The New York Times View of the World

Back on Tuesday President-elect Trump had an on-the-record interview with the New York Times chappies and chapettes. And I have read the transcript.

Let us make a rash assumption. Let us assume that the order and the frequency of raising issues with the president-elect tells us a lot about the chaps and chapettes at The New York Times.

The alt-right. Yes, first out of the box, Dean Baquet, executive editor, asked about the alt-right convention in Washington DC. "So, I’d love to hear you talk about how you’re going to manage that group of people[.]" Oh please.

Next up, the Clinton pardon. Maggie Haberman, political reporter, asked about that, and what it means in detail (you know, so the Clintons would know what was coming at them).

Then, climate change. Thomas Friedman, opinion columnist, asked "But are you going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change?" Oh no! Trump said he had an open mind, but mentioned the Climategate emails. Yay!

Hey! Clintons again! Elizabeth Bumiller, Washington bureau chief, " I just wanted to follow up on the question you were asked about not pursuing any investigations into Hillary Clinton. Did you mean both the email investigation and the foundation investigation — you will not pursue either one of those?" Trump actually equivocated, saying that he just wants to go forward.

Then, climate change again! Michael D. Shear, White House correspondent, asks it Trump is going to take us out of the Paris accords.

Then, climate change yet again! Shear asks about wind turbines on Trump's golf courses and the conflict of interest.

Then, climate change again! Michael Barbaro, political reporter, asks about Trump meeting with Brexit leaders about wind farms. Trump says that we are "subsidizing wind mills all over this country" and they kill all the birds. No!

Hey kids! Back to alt-right and Steve Bannon. I am not making this up. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, White House correspondent, asks about Steve Bannon, "hero of the alt-right. He’s been described by some as racist and anti-Semitic."

Now, Breitbart. Unknown asks, "what do you think of the website [Bannon] ran, Breitbart?" Then Julie Davis mentions African Americans and Jews and "the slant that Breitbart brings to the news[.]" The horror!

Finally, actual economic policy. Ross Douthat, opinion columnist, asks how whether in four years the Rust Belt will feel that Trump governed more like Paul Ryan. Trump goes on a riff about the forgotten men and women. But what about the robots? Trump says we'll make 'em here. And by the way he got a call from Bill Gates and from Tim Cook and talked to Cook about tax cuts and making iPhones in the US.

Look out: alt-right Nazi alert! Unknown asks about the "conference this past weekend in Washington of people who pledged their allegiance to Nazism." Trump says "Boy, you are really into this stuff, huh?"

Now infrastructure. Pinch Sulzberger asks "is infrastructure going to be the core of your first few years?" Trump says not the core, but important.

Now shock and awe. Thomas Friedman says "I came here thinking you’d be awed and overwhelmed by this job, but I feel like you are getting very comfortable with it." Trump says he is comfortable and awed. But then Michael D. Shear chimes in saying that Obama said you guys were pretty overwhelmed. Trump says he had a good meeting with Obama.

Finally, foreign policy. Thomas Friedman asks "What do you see as America’s role in the world?" Trump waffles then goes off the record on Syria.

And waterboarding. Maggie Haberman asks if Trump would return to waterboarding. Trump says that Gen. Mattis told him that you can get more from a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers than torture.

And Jared Kushner. Haberman asks if Trump will bring Kushner in. Trump answers: maybe to bring peace between Israel and Palestine.

Finally First Amendment. Mark Thompson, CEO, asks "after all the talk about libel and libel laws, are you committed to the First Amendment to the Constitution?" Trump says no worries. Because he doesn't want to be sued any more than The New York Times.

OK, sports fans. Let's add up the score on mentions.

1. Alt-right, Bannon, Breitbart: 4
2. Climate change: 4
3. Clinton emails, etc.: 2
4. Economic policy, infrastructure: 2
5. Foreign policy, torture: 2
6. Son-in-law: 1
7. First Amendment: 1

Now my question is this. Do you think that the folks at The New York Times are serious journalists, or what?

Maybe the US Will Always Have a "White" Majority

The reason liberals are Borking Bannon and Sessions and anyone that dares to normalize the alt-right is that the alt-right is threatening to ruin the left's filibuster on race.

That's because the alt-right is playing with the idea that whites ought to get into the identity politics business, just like blacks and Latinos, and that, down the road, as immigration continues, whites will become a minority in the United States unless they act now.

Don't think that this idea is just the whine of a coven of KKK enthusiasts. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira proposed it in The Emerging Democratic Majority. Democrats would rule forever, they prophesied, with a coalition of minorities, women, youth and the educated.

Only suppose the immigrant minorities never quite coalesce into a racial majority?

Steve Sailer in his review of alt-right Jared Taylor's White Identity proposes a notion of "solidarity among American citizens" rather than white identity politics. Right now, according to Sailer, white identity politics would fail because Jews wouldn't buy in. But later on, when whites and Jews feel embattled? Stay tuned.

But here is a John O'Sullivan piece in National Review discussing the fact that in 2016 the Latino vote again failed to explode. It was 11 percent of the total vote, about the same as in 2012.

But wait! Aren't Hispanics supposed to be surging as a percent of the population? So what has happened to their vote? O'Sullivan uses a Latino professor, Roberto Suro, as his foil. Suro argues that the placidity of Latinos would turn to anger in 2016.

Suro believed or hoped that would change as the election became more exciting and as issues such as multiculturalism and immigration became matters of ethnic loyalty. Hispanic citizens would then get angry, organize, register, and vote in larger numbers.

We got a test of this theory with Donald Trump who campaigned against political correctness and immigration. And the Latino voters didn't get angry, didn't organize, didn't register, and didn't vote in larger numbers. What gives?

The answer is that, as they integrate into middle-class American life, the descendants of immigrants tend to identify as white. But the government's statistical mill aggressively tries to classify people as anything but white. So the children of a Hispanic married to a white are classified as Hispanic until they grow up and can identify themselves. A child that the government classified as non-white ends up calling itself white when it grows up.

In other words, ordinary middle-class Americans working and living in ordinary suburban America tend to merge towards a kind of "mainstream" identity, and as they do so the definition of "white" tends to expand to fit them.

Here is how I would explain the situation. Politicians and ideologues are always trying to divide people and enlist them in their ideological armies. But the economy is always pushing in the opposite direction. Capitalism wants everyone to get on so they can make more products and consume them and be nice to each other and trust each other and make lots of lovely wages and profits.

And capitalism is always making people rub up against strangers and work with them and find out that the fearful strangers are people just like them.

Maybe what's really emerging is the great emerging middle-class majority. We word-peddlers that take our middle-class prosperity for granted, but we forget that for immigrants the effortless middle-class lifestyle -- with its college and careers and homes and SUVs and children that get a real childhood -- is a incandescent dream.  It is the city on a hill, and the immigrant wants to get there, or at least make sure her children get there.

On my view the left has been a 200 year reactionary movement that has been making it as hard as possible for the immigrants to the city to climb up from the dusty plain of agricultural idiocy to the broad sunlit uplands of bourgeois life.

Maybe the reluctance of Hispanic voters to validate the emerging Democratic Majority model is a sign that the whole leftist secular religion is a crock, and is going to end up on the scrap heap of history.

Trump University's Course in Politics 101

According to the news media, Donald Trump has settled the suit against Trump University for an apparent $25 million.

Meanwhile Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have opened the Trump Open University for Political Education. Because they just broke all the rules and won the presidential election.

Jared Kushner? Who he? I know. He's Ivanka's husband and he has his own real-estate empire. And he is the guy that ran the Trump campaign.

Go ahead, read the Forbes piece on Kushner. Then come back and we'll discuss the whole thing.

Meanwhile I was reading this piece by Rich Galen, a GOP campaign operative from way back.

We could walk into just about any Congressional District in the nation and put together a credible campaign. We could set up a fund-raising operation, press, volunteers, scheduling. We could find someone to handle the polling and the printing. We could find a candidate who, at a minimum, would not embarrass themselves and we could flip a switch and voila! A campaign would spring forth fully formed and ready to … lose.

In other words, they had all the data, all the polling, all the technical details. Just like Hillary Clinton and her campaign. But there was one thing they did not have. No, it wasn't heart. You are confusing politics with The Wizard of Oz. The problem was that the campaigns did not have soul.

We couldn't build in passion. We had not found a way to, as we say now, energize our voters. We couldn't help them see that we believed they were the most important cog in our beautiful machine. 

Now just this very morning I was at the checkout at my local market and the checker, who was going to be working on Thanksgiving, descanted about the dignity of labor, going to to work, paying your taxes, and making the country work. Then a scuzzy-looking white guy behind me in line chimed in about being a Deplorable.

Hello soul. Hello passion. These white guys were acting pretty perky in the aftermath of the Trump ascendancy.

So that is what Donald Trump, the political neophyte, has managed to do. He has managed, for the first time since Ronald Reagan, to add soul to a GOP presidential campaign, which the Bushes, and McCain and Romney had failed to do. He added passion. He built what he acknowledged in the final weeks of the campaign was a "movement." With the indispensable help of Jared Kushner.

The whole apparatus of campaign technology and campaign consultants is all about trying to win elections without passion, trying to jump start the voters on a cold day in February. But if you can sell them on the idea that you care about people like them, yes, even the deplorables, then it doesn't matter how cold it is outside. If you have passion you could have lightning in a bottle.

Of course, let's be fair. Lightning in a bottle is what Barack Obama had in 2008. I don't know how much was him and how much was First-Black-President. It doesn't matter; he got people to believe in him; he filled a stadium at the end of his nomination convention in the Night of the Grecian Formula Columns, and African Americans were crying in emotional release on the day after his election, because they never thought they would live to see the day when an African American could be President of the United States.

And now it appears that the genius of the Trump campaign was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. You've read the Forbes piece by now. Wouldn't you like a son-in-law like that? Or a husband? Or a son? Or a business associate? What an amazing young man.

It's interesting to me that Kushner manages to enunciate the Peter Thiel line about "Tell me something that's true, that almost nobody agrees with you on." Says Kushner:

What would that say about me if I changed my view based on what other people think, as opposed to the facts that I actually know for myself?

Nobody knows what kind of a president Donald Trump will be. But we know one thing, that a few months ago we were reading stories about the white working class dying of despair, and now they are in the checkout line proudly calling themselves Deplorables.

I'd say that on balance that was a good thing. How about you?

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.