Can Anyone Stop Identity Politics?

Back in the 1960s liberals knew that the New Left and the New Politics was going to fundamentally transform America.

But ordinary Americans looked at the riots and the protests and voted for Richard Nixon. Twice.

So liberals cooked up a case against Nixon and shamed him out of office in 1974.

But then ordinary Americans came back and elected Ronald Reagan six years later.

Let's look at this straight up. Back then white working class Americans looked at the new liberal politics and they didn't like it. Just like today.

Back then white working class Americans didn't like the idea that white working class Americans were going to be the ones paying for Affirmative Action and quotas with their jobs. And their children were going to have to pay for the wonders of school busing with their education.

In 1992 Bill Clinton squared the circle by making like he was one of the guys. And so he pulled the white working class away from the Republicans. And then the white working class voted for Barack Obama.

Maybe, like many of us, the white working class thought that by voting for Obama they would put to rest the race politics that had been aimed like an arrow at their livelihoods and their culture, and sneered at them as All in the Family sneered at Archie Bunker.

But they were wrong. Race politics is who liberals are. They need race politics to get their 90 percent of the black vote and they need gender politics to get their 80 percent of the gay vote or the 62 percent of the single women vote.

Of course liberals think they are really smart, and that they can control their supporters, so that if identity politics really became a problem and threatened America they could turn it off and still lead hyphenated America on to sunlit uplands.

But Lee Kuan Yew, long-time Prime Minister of Singapore has written that in a multiracial society, people vote by race. That's from Samuel L. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. So here is how people vote in Mississippi, according to local columnist Bobby Harrison.

What continues to be a little odd about voting in Mississippi is that the state has the nation’s highest percentage of African American voters, who almost always vote Democratic while white Mississippians vote Republican by high margins.

 You don't say. According to Steve Sailer Mississippi whites voted 88 percent for Romney in 2012.

I fear that we educated middle-class people are living in a fool's paradise. We have convinced ourselves that we are tolerant and non-racist and that we can live in harmony with others different from ourselves.

But in fact, of course, we live next to people exactly like ourselves: educated upper-income people that define ourselves by our education and our profession and our cultural sophistication and our tolerance.

Very nice. But suppose that our neighborhood started to decline and that immigrants started to move in and crime started to go up. What then?

The answer is simple. We would move. Because we can afford to. So for us to preach tolerance and inclusion and diversity is just fine, because we could always get out if the going got tough.

For the folks lower down the income scale things are not so copacetic, because their jobs are not so secure, their options are not as broad, and their finances are not robust enough to take the hit of moving out. There is a reason why they adhere to notions of tribal and racial identity. Because that is how humans have defended themselves from the invaders since time immemorial. And right now they feel themselves under attack.

Like I say. The best way to unite a divided people is to take them to war. That's how the US united the divided immigrants of 1900. The ruling class sent their children to war in 1941.

But what sort of a war could the ruling class gin up today to unite the immigrants of 1990? The War on Terror didn't do it. If anything it divided the nation.

So you tell me. What kind of a war would unite all the factions of the ruling class so that nobody checked out half way through?

Frankly, my dear, I have no idea.

Trump's Loud Mouth: Not a Bug But a Feature

I was reading someone over the weekend who said that the Trump voters were the people in the room that didn't say anything: or the Uber driver that admitted being a Trump supporter only reluctantly.

The point about Trump is that he would say stuff that the Trump supporter couldn't. Because political correctness, which I argue is in fact intellectual terrorism.

So the point of about Trump being rude and crude starts to come into focus. It was not a bug, but a feature. GOP voters wanted someone who had the cojones to say the things you are not allowed to say in America. So when we saw the early GOP debates it was stunning to see Trump utterly fearless and rude. He was saying things we wanted to say to liberals, but wouldn't, or couldn't.

Because we knew that violating the rules meant instant immolation by media. Also known as auto da fé. But Trump went through the fire and survived! He did something that no prudent person would dare to do. Because of the example of all kinds of GOP politicians whose careers got eliminated with one wrong word.

I remember some incident, which got into racist, sexist territory, and every GOP candidate, even Ted Cruz, the anti-establishment candidate, piled onto Trump. But Trump survived, and they did not.

Because the GOP base wanted a candidate with the courage of a Trump.

Here's a girl professor, Joan C. Williams, addressing the issue.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. 

Oh and another thing. The working class doesn't like the professional class.

[T]he white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” 

Professional people are the managers and supervisors that tell the working class what to do. And the working class doesn't like it.

So, when you think of it, Trump and the white working class is a marriage made in heaven.

But I think there is something bigger going on. It is simply that a political leader is supposed to be a leader, he is supposed to "boldly... outdare the dangers of the time."

Now the great danger of our time to white normal Americans is political correctness, which, after Bryan Magee, I call intellectual terrorism. It has two parts. In the first place it terrorizes the opposition to the left into silence, because to disagree with the left is to be anathematized as a  racist, sexist, homophobe and to risk your job. In the second place it teaches its liberal supporters to hate and to fear the dreaded racist, sexist homophobes. And how, as we discovered after the election.

This is not good. But, as I have written here and here, it cannot last. The politics of intellectual terrorism is, in reality, a Reign of Terror, and reigns of terror, after Crane Brinton in Anatomy of Revolution, cannot last. People cannot live forever in a whipped-up ideological fervor. Eventually they give up out of exhaustion and go back to normal life. This return-to-normal has come to be called "Thermidor" after the coup against the Jacobins on 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) that ended the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

I am saying that the intellectual terrorism of political correctness was bound to end up in some kind of a Thermidor. And we can now call it Trumpidor.

The left has traditionally railed against the leader that executes on the Thermidorean reaction, and for good reason. In our age, Thermidor always takes place at the peak of some lefty Reign of Terror, like the Cultural Revolution in China, and lefties naturally take a dim view of their glorious revolution being stopped dead by some man on a white horse. But this is because lefties are living a dream reality, a secular religion that explains everything and nothing. Leftism is an apology for revolution and intellectual terror, but nothing more.

So Trump has had his Thermidor. The question is whether he will lead America back to prosperity and comity, or whether he will bury America on some mad adventure in Russia, like the man that picked up power in the street after the first Thermidor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, it is time to Cut the Cringe, and openly say to the accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, hate, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and climate denialism: We Don't Care.

How Do We Get the Left's Army to Go Home?

I am reading a memoir by philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy. But don't imagine it is about his life. Oh no, it starts with the young Bryan, aged 5, being concerned that he never experienced the act of going to sleep.

[O]ne moment I was talking to my sister in the dark, and the next I was waking up in a sunlit room having been asleep all night.

Then, at age 9, Bryan was amazed that he could move his finger just by thinking it. What did it mean?

It wasn't until he went to university that he realized that there is a word for puzzling about life, the universe, and everything. It is called philosophy.

I tell you this by way of an introduction, because later in the book Magee, who had read the whole of Marx's Das Capital, describes Marxism as "intellectual terrorism."

But that, I thought, is the way to describe everything about the Left. When they are not doing actual terrorism, as they are doing right now, "protesting" the election of Donald Trump, they are engaged in intellectual terrorism, beating up on anyone that doesn't agree with them with their all-purpose pejoratives of racist, sexist, homophobe.

This notion of "intellectual terrorism" showed up at exactly the right moment, because I am writing an article in my head about the fact that everything the left has been agitating for is achieved. But try telling any army to quit and go home, pal. The whole world view and ethos of the left is "activism," the struggle. Without activism, without the struggle, life would have no meaning.

That is why a nice woman I know said to me some years ago that she had always wanted to "do activism." Of course she does; that is what they teach good little girls in school today. That is why the colleges in the nation are convulsed in the days after Donald Trump's presidential victory by "protests" making non-negotiable demands that Trump is "Not My President."

But everything the left wants has been achieved. It's time to declare victory and go home.

First of all, the working class.

When rich kids Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued their Communist Manifesto in 1848 it made a lot of sense that the bourgeoisie would replace the feudal lords as the oppressive ruling class, and that there was a fundamental conflict between employers and workers, and that the workers would probably starve unless something was done.

In fact, it was in 1850 that the European working class started making real wage gains, and that was before the workers had got the vote and before any pro-labor legislation had been written. Then in 1870 the whole intellectual framework of Marxism was demolished by the marginal revolution. Then, by the end of the 19th century it was clear that the bourgeoisie, and in particular the great robber barons, were not that interested in power. When they had "made their pile" they quit business and started philanthropies: medical research and universities in the case of John D. Rockefeller; libraries and Peace foundations in the case of Andrew Carnegie; and libraries and art collections in the case of J.P. Morgan. By 1900 it was clear that the working class was rising, and the level of absolute poverty was going down.

So, by 1900, it was clear that special, violent, revolutionary means were not warranted to help the workers. And indeed, the Great Enrichment has continued down to the present moment. It has brought billions out of starvation into prosperity wherever capitalism, the economic ideology of the bourgeoisie, has been tried.

But if the bourgeoisie were not the monsters that Marx had imagined and the workers were prospering then what was the point of all the pro-labor legislation, that, in 1900 was just beginning a huge tsunami that would engulf all nations' governments. I take the position that the only thing government knows is to make war. If we didn't need to make war on the bourgeoisie, then what was the point of spending 30-50 percent of GDP on economic war programs, to force nations to provide pensions, health care, education, and welfare for the poor and the middle class?

The brighter Marxists realized this by 1920 and that is why the Frankfurt School intellectuals switched their movement from What About the Workers to What about Blacks and Women -- and imperialism and marginalization of minority groups.

But the fact is that the western nations responded to What About Blacks and Women immediately. Women were given the vote, and emerged, generation by generation into the public square. Blacks got the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. The west tired of imperialism and gave up its empires. People stopped talking about the "lesser breeds." And upper-class diversions like LGBT got mainstreamed.

But you would never think any of this had happened. We have Black Lives Matter running around acting as if the Civil Rights Acts never passed and that no black could get elected to the US Senate from South Carolina. We have feminists running around insisting that the patriarchy is beating them to an emotional pulp. As if women weren't 60 percent of college students, and had had the right to kill their babies in the womb for 40 years. We have gays running around picking on dangerous wedding photographers. And we have the environmentalists that cleaned up our air and water insisting that the planet is about to fry from global warming.

What is going on here? The answer is simple. Once activists have set up a political army to achieve some great purpose it becomes almost impossible to shut it down and send the soldiers home. The political generals are having far too much fun directing their political army, and the soldiers are having far too much fun looting and pillaging.

So today we have labor unions that flourish today only as representatives of government employees, and they are sending governments into bankruptcy. Today we have BLM activists acting as if police brutality is a bigger problem than gangbangers killing each other and 75 percent of children growing up without a father. We have women still imagining that the racist sexist homophobic patriarchy is out to get them. We have hateful gays accusing everyone else of "hate." We have environmentalists accusing skeptics of being the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

Of course we do. Because otherwise all these "activists" would have to go home, get a job, get married, and spend the next 20 years in the endless grind of raising children. And who needs that, when the alternative is the excitement and a life of meaning in left-wing activism.

That's the big agenda item for the next 50 years. How to get the generals and the colonels and the buck privates in the left's activist army to declare victory and go home.

No, New Yorker, YOU are the American Tragedy

My text today is from The New Yorker reacting to the election of Donald Trump. David Remnick writes:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.

Hello? "American republic?" I thought you chaps believed in democracy, not the republic of laws and limited government set up by the Founders. What's with the sudden concern for the "republic?"

"Tragedy for the Constitution?" I thought you chaps believed in a living constitution, after the original Progressives, that the Constitution should be updated according to the will of Supreme Court justices who would just happen to be malleable creatures of the educated ruling class. You know the drill: finding penumbras under which favorite liberal issues just happen to be hiding.

"Nativism?" Well you got me there. As an immigrant American I am all in favor of limiting immigration to keep the culture of Americanism strong and undiluted by country folk that still think like peasants and nomads. Although it certainly wouldn't hurt for all those liberals to leave the country as they promised.

"Authoritarianism?" Well, I see your point. Donald Trump might do a few things you don't like. But if we are talking about authoritarianism, how about the presidency of Barack Obama, with its executive actions, its egregious use of administrative and regulatory ukase, its abuse of the IRS to punish conservatives, its corruption of the FBI and the Justice Department to give Hillary Clinton a pass, and the cram-down folly of Obamacare?

"Misogyny and racism?" The thing I love most about liberals is their utter blindness to their own anti-woman and ugly racist politics. The Great Society welfare state has been a disaster for lower-class women who are treated as disposable one-night stands and are reduced to marrying the state. Oh, and they can kill their babies any time they want. But Trump is a misogynist.

And racism! Do you not understand, Mr. Remnick, that the whole point of modern liberal identity politics is to hive off tribal groups into their silos and keep them there? To keep blacks voting 90 percent for Democrats, and women voting for Uncle Sugar? I have been reading today about a poor helpless Hillary voter going to work at the Pentagon and seeing nothing but men and being frightened. Golly, I wonder where she got the idea to be frightened! My line on this is that you can't get 90 percent of a group to vote for anything unless you frighten the pants off them. Well played, Dems and media. You got you base well and truly frightened. But that is what the Democratic race and gender politics is all about. Frightening people so they can be used as pawns for liberal power politics.

I don't know if Donald Trump will turn out to be a half decent president or a continuation in the line of failed presidents. But I do know this. Our liberal ruling class is a disaster.

And the disaster really issues from the lies that the ruling class tells itself and its supporters.

And that is an American tragedy.

The Revenge of Archie Bunker

It was back in March that I thought of the meme that defines the election of 2016. It was in a blog post I called "Trump Hauls White Working Class into the GOP Boat."

And I suggested that Archie Bunker is the poster boy for all this.

If we mark the debut of All in the Family in winter 1971 as the date that the white working class was cast out of the Democratic Party, branded as racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers, every one, then the white working class has been wandering in the wilderness for about 40 years, just like the Israelites. 

Only now the white working class has found a home, found a politician that speaks to it. It means the end of the Republican Party that I have known and supported, as a party of small government and the home of the People of the Responsible Self. But I am willing to let the white working class in. Because we should always shelter the homeless.

And really, would it harm the Republican Party to adapt itself to the political needs of the white working class? A little less immigration, a little less racial spoils, a more moderate reform of entitlements than hardcore libertarian conservatives like me would like? Is that so hard to swallow? 

 I have written that I think that the Democrats' abandonment of the white working class is one of the crimes of the century. Whaddya mean, dumping the white working class after calling them the salt of the earth and loading them up with political loot?

And I shall write later about the bigger issue, the record of vile injustice practiced by the left ever since the false dawn of 1848. There is no fundamental conflict between employers and workers; workers have benefited enormously from capitalism, and once the workers got the vote there was no need for special privileges for the workers. There is no fundamental conflict between men and women, white and black, gay and straight. Once women got the vote, once blacks got the Civil Rights Acts, once gays got the police off their backs, then the "activists" should have gone home and let the law take its course.

But people do not go into politics to pass and law and then let the grass grow. They go into politics to taste power and visit humiliation on their enemies. And so the left has mixed ordure, the ordure of division and coercion, with its noble ideals, and the result is ordure.

My hope for the Trump presidency, which began last night with his statement, "I love this country," is that he manages to turn a bunch of blacks and Hispanics into typical Americans that simply love America. That is the whole point of capitalism and the Great Enrichment. Instead of everyone sitting on their patch of land and defending it to the death, we all mix together and produce and consume and buy and sell with only one principle to guide us: to trust people that demonstrate trustworthiness.

And the way to give the marginalized a break is to break down the ramparts of economic privilege, the domination and hegemony of the administrative, regulatory state. The science is settled on this, you know. Bureaucrats just can't do the job; only producers and consumers and prices can do it.

"What About the Workers?"

The great theme of the 2016 election has been the sudden discovery of the white working class. It's as though somebody asked, as they did of Peter Sellers' character droning in a British upper-class accent hears a voice from the audience: "what about the workers?"

Gosh! I thought we had dealt with the problems of the workers, two generations ago. I thought they were put to bed so we could all work on women and minorities and gays.

In fact, of course, politics has ever created more problems that it solves, and every group that gets "helped" by government ends up with what I call the "little darlings" problem. Simply, if you become the little darlings of the ruling class you are getting set up for disaster, because the day will come when the ruling class no longer likes you, or needs you.

Even liberals are coming round to the notion that something went wrong with the white working class -- in The New Yorker yet. Well, yes, liberals. What went wrong is that you gave the white working class special privileges and enabled a generation of the working class to avoid the challenge of embourgeoisment. You taught them to believe that good manufacturing jobs at good wages would last forever, and vote Democrat. Then you went off and taught women and minorities to believe in liberal promises and vote Democrat.

But I am just thinking, on this Election Day, November 8, 2016, about the folks you see in the photos at Trump rallies. I suppose they are all racists, sexists, homophobes, as the liberals insist. But to me they just look like ordinary Americans. OK, ordinary white Americans.

It makes you realize how Republicans have failed in the last few elections. The party leaders have failed to connect directly with ordinary, typical Americans. They have instead appealed to libertarian conservatives like me, and Christian conservatives in the Religious Right, but not ordinary unaffiliated, typical Americans. It is shameful that it took a political neophyte like Trump to connect the party with typical Americans given that Michael Barone writes that the Republican Party has always been the party of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans."

In a long article on "Economic Growth," John H. Cochrane, an economist, lays out in excruciating detail how the present government makes life difficult for the average "typical American" with its taxes and its subsidies and its regulations and its favors and its rigidities. It's been a long time building, and it is hard to imagine how any government in the near future will have the mandate to do anything about it, since politics is and has always been about taxes and subsidies and regulations and favors and rigidities. Until the Huns ride in from the Asian steppe.

But I still have in my mind the images of ordinary Americans at the Trump rallies getting enthusiastic about a political leader that is actually speaking to their concerns.

According to Larry Summers, the Republican Party has combined "social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people." Well, yeah. That is the image that Democrats and liberals want to propagate, and they do it very well. But it doesn't really connect with the idea of former construction worker Sean Hannity that Republicans are really people that follow the law, go to work, and obey the rules. The point about free-market economics is that it allows unknowns to enter the marketplace and thrive without having all the good paths reserved for the established and the well-connected. If you call that "helping rich people" well I gotta bridge to sell you.

And I get what he is talking about. If you think that life is a patron-client experience, where people are all People of the Subordinate Self that rely on the power of a patron to survive and prosper in this world, as proposed in my Three Peoples theory, then you really cannot believe in the notions of economics and the city economy of trusting the stranger without the intervention of the powerful patron on your behalf.

But I think that Republican voters are and have been people that are not organized into political armies under some patron for the purpose of wresting loot and plunder from the economic system. They may be that way because they are established middle class, or because they are aspirant, seeking to rise. But I don't think that the Republican Party is the part of "the rich." Not today. It must be pretty obvious that these days "the rich" are people that are very careful to keep on the right side of the Democratic Party and the liberal culture in general. The point about Peter Thiel, Trump supporter, is that he is an outlier.

My view of the world is that progressives -- Marxists socialists, whatever -- have created human wreckage wherever they go. There is a ton of wreckage in the welfare state today after about a century of progressive politics, and it is not just the white working class that got wrecked. How about the black underclass and how about women?

Yeah. "What about the workers?"

Da Fix is In!

The problem with the ruling class giving itself a pass, as in the classified emails and private server of Hillary Clinton, is the question of where it ends.

Obviously, the whole point of being a ruling class is to afford yourself and your supporters a certain relief against the rigors of the rule of law. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

So it makes sense that the White House and the Department of Justice would put the screws to the FBI when the FBI was investigating one of its own. And it makes sense that a little man like James Comey would bend under the pressure. Not just the White House but the whole Democratic Party and the Democratic Party operatives with bylines were telling him to put it where the sun don't shine.

But how far do you go? The whole point of politics and the rule of law is not "justice," at least not in my view. The whole point is to head off civil war. Government is force, and the people on the receiving end of force don't like it. If you keep your government force going too strong then the people on the receiving end might decide to create a head of rebellion.

That is why I rehearse constantly my catch phrases about Government is force, politics is division, system is domination, and Government is injustice. I am reminding the ruling class that everything that government or a politician does is riling up some yahoo somewhere. And the longer it goes on, the more likely that some yahoo will talk to his buddy and start to think that force must be met with force.

The problem with our liberal masters, as I see it, is that they really have no clue how deep is their self-dealing and how corrupt they are. They have no clue what a corrupt operation Obamacare is, or their climate agenda. There is a simple reason for this. Our liberal friends think that they are the good guys and that everything they do advances emancipation, liberation, and justice. And their willing accomplices in the media repeat back their catch phrases back at them. Of course they do. Not only is the ruling class intermarried with the media class, but it is clear to me, from nods and winks in the Obama era, that it is not good for one's media career to be a nail that sticks out -- apart from the basic fact of media life that the media lives by access to the powerful, and access can be easily withdrawn.

So Hillary Clinton has skated on her illegal and insecure private email scheme. For now. The problem is: next time. What happens when Hillary Clinton -- or any member of the ruling class -- next needs to compromise the justice system in order to skate on corruption or abuse of power? How much deeper into the corruption of the justice system will she need to go?

Our Democratic friends reject as laughable the idea that the Clinton scandal is "worse than Watergate." Oh really. As I recall Watergate issued from some over-enthusiastic campaign operatives burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton e-mail scandal issues from the decision of the Secretary of State to conduct her business not on secure State Department systems but using her own private email server. So the Watergate scandal began with illegal actions by underlings; the Clinton scandal begins with illegal action by the principal. And we are not just talking about illegal action but illegal action that endangers national security. You tell me which is worse.

OK, now let's segue to the bigger issue. The problem is not just corruption of the justice system to evade responsibility for illegal action. The problem is that, now that progressivism has got into its mature stage, and government is gigantic and complicated, government has to evade the law, just to keep on keeping on, with executive actions and administrative ukases that amount to legislating. That is because government is doing complicated things that need constant adjustment to deal with unanticipated consequences of the original government intervention. We see the Obama administration doing this with Obamacare. And there is a strong current, supported in the ruling class, for using administrative ukase and regulation to enact policy that could never get a majority in Congress, especially with regard to climate and the environment.

Again, our ruling class is missing the point with its clever end run around the legislative process. If you want to enact climate change policy that will stand the test of time you need to go through all the flummery of legislation and vote-trading and a bipartisan consensus. Then, when the going gets tough, you can appeal to Democrats and Republicans and the whole American people to support you, since the policy was honestly proposed, honestly debated, and honestly voted in. But when you do things the Obama way, with phones and pens, with activists pushing through dubious policy in the depths of the bureaucracy, then people start to complain that The Fix Is In. And then nothing that you do is fixed and permanent, because tons of people think that you cheated, and they know that nobody asked their opinion.

We see this problem all across the west as the voters start to rebel against the globalist agenda of no borders and global migration and global commerce. The global elite never asked anyone's permission; they just believe that globalism and transnational government is necessary and that nation states deserve to go onto the waste heap of history and that they, the global elite, know what they are doing. They are wrong, and millions of people are going to suffer for their error and their arrogance.

And we know that they are wrong because they need to violate the law to get the job done.