Could the Smash-mouth Trump Era Have Room for Irony?

Despite the awful cruelty of the Trump era, featuring Trump gnawing on the hind legs of the new-born lambs of the mainstream media as they gambol innocently in First Amendment Meadow, and also featuring the entire liberal “community” and its bribed apologists in the Deep State attempting to grab Trump by the neck and scrag him, there still seems to be room in these United States for the delicate flower of irony.

In the first place I was intrigued by a piece on the Hells Angels motorcycle gang by Joe Bob Briggs. One fine day the Hells Angels showed up to award Briggs a gold-plated ball-peen hammer. But they couldn't just give it to him nice and sweetly. They had to demand that he show up on stage immediately to receive the award or they would know the reason why.

Briggs runs down the key attributes of a successful gang. The key to being a proper motorcycle gang is to have the reputation of being the roughest, toughest hombres west of the Pecos.

Motorcycle gangs are superpatriotic, writes Briggs; they defend their brothers in a fight, as “Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said to the president of Mexico last week.” They always have an enforcer, and so on.

Hmm. I wonder what Joe Bob Briggs is really talking about?

Then there is Victor Davis Hanson writing about “The Metaphysics of Trump.” How could a bad man select such good appointees, and how could they work for such a bad man? And if it is OK for these people to work for Trump then how come “nearly the entire diplomatic and security establishment in Washington refuses to work for such a reprobate?”

I am reminded of my departed mother, who recalled all her life being taught that King Charles I of England was a good man and a bad king, and Charles II was a bad man and a good king. In the end, of course, it didn't matter, not after Prince William of Orange invaded Britland with a 500-ship fleet and turned the Stuarts out of office.

And then we come to the Republican establishment with its globalist agenda of tax cuts and free trade agreements, but could never see around the corner to say “we love our miners, farmers, vets.”

Now that Trump has done it, it all seems so easy.

Golly, who would be dumb enough to figure that he could win a presidential election by making people feel that “he cares about people like me?” Or outfox the Democratic presidential candidate and her twentysomething whiz kids by executing on a sucessful Electoral College strategy to win the election decisively even though he lost the popular vote?

And what Republican has recently made such a bold outreach to African Americans?

I mean who are the dumb ones here? The ruling class Poo-Bahs? The Deep State time-servers? Or the guy with a combover that plays an idiot on TV?

See, I think that the key thing about Donald Trump is that there was a day in his life when he was in a room with 40 bankers trying to persuade them not to liquidate his bankrupt business empire. He managed to persuade them to take a haircut and let him live to rise again.

In my view you need a lot more smarts to hornswoggle a room full of bankers than to persuade Americans to vote for you.

Here is the big question facing the deep thinkers of America in the late winter of 2017. Is President Trump a political genius that figured out, finally, how to bring the white working class out of the wilderness? Or is he the leader of a biker gang that only knows the rules of intimidation?

You make the call.

What's All This About "Fourth Turnings"

Trump adviser Steve Bannon, we are told, is a devotee of a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy published back in 1997. Now the Washington Post has asked Neil Howe to write about his book.

As Neil Howe writes, his book proposes that society moves in "a recurring cycle of four-generation-long eras." The cycle culminates in "a time of civic and political crisis." The idea of the book was to "reject the deep premise of Western historians that social time is either linear... or chaotic[.]"

The Crisis could, of course, involve war, as in World War II, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. For the current Crisis, Strauss and Howe predicted a "'Great Devaluation' in financial markets" starting in about 2005. In other words, we are back in the 1930s, a decade that was resolved, you may remember, by a big old world war that healed the divisions in America by drafting all the young men from the great immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century into the armed forces.

Strauss and Howe were writing a book, so their cycle theory of history needed fancy names, with four Turnings that amount to a seasonal cycle, starting with the hope of High, followed by Awakenings, Unraveling, and Crisis. But their theory is not much more fanciful than the normal way of politics. A new ruling class gets power, mobilizes the nation in a new vision but, after a decade of two of looking after their supporters and blindly ignoring the fate of others, find that the natives are getting restless. That leads to a crisis, because the ruling class is usually too stupid or too proud to listen to the grievances of the "other," and allows grievances to fester. Anyway, they already spent all the money on their supporters.

My daughter recently alerted me to the work of Peter Turchin. In Ages of Discord he observes that the last time that the US experienced a partisan divide like the present was back in the 1850s. Same thing, different theory.

In the 1850s the issue was slavery. Imagine that the South had been willing to deal on slavery. The deal would have involved some sort of payoff, some sort of compensation to the plantation owners for the loss of their property. In retrospect that would have been a pretty good deal.

Now we have an issue between the idea of the nation-state community and the global elite. The global elite wants to get to the future in double quick time, and the people of the nation states don't want to lose what they have got. You would think there has to be a deal that would satisfy both parties before we get to fighting words.

The immediate question is: what does Steve Bannon want? Is he using the theory of Strauss and Howe to upset the apple cart, to force a crisis? Or is he trying to move President Trump to a deal that preserves the nation-state culture while still admitting the fact of a global economy where there is no place to hide, at least not for long?

Is the Trump era going to solve the Crisis, or is it going to intensify it?

The problem for our liberal friends, I suspect, is that they instinctively realize that the Trump era is not going to be good for liberals. That is why they are all piling up at their therapists.

But how bad could it be? At this stage of the game, all we deplorables want is for liberals to stop insisting on piloting the US solo. We want them to share power, and allow other hands upon the controls.

It is pretty obvious, since November 8, that our liberal friends are terrified by the idea of other hands on the controls. They seem to be preparing to fight to the knife to prevent Donald Trump from messing with their hegemony.

Either way, it seems that the US, and the rest of the West, is approaching a crisis, because something will have to change.

I would like the crisis to be resolved amicably. But I am not sure that we will get so lucky.

Have You Now, or Have You Ever Been a Creationist?

It was Douglas Adams in his remarkable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who coined the felicitous phrase about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

For the fact is that we do not know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. But we insist that life, the universe, and everything should have a meaning, and for that we humans have gods.

It is the conceit of many moderns that we have done away with gods, and have now determined to stand naked in the world clothed only in the truth of Darwin and evolution. God didn't create the world; evolution did. All this talk of God and Creation is mere creationism, the crude insertion of "skyhooks" into the world to explain what we cannot, at least not yet, explain.

Enter Matt Ridley and The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge. Ridley proposes that it is not just animals and plants that evolve through their selfish genes. It is everything.

And anyone that demands a higher authority for, e.g., managing the economy, is nothing but a creationist. And you know what those people are like. Think Canada's liberal darling Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale. Only, of course, Atwood sensibly confines her examination of creationists and fundamentalists to the religious ones.

We humans do not just demand gods to wisely direct our moral and political affairs from above. We imagine it in all corners of our life, from religion to culture to the economy to education. It cannot be that grubby and ordinary humans, combining together in voluntary cooperation, can improve on the edicts of kings, bishops, moralists, and professors.

Rubbish, writes Ridley. If you look around, you will find that everything in the universe proceeds in a bottom-up way, by felicitous combinations and innovations. And it is not usually some lone genius that makes the breakthrough, but several people, all trying to solve the problem du jour.

For instance, in addition to Darwin there was Wallace. And there were several people in addition to Einstein around 1900 that were trying to solve the problem that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. Einstein got there first, and to him the glory. But in no time there was quantum mechanics, an amazing collaboration of minds unlocking the secrets of the sub-atomic world.

And if you need a confirmation of the idea of evolution, here is a piece by Vaclav Smil from IEEE Spectrum about the five "Stages of Electronics," the evolution from Maxwell's unified theory of electricity, magnetism and light down to the present ubiquity of hand-held smart electronics. It is staggering that from the problem of figuring out light, magnetism, electricity, and everything, we have arrived in a little over a century at $100 smartphones that provide instant video communication across the world and a window on all the knowledge of the world. And nobody was in charge.

Matt Ridley, who is a climate skeptic, is making the argument against top-down wisdom from the right. But I am reading, courtesy of a liberal friend, The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere is the abstract side and logical side and the right hemisphere is the experiential and emotional side. The book proceeds from a detailed exposition of the current science of the brain to a critique of culture. The left hemisphere, says the blurb,

has grabbed more than its fair share of power, resulting in a society where a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure, narrow self-interest and a mechanistic view of the world hold sway, at an enormous cost to human happiness and the world around us.

Yes, but, according to chaps like me, the problem is the usual suspects like the back page quotes from Huffington Post and the Times Literary Supplement. It is their conceits and their prejudices and their appetite for power from which issue all the problems of the world, including bureaucracy and mechanism. So I wonder how McGilchrist makes his argument which, according to chapter headings, goes through renaissance and reformation and  enlightenment and romanticism and industrial revolution and modernism and postmodernism. I can't believe that he takes too close a cut against our present evolved, educated, administrative ruling class and cultural elite. But we will see.

However, despite all the talk of creationism, of skyhooks and turtles-all-the-way-down to deal with the problem of what lies on the other side of the boundaries of knowledge, we humans still, as we ever, insist on the question of the meaning of it all, life, the universe, and everything.

And in my view the more knowledge we accumulate about the world and beyond it to the universe the bigger the question becomes. What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

Because if life, the universe, and everything do not have a meaning, or an origin, or a design, or a purpose then what does that mean?

It Is AstroTurf All the Way Down

If you want to know the secret of life, the universe and everything, there is a problem. At some point, you hit a brick wall, the horizon of your knowledge.

So the deep thinkers of the world have come up with a useful skyhook. The world, they say, is sitting on a turtle. But what about the turtle? What is the turtle sitting on? There is only one answer to that. It is turtles, all the way down.

Conservatives have a similar problem when trying the analyze the meaning of the left and its peaceful protests. How much of it is real unprompted bottom-up assemblies of ordinary people presenting their grievances to the government? And how much of it is top-down AstroTurf ginned up by the ruling class and its bribed apologists, bought and paid for by the irrepressible George Soros.

There was a famous moment, during the rise of the Tea Party, when then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the Tea Party of being AstroTurf, a creature of right-wing moneybags,

This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.

Well, it is certainly true that in due course the Tea Party got the support of Koch Brothers money. As you can imagine that the MSM was right on it. But in the beginning nobody had a clue where the Tea Party was coming from. Nancy Pelosi couldn't understand a peaceful protest that was not wholly owned by rich kids playing at revolution.

I am talking about folks like the young "Refuse Fascism" activist on Tucker Carlson, determined to protest and Resist the fascist Donald Trump.  As they sing on South Pacific, you have to be carefully taught, to hate and to fear, to protest and to Resist.

So now we learn that the spontaneous protests at the townhalls of Republican congressmen are the "Townhall Project" of Jimmy Dahman, a former Clinton campaign volunteer.

His Facebook page lists the youthful Dahman’s current position as Deputy Organizing Director at Ohio Together, and former positions as Regional Organizing Director at Hillary for America and Organizer (Party) at Hillary for Iowa.

Well, of course. It is AstroTurf all the way down when you are pushing back against the outrage of Republicans daring to roll back the administrative state's Obamacare project.

Not that I am surprised. The activists that I have seen on various video of GOP townhalls featured well-born women with well-born hairdos. I'm sorry, but women like that are not helpless people about to lose their Obamacare exchange health-insurance policies in the general meltdown of government health care.

But it is important for GOP elected representatives to know whether they are dealing with a genuine groundswell of opposition to Obamacare repeal and replace, or whether the protests are just the usual left-wing rent-a-mob featuring paid activists bused in by the deep state.

After all, the whole point of "activism" and "peaceful protest" and "resistance" is to make it look as if the grass roots are rising in rebellion, and that a tidal wave of rebellion will engulf the racists and sexists and homophobes unless they submit.

But what I would like to know is what that young woman talking over Tucker Carlson really thinks she is doing. I mean, it is all very well to talk about resisting, and brandishing manifestos featuring  NO! in 72 point type. But what is this young woman really proposing? Peaceful protests? Actual riots? Attacks on police stations? Armed insurrection? I could tell that Tucker Carlson was trying to get Sunsara Taylor to tell him what she was really proposing to do about Hitlerian Trumpian fascism. But the canny activist refused the bait and just kept talking about protest and resist and NO!

So Sunsara Taylor is probably just a pretty piece of AstroTurf wearing the obligatory Rachel Maddow eyeglasses.

Deep State or Paper Tiger?

The big question facing America is just how hard and how successfully the so-called "Deep State" will push to stop Donald Trump and his agenda.

We have seen it take out Gen. Flynn, President Trump's choice for National Security Advisor. And we have seen curious leaks of conversations between President Trump and foreign leaders. And we have seen the push-back against President Trump's refugee ban.

And presumably the Deep State was involved in the humiliation of gay controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos.

The telling thing to me about these actions is their penny-ante nature, the fact that the "Deep State" is identifying itself not in a sweeping coup against the president but in a minor-league score-settling acts.

I'm not an expert in bureaucratic process, but I would say, from a military strategy standpoint, that the president's opponents don't want to be IDing themselves so early and so unnecessarily. I'd say that the EPA bureaucrats do not want to be signalling their opposition to Trump by calling their congressmen to oppose Scott Pruitt; that just makes it easier for Trump to shut down whole areas of the EPA by executive order.

The Deep State may have the power to obstruct a lot of President Trump's effort to slow immigration and deport illegals. Only problem is that his policy is pretty popular with ordinary Americans and many legal immigrants.

Here's George Will saying that "conservatives will distance themselves from Trump by midsummer." Really?

Anything is possible, but I'd say that the very fact that President Trump is acting like a "strong leader" means that it will be very difficult for conservative waverers to jump ship in the near future. The whole point of strong leadership and military discipline is the get the troops committed to the leader and the cause so that they keep on battling, even when the tide of battle turns against them.

I'd say that the secret of Trump's success thus far is that he has been doing precisely what the Republican base and the basket of deplorables want him to do. He has been sticking it to the liberal ruling class and telling them to put it where the sun don't shine. The themes of his campaign -- America First, halt immigration, stop outsourcing, fix Obamacare -- are cunningly chosen to be popular with ordinary Americans and unpopular with the liberal ruling class.

Think about it:

Do ordinary Americans want low gas prices or do they want to save the planet?

Do ordinary American women want transgender bathrooms or do they want single-sex bathrooms where they feel safe from male predators?

Do ordinary Americans want to compete with illegal immigrants for entry-level jobs or do they want them to be sent home?

Do ordinary Americans want to fight microaggressions and create safe spaces, or do they want to be free of the fear that a careless word at work could cost them their job, courtesy of the harpies in HR?

I'd say that if the economy fails to take off, and we get a recession before 2020 then all bets are off.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that the Deep State is a paper tiger. When it comes to the crunch the folks in the bureaucracy are going to want to hold onto their life-time jobs and their pensions. And if there are a few with more imagination than sense, I would suggest the Bing doctrine for President Trump. A couple of high-profile firings of disobedient bureaucrats should, in Voltaire's words, suffice to encourager les autres.

The point is that many battles in history are decided by the side that gives up last. And in 2016 Republicans and Americans chose a leader who seems to be just the person to be the last to give up.

Mirror Mirror: Who is the Incompetent One in the Land

All of our liberal and lefty friends are chanting in unison, as if at a peaceful protest, that Trump is Incompetent.

Maybe they are right. Or maybe they haven't gotten out lately. Maybe they have been too protected by The New York Times and NPR from the dreadful record of President Obama's incompetence.

Here is D.C. McAllister going into chapter and verse about Obama's incompetence, as in

• November 2010: Democratic senators say Obama "out of his league."
• October 2010: Guardian reports officials "outside inner circle" leaving administration
• June 2010: Mort Zuckerman says that "world sees Obama as incompetent and amateur."

And so on. Golly, who knew that wise heads were saying that back then? 

As Robert W. Merry writes, the fact is that the US and the world are facing an existential crisis. Here in the US it looks like this:

Wall Street dominates...  Public-employee unions utilize their power... Corporations foster tax-code provisions that allow them to game the system. “Crony capitalism’’ runs rampant. Members of Congress tilt the political system to favor incumbency. A national-debt burden threatens the country’s financial health. Uncontrolled immigration threatens... The nation’s industrial base has been hollowed out, and the vast American working class—the bedrock of the FDR coalition—is squeezed to the point of desperation.

And that is just the US. What about the world?

 China... wants to expunge American military power from Asia. The Middle East is aflame, largely as a result of mindless U.S. interventions there. Western civilization’s European heartland is threatened from without by mass immigration and from within by waves of populist nationalism bent on destroying the postwar experiment in political consolidation. Tensions are on the rise everywhere—between Sunnis and Shia in the Middle East, between the United States and Russia, between China and its neighbors, between southern and northern Europe over currency issues, between the United States and Iran. 

If you look back at 2015, Merry writes, just before Trump descended his escalator, "everyone" was expecting a status-quo election between the Bush clan and the Clinton clan.

Can you spell "incompetence?" As in SNAFU, Situation Normal, All F*cked Up?

Look, all government is incompetent, all the time. Government lurches from one disaster to another. But government has something that you don't have. It has apologists and flacks whose job is to spin dross into gold. This goes on until the regime collapses and then everyone agrees that the old regime was the worst political dynasty since the later Roman emperors, or the Bourbons in France after 1815 who had famously forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

Take the US. In the 1850s it failed to keep the nation together and descended into a bloody civil war. After the war it screwed up the aftermath, both in the Reconstruction of the South and in the resumption of gold payments that resulted in a huge crash in 1873 and a depression. Then there was another depression in the 1890s, followed by a crash in 1907, followed by the folly of World War I. Then the nations of the world screwed up the resumption of the peacetime economy, resulting in the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression and another World War! Since then there have been wars, riots, inflation, the tech bubble, the real-estate bubble, the Great Recession, and the great racial divides of the Obama era.

Who were the geniuses putting us through disaster after disaster?

Look at the United States right now. Here we have the white working class descending into despair. We have African Americans denied their proper entry into the middle class by a liberal plantation that has destroyed the African-American family, killed millions of its babies in utero, and kept them separate from the great American center. We have illegal immigrants that, on the one hand are exploited because of their illegal status, and on the other take jobs from ordinary Americans that don't want to accept slave-labor wages.

Meanwhile the ruling class of the United States is all worked up about global warming, spending tens of billions on "science" and crony capitalism. And it is really focused on gay marriage, transgender bathrooms, and the sexual distress of well-born women students in the nation's universities.

What could possibly go wrong?

And the experts are telling us that, after one month, President Trump is a failure?

The only thing to remember is the reply of Adam Smith to a young nobleman worried about the defeat of Gen. Burgoyne in the colonies back during the disaster of the revolt of the colonials in North America. He told his young friend that there is always a lot of ruin in a nation.

But don't tell that to your Venezuelan friend. Sometimes the isolated instances of ruin in a nation combine into a general ruin and conflagration.

Making Sense of Trump's Attack on the Media

With regard to President Trump I take the position that Trump is not an idiot; he only plays one on TV.

So what are we to think about Donald Trump's broad-based attack on the media, those chappies that Glenn Reynolds calls "Democratic operatives with bylines."

It all seems as plain as day to me. But maybe I have got it wrong.

Anyway, here goes.

The Republican base has been getting very angry lately that its leaders do not "fight." We mean that Republican politicians, at least since the first President Bush, tend to cave to the Democrats, so that Republican governance became Democrat-lite. During the George W. Bush administration this became official policy, with "compassionate conservatism" and the No Child Left Behind Act compromise with Sen. Ted Kennedy.

According to the conservative narrative this attempt to make nice with the Democrats was a failure. In the first place, Democrats never conceded the 2000 election and encouraged their partisans to believe that Bush was "selected no elected," and secondly the Democrats went into full anti-war mode when President Bush "did something" about 9/11 by executing on the bipartisan policy of "regime change" in Iraq.

The Obama administration, according to the conservative base, was a direct attack on America as we know it, pushing every liberal nostrum without attempting to do any bipartisan compromise. Particularly egregious, from my view, was the abandonment of welfare reform and its central policy of a work requirement. BIg-time government welfare, on my view, is not merely injustice; it is cultural genocide on the recipients.

Then, of course, there was the Obama administration's culture war agenda that amounted to cultural war on Christian conservatives, using the power of the state to punish conservatives for their views, from weaponizing the IRS on the Tea Party to the demand that Christian conservatives provide services for gay weddings.

(Parenthetically, this is why Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He felt, as a libertarian, that the civil rights acts should apply only to government. He wanted it to be illegal for government to discriminate by race, but not be illegal for business to discriminate by race. He just wanted to undo Jim Crow laws and Davis-Bacon Acts that forced business to discriminate by race.)

Fast-forward to the 2016 presidential race. The leading candidate after the extinguishing of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), turned out to be Ted Cruz, who had made a point about getting in the face of the Democrats as a rookie Senator. Oh, and then there was Donald Trump, but he was a joke.

It turned out that Donald Trump was way better at getting into peoples' faces than Ted Cruz. That's probably because Trump is a people person, and Ted Cruz is manifestly not. People just don't like Cruz, face to face.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of President Trump. He has been elected to stick it to the opposition. But Trump is a deal-maker; he knows that sooner or later he is going to have to make deals with Democrats over immigration, Obamacare, taxes, whatever. So it is not a very good idea to attack Democrats, the very people that he is going to have to deal with. Politicians are touchy about insults and slights. How did things work out for Obama, who made no bones about attacking Republicans?

So what does President Trump do, to stick it to the opposition, while still serving his supporters with red meat to snack upon?

Simple. He attacks the liberal media, the MSM of who you've heard tell, the Democratic operatives with bylines. He appoints the liberal elite media as the official opposition. Is that brilliant, or what?

Now look at what happened at last Thursday's press conference that was either a train wreck or the most amazing thing since sliced bread, according to your partisan affiliation. Trump took a question from a young black reporter that asked him about talking to the Congressional Black Caucus. Oh yeah, said Trump. He had thought he had a meeting with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), but Cummings backed out. Could the reporter arrange a meeting?

This is, as they say, trolling, Grandmaster Level. The result, after lots of huffing and puffing, is that Trump has a meeting set up with Cummings and the Congressional Black Caucus. Those were the chaps, you may remember, that boycotted his inauguration.

Fast forward to Trump's rally at Melbourne, FL on Saturday, Feb. 18. The warm-up was conducted by a couple of black women, using the cadences of the black churches, and around the podium were placards reading BlacksforTrumpt2020.com. Golly, what could that be all about?

Look, the longer that liberals keep insisting that Donald Trump is a fool and that his month-old administration is a train wreck the better. There is a new game in town, and liberals don't have a clue how to play it.

Could it be that the Trump administration is executing on a deliberate strategy to confuse the opposition with multiple initiatives, with noise and confusion, to make it difficult for the opposition to achieve strategic concentration in opposing the complete range of his policies?

It is a commonplace to remark that businessmen don't know how to operate in the political arena. But suppose that a businessman like Trump is more like an army general that has learned how to run a battle and keep a cool head despite the utter confusion and conflicting signals and fear and panic? Our modern politicians seem to like everything calm and quiet, with a somnolent bureaucracy to execute on policy in its own sweet time.

Obviously, the Trump administration is not going to be like that.