What is the Common Denominator of the New Right?

The news is just in that François Fillon will be the presidential candidate of the center-right Republican Party in the elections in France in 2017.

He is proposing dramatic economic reforms that include slashing 500,000 public jobs, ending the 35-hour week, raising the retirement age and scrapping the wealth tax.

But the Front National, the party of Marine Le Pen, is not having any of that. It wants to keep all the social benefits. That way she

can emulate Donald Trump’s winning strategy by posing as an economic nationalist, the stalwart defender of French workers against a culturally alien “global elite” of capitalists and financiers.

In Britain, the UKIP started out as a fairly libertarian party, but has since veered towards appealing to the white working class with support for traditional welfare state benefits like the National Health Service.

So really, we are seeing the emergence of a New Right that supports the good old working class welfare state benefits and is nationalist in tone.

You might even call it national socialist.

And of course national socialist is bad, bad bad. Fascism, in fact, as every liberal has been carefully taught.

This takes us back to the 1920s and 1930s and the basic political fact decided by World War I.

World War I demonstrated that the workers were patriots and members of nation states before they were workers. So when the social democratic parties seemed to fail in the 1920s they began to support parties that combined patriotism and worker rights. Nationalism and Socialism.

Oh no! So after World War II the educated and evolved elites were determined that national socialism would never rear its ugly head again. Hence the United States and the European Union. Wise, evolved leaders would ensure that the workers never again would empower radical fascists like Hitler and Mussolini.

What they failed to understand was that the workers voted for Hitler and Mussolini because the wise, evolved leaders had failed to lead their countries into green sunlit uplands with good jobs at good wages. Instead they had plunged the world into a Great Depression.

Just like the present era. It ain't as bad as the Great Depression, but the Crash of 2008 and the Great Recession have revealed that today's wise evolved global elite doesn't have a clue. Just like the wise, evolved elite of the interwar era.

And the average working person wants a strong leader to solve the lingering economic problems of the Obama era, but doesn't see why he or she should give up any of the social benefits, for which he and she have paid big-time payroll taxes all their working lives.

Now my view, as a libertarian conservative, is that the wise, evolved elite should never have bribed the working class with government benefits. They should have left the labor unions and the mutual-aid associations of the 19th century to continue to provide social benefits to their members. They should have encouraged the workers to move up out of working class identity into the broad, responsible middle class. They should have kept a hard money policy, and never succumbed to the temptation of crony capitalism.

But they didn't.

And worse, they took over a new form of identity politics from the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Whereas Marx had recommended an identity politics of class based on the idea that the workers were horribly exploited and oppressed, the Frankfurters proposed that blacks and women and colonized peoples were the real victims of exploitation and oppression.

It's been great for the wise, evolved elite. Their new identity politics has yielded votes and political and cultural power.

Eventually the workers were bound to get pissed off with this. Because after all, they were supposed to be the little darlings of the wise, educated elite.

And so here we are back to the 1930s, with nationalist social-welfare parties starting to move to the fore.

Who could have foreseen it?

Remember, The Left's First Promise Was to Improve the Worker's Quality of Life

I am going through a set of videos on philosophy that were shown on the BBC in the 1970s and 1980s. They were hosted by a guy called Bryan Magee, who was born worrying about philosophical problems.

The first set of videos are with Uncle Herbie, Herbert Marcuse, an unreconstructed leftie and member of the Frankfurt School. He complains, in session #4 at 1:20, about the modern era (in the 1970s).

What has gone wrong with western civilization? At the height of technical progress we see the opposite as far as human progress is concerned: dehumanization, brutalization, torture as a normal means of interrogation, the wasteful development of nuclear energy, destructiveness everywhere and so on.

And, according to Marcuse, whatever its problems, many "concepts of Marx have been decisively corroborated in the development of capitalism:"

the concentration of economic power, the fusion of economic and political power, the increasing intervention of the state into the economy, the increasing difficulties in stemming the decline in the rate of profit, the need for engaging in a neo-imperialism in order to create markets and possibilities of enlarged accumulation of capital, and so on. #3 (1:30)

Yes, and then there is alienation. Here is what Marcuse has to say.

According to Marx, alienation was a socio-economic concept, and it meant, basically -- this is a very brutal abbreviation -- that under capitalism men and women could not in their work fulfill their own individual humane faculties and needs. That this was due to the capitalist mode of production itself, and could only be remedied by radically changing this mode of production. #3 (8:12)

I quote all this because I think it is radically, comically wrong. The basic fact of the last two hundred years is that capitalism, the Great Enrichment, has enabled men and women through simple wage labor to fulfill their faculties and needs in a way far beyond the dreams of avarice. That any attempt to politically or violently change the capitalist mode of production has resulted in dehumanization and brutalization. That under capitalism economic power is not concentrated, not without the assistance of government, but in fact that capitalism promotes a constant change in the dominant economic powers. That the "rate of profit" has constantly been renewed by utterly unimaginable product and technology revolutions. Etc.

The story of the last 200 years is that whenever the political elite and the ruling class tried to mess with capitalism they got it wrong, because they almost always surrendered to the age-human yearning to stop the world at noon, and precipitated misery.

The central fact of capitalism is constant revolution, "creative destruction." This is the source of its Great Enrichment, but also the source of human opposition to it. What the political elite could have done, should have done was to submit to this truth of capitalism, and teach it far and wide, while encouraging the erection of social structures to shelter people for a season when the market turns against them, as it always will in time.

When Herbert Marcuse talks about dehumanization and brutalization and torture I suppose he is thinking about lefty bêtes noires like Pinochet in Chile and the apartheid regime in South Africa. I am sure he is not talking about the evil Castro brothers in Cuba. But the fact is that dehumanization goes with big government like ham and eggs, because it allows people with political pull, be they the Communist Party nomenclatura or crony capitalists or big labor unions or environmentalist pressure groups, to use force to provide extra-market benefits and privileges; he is talking, whether he knows it or not, about the efforts of governments to mess with capitalism, to teach people that they can live without surrendering to the market, to tax the creators and spend money on the takers, and generally give people the idea that they can live by power rather than live by working every day to serve their fellow citizen in the great and prosperous market system.

The Trump election shows up the utter bankruptcy of the left. Here we have the white working class, once the darlings of the progressive ruling class, voting for a billionaire crony capitalist because... well because the progressives, that once swore that the only thing they cared about was helping the poor and the workers, had written them off as racist sexist bigots and deplorables, and because finally, after 50 years when the white working class wandered in the political wilderness, here came a candidate that said he cared about the plight of the Rust Belt that has been hollowed out by the move of manufacturing to lower-wage countries.

Of course we cannot know what would have happened without the progressive politics of the last century and more. We are where we are and we cannot undo history.

But the fact is that the fundamental promise of the left to help "men and women... in their work [to] fulfill their own individual humane faculties and needs" was a lie and a failure. Wherever the left has obtained power it has dehumanized and brutalized, and that for a simple reason, that government is force, and government is injustice, and that you can never build a perfect society by the use of force.

Ding Dong, The Wicked Witch is Dead

I woke up this morning to read that the darling of the left, Fidel Castro, was dead at 90.

But even though the wicked witch is dead, it is not time to ring the church bells, because the other Castro brother is still in power, and really, when your principle of existence is power, who is going to be the one to start to dismantle the regime and the perks that go to its supporters?

The fact is that a brutal regime can continue indefinitely if it is willing to use terror. That was the lesson that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai learned as red guerrillas in southern China in the 1930s.

How bad is it in Cuba? Well, the official stats show it doing fine, level pegging with Jamaica, and not too far behind Mexico in per-capita GDP. But, conservatives tell us, you can't believe a word of Cuba's government statistics, particularly since 70 percent of the economy is government, and a socialist government can't compute prices.

It is interesting to speculate on why the left has made such a hero of Castro over the years. Apart from his undoubted charisma and his opposition to the US, I suppose the reason is that he epitomizes the heroic ideal of Romanticism. Our lefty friends think that the highest and best meaning of life, the universe and everything is to lead the dispossessed and the marginalized to overturn the unjust rule of... of whoever. (But not a lefty regime, of course.) Lefties think of themselves either in the role of the rich kids in Les Mis, leading the people in a passionate rendering of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" or as wise top-down experts organizing a rational program of health, education and welfare. Castro played to these themes, both as a colorful revolutionary and as a man that supposedly provided free education and health care to the Cuban people.

But, of course, the Castro regime was always an economic colony, first of the Soviet Union, and recently of Venezuela. The brave revolutionary was really a puppet of other powers that liked the idea of their guy thumbing his nose at the Great Satan 60 miles from Florida.

Anyway, President Obama sent his condolences, while President-elect Trump condemned Castro as a brutal dictator and expressed his hopes for a free Cuba. So there is that.

Yes, What Should Democrats Do Now?

Helpful as ever, pundits all across the fruited plain are advising Democrats how they can win again. Ted van Dyk, in the Wall Street Journal, has a piece that manages to say nothing about what to do, except that Adlai Stevenson put a committee to work after his defeat in 1952, and so did most Democrats since.

Then there is Charles Krauthammer telling the Dems to lose the identity politics, whereas Michelle Goldberg writes that Democratic politics has to be identity politics.

But my advice to Democrats would be to go and read Charles Murray. Yes, Murray is a libertarian, but his whole life's work amounts to a critical analysis of the consequences of Democratic government programs.

Critical analysis. Remember that? It has what the left imagines it is all about, leveraging off Kant's three critiques at the end of the 18th century. That is what Marx's Das Kapital was supposed to be: a critique of capitalism using its own classical economics and subjecting it to Hegelian dialectics. That is what the Frankfurt School was all about: critical theory.

Are you up for a bit of critical theory, Democrats? Or is critical theory just a club with which to beat the bourgeoisie?

So let's go through the Murray oeuvre -- that's French for work. His first big book was Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. Here is what the blurb on Amazon says.

This classic book... argues that the ambitious social programs of the 1960s and 1970s actually made matters worse for its supposed beneficiaries, the poor and minorities.

Murray makes the telling point that liberals instrumented their Great Society programs with social science studies to measure the inevitable success. But when the research showed that the programs hadn't helped, Democrats did nothing. Hey, Democrats! How is that welfare system doin' 50 years later in the 21st century, pal?

Murray's next big book was The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, written with Richard J. Herrnstein. Here's the Amazon blurb.

The controversial book linking intelligence to class and race in modern society, and what public policy can do to mitigate socioeconomic differences in IQ, birth rate, crime, fertility, welfare, and poverty.

Yeah. The controversy was about race. How dare racist Murray dare to write that blacks had a lower IQ and therefore were disadvantaged in a society and an economy that seemed to be self-segregating by education and IQ. Hey Democrats! Had any good ideas about race and IQ and identity lately? Oh yeah. Black Lives Matter. Rich black dudes ginning up a bit of street action.

Murray's third big book was Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. After being sent into the dunce's corner after The Bell Curve, Murray decided to do the whole thing again, this time just talking about White America. No racism here; no Sir. This is just about racist, sexist, homophobe white people. Here's the Amazon blurb.

Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity. 

No kidding, Sherlock. So Murray shows that the top 25 percent of white America, that lives in "Belmont," is doing fine, getting educated, working at satisfying careers, getting married, having children, and not getting divorced. The middle 50 percent is doing OK, although nothing like as pretty-please as the top tier. The bottom 30 percent, that lives in "Fishtown," is a mess. The men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Hey, Democrats! You think this has something to do with the Trump phenomenon, pal?

In a more recent book, By the People: Building Liberty Without Permission, Murray suggests it is time for small government advocates to start a bit of what we might call "activism:" waging a peaceful guerrilla war against the administrative state by making life hell for mid-level government bureaucrats.

So my message to my Democratic friends is: what are you going to do about those folks in Fishtown, where the men don't work and the women don't marry? Since the science tells us that the children of such people tend to end up on welfare and in jail.

So seriously Democrats. What are you going to do about this social Armageddon for the folks in the inner city and in the bombed-out Rust Belt?

'Cos I don't see that your identity politics does a blind bit of good for those folks. I don't see that your administrative-state palliatives like a $15 minimum wage, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Clean Power Plan, and Renewable Energy, and Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley, and Obamacare, and all the other top-down expert-led administrative interventions have ever helped or will ever help the folks at the bottom to climb into a decent middle-class life.

And I reckon that the science backs me up.

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?