Can Trumpism Survive Trump?

Here’s a piece by RCP editor Emily Goodin that talks about how Donald Trump rewrote the script on how to win in Pennsylvania.

See, Hillary Clinton did pretty well in Pennsylvania,

gaining about 60,000 more votes than Obama. But Trump got almost 300,000 more votes than Romney did.

Trump concentrated on the rural votes while Clinton concentrated on the four suburban “collar counties” around Philadelphia. But the election came down to turnout. It’s not the percentages that we see in the polls. It’s motivating and turning out the raw vote totals.

But Trump did not do well in the suburban “collar counties.” And we know why. He did not appeal to the college-educated graduates in the suburbs, particularly, I should imagine, the college-educated women taught to believe that men should never indulge in locker-room talk.

The next question is obvious.

Can the Trump phenomenon succeed without Trump?

I’d say it could if Trump expands his white working-class base to include the non-white working class. Right now, our liberal friends are fainting in the aisles because Trump is a racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, and Islamophobe. Besides which he is a hater. Plus, he triggers people.

Liberals will obviously keep going at their racist, sexist, homophobe name-calling; it’s what they do. But it seems to me that Trump has a clear strategy to win the hearts and minds of not just the white working class but the non-white working class.

On the one hand there is his Carrier tactics: showcase headline successes in keeping jobs in the US. This is something the man in the street understands.

On the other hand there is the economic policy tactics: roll back taxes and regulations on businesses. Oh, and keep the fracking revolution going with cheap oil and above all cheap natural gas.

Did you know that industries have already been moving to the US because of the collapse in natural gas prices? The point is that natural gas is used as a “feedstock” for industries like plastics, and natural gas is very expensive in Europe where industry is forced to use imported gas from Russia.

Everybody has an opinion about jawboning corporations and “saving” jobs from foreign competition.

But the real action, that few people understand, is in the economic rules. Our liberal and Democratic friends believe in an administered economy, on the Obamacare model. Government will define and mold the commanding heights of the economy and tame the capitalist law of the jungle with beneficial regulation and targeted tax cuts. And government will direct the economy towards beneficial ends like subsidizing the move to planet-saving renewable energy and bike paths.

Everything about the liberal view is false, falsified by science and falsified by history. But that doesn’t matter because liberals naturally believe in their intelligence and the need to have the power to use their intelligence for socially beneficial ends, and ordinary people naturally think in patron/client notions about the big man having the power to protect them from the cruel world.

So the visible Trump policy will be the Carrier-type “deals” and infrastructure jobs while the invisible policy will be the reduction in corporate income tax rates and regulations in the face of liberal rhetoric about Trump acting for the rich and the 1%.

And maybe Trump will convince a slice of black and Latino voters that he cares about people like them.

But I wonder about the college graduates. I worry that college graduates actually believe the lies and the rubbish that their liberal university professors have taught them about race and gender.

And that is the real reason to worry about the future of America.

Let's Not Go Burn Flags, But Laugh at the Liberals

Everybody knows that flag-burning is a sacred right located right underneath a penumbra of the First Amendment. Because when the people peaceably assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances the first thing they think about is to burn the US flag, just to remind everyone that, as Hillary Clinton once grated, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

But was President-elect Trump way off the reservation when he tweeted about "consequences" for burning the US flag? Was it his fault for trivializing the flag when peaceful protesters immediately burned a flag right in front of the Trump Hotel NYC?

I don't know, but I certainly get the impression, from reports of a LGBT rainbow flag burning in Rochester, that rainbow flag burning is not quite the same thing as a little peaceful protesting against the US flag. For instance, when a rainbow flag burns, "local LGBTQ community fears rise," whereas US flag burning just gets veterans upset. The only guy that has a license to burn a rainbow flag is the excellent MILO.

And anyway, burning LGBT flags lowers us to the liberal level of conceit and the false consciousness that "peaceful protesting" is peaceful and a protest and not just a show of force by the street thugs of the ruling class.

The best thing is for ordinary Americans to go about their business and leave the liberal trolling to the Life Grandmaster troll, Donald Trump. It's beginning to get through even to a dull old man like me that Trump is a genius. The line that Trump is an impulsive idiot is starting to get a bit thin, especially since the idiot just rolled the GOP establishment into the ditch, in the first half, and then rolled the Clinton Crime Syndicate into the ditch for an encore. Could you do that?

Here something for you grandmaster trolls to deal with. I was just at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach and they had a video installation called Question Bridge Black Males with black males talking about the black situation and the black experience.

Yes, that is so special for a liberal art museum to put on a patronizing show with black males speaking out of big flat-screen monitors about the black experience. Do you realize, you art patrons, how dull and derivative that is, to inflate the racist Black Lives Matters AstroTurf operation with a patronizing art-show, courtesy of the 1% and the ruling class? It's just what a ruling class would do, to pet their little darlings, in the years and months before they decide to dump the little darlings and all the catchphrases about slavery and marginalization and racism. With nary a word about how ruling class welfare and abortion policy has blitzed the black community like no racist KKK could ever do.

Really, it is no use engaging liberals about their hypocrisy. Nothing of that sort is going to prick their bubble of self-righteousness.

The only thing to do is to troll them. Humor and satire has ever been the way for the ordinary people to make blow the raspberry at their masters.

Let's make fun of the liberals. And then, one day, take over the culture when their little darling women and minorities decide that they have been deceived and used and finally thrown away, just like the white working class, and every little darling down the ages.

Sen. Schumer announces War on Seniors

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has come out and told Republicans to put Medicare reform where the sun don’t shine.

Schumer was criticizing the nomination of Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. In a mild statement, he said “It’s clear that Washington Republicans are plotting a war on seniors next year.”

Wait! I thought that kind of rhetoric was considered to be exclusionary and divisive! Almost as divisive as President-elect Trump saying that people should be put in jail for burning the flag.

But then there is the Ohio State axe-man Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a legal immigrant from Somalia. He was forced to act because of Islamophobia.

Just saying, but could there be a problem with liberals running around accusing conservatives and Republicans of various “phobias?” Could they be riling up simple-minded young people to imagine themselves as helpless victims and provoke them to acts of violence?

And by the way, when you talk about “phobias” -- homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia -- you are implying that the people in question are sick; you are medicalizing a political disagreement. And that means that you are one step away from putting your political opponents into a sanatorium for psychiatric treatment, just like the Soviets used to do.

But back to Chuck Schumer. He doesn’t like that the Republicans, under Reps. Ryan and Price, want to “privatize” Medicare. Says Chuck:

Between this nomination of an avowed Medicare opponent, and the House Republicans threatening to privatize Medicare, it is clear that Washinton Republicans are plotting a War in Seniors next year.

I was reading some pundit the other day who noted that while House Republicans like Paul Ryan want to reform the senior entitlements they are wrong to advance these reforms until Democrats are willing to sign on. President-elect Trump is opposed to Social Security reform.

I agree. It is useless to propose reform of entitlements until Democrats are on board.

But I do wonder about the Democrats. Don’t they understand that down the road the entitlements will run out of money, and that in the ensuing Venezuela-like debacle minorities and women will be hardest hit?

And here is another idea. Maybe I shouldn’t advertise it, because it might give people ideas.

If you go to usgovernmentspending.com you will see that Government Pensions and Government Healthcare add up to 42 percent of government spending. Imagine that we privatized the middle-class portion of that, and let’s imagine that the remaining program would be the same as the current welfare budget of 7 percent of spending.

Do you see what that means? It means that 35 percent of the current spending would be available for lovely new programs!

According to economist Milton Friedman all governments tax as much as they can get away with. I imagine that they spend as much as they can without wrecking the economy right away. So if Republicans succeeded in privatizing Social Security and Medicare they would also free up fiscal space for other programs.

And that would be a bad idea until the day that Americans decide that the current rate of spending at 36 percent of GDP and the current rate of taxation at 37 percent of GDP are both outrages and not to be endured.

People don’t seem to realize that when the government taxes the nation at 37 percent of GDP it means that the government is taking 37 cents of every dollar that people earn and spending it on its supporters, without regard to whether the money is better spent on government supporters rather than goods and services for consumers.

Or maybe they do know, and they like it, as long as they get a cut.

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.