Never Mind NeverTrump

Today's little dust devil seems to be the NeverTrump crowd and the news that Bush 41 is probably voting for Clinton.

A lot of people are rather cross with the NeverTrumpers but I am not. I understand their situation; I feel their pain.

The best way to understand the whole thing is to shine the light of Mencius Moldbug's Cathedral concept on the 2016 situation. Moldbug's real name is Curtis Yarvin.

Moldbug's notion is that our present ruling class is a kind of Cathedral, a big church of which the universities, the media and the entertainment folks are the bishops and deans. And all the deans in their stalls in the Cathedral sing from the same hymnal and pray from the same prayer book. Politics, as Andrew Breitbart said, is downstream from culture, so politicians have to conform to the orthodoxies issued and enforced by the bishops at the Cathedral.

Under the rule, ideological and political, of the Cathedral there are two political parties. The Democrats are the Inner Party; when they are in power they rule. The Republicans are the Outer Party; when they are in office they govern.

The consequence of all this is that the Cathedral and the Inner Party decide what the Outer Party and its minions are allowed to say. They define, as we say, the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Step outside the window and you are a racist sexist homophobe and may lose your job.

You can see where the NeverTrumpers fit in all this. They are intelligent people that have learned how to stoll around politely in the sacred precincts of the Cathedral close saying semi-conservative stuff knowing that their privileges could be withdrawn at any moment. Their careers depended on their good behavior and their proper genuflections before the altar of political correctness.

The point is that if they go with Trump and Trump loses, then what happens to the TV appearances and the book contracts? And as for the NeverTrump politicians, they have managed their careers in the knowledge that a careless word could be a career-ender. So why throw in with Trump? The potential downsides are too big.

So I understand the NeverTrumpers. They are just being careful, making the calculation that their careers depend more on sucking up to the Cathedral than taking a flyer on Trump.

And really. If Trump wins will the NeverTrumpers be out of a job? Probably not. But many of them probably won't get the plum jobs in the new administration. The A-listers will get jobs, because their presence in a Trump administration will add gravitas, but the mid-listers may miss out and molder away at their present policy-analyst jobs.

This is the way a revolution works, of course. Everything goes on in the good old way, with the wise heads of the old regime wisely stumbling from one mess to another and calling it progress. Everything goes on as before until the music stops, and the wise heads of the old regime are suddenly out of the swim, and new men, that nobody ever heard of, that were saying wild things that it was best not to know about, are suddenly in the saddle.

All of a sudden the place-holders of the old regime are scurrying around trying to find a berth in the new regime and trying to convince the new rulers that they are loyal and reliable.

Is that what is happening in 2016? Nobody knows, because we won't know what is happening until it has happened.

But meanwhile the prudent thing for Outer Party functionaries is to do the NeverTrump. They know the depth of cruelty in the present ruling class. The cruelty of the new ruling class is still just a possibility.

And Trump or no Trump, the Cathedral will still stand and the deans will still be singing in their old stalls.

The Left: Teaching People How to Hate

Ever since a liberal friend mentioned, in the context of 2016 politics, the embarrassing Trumpian memes of "hate" and "xenophobia" my mind has been in overdrive.

Because we typical Americans need the language to push back against liberal condescension and virtue-shaming.

For instance, what in the world does Hillary Clinton get away with condescending against half of the Republican voters as a basket of deplorables?

Finally, last night, the light-bulb went off. The problem of the left is that it has taught its followers to hate.

That is bad enough. But the real crime -- and it is the crime of the century -- is that the leftist culture of hate has hived off its supporters from the mainstream of American life and monstrously betrayed them.

Let us count the ways of the war of hate.

First of all, the left mobilized the working class. Hey, there was a problem, for the working class, that was up until yesterday starving on the farm, came up to the city and suffered for a few decades in factories and slums.

The way that the left mobilized the working class politically was to teach the working class to hate their employers. That was bad enough, but in addition it taught the working class that it didn't need to acquire the culture of the city, the culture of trust and responsibility and surrender to the market that is the magic bullet that enables people to thrive in the city.

And then the left fell out of love for the working class, and left it to molder away in decaying factory towns. It took the white working class 50 years to find a champion in Donald Trump.

Then the left mobilized African Americans in the civil-rights era. It all started out innocently enough, especially with the non-violent protest culture that Dr. Martin Luther King borrowed from Mohandas Gandhi.

But with the civil rights laws passed, what was the left to do then? Perfectly simple. It would teach African Americans to hate, and so today African Americans are the angriest racists in America, as in Black Lives Matter.

Then the left mobilized women in the second-wave feminist era. Sexual liberation for women! With no more double standard, and abortion on demand. And how did the left mobilize women for this movement? It taught women how to hate men and the patriarchy. It assumed that the grass was greener on the other side and that women needed to be force-marched in the world of career and paid work and farm their children out to child-care just like rich women down the ages. Well, the result is that college women have to drink half a bottle of vodka before going out to college parties, and they find that they have to submit to cringing sexual humiliation in order to get the attention of high-status males. It is not surprising that feminists are the angriest sexists in America, as in female college diversity administrators.

Then the left mobilized gays and lesbians. I don't know how much gays and lesbians were oppressed in the bad old days. All I know, from personal experience, is that when I was a young man in the 1960s it was the left that was stigmatizing gays as upper-class poofters. Talk about hate. Now of course the left has turned 180 degrees. Instead of combining sexual and class hate in a war on upper-class poofters it has taught an entire generation of sexual experimenters to hate the straight world. Now we have government-empowered gays hatefully teaching Christian bakers and pizza parlors and wedding photographers that they will be made to care. So liberals have taught gays to be hetero-phobes, terrified that the straight world is out to crush them.

The big thing to understand about all this is not that liberals are scum. It is worse than that. It is that liberals have a fundamental misunderstanding about the uses and the scope of politics.

The basic faith of the left is that politics can be used to liberate the world, and that this liberated world can be structured and organized on political principles using political power.

But this is a lie. Politics is division, and political actors are people leading a political war in a war-by-other-means. How do you mobilize people for a political war? You teach them to hate the opposition, just like the leaders of World War I taught their people to hate the Brutal Hun.

So, the more politics you have, the more division you have, and the more hate you teach to your supporters.

That is why, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and its religious wars, wise heads started to think about how to dial down the hatred and the violence. They came up with a couple of genius ideas. One was the idea of the separation of church and state. It just was not a good idea to give ideological warriors the keys to the kingdom, because they would start religious wars.

But the wars of the Reformation were nothing to the wars of the secular reformation of the last 100 years, when ideological prophets and thugs got to lead Russia, and China, and Germany, and Italy, and plunged the world into two gigantic wars. And how did they mobilize their peoples for global war? They taught them to hate: the kulaks and the landlords and the Jews.

The second idea that the wise heads came up with was limited government and the separation of powers within government. What was the point? Well, I have explained it with my catchphrases that government is force, and government is injustice.

It doesn't matter what the ruling class and its supporters think about the government's agenda. The people on the receiving end will experience its program as brute force, making them pay taxes and submit to government initiatives that do nothing for them and their children. In fact, these victims of government force experience government as injustice, and they learn to hate the the people that oppress and exploit them.

So you can see what comes next. It is our response to the brutal put-down, so thoughtfully enunciated by Hillary Clinton, that we rubes are a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobes.

If only this latest from Hillary Clinton weren't a bunch of lies.

Hey, you ain't seen a racist until you've been on the receiving end of the racist thugs at Black Lives Matter.

You ain't seen a sexist until you've been bullied around by a sexist feminist college diversity administrator.

You ain't seen hate until you have been on the receiving end of the gay mafia and its corrosive war on bakers, pizza parlors, and wedding photographers.

And you ain't seen classism until you have seen the disdain from a politician like Hillary Clinton and her bribed apologists in the media for the people they all hate as "deplorables."

An Age of Atheists That Ignores Secular Religion

I have been over to Third Place Books a couple of times to look at Peter Watson's Age of Atheists. According to the publisher blurb on Amazon:

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzche declared that “God is dead” and ever since tens of thousands of brilliant, courageous, thoughtful individuals have devoted their creative energies to devising ways to live without God with self-reliance, invention, hope, wit, and enthusiasm. Now, for the first time, their story is revealed...

[It] sweeps up William James and the pragmatists; Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Albert Camus; the poets of World War One and the novelists of World War Two; scientists, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking; and the rise of the new Atheists—Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

So I decided not to buy it.

Because the issue of the Age of Atheists, to me, is the question of the secular religious movements that have swept the globe like nothing else in history.

I mean, seriously. Sixty years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto Russia determined to try it, and 100 years after the Manifesto China tried it out, and India kinda, sorta tried it out.

When has there ever been an intellectual, or religious, or political movement that conquered the two most populous nations on the earth within a century?

Look, I am sure it is great fun to check out Picasso, Freud, Joyce, and even the second tier chaps like Dawkins and Harris and their courageousness. As if. As if they weren't boosted and celebrated in all the right places.

I've just finished a harrowing book about the youth of a believer, a believer in the secular religion of socialism. Child of the Revolution is the memoir of Wolfgang Leonhard, the son of a communist activist who fled Nazi Germany in 1935. This kid got the full indoctrination treatment at special schools, and he became enough of a true believer in the Marxist-Leninist theoretical system to become a member of the "Ulbricht Group" that followed the Red Army into eastern Germany and set up the communist East German state.

Yes, but what about freedom? To Leonhard, the west had no idea.

For us freedom meant insight into historical necessity. We were free because we were the only ones who possessed this insight on the basis of scientific theory[.]

The point is that for Leonhard and for many like him, ten years of the study of Marxism-Leninism provided him with a complete answer to life, the universe, and everything. He was appalled by the brutality of Stalinism but continued to believe in Marx's idea of every people finding its own independent way to socialism. But socialism was truth and truth socialism.

I have written that one aspect of this new secular religion is that today every well-born youth, male or female, wants to get into "activism," to do something for social justice. And that such activism gives meaning to their lives. You know, just like religion.

I want to read more about this, and understand it more. Because one thing I believe, that British social scientist Steve Bruce is wrong when he says in God is Dead that secularization means that "shared ideas are no longer as persuasive as they once were" and "a long-term decline in the power, popularity and prestige of religious beliefs and rituals."

Hum. If you confine "religious beliefs" to belief in God, I agree. But that misses the point completely. The question is, if God dies, then what takes His place. The answer is pretty obvious: transcendental religion gets replaced by secular religion that replaces a god-based religion with a secular religion that satisfies all the needs of what Nicholas Wade calls The Faith Instinct without actually enthroning a god in heaven.

And I want to know more about how this works.

Not Just Obama, But Liberals Created Trump

There is a lot of good clean commentary on the rise of Trump, keyed into Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" speech. Here's a good piece by Laura Hollis on the ten things that Obama did to create him, with advice on what not to do, including:

Stop pitting Americans against each other; focus on the positive; don't apologize for America.

And so on.

But let us cut to the chase. The reason the white working and middle class have gone for Trump is that his slogan, Make America Great Again, provides them with a place to belong.

Marx wrote, famously, that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

No it isn't. That is complete rubbish. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of tribal warfare.

The class struggle arose in the context of the rise of the cities and the market economy, where the lower class migrated to the cities and their jobs, and there achieved enough strategic concentration that they could combine, for almost the first time in history since the fall of Rome, to agitate for their interests. The genius of Marx was to articulate this truth, and to teach the sons of the bourgeoisie that they could mobilize the working class for their own educated-class power project.

The rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with the rise of the nation state. I'm not sure that the bourgeoisie planned it that way. More likely the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the interests of the absolute monarchs because bourgeois merchant credit could be used to finance nation-state armies, and nation-state armies and navies could protect international bourgeois commerce.

I think it is fair to say that in the bourgeois era, the political question was who best deserved to represent the nation: the old landed aristocracy or the new merchant bourgeoisie.

In the last century the liberals, progressives, left, whatever, has tried to marginalize nation-state politics and replace it with class politics and now identity politics.

So the point of Hillary Clinton and her "basket of deplorables" is to marginalize the old nation-state politics and elevate the identity politics that the Democratic Party uses to gain power. Instead of doing a politics that heightens the idea of nation, and all people living in the United States as Americans united as one people, Hillary Clinton subscribes to a politics of identity, a race politics that heightens race identity, a gender politics that heightens the identity of women and LGBTs. The other side of this politics was to marginalize and anathematize nationalism as equivalent to Nazism or white identity politics.

And you have to give liberals credit on this. They have done an amazing job on a lot of Americans to get them to move their allegiance from America to their race or their gender.

But there is a problem with this. The United States is a nation state. The President of the United States is not just the administrative head of government, he is also the chief priest, if you like, of the national cult. There are, you will notice, several holidays -- holy days for the celebration of the national cult -- at which the president is expected to preside. He is expected to utter words that dignify the occasion and stir the national soul with the three principles of the national cult: that America is the best country in the world, and the American people are the best people in the world, and the American way of life is the best way of life in the world.

This is something that President Obama has not done. This is something that Hillary Clinton has not done. And so they have left a yuge opportunity for some fool candidate to run a campaign to Make America Great Again, and celebrate America as one nation and the American people as one people.

The point is that for the ordinary white middle class they have nowhere else to go. The ruling class has stopped celebrating the working class, and whites are not allowed to have a white identity politics. But what the white middle class can do is rally to the banner of America. And so they have.

This is the point to blame the GOP establishment that has failed to rally Americans to the flag in the last 20 years. But I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. The liberals and the media have made life very difficult for them, because, as Hillary Clinton has said, you are with us or against us. If you are with us you are all in favor of our identity politics. If not, you are a deplorable, and a racist, sexist homophobe besides.

It is not easy to figure out how to counter people that will stigmatize you as a racist for all time if you beg to differ with the liberal agenda. But in the end, someone would figure it out and that someone has done so. His name is Donald Trump.

Liberals like to think that they are beyond and above nationalism and the flummeries of celebrating America. To replace it they have chosen identity politics, which they will manage at home, balanced by a cosmopolitan globalism abroad. But that leaves the average American with nothing to believe in.

Maybe that is why a large majority of the American people have come to believe that America is on the "wrong track." Per David French it goes beyond a sour economy. He quotes Kellyanne Conway:

We noticed a number of years ago that the responses to the wrong track question are not purely economic . . . In fact, for many Americans, they are not connected to politics or policy at all.

Kellyanne Conway is now with the Trump campaign. Ahem.

When Al Gore lost the 2000 election I noticed that Gore, and following him, liberals, did not concede the election and say, OK, now we are all Americans. Instead they put bumper stickers on their cars to "ReDefeat Bush." But Bush sat down with Ted Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind. Then in 2008 President-elect Obama did not reach out to Republicans and develop a program that both parties could support. He said "we won" and developed a program in Congress without a single Republican vote.

In the old days the candidates would say after the election that we are now all Americans and call for unity.

I am not saying that this sort of thing is bad for Republicans. I am not even saying that it is bad for America. Although it is. I am saying it is bad for Democrats.

It is bad for Democrats not to embrace the national cult. It is bad for Democrats not to say, after the election: we are now all Americans together. It is bad for Democrats to stigmatize your opponents as deplorables and racists.

This is something that progressivism, going back to Marx, does not appreciate. That's because Marxism and progressivism are really secular religions; they are using politics to implement their heaven on earth. There is a reason why the Founders proposed no establishment of religion, and Thomas Jefferson talked about a wall of separation between church and state. It is much harder to compromise questions of religious faith than to compromise questions of law and distribution of loot.

And the whole point of politics is to avoid civil war and compromise differences instead of fighting to the death.

Democrats and liberals are blind to this, probably because they do not understand that their progressive faith is in fact a religion.

My dearest hope is that African Americans and Hispanic Americans will rally to Trump's banner, and decide to think of themselves as Americans who happen to be black or Latino. Because then they will start to enjoy life in America instead of being shock troops for the liberal agenda.

One fine day, perhaps, we humans will rally worldwide, as merely humans, and not as tribes, or classes, or nations, or identities. But until that day the best thing going is the nation state and its supporting cult of the nation, the national people and the national homeland and the national government. The alternative that liberals propose, of warring sub-national identities presided over by a global elite of the educated and the evolved, is a royal road to conflict and the killing fields.

Yes, Inflation is Hidden in Govt.Health Care and Education. But Who Will Bell the Cat?

If you want to know where inflation went, given that it must be somewhere, what with zero-interest-rate-policy and all, the answer is simple, writes my man Kevin Williamson.

Inflation went to live in the sectors run by government. Housing price inflation. Education price inflation. Health care price inflation. And usually, each of these things screw the young and poor.

Obviously the Fannie/Freddie housing scam favors people that already have houses. Fannie and Freddie just make it easier for young people to waste their youthful energy on propping up the house prices of their elders with liar loans. In the ensuing crash, women and minorities hardest hit.

In lower education we have lifetime teachers failing to teach poor and minority students and in higher education we have "free money available to consumers in the form of loans with no underwriting standards and concessionary interest rates." So universities jack up their prices and hire lots more administrators. And the kids pay the bill.

In health care "Pouring an extra $1 trillion into health-care subsidies will not make medical care less expensive; it probably will end up making it more expensive." The big idea with Obamacare, you'll remember, was to force the kids to get health insurance once they got off their parents' policy at age 26.

But that doesn't stop a commenter from complaining about the system.

4. Except for hypothetical idealistic beliefs in the perfection of a market system, realize there is NO BENEFIT to having for-profit healthcare unless you are a doctor, pharmaceutical company or insurer.

As long as there are people like that there will be politicians offering "free" health care.

But enough of that. Wot I want to know is, how do we crash the system so that the government inflation is purged out of housing, education, and health care?

I think we could do it on housing, because nobody really understands Fannie/Freddie, and the government has inadvertently throttled the housing game with Dodd-Frank bureaucracy. Kids and minorities and women hardest hit.

On education, the lower education answer is school choice and homeschooling. And really, how dumb can the teachers be for putting all their political eggs in the basket of one party?

The real question is health care. How do we lance the boil? How do we start a parallel system, that is like Uber to the taxicab cartel, that quietly and inconspicuously starts undermining the whole horrible corrupt government-irradiated health care system?

Honestly I don't know. But that is why we have entrepreneurs and innovators and startups and venture capitalists. Get to work you guys, and no lunch at Il Fornaio until you launch the affordable health care app.

Hey, I know. How about health care on the home-delivery model used by the food-delivery apps. You hit the Health app on your smartphone, and wait for a health care provider to show up at your door. She could have a van all tricked out with the regular stuff you need to provide GP services.

Hmm. That would mean elbowing in on the Fire Department's aid car racket.

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.