What Will Happen to the Deplorables?

Let us suppose that Hillary Clinton and the elite Democrats actually believe that half of the Trump supporters are the "deplorables," the racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes, of liberal imagination.

It seems fairly obvious, given that Hillary Clinton used the same ideas in an interview with an Israeli media outlet, that anathematizing of the deplorables is part of basic campaign strategy, unveiled in Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech.

The next question is: what shall "we" do about them, the deplorables? Should they be sent to re-education camps? Fired from their jobs? Their children taken into care? Shall they be deported?

It's all very well to anathematize people in a political campaign, but what happens after? Well we know, because we have the liberal record of the last 50 years.

On race, after the success of the civil rights acts which basically resolved America's race problem, liberals made it worse by wrecking the black family and calling racists everyone that disagreed with them.

On sex, after the success of getting votes for women and making women into a majority of colleges students and graduates, liberals have conducted a war on men and boys to remove the last remaining vestiges of sexism.

On homophobia, after whisking gay marriage through the Supreme Court, liberal vigilantes are seeking out unredeemed Christians and destroying them with the power of the state.

On xenophobia, liberals ignore the law on immigration to advocate for unlimited immigration and the exemption of illegal immigrants from the law of the land.

On Islamophobia, liberals advocate for a religion that opposes everything they stand for.

And yet the deplorables are the other guys.

Look, I understand what is going on here. Liberals are just blindly executing on the Frankfurt School tactics that recommended the left to abandon the class politics of Marx that advocated for the working class, and switch to an identity politics that advocated for marginalized people everywhere, women, blacks, and gays. They are not realizing that they have basically won the culture war. Of course not, they are culture warriors and culture war is what they do.

You might say that the left followed Eisenhower's advice, that if you don't know how to solve a problem, make it bigger.

But my problem with this is that it is still a tactic, because when you look at the left's program together, its anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc., it runs up against a little problem. It is a totally incoherent mess.

It is fine to advocate for African Americans, and make up for centuries of exploitation, but in the end African Americans must make their peace with America and join the middle class as ordinary responsible citizens that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

It is fine to advocate for women's education and advance in the labor force, but in the end women are the generators of the next generation; most women must have babies and raise them. It has long been a conceit of high-status women that they should be above mere child production. This is odd, because the production and the socialization of children is the only job in the world that really matters. Everything else is just frosting on the cake and providing the food and shelter to make the next generation possible.

It is fine to advocate for sexual minorities and allow people to veer off the mainstream of heterosexual mating and reproduction. But the vast majority of people must and will mate with the opposite sex and have children. It is a monstrous lie to pretend that gays and gay marriage is anything other than the extremes of the bell curve and anathematize people that live on the mainstream and believe in what they are doing.

And so on. It's fine to be nice to immigrants like me, but we cannot invite the whole world to America. It's fine to be nice to Islam, but it would be good to get some reciprocity from the imams.

So what is the problem? Why are the liberals trying to unmake America? What is their point?

I have attempted to explain this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. I understand liberals as People of the Creative Self. Liberals are communicants in the cult of creativity; they believe that the best life is the creative life, creating a work of art that blows the doors off the past, creating a new society liberated from the superstitions and injustices of the past They also think you are nothing unless you are creative.

It is that last place where liberals have gone off the rails. It is true that creative innovation is a wonderful thing, but it is not given to many of us. Creative people, genuinely creative people, are very few and far between. For the rest of us, we have to make the best fist of our modest talents and energies and participate as conforming members of human society. We cannot hope to be comets flaming across the sky; our only hope is to be steady points of light in the firmament, shining a little light on a dark and fallen world. Our contribution is to help things as they are, rather than to imagine and implement things that never were. Still, we can make a creative contribution to society by creating and raising children. And that is not nothing.

In my view, our liberal friends will eventually collide with the above reality. They will find that the deplorables will rise up against them and reassert the right to be ordinary and modest and conservative people that deserve the support of society even if they are horribly backward and unredeemable.

The funny thing is that the whole movement of the left arose precisely to give voice to a group that seemed to be left behind by the blinding changes of history. The left arose to advocate for the working class that did not have the market skills and the cultural skills to thrive in the early industrial age. The working class deserved special protections, the left argued, and should not be shamed and marginalized as backward and stupid.

The fact is that the bourgeoisie, the rising class of the time, listened to the left and acceded to the legislative program of the left. Whatever their faults, they were people of good will, and were willing to compromise with people struggling to cope with the new industrial world.

The difference today is that the left is now not willing to compromise with the people left behind by the creative revolution. The left thinks they are deplorables, not to be endured.

"And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." So said the Fool at the end of Twelfth Night.

That is what I would be worrying about, if I were a liberal and a Democrat and a supporter of Hillary Clinton.

Politics is About Power. That is All

There's a long thumbsucker in National Review today about Hillary Clinton and what she stands for. William Voegeli tries to penetrate through the vapid rhetoric about change and meaning. Here is what Clinton said back in the 1990s:

Let us be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.

Rather obviously, this is not about government, but a totalitarian mash-up of politics and religion. And it is about the eternal quest of politicians to imagine that their profession is something higher and nobler than just using force to keep the natives quiet.

The truth is that anyone in politics is sniffing out an issue, any issue, that can be used as a means to power or a means to continue power.

And what hope is there for conservatives in this? We think that the whole point is to reduce political power because political power is normally a means to death and destruction. There seems to be no escape from understanding the world in terms of Power and Possession.

The conservative conundrum is the same as the pacifist's. What chance have you, in a world of war and conflict, to stand aside and merely pontificate that war never solves anything? Meanwhile, somebody's army drives right over you.

While you and I are working and attending to our families, a thousand liberal activists are dreaming up a new way to deploy government power. How can we hope to stop this unless we are opposing liberal activism with conservative activism?

Down at the city zoo it is not enough for them to take care of the animals. They must be saving the Red Wolf from extinction! They must be forming themselves into the number 350 to show that they are concerned about CO2 concentration and are working to save the planet!

Over the weekend conservatives have been chuckling about Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment. But the bigger question to me is the blind folly of Clinton. Here the liberals are: they have fought racism to its knees, taught women to shatter glass ceilings, cunningly pushed gay marriage through the Supreme Court, and they are worried about the mass of deplorables out there, the racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. Don't liberals realize that they have won? That they have enacted just about every government program imaginable?

Really. Liberals have implemented a huge agenda over the last century, riding roughshod over the American people, and they seem to think that it's time to amp up the rhetoric to make sure that none of the gap-toothed primitives dare to move a finger.

Look, I get it. the point is political power. And political power always needs an emergency. It really doesn´t matter what the issue is. You just need to rally your supporters and remind them of the existential perils out there that are waiting to engulf them unless they follow you once more into the breach.

Which is to say that when the rule of the progressives ends it won't be with a whimper but with a bang. Because liberals won't give up their political and cultural hegemony without a fight.

And that means that whatever comes next, whatever its agenda, it will have to obtain political power to vanquish the old order of politics, politics, politics.

And so the cycle will begin again. Politics. Power. Force. Domination. Injustice.

Arabs, Power, and Charles Koch

An acquaintance told me a story about his college days in the 1970s in the UK. He opted to live in a student dorm for foreign students. The idea was that one Brit student should live with the foreign students to interpret British culture to the foreigners.

But he found that mostly he was trying to explain the foreign students to each other. The foreigners were just as confused about other foreigners as they were about the Brits!

But one group of students was different. The Arabs. The only thing that Arab students understood was power, power and possession.

That was back in the 1970s so I am sure that things are different now.

OK. Let us segue to a video featuring Charles Koch, he of the Koch Brothers, and Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs," who makes a living championing the "skill trades." Pull quote from Koch:

People who lead happy, fulfilling lives are ones that develop their abilities and figure out how they can best contribute … and they’re rewarded for it and respected for it.

Of course this is the basic contract of the exchange economy. Find something to do that other people will pay for, and do it. It is based on true altruism, thinking about the other and their needs before thinking about your own and setting forth your non-negotiable demands.

The other philosophy, the power philosophy, is based on the idea that you compel your welfare out of the sweat and the work of others. By the dawn raid on the neighboring village. By defeating the neighboring country and imposing an bone-chilling indemnity on it.

The great lesson of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is that the way to human prosperity is the way of surrendering to the market, and doing what the market -- which is nothing but the aggregate expressed needs of other people -- demands with its price system.

Oh and one other thing. Innovation. The great thing about the last 200 years is that numberless nobodies had an idea for a product or a service that nobody else had thought of, and they went out and did it. When this idea was a true innovation, in technology or in organization, the innovator very often built a huge business making huge profits, while the business lowered prices of oil by 90 percent or steel by 67 percent.

The big thing about this age of innovation was that the powers that be did not, or could not, prevent it. That's why Charles Koch in the video talks about "permissionless innovation." You shouldn't need to ask someone's permission to try something new. You shouldn't have to get credentialed to do hair-braiding. Or even inventing a new pharmaceutical drug.

The big thing about all this is the retreat from power. The basic assumption is that humans can work together and do things for each other without the overweening threat of force. This, according to my acquaintance, is something that the Arabs in the 1970s did not understand.

And, of course, it is something that our liberal friends do not understand. They think that the economy must be dominated by a central administrative authority of credentialed experts, and that these powerful experts will lay down the parameters of human cooperation in the economy.

I wonder what it would take for our liberal friends to abandon their faith in power and surrender to the altruistic wisdom of the market.

Yes, But How Bad Is It?

Yesterday the jauntily optimistic Rush Limbaugh had a field day with a piece in The Claremont Review of Books on the 2016 election as "The Flight 93 Election." The piece argued that, if conservatives are right about our issues, then conservatism -- its gradualism, its respect for the rules -- must be wrong. It's time to say "let's roll," and accept that we have to crash the airplane, even if we die in the process.

We are getting to the point, writes the anonymous author, where the left doesn't think it needs us any more.

Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

 Actually, I think it is better to compare this time with the Soviet Great Purge of 1936-38, and I just happen to be reading a book about it, Child of the Revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard. Leonard was a red-diaper baby whose lefty mother took him to the Soviet Union in the mid 1930s when Germany became too hot for her after Hitler came to power.

To illustrate my point, let us compare two texts. The first is from Portuguese-born SF writer Sarah Hoyt. She is writing about an American instructor at her Portuguese university giving a lecture in American literature.

Until in the middle of a lecture he said something like “When any writer sets out to do x, he–” And stopped, growing pale, and started apologizing profusely.

Apparently looking on that sea of female faces, he thought he was about to be crucified. When we got it through his head that we were not offended, he said “Oh, wow. American women would be. I’d have to say he or she.”

OK. Now let's switch to Leonhard in a class in Moscow in 1937. The teacher was reading "a passage out of a book by the anti-fascist author Georg Born." But a whisper ran around the class and then a kid stood up.

"Comrade teacher, my father told me that Georg Born was arrested a few days ago as an enemy of the people."

Our teacher went pale as ashes.

Now, my theory is that a revolution transitions into its Reign of Terror phase when it is clear that the millennium is not here, and ain't gonna be any time soon. That is when the party leader needs to start dealing with the "enemies of the people" before they start up a head of rebellion.

And really, why be surprised that liberals are amping up the terror? Things aren't going too well for them right now. Their high-handed assumption that the economy would bounce back with a quick kick in the stimulus has proved wrong, and so the introduction of Obamacare created double-trouble by weighing down the already deflating economy with the lead weight of regulation.

And the point is that, like lefties everywhere since the French Revolution, their religion is politics; they think that the way to solve the problems of the world is through politics. That means, to deploy my catch-phrases, they always think that a bit of government force is needed, a bit of political divisiveness is needed, and a few more of the bad people need to be crushed by government injustice.

The point is that, as we have seen with every lefty regime since the French Revolution, this is not going to end well. As in revolutionary France, as in fascist Germany, as in the Soviet Union, as in Castro's Cuba, as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, as in prostrate Venezuela.

Let us give Wolfgang Leonard another word. He is talking about the four types of members in the Komsomol, the Soviet youth movement, in the 1930s.

There were first the enthusiasts--young people bursting with activity and initiative[.]

[There were also members, like Leonhard, who] joined the organization from political conviction and found themselves principally attracted by questions of the organisation's programme and political discussions.

[There were "careerists,"] principally among the sons and daughters of officials of the Party, state, and economic organisations.

[Then there were young people who] had joined it because that was what everybody else did... because it was the thing to do. I found this type mostly among the girls in the Komsomol[.]

Nothing changes, does it.

Personally, I think that the Obama PC push has been a strategic error for the liberals. The future outlined in The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira was that the new majority of women, minorities, the educated, and young people would rule for the next thirty years.

And so the new majority might have done if Obama & Co. hadn't pressed the pedal to the metal, and inspired the Republican base to rebel against leaders that weren't leading, and provoked the dying-of-despair white working class to get angry and follow the populist Trump.

Now the whole conservative movement is in ruins and nobody knows what comes next. Or, if you use Mencius Moldbug's formulation, the good old days of the Cathedral and the Inner Party ruling the nation and the folks in the Outer Party touching their forelocks are over.

Now of course, it's possible that the bishops of the Cathedral may turn into Jacobin monsters, mobilize their Black Lives Matter shock troops and wipe white middle-class Americans off the map.

Or not.

What is certain is that the politics of the last 30 years, since 1988 and the end of the Reagan era, is over. Something else is going to take its place.

And one thing more. However crazed the crazies may be, there is a moderating factor. It is that for a modern ruling class to rule successfully it must make capitalism work. The reason that 2016 is the end of an era is that the economy has not been doing well, and the people are restless.

Get the economy right, and all things are possible.

But that is a very hard lesson for religious enthusiasts, particularly our modern secular religious enthusiasts, to learn. Because, after all, when the question is saving souls, or saving the planet, who cares about stupid things like profit and loss and economic growth?

Reality Check on "Tax the Rich"

Hillary Clinton is proposing a ton of new federal spending, including free college. So where is she going to find the money? Here's how she explained it recently in Tampa:

We are going to the top one, ten percent, the millionaires, the billionaires, they are the ones that are going to have to start paying.

What's that? To start paying? Where have you been all this time Mrs. Clinton? Don't you ever stop by usgovernmentrevenue.com to check up on the facts? If you did you would find out that the top 1 percent already pay about 40% of the federal income tax.

And do you notice something else about the chart on "Income Tax and the Top One Percent?" It shows that the share paid by the rich has been going up. Except when we get big hunking recessions. Then the income tax share paid by the 1% goes down, as their share of income goes down.

But hey, what about the rest of the rich, the top ten percent? What about them?

OK, let's to to the IRS data on income tax collections, because that gives us income tax return data on the top 1%, top 10%, top 20%, and top 50%. Here's a table showing the latest tax return data, for 2013.

	Income share	Income Tax share
Top 1%	19.0%	37.8%
Top 10%	45.9%	69.8%
Top 20%	61.9%	82.1%
Top 50%	88.5%	97.2%

Hello, Hillary Clinton? You say it's time for the rich to start paying? When the fabled One Percent is already paying 38 percent of all individual federal income tax receipts? When the top 50 Percent is paying 97.2% of income tax receipts? Which planet are you on, Madam Secretary?

Now stop me if I've got this wrong, but I thought that the central conceit of our ruling class that they were the educated ones; they were the informed ones. They knew the facts, and if they didn't they could get an expert to brief them. And I thought that the hit on Donald Trump was that he was a lying populist appealing to "hate" and "xenophobia." I thought that a politician that said Yeah! We're gonna make the rich pay! was a populist thug. Maybe even a demagogue. Maybe even a fascist demagogue.

Now, of course, I suppose there is a principled argument that the top 50% should really pay all of their income in tax, and that having them pay nearly all the income tax receipts doesn't really begin to provide the government with enough resources to meet human needs. Because, yeah! the rich can afford it.

Now Hillary Clinton, according to reports, wants to spend more money "for college education, child care, mental health, drug addiction, green energy, solar panels, and national infrastructure."

Really. Aren't we already spending a ton of money on all this stuff? And really, will spending more on all this stuff really make a difference? Isn't the problem with with government spending on colleges that it has alreadyramped up the cost of college so that students can't afford to go to college without loans? Child care? Isn't the problem that child care is already regulated out the wazoo? Aren't we already spending a crony capitalist's ransom on green energy and solar panels?

As I said. The conceit of our ruling class is that they are the smart guys.

Here is something even smarter. The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years came not from government programs and educated experts and politicians, but from nobodies with an idea that turned into a huge business that provided new products for the masses at low prices.

And I'd say we need to keep taxes low so that these inventive nobodies will keep doing more of it.

The Meaning of Phyllis Schlafly

Was Phyllis Schafly, who died over the Labor Day weekend at the age of 92, a brilliant conservative mastermind, as Ann Coulter suggests? Or was she a privileged wife of a wealthy lawyer, as the New York Times obituary suggests?

I didn't become aware of her until her activism to stop the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and of course at the time, having been carefully taught as all middle-class children are, I thought she was bat-shit crazy.

And now? Today I reason backwards from the fact that women in first-world countries aren't having enough babies to achieve population replacement. I'd say that is a real problem. It is the first problem. If women aren't having enough babies then you are in a world of hurt.

Today I reason that all the world's problems stem from the mechanical Newtonian model of reality that imagines all the things in the world as billiard balls. It works, as far as it goes, in a lot of things having to do with mechanics: building bridges and stuff.

But the world has moved on. Today our fundamental understanding of life, the universe, and everything is the quantum mechanical state function. Everything is a cloud of uncertainty until something happens. And even then you can't be too certain about anything until a lot of things happen.

Notice that although we like to think of markets using mechanical and hydraulic metaphors like the push and pull of supply and demand, it is also possible to think of them in a quantum mechanical way. There is no such thing as a price until an actual exchange transaction takes place. And there is no such thing as a market until a bunch of transactions take place. So really, prices and markets are the most modern and sophisticated things around.

Today, physicists say that the basic principle of life, the universe, and everything is asymmetry.

Yet our culture and our politics is driven by the totalitarian mechanical mindset and the rage for symmetry and sameness. Everything must be determined by government force. Everything must be equal. Everyone must be shamed into the correct opinion.

I don't know what Phyllis Schafly knew or what she thought. She was such a controversial character that everything written about her had the taint of partisan apology.

But I think that, when the modern era -- with its big government, its totalitarian politics, and its heaven-on-earth theology -- grinds into dust, the new thing that replaces it will look a lot more like Schafly's notion than the Newtonian mechanical force machine of liberal/progressive/cultural Marxism and the top-down rule of the experts.

Here's My Detroit Speech

Last Saturday Donald Trump committed lèse majesté and addressed an African American church in bombed out Detroit. He was very nice to the church members, and I would be too, if I had an opportunity to speak. Here's what I would have said.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. Because I am not a politician I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell it like it is, in the immortal words of Howard Cosell. I hope you will not be too angry with me.

In the last few weeks, Donald Trump has been reminding us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and that the KKK was a Democratic militia group, and Jim Crow was Democratic Party policy.

But it is also true that the Republican Party, after freeing the slaves, walked away from the freedmen, and left them to the tender mercies of the KKK and Jim Crow. Why was that? Well, it was because by the election of 1876 the Republican Party had other fish to fry, and spending blood and treasure on protecting African Americans in the South wasn't on the menu.

Still, African Americans voted for Republicans up until the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What else were they to do? Meanwhile Republicans in the North were acting to curb the Great Migration with laws like the Davis-Bacon Act (Davis and Bacon were both Republicans) to prevent black laborers from the South from undercutting the wages of unionized whites in the North.

Northern Democrats and Republicans participated in the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s, even though Barry Goldwater voted against, on the libertarian grounds that he didn't want the government getting involved in private transactions.

Nevertheless, northern liberal Democrats took the credit for passing the civil rights laws and they deserve the credit. But let no one doubt that the great genius of the civil rights movement was Martin Luther King and his policy of non-violent protest adapted from Mohandas Gandhi in India.

Why then have not African Americans taken their place as full participants in the American Dream?

It is because, just as Republicans in the 1870s abandoned African Americans to the KKK and Jim Crow, the Democrats in the years after the 1960s abandoned African Americans in the inner cities to drugs and gangs. And eight years of America's First Black President hasn't made a difference. Black inner cities are still victimized by drugs, by crime, by joblessness, by lousy education, and by gangs.

Maybe it is time for a change.

But what? Can Donald Trump make a difference, with his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs and bring school choice to inner cities? Probably not. Would Black Lives Matter and its program of targeting police abuse make a difference? Probably not.

What will make a difference? I'd say that the only thing that can make a difference for African Americans is African Americans.

I'd say that the difference will come from African Americans deciding that they don't care about racism, don't care about police brutality, don't care about institutional racism. Because America lives on people deciding to go out and get a job and take care of their family, and do the best they can. African Americans have tried everything else. Maybe it is time to just go out and look after their own.

Because the thing about politicians is that they don't care about you, they only care about your vote. And the same goes for activists. They don't care about you, they only care about how many people they can get into the streets.

If you sign up with the politicians it is not different that signing up for the military. At some point you will cease to be useful to the generals, and they will cast you aside.

I can understand how African Americans might feel about things. As a conservative, this last year has seen the burial of all my hopes; the conservatism I believed in has been smashed to pieces.

So what do I do? Well, I keep on living, a day at a time, doing what I can in my small personal world.

I dare say the same applies to African Americans, after fifty years down the toilet. You go out, and work, and look after your family. Because nothing else matters.