How to Deal with an Unaccountable Federal Bureaucracy

A big question of our age, perhaps the big question, is how to prune back the huge, hegemonic and dominatory power of the federal government.

It is not just the question of 2,000 page bills in Congress that nobody has read. As E. Donald Elliott writes in The American Spectator, the bigger problem is the administrative and regulator apparatus.

[M]ost of our law today is made by officials in the agencies and the courts who are not responsible to the people and often do not reflect their common sense. Call this the “three smart guys in a room” problem: a small group of self-appointed agency experts get together and come up with a rule that sounds good to them in the abstract and then (some times after notice and comment and judicial review), the rest of us have to live under it unless Congress disproves it and the President does not veto the Congressional disapproval of a rule enacted by his own Administration.

So Elliott has a small, but significant suggestion. The federal bureaucracy has three levels. There are the executive positions that serve at the pleasure of the president. There is the great mass of bureaucrats. But in between is the Senior Executive Service (SES). Out of the total of 2.7 million bureaucrats the SES consists of 7,800 senior officials just below the presidentially appointed positions. And they serve for life or until they retire, and they are the main source of the "three smart guys in a room" problem. Writes Elliott:m

Congress should enact term limits for members of the “Senior Executive Service” (SES) and make them subject to periodic retention votes by the Congress. SESers are the barons just below the temporary Presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate.

But will that make a dime's worth of difference? A bureaucrat is a bureaucrat and what bureaucrats have learned over the last century is the philosophy of administration and a world view that regards sensible regulation and centralized provision as the very meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Aside from the natural instinct of bureaucrats to centralize and control, there is another problem. Aside from the fact that government is injustice, administrative government cannot respond to changing circumstances. That is why we see continual government failures that never get fixed. And the one thing that government cannot do is cut spending programs, except the armed forces after a war. The recent lesson of Venezuela is a case in point. The government could not bring itself to cut its headline programs in the aftermath of the oil price collapse after 2014. So it has ended up with massive inflation and the failure of all its spending programs. Why is this? It is because the beneficiaries of the spending programs are the government's supporters. To cut spending is to break faith with the government's supporters, so governments always crash and burn before cutting its programs.

Charles Murray has another idea, in his By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. He doesn't think that moving the deck chairs on the government Titanic is going to do it. So he proposes a strategy of disobedience, a way of outflanking big government to regain our freedom.

The problem is, as I outline in a blog post, is that the the current legal system allows the government to convict you of a crime for a mistake rather than a self-consciously evil act, and with the rise of the regulatory state, there is no way to roll back government. So we must start a guerrilla war against government. He calls it "Opening a New Front," and I have blogged about it here.

The idea is to fight back against government and gum up the works of the regulatory machine. Murray wants us to turn the tables on the mid-level bureaucrat, and say to him: you touch me and I'll make your nice secure job a hell. The idea is to crate a "Madison Fund" to protect "ordinary citizens who are being victimized by the regulatory state." The Madison Fund would come to the help of citizens being victimized by a bureaucrat and make life hell for him. Call it reverse-regulatory terrorism: eat one bureaucrat and terrorize ten thousand. Take away their pensions and you take away their reason for living.

You can see how important Murray's idea is when you consider the issue of the IRS and the Tea Parties. The IRS, encouraged by some Democratic senators, decided to slow walk the applications of Tea Party groups for 401c(3) status. Nothing happened to Lois Lerner, the bureaucrat in charge of the outrage, and nothing happened to the truculent IRS commissioner that basically told the investigating congressional committees to go pound sand.

So. Will the new Trump administration Do Something about regulatory hegemony and injustice? I am not holding my breath.

Sorry Liberals, Protest is for People Outside the System

Because I'm a bourgeois, born and bred, I really don't get the protest culture. After all, if you have a political problem, you need to elect a representative and create a legislative majority and change the law.

But then a middle-aged woman friend that told me at lunch that she had always wanted to get into "activism." Hello? There was obviously something that I didn't understand, so I turned on my cultural antenna to search for an answer.

The next target on the radar plot was a young woman in a Philosophy of Hume class at the University of Washington here in Seattle. She spoke as though politics was a protest march to City Hall. So who filled that good little girl's head with that stuff? She was talking as though she was a disenfranchised serf, not a privileged young woman well on the way to becoming a candidate member in the professional class. Why would she think that politics was a question of peasants with pitchforks?

Then I read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Nominally a history of the modern era, it is really an apology for the elite-guided administrative state. It takes for granted that the top-down administrative state is a good thing that is fixing horrible problems with capitalism. But one thing accidentally shone through the educated-elite apology. It was that once the working class got the vote in the 19th century it stopped the riots and demonstrations. That's because once the workers got the vote the political process started to accommodate their agenda; no need to take to the streets.

Oh really.

So why then do the college students and professional protesters take to the streets after a perfectly normal presidential election hashtagging #NotMyPresident?

It's because good little girls in America are being taught in college that "activism" is the highest calling for a meaningful life.

Hillary Clinton learned that in college; that's why she became an Alinsky fan. That is also why President Obama is telling us that he is going to become a community organizer after he leaves the presidency.

All the social justice, environmental, LGBT activism is all part of this culture, that the way for a young sprout of the educated class to find meaning in life is to bend the arc of history towards justice through political action and peaceful protest.

Note the contrast with the conservative philosophy that politics is a necessary evil, that all political action should be leavened with the consent of the governed, and that major pieces of legislation, according to Pat Moynihan, should be passed with nothing less than a 70-30 vote in the US Senate.

Note the contrast with my sharpened notion that politics is division, deliberately separating Americans into two separate tribes; that government is force, so never forget that the vital and necessary agenda of "our side" is experienced by the folks on the receiving end as injustice.

Notice that the conservative and the Chantrill notions imply that you should be very careful about stirring up a hornet's nest when you poke around with political protest and government power.

Notice that the conservative and Chantrill notions imply that you should be putting yourself in the place of the "other" when considering some new political initiative.

It is clear from the actions of our liberal friends in the wake of the Trump election that they have no clue about this. The only reality is their reality and if you disagree you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc.

Here is my prediction. Either conservatives are right about this, or liberals are right. Either it is true that you really want to avoid riling up the opposition, or it is true that, in the quest of bending the arc of history towards justice, activism and political street action and peaceful  protests and non-negotiable demands are the only way.

So who is right?

I think that the nearest example is the aftermath of the Sixties. In the Sixties the radical children of liberal parents thought they were changing America forever. They were intoxicated with the ideas of the New Left and the repressive tolerance of Herbert Marcuse.

But then the Democrats nominated not the kids' candidate Eugene McCarthy but old-time liberal Hubert Humphrey, and Americans elected Richard Nixon, who championed the Silent Majority that did not want to live the mobilized life of the political activist. Democrats knew what to do about that; they drove Nixon out of office for shenanigans that Democrats get in their mother's milk. So the American people elected Ronald Reagan, a B-movie actor, to make the point and underline it.

Will we have a repeat of the Sixties? Certainly not. History does not repeat itself, it merely rhymes.

But it would be glorious if the New Activism ended up sending not just the white working class but the black and brown and pink working class into the Republican Party.

On Electoral College, Be Careful What You Wish For Liberals

Every time a party wins the popular vote but loses in the Electoral College it starts thinking of ways to eliminate the Electoral College.

Of course, there's a bit of a problem with that. The Electoral College is right there in the constitution. See, it's right there, as Lina Lamont might say.

Not that some liberal Supreme Court might not vote one day to eliminate the Electoral College because of some penumbra in the Constitution that clearly establishes a right to a popular vote for President.

Failing that, as Paul Waldman writes, we can implement the National Popular Vote plan.

This idea utilizes the fact that the Constitution gives each state permission to allot its electors any way it pleases. States that join in make a pledge to allot their electoral vote to whoever wins the national popular vote. Once you have states that combine to exceed 270 electoral votes, the measure can take effect and then the popular vote winner will automatically win.

I would think that any sane person would be able to see the problem with this. What if a state backs out at the last minute? What about skullduggery? After all, I wouldn't think that a Hillary Clinton, based on her peerless record for political shenanigans, would hesitate for a minute to bribe a state delegation to vote the other way, and have the entire mainstream media and the Washington establishment behind her.

Anyway, based on my understanding of Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent, which is an eyewatering analysis of voting systems, I would estimate that whatever system we have for electing a president it would still involve bribing the fence-sitters to make up a majority. Because that is what Buchanan and Tullock asset. Every voting system comes down to bribing the fence-sitters. We call it "log-rolling."

That is how it is today in presidential elections. The candidates take the deep-blue and deep-red states for granted and campaign almost exclusively in the so-called toss-up states. They are, in effect bribing the fence-sitters.

In 2016, as we know, Donald Trump either by luck or design centered his campaign around an appeal to the white working class and, low and behold, he turned the white working class Rust Belt states -- Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennslyvania -- from blue to red. Was that genius or dumb luck?

Here is something else to consider, liberals. It issues from the words of Lee Kuan Yew, once Prime Minister of Singapore. He remarked that in a multiracial country the voters vote by race.

So let us think, what would candidates do if they were running national campaigns that focused completely on the national popular vote. I'd say that sooner or later they would run campaigns based solely on identity politics: in other words, race. They would find that basing a campaign on anything more fine-grained than that just wouldn't work on a national scale.

Of course, the Electoral College, like the Senate, is one of the concessions that the Founders had to make to the small states to get them to sign onto the Constitution. The Electoral College and the Senate both over-represent the small states in the affairs of the nation.

The question is: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Obviously a president elected on a pure national popular vote would not care too much about small states, and without a Senate a small-state Senator Reed (D-NV) would not be able to hold up the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.

Here's another idea. What about diversity and inclusion, liberals? Surely, without the Senate and the Electoral College we would have much less diversity and inclusion in the nation, because the big states would just outvote the small states and impose their big-state agenda on the little guys.

It all comes down to this. Who do you trust? Do you trust modern liberals that backed the most corrupt presidential candidate since Lyndon Baines Johnson, or do you trust the Founders like Madison and Hamilton, who had read, learned and understood the great books about political philosophy that had been coming out in the previous century or so. They had read their Locke, their Montesquieu, and the result was the US Constitution. Then they wrote the Federalist Papers, perhaps the finest disquisition on politics and constitutions ever written. The basic argument of the Federalist Papers was to justify how much government was enough. How much was needed to keep a nation safe in a world of predators and yet keep government small enough so it would not oppress its people.

In my lifetime I haven't seen liberals rise above a tactical mindset that seeks to queer the system to benefit liberals next time out. So I'll stay with the Constitution and the Electoral College as written, until the day dawns when the nation boasts another Madison and another Hamilton in its front rank.

Unpacking the Steve Bannon Flap

What should we make of the sudden liberal "concern" about Steve Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in the last three months leading up to the election, and has now been appointed "chief strategist and senior counselor" to the president-elect? Before taking up with Trump he headed up Breitbart, the alt-news on-line media engine that was 1000% for Trump.

The answer is that liberals think they can play the race card on Bannon. Because he has not thoroughly rejected the alt-right, who we all know are racists, sexists, homophobes and Nazis. Here is the New York Times piece.

Unfortunately, many of the people defending Steve Bannon are pretending to be shocked that gambling goes on in Steve's Cafe. Alt-right, they seem to ask? Never heard of it.

Of course they know about the alt-right. Of course they know that the alt-right is looking at a white identity politics as the natural reaction to everything-else identity politics. Of course they know that the alt-right has unkind things to say about Jews.

So I think that the Bannon apologists are missing a shot when they insist there is nobody here but us chickens.

The way to proceed is to turn the tables on the liberals. To ask liberals what they expected after 50 years of liberal race politics? To quote Lee Kuan Yew that in a multi-racial society people vote by race. So say that liberals are intellectual terrorists for calling anyone that disagrees with them by some pejorative.

They should offer liberals a deal: you stop harboring black racists like Black Lives Matter and Hispanic racists like La Raza and the feminist man-haters and the gay hetero-haters and we'll get tough on our uglies too.

The amazing thing is that white identity politics hasn't been a big thing already. You would think that middle and lower-class whites would have twigged long ago that the race and gender politics of the Democratic Party is like a gun pointed at their jobs and their families, and that they would have left the Democratic Party decades ago and made the Republican Party into the white party.

But the interesting thing is that the white working class in the states that won the election for Trump -- Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania -- all voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. So they can't be racists, can they? Sexists, maybe. Or maybe they thought that if they voted for a black president then the race politics of the last half century would go away and leave them in peace.

The point is that Donald Trump got nominated and elected as least in part because he pushed back against the intellectual terrorism of political correctness. And Steve Bannon was a part of that process.

So of course liberals want Bannon banished to Outer Slobbovia. They don't want their little gravy train of poisonous race and gender identity politics to end, because what would liberals do then, poor things?

Liberals really shouldn't want to provoke working class whites into voting by race. Whites are 70 percent of the electorate and if they started voting 90 percent for the GOP candidate like blacks vote 90 percent for the Democrat it wouldn't be pretty.

Anyway, the Republican Party is simply the home of Americans that the Democratic Party doesn't want. Democrats decided that white Southerners were racists, so the white South decided to become Republicans. Democrats decided that enthusiastic Christians were bigots, so the Christians decided to become Republicans. Now Democrats have decided that the white working class are all racists, not to mention deplorables and bitter clingers, so the white working class has broken down the doors to the Republican Party and is helping itself to the smorgasbord.

I wonder which group will be next to anathematized by the Democrats? My bet is on the Jews, still voting 70 percent Democrat.

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.