and-file in someone's political army, whether you are white or black. That's because armies are not run for the benefit of the rank-and-file soldiers; they are run for the benefit of the generals and their political masters. That's why I have developed my idea of "little darlings." If you are the little darlings of the ruling class, watch out. One fine day (that's un bel di in Italian) you will find yourself abandoned by the side of the road, sick and wounded, just like a soldier in a rifles-and-bayonets army.

The root cause of black and white underclass malaise is simple. Blacks and whites enlisted in some ruler's political army, and believed the recruiting sergeant and his promise of loot and plunder. It all started out well. Until the ruling class decided it had other fish to fry. The ruling class cast the white working class adrift about half a century ago, just as the labor-union arc of history started to bend towards oblivion. And now blacks are wondering angrily about what happened to all the Hope and Change they were promised and that they believed in eight years ago just as the affordable housing bubble collapsed on them.

We are starting to see the harvest of the liberal sowing of race and class politics, as angry and disappointed hyphenated Americans that have been left behind turn on each other in the flatline Obama economy.

But the reality of life is still the reality of life. Social animals help those left behind up to a point. But when the going gets tough, the tough get going. If you are not adapting to the changing economy then you are going to get left behind. Society will help you for a season -- especially if you are useful to someone's power project. But society will not help you forever.

The Scots-Irish and the West Africans both came from war-torn borderlands where force ruled. The Scots-Irish left their borderlands because of poverty, and the West Africans were the victims of inter-tribal warfare, conquest slaves sold to the European slavers. Both groups have had a problem adapting to the life of the city, where cooperation, not fierceness, is the order of the day.

Unfortunately both groups have suffered as political opportunists have exploited their fierceness and recruited them as political soldiers. So they have not adapted well to the cooperative culture of the city.

And time is running out.

Frankfurt School Analysis, Part Two

These days the Frankfurt School is conservative Enemy #1, on account of “cultural Marxism” and political correctness. But I have been reading a book about Horkheimer and Adorno written in the 1970s, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, by Zoltán Tar.

In Part One, I looked at Tar’s view of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality. Both books were lefty responses to the rise of fascism. Dialectic rather importantly reminds lefties that, foes of domination and oppression as they are, the very fount of their faith issues from the Enlightenment and its program to dominate Nature.

The Authoritarian Personality is something of a joke to me. It is a bunch of lefties trying to understand fascism as a natural outgrowth of lower middle-class culture and the natural end-point of bourgeois capitalism. These lefties are blind to the obvious notion that, when the economic interventionism of the democratic left fails, as it did in the 1930s because its ideas are bad science, the people naturally turn to a strong leader to get them out of a jam.

Zoltán Tar writes off the Frankfurt School as a failure, in part because of the haut-bourgeois Jewish origins of Horkheimer and Adorno, whose Jewishness keeps interfering with their leftiness. This meant that they fell away from the true faith of Marxism:

Critical Theory dissociated itself from the basic tenet of Marxism: the unity of theory, empirical research, and revolutionary praxis… The crucial issue here is the abandonment of the Marxist method for metaphysical speculation.

Amusingly, Tar then admits that the Marxian prophecy had failed:

The Marxist prognosis about the polarization of classes in a capitalist society (bourgeois versus proletariat), with the Verelendung [immiseration] of the latter… did not take place.

Hey! I’d never known what the original German word for the “immiseration” of the working class. Elend is the German for “misery,” according to Google. Thus Ver-elend-ung. So immiseration is a direct translation!

Hey kids! Maybe the failed Marxist prognostication is telling us something! Maybe it is telling us that the portentous Marxian combination of theory, research and praxis was, as the Brits say, a load of bollocks, because its basic prediction, the immiseration of the working class, never took place. In fact the opposite is true.

And by the way, what does "revolutionary praxis" mean when it's at home? The only thing I know is that revolution combined with praxis means riots, and killing, and secret police and revolutionary terror.

As I have mentioned, what Tar could not know in the 1970s, as he complained that American academics knew next to nothing about the Frankfurters and Critical Theory, was that Critical Theory would turn out to be the left’s star turn. Imagine!

In the hands of Horkheimer and Adorno’s students, the Marxian “polarization of classes” was expanded into a polarization of races and genders. Why not? Politics is division and if you can’t burn the place down with class division and the instinctive animosity between rich and poor why not go back further into mankind’s instinctive past and gin up a race war? And Herbert Marcuse with his convoluted idea of repressive tolerance, or tolerant intolerance, or intolerant tolerance, gave the left permission -- as if it needed it -- to persecute anyone it chose in the name of tolerance and diversity. Today every lefty knows how to play the game of political correctness and humiliate anyone that dares to disagree with the lefty agenda du jour. Including getting them fired. They get it in their mother's milk.

Hey lefties, wasn’t firing people for their beliefs a big issue for you in the Fifties when a few Commies got fired from their government teacher jobs and a few Hollywood lefties got blacklisted, but not actually driven out of the industry?

But those Commies were on the right side of history.

The biggest jobs program since World War 2!

Hillary Clinton is promising to enact "the biggest infrastructure and jobs program that we've had since World War II," according to Yahoo writer Rick Newman.

Oh great. According to Newman:

Clinton's plan would amount to $300 billion in transportation projects spread over five years... That $300 billion would come from new taxes on the wealthy...

Oh great. Do these people never learn? That taking money from rich individuals and spending it on crony capitalist "infrastructure" deals is bound to be a net loss economically? Because the things that rich people would have done with their money would have done more for economic growth and "jobs" than the crony capitalist/union deals that government calls "infrastructure."

Of course, they don't want to learn. The ruling class does not have much interest in reducing the size of government and releasing resources to the private sector. Where's the power in that? Where's the pay for play?

Also, the Clintons have done us a favor with the corrupt Clinton Foundation links to the State Department under Hillary Clinton. It has shown us how expensive it is to keep a presidential operation in being, and how politicians will stop at nothing to fund their political operations, and how the world is full of people eager to pay for play with politicians.

So of course when the politicians get into office they need "infrastructure" programs to pay off their supporters.

But the sad thing is that the journalists of the nation -- Rick Newman excepted -- allow this to go on without protest. Hey, liberals: I thought protest was your thing. There are all kinds of issues, mostly about evil Republicans, for which the journalistic response is immediate recourse to protest or the fainting couch. But the journalists of the nation seem to be able to digest economic and Democratic Party sponsored rubbish three times a day without so much as a hiccup.

Let us get this straight. All government spending, from the Pentagon to the latest wizard wheeze for an offshore wind farm, is a weight on the economy. Period. All economic regulation, from labor laws to building codes, is a weight on the economy. Period. Some of these things may be good ideas, and not just special interest giveaways, but they are good in spite of the damage they do to the economy. We may say that we want to spend money on Social Security to help seniors, but those monies sent to the government are monies that might have been saved for private investment. We may say that we want a living wage of $15 per hour, but that means that unskilled minority youth gets screwed.

But you won't see liberal journalists writing things like that. And you have to wonder why. I think that most of the time liberal journalists are strategically incurious about economic knowledge; they instinctively know that economic knowledge is bad for their career. Also, I suspect that there is a "you'll never work in this town again" aspect to journalism. You go along to get along. Or else. I suspect there has been quite a lot of that during the Obama administration.

The fact is that the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has been a surprise all the way. It is my belief that the Great Enrichment, seen as a succession of surprise innovations, has succeeded because most of the time the special interests and their bribed apologists in government and media did not see it coming. And when they finally realized what was happening and mobilized against the innovation -- e.g. cab cartels against Uber -- it was too late. Except in Austin, Texas. But Austin, Texas, is a liberal town.

All along, during the last 200 years, one crank idea after another has come along to discredit capitalism and the Great Enrichment. And intelligent, educated people have believed each one and boosted it. Marxism, Fabianism, Institutionalism, the National Industrial Recovery Act, cheap money, economic regulation, Keynesianism. The educated ruling class has lusted after anything that could discredit capitalism. Yet one after another, these gods have failed. What is wrong with these people?

Yet here we have Hillary Clinton running on increasing taxes and rolling out yet another stimulus program.

OK, I'm not dumb or somep'n. I know what it's all about. It's because the average voter doesn't give a flying fig for economics and the market system. All the average voter cares about is the prospect of some loot from the government. Although I suspect that the average voters doesn't really understand how many middlemen get their cut when politics is involved.

It was the conceit of the present educated ruling class, decades ago, that an educated ruling class, relying on the advice of experts, would use the best science and knowledge to govern wisely and well and neutralize the brutish instincts of the hoi polloi and the corrupt spoils system.

Instead, it has governed by appealing to ignorance and greed. Just like every other ruling class in history. And today's spoils system, featuring the Clinton Crime Syndicate, makes the spoils systems of Tammany Hall & Co to be Boy Scout stuff.

So when will the kid show up to tell us that the emperor has no clothes?