The Left Always Preys on People Outside the System

A couple of weeks ago I published my "General Theory of Leftist Politics" in the American Thinker. My argument was that the whole program of the left is based on the notion that there are people left out of the system, for whom the only recourse is violent revolution, led by the rich kids of the left.

This was abundantly true in 1848 when rich kids Marx and Engels proposed a proletarian revolution. It was still true in the mid 20th century when rich kids Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse proposed revolution for women, minorities and gays.

But contrary to the revolutionary faith the bourgeoisie of 1848 and the white patriarchy of 1950 were not that interested in power. They were perfectly happy to bring the workers of 1848 and the women and minorities of 1950 into the system where they could bargain with the rest of us for their rights and their share of the loot of the modern state.

So it makes perfect sense that the left has found new clients for its violent revolution of the rich kids. These new clients are the migrants.

Migrants are, by definition, people who are outside the system. If they are refugees they are outside the system. If they are H1B visa holders they are the equivalent of indentured servants, who must return to their homelands the moment that they leave their jobs. They are outside the system. If they are illegal immigrants without papers, they are obviously outside the system.

This makes them the ideal clients of the rich-kid left. The whole point of leftist politics is not to solve the problems of its clients but to use them as cannon fodder in the revolution that is to come. And while the system was happy to bring the workers and women and minorities into the system it is naturally hesitant to do the same for migrants, especially illegal immigrants without papers.

There is a good reason for this, that migration is invasion. Case in point is the migration of the Lombards from out of Scandinavia through Burgundy and the upper Danube to what is now called "Lombardy."

How do you tell whether "migrants" might or might not be "invaders?" Answer is, you can't until it's too late.

Of course it is also true that migration and invasion and subjection and what we now call genocide is just the way of the world. Humans are a migratory species; migrate and invade is what we do. But the key thing in human history is to avoid getting on the wrong side of migration and invasion. Ask the Native Americans about that.

Our lefty friends and their center-left allies understand themselves as advanced and evolved people. They believe, based on the record of the last century, that they know how to lead and control the wretched of the earth. According their their own sacred history they triumphantly advocated for workers and women and minorities and were thus the overwhelming agents of history. Workers and women and minorities are therefore eternally grateful to their liege lords and will vote for them forever.

Only what workers and women and minorities want, once they have been brought into the system, is to be safe in their homelands from migration and invasion, and that is why, all across the west, the workers are starting to leave the center-left political parties for which they have voted for the last century. They understand that the left is now interested in new political flesh and that they are to be the sacrificial victims on the altar of 21st century leftist politics.

The point is that people already brought into the system are useless for leftist politics. They just want to be safe and to be able to bargain for their fair share of welfare state loot. It is only those outside the system that are open to the fiery revolutionary program of lefty rich kids.

Then there are the Muslims. They seem to be ideal clients of the left because their jihadist ideology keeps them separate from, and thus opposed to, the host culture.

So the politics of the next few years throughout the West will be a great sorting out, in which every group presently or formerly part of the left will have to decide which side they are on. Are they to continue to be the "little darlings" of the left, or will they find that, once they integrate into western democratic society, they are no longer any use as revolutionary cannon fodder and are cast aside by the rich kids of the left?

That is what we are going to find out.

It's Not Quite a Valentine's Day Massacre, But...

I assume that an outsider like me cannot really penetrate to the wheels within wheels of the resignation of Gen. Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor.

Was it the CIA getting back at a critic? The Obama holdovers sowing mayhem? The misleading of Vice-President Pence? The bureaucratic incompetence of Flynn?

Who knows? I expect we will see a lot more of this in the Trump administration. His presidency is, after all, a direct challenge to the power of the "deep state" and the deep state is going to do its best to weaken him.

Over at RealClearPolitics.com, the liberals are all shocked as the chaos in the Trump administration, but I wonder. The whole Trump campaign has been a notorious chaos, so we have to wonder whether that is by design.

Normal politicians avoid the appearance of chaos and uncertainty in their image and actions, for an obvious reason. They want to project a notion of the steady, fatherly leader. Trump obviously doesn't.

Polymath Willis Eschenbach proposes a reason why, extrapolating from his own life experience. Donald Trump is a builder. He has spent his life building buildings. Builders, Eschenbach explains, cannot afford to take their eye off the donut. Everything they do must be about about building the building.

Once you start out on the path to the finished building, you stay focused on the finished building, ignoring everything else, and you do whatever it takes to get the building done. In other words, it’s all about the building first, the building second, and everything else is a distant third.

But there is another aspect of building that Willis leaves out. Every building project is a controlled crash. Everything that can go wrong probably will go wrong, but the builder in charge must keep his cool and keep solving problems until the building is done. And when it is done and signed off, nobody that wasn't there will have the least idea of all the toil and trouble it took to get the building built.

I think that is the key thing to understand about Trump and his critics. Trump is used to the controlled chaos of building buildings. Whatever his strengths and weaknesses he has been able to wive and thrive in the chaotic ups and downs of his career in developing and building buildings.

Compared to him, most of his ruling-class critics have had a quiet life. Maybe they came up through the elite colleges; maybe they advanced upon their parents' connections. Maybe their sheer talent has helped them along. But few of them can have experienced the chaotic life of ups and downs that Trump has apparently mastered.

As for me, I hate construction projects, even at the mild domestic level. I like an even-tempered life of routine, doing the same thing every day, and I hate being pushed off kilter by the whims and the needs of other people. So I get why Trump's critics are appalled by his modus operandi.

Of course, at this stage, nobody knows whether the Trump administration will be a success or a failure. But it would be foolish to think that the daily Sturm und Drang means that Trump is incompetent or out of his depth.

Trump is used to chaos. He is a builder.

Let's Talk About Dystopian Novels

In recent weeks liberals have shown a sudden interest in dystopian novels, and NPR has been interviewing Margaret Atwood, of The Handmaid's Tale. What's next in dystopia, asks NPR?

People have been devouring The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here and The Plot Against America — so what's the next book we'll be reporting on?

Atwood thinks that things are moving too fast for book publishing. She looks for some newspaper serialization, week by week.

Now it happens that I went to Paris last week, and therefore endured a couple of 3-movie flights. That's how I measure long-distance flights. The important number is not the number of hours, but the number of movies you can watch in between meals and snack breaks.

So I watched Divergent, the movie adaptation of the dystopian Young Adult novel by Veronica Roth about a post-Armageddon Chicago where society is organized into five Factions and ne'er the five shall meet. It's the resolution of a blame game. Those that blame aggression for the sins of the world belong to Amity, those that blame ignorance belong to Erudite, those that blame duplicity belong to Candor, those that blame selfishness belong to Abnegation, and those that blame cowardice belong to Dauntless. Then there is the underclass; they are the rejected factionless.

Of course, the old dystopian novels were teaching us about mid-century totalitarianism in 1984, Animal Farm. And before that there was Brave New World that satirized the benevolent rule of the educated administrative expert. And they were peculiarly attractive to adolescents. "Everyone" read them as teenagers, and I would have read the SF juvenilia like Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Space Cadet as well if I had known about them.

Now, I have read Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, about a North America ruled by fundamentalist Christians that use handmaids to slake their sexual thirst when their wives become too old to be rogered. And I think it fundamentally misunderstands the world view of fundamentalist Christians, who are not that interested in power and would probably not imagine that they could create a fundamentalist Christian state. But what would Margaret Atwood know about real Christians, as opposed to the liberal bad dream about them?

What fascinates me is the new genre of dystopian novels, like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series, and Veronica Roth's  Divergent series, all of which have been made into blockbuster movies, and all written by women. What is going on?

I interpret Harry Potter as the simple angst of the creative artist in a world of ordinaries, wizards eternally bothered by muggles: the toils of the People of the Creative Self condemned to live in a world of the People of the Responsible (and dull) Self.

But The Hunger Games and Divergent seem to me to be darker, and satirizing the world that liberals have given us. What are we to think of the Capitol of corrupt superficial overlords and the miserable Districts dying of despair, forced to fight to the death in a humiliating reality show hosted by the awful Caesar Flickerman every year? Is that not today's liberal dystopia to a T?

What most affects me is that the heroes of these novels are teenage girls. Maybe this is just because the prime readership is teenage girls since the boys are all playing Minecraft. But why are the girls having to fight to the death? Is this just the feminism of the authors giving us diversity or is it something deeper?

See I think that the big untold story of society today is that young women are subjected to a cruel sexual predation, consequent upon the sexual revolution, for which young women everywhere are ill prepared and always were. The fact is that young women are helpless before the first man that comes to them whispering sweet words of love. I interpret the hysterical campus sexual assault movement as a reaction to the impossible position in which young women are placed by the campus hook-up culture which, with the sexual revolution, has removed romance from the dance of the sexes. The whole point of fathers protecting their daughters was not patriarchal oppression but experience protecting naiveté.

What is a young woman to do and how is she to live when male protection from sexual predation is removed? We see this in a limit case in the harrowing A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City by Anonymous. When women are left unprotected in a conquered city they try to protect themselves by prostituting themselves to the officers of the conquering army, the more senior the better. And they hide the teenage girls in the attic.

So what about today's scene in which you read about the ubiquity of sex before the first date? What have we done when we have stripped sex of its romance and its drama?

Maybe the great liberal contribution to the world is to drag the teenage girls out of the attic and make them into campus sex slaves. The result is Mattress Girl, a young woman enraged by the disappointments of hook-up sex.

I feel also for the rage and the humiliation that our liberal friends are feeling with the presidency of Donald Trump, I really do. I can see how they think that the election of Trump is equivalent to a rape and that it really could happen here and that 1984 proves it.

But I also think that liberals should get out a bit more. And see How the Other Half Lives.

To me it all comes down to the verdict of Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Life is good for liberals in today's America. Of course it is, they made it so.

But for the bottom 30 percent, the men don't work much, and the women don't marry much. I would call that dystopia, and I suspect that The Hunger Games and Divergent are telling us something about the world that liberals made.

As Colonel Pickering sang to Henry Higgins: You Did It!

The Coming Implosion of Liberal Rule by Judiciary

So the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the lower court's defiance of President Trump's immigration pause.

Reading the Bloomberg news item you clearly get the globalist line, the harm done to the ruling class by the order:

The two states, the judges said, showed “ample evidence” that they, their businesses, universities and citizens would be harmed if the ban were restored, even temporarily.

Really? Harmed by the pause in immigration from seven rather inconsequential Middle Eastern states?

But I get it. This is the liberal ruling class using its own particular branch of government to fight back against the populist wave represented by Donald Trump and Brexit. The current system works rather well for the trans-national globalist elite, of which I admit that I am a disloyal member.

We are talking about the kind of people that switch from corporate jobs in the US to corporate jobs in Europe, the academics that switch easily from a professorship in the US to a visiting professorship in Europe. It is, of course, intolerable that a President Trump should foul up the gears of this comfortable life for "businesses, universities and citizens" like me.

But never mind about all that. What I wonder about is where this judicial supremacy, piled on top of the already gigantic administrative state, ends up. It's all very well for the swells, up in the higher echelons. But what the people need is swift resolution. Let's figure out what the new policy is going to be and then let's get there. But the current system seems designed to frustrate the needs of the ordinary citizen, and instead create jobs for the supporters of the ruling class.

Let's take the example of Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann's suit against National Review and Mark Steyn Rand Simberg and others for defamation. You'd think that it should be a pretty open and shut case that could be quickly tried and resolved. But no; it is tied up in preliminary appeals that have been going on for three years! Here is Mark Steyn's latest bulletin on the progress of the suit. Three years, on a case about a relatively simple blog post?

The legal beagling may be great fun for the legal beagles and the lawyers and all, but what about the right to a speedy trial? What about the little guy, Mark Steyn, against Big Climate and all its billions, its "businesses" and its "universities?"

More than a century ago Charles Dickens used the power of satire to argue for a reform of the legal system in England in his novels. He satirized legal monopoly and Doctors Commons in David Copperfield and he sneered at the law's delays in Bleak House. The old system was great for lawyers. But for the people caught in the toils of the law it was soul destroying.

That's where we are in the developed West. We have a gigantic administrative state and a vast ponderous legal system chewing up ordinary people. Back when I was an immigrant, 50 years ago, I got my immigrant visa, my green card, and my citizenship with effortless ease. Today, I learn from acquaintances, it takes lawyers and piles of paper and years of delay.

The ruling class doesn't care. It is the administrative state. It is the legal profession. It likes the current system.

But change is coming. As a bellwether, you could start with Charles Murray's By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. Murray delves into the injustices of the current administrative state and its lack of transparency and its dominatory hegemony. He proposes, as an interim solution, that some billionaire fund a foundation whose sole job would be to terrorize individual bureaucrats in the system, to make them fear for their pensions.

But obviously the problem is much bigger, and requires a much larger reform than a minor diversion using guerrilla tactics. In fact, by proposing guerrilla tactics, Murray signals just how powerful and dominatory the current ruling class is. Today, we are years away from a real broad-based movement that can take the state back from the ruling class.

And Murray was just talking about the administrative state. He had nothing to say about the power of an imperial judiciary to impose the will of the ruling class over the will of the people.

Nobody can tell where Trump's immigration pause will end up. Nobody can tell how long the ruling class's judicial imperialism will continue. Except for this.

The administrative state is a clumsy response to the impossibility of big government. It is trying to do the impossible, because economic life by administrative regulation cannot work. You cannot have a national pension system by administrative government hegemony; politicians and administrators just can't adapt to change and deal with the future. You cannot have a national health system by administrative bureaucracy. It will founder in the administrative overload of Obamacare. You cannot properly relieve the poor by administrative ukase. And you cannot supervise immigration by judicial meddling.

Our ruling class does not understand that. It only knows how to use the political levers at its command to push back against the rising movement of populist rejection that threatens its power and its sinecures. I'll bet a nickel that the ruling class has no idea where its pushback against Trump ends up.

That is all very well, but does Donald Trump know any better? Probably not, but the way of the world is that entrenched power does not last forever. Comes the day when the great edifice of ruling class power crumbles into dust and everyone realizes that it was all pretense and stupidity.

At some point the administrative state will grind to a halt. At some point the imperial judiciary will throttle itself on its own delays and contradictions.

If you are a naïve fool like me you hope that today's behemoth will be replaced by a smaller state and a responsive judiciary. But more likely the whole thing will be swept away in a general civilizational meltdown.

And neither you nor I will like what grows up it its place.

Hello Berkeley, It is Time to Check Your Privilege

I have been making the point recently that the only people justified in using violence in domestic politics are people that are outside the system.

This was the situation of the working class in the 19th century before the workers got the vote, and the situation of blacks before the Civil Rights Acts rolled back the race-based laws of the post-Civil War South. Because these folks at that time were outside the system the only way they could get the ruling class to hear about their grievances was by shows of force, as in marches, demonstrations, and peaceful protest.

But at the University of California at Berkeley they think, in the student newspaper The Daily Californian, that violence, i.e., "radical acts against replaceable property at my school, UC Berkeley" is appropriate against "a Breitbart hatemonger's speech" on campus.

Which means that violence is appropriate against anyone you hate, er, dislike. Because anyone you hate or dislike, because you don't like their politics, is illegitimate and doesn't have a right to come to your campus and spew their hateful bile. Hey, how do you like that "radical acts against replaceable property" meme?

Presently, the UC Berkeley campus is decorated with banners from the Division of Equity and Inclusion that "raise awareness" about marginalized peoples down with the struggle and announce the admission of privilege by white males.

Earth to Berkeley: There is no place under God's blue heaven more privileged than Berkeley, and no people on this planet more privileged than those selected to study or work there.

If ever there was a place and a people that should "check their privilege" that place would be Berkeley. Let us count the ways.

1. The young people that get to study at Berkeley are either young people privileged by their genes or the education and wealth and connections of their parents. That is why they can get into a highly selective college.
2. Or the the young people get in because of diversity, a deliberate policy of the university administration to prefer young people of certain races or gender for study at the university before other young people of differing characteristics. Privilege by any other name.
3. UC Berkeley is privileged by the manner of its funding. Instead of offering itself upon the marketplace of education, UC Berkeley is a creature of the state and enjoys its location, its wealth, and its prestige because the State of California and the United States of America have taxed ordinary people so that UC Berkeley can operate without the immediate spur of market realities. In other words, UC Berkeley relies for its creation and its continuance on government force. Otherwise known as privilege.
4. At UC Berkeley, for my lifetime, liberal and left-wing speech has been protected and nurtured, while conservative and libertarian and religious speech has been marginalized and threatened. And this has been maintained by force symbolized by the protest against gay conservative Milo Yiannopoulos on February 1, 2017. Yiannopoulos and his supporters were threatened with force and his supporters actually physically attacked while the university police stood by and did nothing.
5. The people that work at UC Berkeley, in teaching and in administration, enjoy emoluments and tenure that ordinary mortals would die for. These are economic privileges, straight up, that are backed up by force.

It is salutary to read left-wing writers justifying their resort to force. Because it highlights the whole point of universal suffrage, regular elections, legislatures, and the whole paraphernalia of representative government.

The whole point of modern representative government is to remove the excuse for violence. Elections remove the excuse for partisan mobs fighting it out on the streets. Universal suffrage means that nobody is left outside the system. Legislatures mean that the representatives of all the interests, big and small, get a piece of the action when the government's spoils are handed out. A judicial system means that disputes are adjudicated based on honest interpretation of previous law and precedent.

Of course, everyone tends to interpret these things in their favor. Our side is peaceful and just, but the other side is cheating, and so our side may be justified in using force to prevent the other side from it unjust hijacking of the system.

It is natural that a ruling class should shine a light on the public square that illuminates its own ideas and actions in a pleasant way, and that shines a harsh light upon the opposition. Thus "we" are freedom fighters and "they" are fascists.

For many years, according to conservative narrative, conservatives have not pushed back against the power of the liberal lighting technicians to put their side in a good light and our side in a bad light. In part we have not wished to provoke a political crisis, and in part we have been intimidated into silence by the power of the liberal ruling class to name and shame us as racists, sexists, bigots, and fascists.

But the conservative base has been getting steadily more and more restless under this domination. And that is why we have Donald Trump as president.

It is natural that our liberal friends should experience Donald Trump as an affront against all that is good and decent. And it is natural that they should encourage their elected officials to push back against the president. It is also natural that the aristocratic branch of government, the judiciary, should support the liberal ruling class in this.

But the point of our modern representative government is that everyone observe the rules of non-violence, that differences are resolved by elections and legislation, not by "mostly peaceful protests" and intimidation. If one side feels justified in "radical acts against replaceable property" against the speech of "hatemongers" then the other side will sooner or later respond in kind.

That is why it is a good idea to pass major legislation with bipartisan majorities. That is why it is a good idea to confirm administration nominees without partisan name-calling. That is why it is a good idea to have a judiciary that refrains from legislating from the bench. The only reason for all that stuff is to restrain hot-heads from resorting to intimidation and force.

Do you not understand that, liberals?

Don't Panic!

On the one hand, argue Ross Kaminsky and Victor Davis Hanson, President Trump is risking a debacle with his insufficiently prepared attack upon the ruling class. They are talking about his immigration pause, presently getting shredded by a liberal judge in Seattle and the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

On the other hand, according to Richard Fernandez, Democrats are in danger of a descent into hysterical  irrelevance, equivalent to the decline of the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. Under the leadership of their current geriatric set they might get left behind the radicals of Berkeley and the inconsolable liberal women, and find the Democratic Party turning into a radical leftist organization.

So it is the best of times and the worst of times. Either Donald Trump is going to lead the Republican Party to ruin with the ill-considered rhetoric and insufficiently thought-out initiatives. Or the Democratic Party is going to lose its mind and forget that its power depends not on middle-class feminists and AntiFa street fighters but the loot it hands out to its people of the subordinate self.

Or you could say that Donald Trump is cunningly storming the ruling-class's citadel and overwhelming it with attacks from all directions. And the Democrats are cunningly getting their base riled up to overwhelm the Republicans who are, in the final analysis, squishes.

The simple answer is: we don't know. That's because both left and right are getting fed up that they are getting nowhere. The left is convinced that America is being held up by an evil cabal of fascists, sexist homophobes blocking the road to the Promised Land; the right is convinced that America is being ruined by a leftist ruling class that divides the nation up into warring identity factions.

The obvious answer to all that is that it is 84 years since the last real realigning election, featuring the 1932 presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is in the natural flow of things that, after 84 years of the basic New Deal politics things should now be getting out of joint, and that a political crisis will be needed to set the terms of US politics for the next 80 years.

So will the conflict be decided by a realignment election? If so, it would be the 2020 election with a 60-40 split in the vote. Frankly, I can see either a big Trump win in 2020 just as easily as I can see a Democratic revival.

Or will the conflict lead to civil war, either a hot war or the cold civil war proposed by Dennis Prager? He takes the position that up to now the right has not really been fighting. On his view the importance of Donald Trump is that he has responded to the call for the right to fight back against the left's march through the institutions. And he has done it by bringing a group into the Republican Party that was once the core of the New Deal coalition: the white working class.

Will Trump lead the right to victory? Or will the left, with its domination of the "deep state," frustrate the insurgency of Donald Trump?

I'd say it depends in great part upon whether Trump manages to appeal to African Americans, and persuade them that he has their back and that the Democrats have betrayed them.

I keep harping on the message of Charles Murray in Coming Apart. Today's America is pretty good for well-born liberals. No doubt, because they designed and built it. America is not so good for the non-college-educated middle class, and not at all good for the bottom 35 percent, where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. So there has to be an opportunity for some populist to tell the bottom 35 percent that the current rulers don't care about people like them.

The fact is that President Trump is giving the Republican base what it asked for. It said it wanted a leader that would no longer truckle to the liberal establishment, afraid to be branded with the mark of Cain as racists and sexists and homophobes, and the base got what it asked for.

Now we will find out if the fight-back strategy is going to work.

Of Course the Techs Oppose Trump

So Uber backed away from collaborating with President Trump. So the tech giants are organizing against President Trump's immigration ban.

Of course they are. Uber's drivers, I have noticed, are predominantly immigrant. Which makes sense, since driving is a basic skill that doesn't require extended education and contacts, and Uber drivers really don't make that much money. The tech giants have imported tons of educated immigrants, via the H1B program, and now find themselves tied to the mast of unlimited immigration.

But I'd say that taking political sides is poison for capitalists and corporations. Corporations are a target for everyone in the political arena, and the simple reason is money.

Apple recently announced its quarterly earnings, and the Drudge Report symbolized the news with Apple's current cash hoard: $264,000,000,000. Talk about having a target on your back.

The fact of life for businesses and corporations is that they are where the money is. It is they that convert inventions into products and hunches into profits. It is they that function as the goverment's tax collector. And that means that while corporations may not be interested in politics, politics is interested in them. So Marx was interested in capitalists in 1850, and anti-trust politicians like Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th century. Leftist politicians were interested in nationalizing corporations in the first half of the 20th century, and now social justice warriors are interested in "converging" corporations towards left-wing politics in the 21st century.

Today corporations are caught in the undertow between their need to truckle to the educated ruling class of the 20th century, and deal with the rising movement of populism that pushed Brexit and elected Donald Trump and is behind the rise of nationalism in Europe. Right now they are siding with the globalists. But I wonder how that will work out in the coming decade.

My daughter in Paris, who is just finishing up a Masters degree in international affairs, has introduced me to the cliodynamic theories of Peter Turchin and his books such as Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. It may all be a bit "overdetermined," but hear this.

Back in the 1830s the "political stress index" started increasing. We may take the political stress index as a measure of partisanship. This index went straight up until the Civil War broke out in 1861. The point is that, starting with the election of Andrew Jackson as president, a profound divide appeared in US politics, between the order developed by Jefferson and Madison in the early 19th century and the "backwoodsmen" that supported Andrew Jackson.

In our own time a similar increase in political stress has developed, starting in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, and getting rapidly worse in the last ten years. You can see what is happening. We are getting a movement that is dissenting from the post New Deal consensus, and the existing establishment is doing all it can to defuse and discredit the movement of rejection. Everyone is getting more and more angry, as nobody is willing to negotiate a common ground between the big-state establishment and the populist dissenters.

For instance: abortion. Could there not be a common ground that concedes a right of abortion in the first trimester, but not thereafter? Right now, it seems that pro-lifers insist of the total sanctity of life from conception and pro-choicers insist on the right to abort right up until (and sometimes after) actual birth.

Or immigration. Can we not agree that illegal or undocumented immigration is not to be endured, even while we accept a reasonable rate of immigration that is slow enough to allow assimilation of immigrants and avoid the establishment of oppositional enclaves that that might develop into incubators of rebellion. And is it not curious that, per Turchin p. 65, that real wages in the United States increased rapidly in the period 1920 to 1970 when immigration was restricted, and that real wages have stagnated since 1973, just after the Immigration Act of 1965 that started the current immigration surge?

So now we have the immigrant-heavy tech firms advocating against an immigration slowdown while the white working class of the Rust Belt wants to build the wall. How surprising is that?

In my view the partisan turmoil of the ante-bellum era issues from the same source as the current partisan divide. A ruling class gets to set the rules and like God, looks out over its creation and decides that it is good.

But in fact the programs and favors that the ruling class has handed out to its supporters have visited injustice to many others, and it may take a while before the sufferers identify their grievances and decide to do something about it. Facing a movement of rejection the ruling class, smug in the certainty that it is bending the arc of history towards justice, becomes angry and insulted when the movement of rejection damns the rulers' glorious work to hell and back again.

By the time that the movement of rejection has arisen and found leaders and got a leader elected to power, chances are that There is No More Money. As in the French Revolution, and as right now when the Federal Debt is up at 100 percent of GDP.

That makes it very difficult to square the circle and continue the benefits of the supporters of the Old Regime while responding to the demands of the rising movement of rejection.

It makes complete sense that the supporters of the Democratic Party are outraged by the election of Donald Trump. Why, if that guy gets his way he will destroy all the social change and benefits of the last century! Meanwhile the supporters of Donald Trump can see nothing but injustice from a ruling class that just assumes that whatever it does is good and just, and sneers at the troubles of the deplorables.

President Trump tells us that he is a great dealmaker and that he will make great deals for us.

But what if the two sides in America don't want a deal? What if they insist that their opponents are thoroughly defeated first?

That is why I don't think it is a good idea for corporations to take sides in the political wars. It is just not good business to paint a target on your back.