Science and the Partisan Divide

There's a great analysis out this week of the 2016 election by the Voter Study Group of the Democracy Fund. Among other things it breaks out Trump and Clinton voters according to twelve "issues."

The study assumes that people just "come" to these positions, but of course that is nonsense. Ordinary people do not have any ideas, except those that are implanted by ideologically motivated elites and other ideological entrepreneurs.

But I want to look at each issue, where the voters are, and where the "settled science΅ is. Which is shorthand for what I believe. Oh, and let's also guess where the ruling class comes down.

Issue 1: Politics is a rigged game. Voters are about agreed on this. Settled science? Really, you could knock me over with a spoon. Of course politics is rigged; that is the whole point of politics. Ruling class: Who me?

Issue 2: Importance of Social Security/Medicare. Almost everyone is on the left and on the right agrees that Social Security/Medicare are important. Settled science? Social Security/Medicare is a terrible idea that is bound to crash and burn and in the mean time is a crushing injustice on the young 'uns. Ruling class: Huh! We really snookered them on that one.

Issue 3: Foreign trade. Clinton voters are a bit to the left of Trump voters, but on the whole everyone is suspicious of it. Settled science? Tax foreign trade like we tax everything else, no more and no less, and shut up. Ruling class: We are for foreign trade except when we are against it.

Issue 4: Attitudes on gender roles. Clinton voters are mildly left; Trump voters are right in the middle. Settled science? Most people would be utterly lost without well-defined gender roles. Ruling class: a screwed up population is easily led.

Issue 5: Pride in America. Clinton voters are moderately proud of America, and Trump voters very proud of America. Settled science? Nationalism is probably the best thing going that gets people to unite and forget their partisan squabbles. Ruling class: Yes, but when does nationalism verge into Nazism?

Issue 6: Perception that "people like me" are in decline. Clinton voters are about even on this; Trump voters are in agreement. Settled science? In any economic revolution, people will worry about their status. Ruling class: Don't look at us, baby.

Issue 7: Attitude towards black people. Clintonites are warmish towards black people; Trumpists are cool towards black people. Settled science? Since the white working class has to pay for race politics it is not surprising they don't like it. Ruling class: Yay! Divide and conquer.

Issue 8: Feelings about Muslims. Clinton voters have good feelings about Muslims; Trump voters have bad feelings about Muslims. Settled science? Muslims are great, as long as we are ruthless about deporting the terrorists like they do in Italy. Ruling class: We can handle this, because we are educated and evolved.

Issue 9: Attitudes on immigration. Clinton voters are pretty OK on immigration, Trump voters are pretty un-OK. Settled science? Immigration directly affects wages, and obviously lowers the potential wages of the native-born. Ruling class: No human is illegal.

Issue 10: Attitudes on moral issues. Clinton voters are strongly left; Trump voters are mildly right. Settled science? Lefty moral issues lead to men that don't work and women that don't marry. Not good. Ruling class: We should not impose our morality...

Issue 11: Attitudes on economic equality. Clintonites are strongly left; Trump voters mildly right. Settled science? Probably any government policy trying to fix inequality is going to make things worse. Ruling class: Divide and conquer.

Issue 12: Attitudes towards government intervention. Clinton voters in favor. Trump voters opposed. Settled science? Law of unintended consequences says intervention makes things worse. Ruling class: More government, more jobs for us.

So what does this all mean? It means, I think, that the attitude of all voters is: Stop the world with government force, I want to get off. It also means that the propaganda of the ruling class has a big effect in America: see especially gender roles. But the settled science says that the market and its prices are the gentlest way imaginable to force us humans, who hate change, to adjust to a changing world with the minimum of hardship, fines and jail time and executions.

It is interesting that the two issues in which average Clinton and Trump voters are all on the same side of the line are Pride in America and "people like me" in decline. People are still proud of America despite half a century of anti-national propaganda from the ruling class. And people feel in decline despite the ruling class's insistence that things are getting better in every possible way due to our ruling class education and wisdom.

The basic problem is that people are asking for stuff they shouldn't be asking for. They think that government can make their lives better. Instead, per JFK, we should ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.

Saving Jobs. For What?

What will be the jobs of tomorrow? There is a simple answer to that: nobody knows.

Meanwhile people are all upset about jobs leaving for Mexico, or the replacement of expensive American-born workers with immigrants from South and East Asia.

So what will we be doing with our lives in 2050?

Perhaps the most baleful influence is the smartphone. On the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, Scott Rasmussen reminds us that all the stuff you could buy from Radio Shack, "personal stereo, AM/FM clock radio, headphones, calculator, computer, VHS camcorder, mobile cell phone, regular speed dial phone, portable CD player, mobile CB radio, desktop scanner, phone answering machine, cassette tape recorder and radar detector," plus camera, GPS, and language translator.

Rasmussen calls the iPhone a "revolutionary consumer product," but that is the least of it. Smartphones and their associated technology are transforming business and the economy at the speed of light. And what about politics, where a politician like Donald Trump or Emanuel Macron can win the presidency of his nation over the heads of the existing political parties and all the pompous producers of conventional wisdom?

When we talk about jobs we have tended to focus on the jobs destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. There were the Luddites that ran around destroying machines. And the left in the late 19th century talked about "deskilling," the replacement of skilled craft workers with machine minders. And yet country people ran, not walked, from the countryside to the city, as the people of China are doing today. Just how satanic is work in a mill and a house in an industrial slum compared to toiling and starving in the countryside?

You can make the argument that the progress from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to industrial to information revolution has been one long de-skilling process. Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel, pointed out that a hunter-gatherer in New Guineas knew 800 plants and when each produced fruit, and which were edible and which poisonous, while the agriculturalist knew how to grow a couple of grains for food, and we know how to drive to the supermarket. That is progress?

Well, we have just gone through the Great Enrichment with income increasing by 30 times, and nobody had a clue it was coming.

The oldsters complained that writing would mean that people would lose their memories, that printing would remove the need for learning, just as cars remove the need for horsemanship. And Google Search removes the need for library card catalogues.

What are we going to do when all the skills of the world are programmed into a smartphone?

The answer is simple; we will live in Jane Austen's world where everything came down to the right marriage, and people did nothing except worry about the next competitive social event.

Of course, the significance of Jane Austen's world is that it was the last hurrah of the agricultural age, where wealth and status depended on the ownership of good rich acres.

So are we living in the last hurrah of the information age, after which everything will change and the absolutes of information age life will seem like a costume drama?

In another half century we will know that answer to that, and most likely nobody will have had a clue what was coming.

Is the GOP Health Plan Doomed?

To the average racist sexist homophobe on the Right the GOP effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare seems like a Keystone Kops routine that is doomed to defeat.

Maybe, but here are a bunch of reasons why not.

First, the Republican Party is not like the Democratic Party. I don't know exactly how the Democratic Party works, but based on nods and winks I've received over the years I'd guess that it is much more difficult for a Democrat to rebel against party discipline than for a Republican. I imagine that's because party funding comes from government employee unions and left-wing billionaires and the ideology comes from left-wing activist groups and foundations. These guys are all pretty clear about what they want from the political system and what they want from Democratic politicians. When lefties get themselves all worked up about the eevil Koch Brothers they are assuming that the Kochs operate the same as George Soros. But they don't; Soros seems to be interested in power while the Koch Brothers are not.

Therefore, we would expect the Republican process for getting a health bill out of Congress to be a lot more messy and out in public than the Democratic process.

Second, read Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent. It will teach you more than you want to know about voting systems. Long story short, when you pass any bill in Congress you have to buy the votes of the folks on the fence. This means that during the negotiation process the people on the fence will appear to be holdouts, and it will look as though the bill's sponsors are never going to get the bill passed. Every time the Republicans put off a vote on their Obamacare replacement the media and the right wail that the Republicans are hopeless and can't pass anything. Maybe, but the holdouts are not pure ideologues; they are practical politicians that have a pretty accurate estimate of what their votes are worth. Obviously, it doesn't pay to compromise too early.

Third, I don't know what people think "repeal and replace" means, but it certainly does not mean that we are moving away from entitlements and free stuff. And with the white working class being Trumped into the Republican Party all bets are off, because the white working class believes they have paid their fair share and thus deserve to get their fair share of the benefits. Short of an alt-right revolution we are not going to get beyond the entitlement state and its promises of benefits for votes, and maybe not even then. The alt-right is anti-free market and pro America for Americans. In other words, the alt-right is perfectly happy using government power to reward its supporters. The number of people that recognize that the entitlement state eventually runs out of other peoples' money and also that actually want to do something about it is very small.

Fourth, the whole point of government is to protect us from change. The job of armies is to protect us from the change proposed by pirates and plunderers. But of course this kind of protection is only temporary. At some point the army protecting us will disappear and leave us to the mercies of the barbarians, as the Germany Army left every woman in eastern Germany in 1945 to the mercies of the Soviet invaders. The logic of this protection idea immediately suggests that the government can protect us not just from physical change but also from economic change, and that is what government has been doing for the last 150 years. The way it does this is by protecting us from the price system with subsidies and benefits and entitlements. Unfortunately the government programs are fantasy and the price system is reality, so eventually the fantasy dissolves. But hey, if the fantasy lasts until after I am dead, who cares?

So if you ask me, I'd predict that the Republican Congress will pass some sort of Obamacare repeal-and-replace. If it does its job right it will introduce a bit more price discipline but not enough to please us right-wing nutcases, and not enough to elect a Democratic Congress in 2018.

Dems Start to Pivot, But How?

You heard it here first. In the July/August 2017 The Atlantic two Democratic operatives with bylines (© Glenn Reynolds) are starting the pivot away from Trump-Russia-Trump 24-7.

Frankline Foer notes that dear old Bill Clinton was right on the white working class thing back in 2015. And Peter Beinart has an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand piece about immigration, the choice between diversity and unity.

OK, you say. How in the Sam Blazes are the Democrats -- that have spent 50 years since Archie Bunker calling the white working class racist, sexist bigots -- going to do this? And how is the Democratic Party that never saw an illegal immigrant it didn't like going to get all flag-happy about people born on the Fourth of July right here in the good old US and A?

All I can say is, just watch 'em. Before you can say Walter Cronkite there will be chin stroking elite journalists all over TV telling you that that's the way it is about how Donald Trump has betrayed the white working class and how all the Republican flag-waving of the last half century is actually a betrayal of everything America stands for.

That's what you can do when you are the ruling class and nobody is allowed to hear a discouraging word from the opposition. You will read The New York Times and never get to read a piece about activists demanding trans-gender cake-baking rights. It will all just go down the memory hole, and good little girls will be asking their conservative friends, with a grimace to indicate their utter sincerity, about the new hate and the new hyphenated phobia cooked up fifteen minutes ago by progressive activists.

Still, it might be a stretch to actually turn on a dime. Old stager Wesley Pruden rehearses the difficulties in this piece.

Some of the Democratic messages, which have been dispatched with such sound and fury are that “straight” folks and particularly straight white men, are so bad they’re not entitled to rights, civil or otherwise. Cops are all bad because they’ve set out to wipe out black folks, and therefore it’s OK to kill as many cops as possible.

Free speech is cool, and everyone should be able to say anything, anywhere, as long as it’s approved by the liberal canon, except that it’s not cool to say “liberal” anymore because somebody stunk up the word and all the liberals are now “progressives.”

Then he segues to Democratic officeholders urging caution and the need to win elections.

And really, I can't feel that the problem is that hard. Pretty soon the Democrats will hit upon some new program offering free stuff, and the voters will start voting for it. Maybe it will be free college, or free health care, or free child-care, or free vacations, or free housing, or free assisted living, or free driverless cars.

Yeah! How come Republicans don't want people to have driverless cars! Are they mean or just stupid?

Who cares? Humans like free stuff and they will vote for the man that offers it to them, whether he is a Viking chieftain offering their longship crews loot and slaves, or a Columbus offering his men the gold of Eldorado, or a Samuel Gompers who offered his union members "more," or a Barack Obama offering an Affordable Care Act that will lower your insurance premium by $2,500 per year.

It is just the dumb middle class that imagines a world of responsibility and private property and savings and marriage and children. Who cares about them?

Democrats: Forget Impeachment, It Ain't 1973 Any More

I suppose that if you are a Democrat of a certain age the heady days of the Nixon Impeachment are a golden memory, when the good guys won and the disgusting McCarthyite Nixon got what was coming to him. Remember what he did to Helen Gahagan Douglas!

But I have to tell my Democratic friends that it ain't 1973 any more. The reason is encapsulated in the key moments of the Nixon Impeachment and the Clinton Impeachment, and what we racist sexist homophobes took away from them.

In 1974 the graybeards in the US Senate, Sens. Goldwater (R-AZ) and Scott (R-PA) went to the White House and there joined with Rep. Rhodes (R-AZ). They told President Nixon that he had 12-15 votes against impeachment in the US Senate. So Nixon decided to resign.

In 1998 the President of the Senate, Al Gore, went to the White House right after the Republican House had impeached President Clinton and held a pro-Clinton rally. And so the Senate failed to convict Clinton of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Now if you  are a Democrat, you might think: Ha, just shows you what racist sexist homophobes Republicans were in the 1990s. Back in the good old days, responsible Republicans knew the right thing to do and did it.

Are you  still reading, Democratic friends? If so here is how a Republican like me looks back on this. To me, it looks like Nixon was driven out of office on a technicality, by trying to cover up a stupid crime by his operatives, and the Republican Party leaders -- used to being in the minority for the previous 30 years -- behaved like whipped puppies. But when it came to the Clinton Impeachment it looks like the Democrats took an attitude of my party right or wrong, and defended Clinton to the last ditch. My party right or wrong: is that the same as "my country right or wrong?"

So I look on the present campaign against President Trump as a vile trumped up monstrosity, one half Deep State and one half Democratic oppo researchers. And I expect the Republicans in the House and the Senate to defend Trump to the last man.

I look at Tea Party groups being harassed by the IRS while private-server Hillary Clinton goes free and I want blood. I look at Scooter Libby being dragged through the mire for a confusion about statements to the FBI while corruptocrats like Maxine Waters go free and I want blood.

Like I say, there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. What  I mean by that is that anyone in politics should forget about being the angel of mercy, the agent of justice. Because that is not how the people on the receiving end experience your mercy and justice. So when you are in power and nobly implementing your vision of justice, helping to bend the arc of history, you might spare a thought for the people whose toes you are stomping on. Government is force, and every government program is an expression of force, i.e., injustice. Every legislative act is a statement of "no more Mr. Nice Guy, it is time for brass knuckles and force."

That is why conservatives say that the government is best that governs least. That's a quote from Thoreau, of all people. Imagine lefty liberal environmentalists thinking things like that today!

So I think that liberals are making a strategic mistake by imagining that they are going to impeach Trump and drive him from office. Anyone who isn't living in the liberal bubble is sick to the back teeth of liberal lawlessness, liberal privilege, liberal hate mobs, liberal hypocrisy, liberal injustice, liberal fake news. That's why we voted for Donald Trump to drain the swamp.

It's natural for liberals to be in denial after the shock of November 2016, as it is natural for children to act out after Daddy took the toys away. But it is time for liberals to realize that we deplorables have been electing Ted Cruzes and Donald Trumps for a reason. The reason is that we want our representatives to fight liberal injustice to the knife.

If Republicans were to allow a Trump impeachment and trial it would probably blow up the Republican Party and get it replaced by something else. And believe me, Democrats: you don't want that.

A Liberal Tries to Figure It Out

In the aftermath of the GA06 special election Democrats are trying to figure out how to thread the needle to victory. Up until now their tactic seems to have been anti-Trump all the time.

Only, it turns out that Jon Ossoff ran as a moderate not a blazing anti-Trump radical, while Handel ran as an anti-Pelosi fanatic. Go figure.

So here comes Damon Linker in The Week trying to figure it all out. He realizes that full-on Bernie democratic socialism plus full-on immigration-abortion-gender-bending ain't gonna do it.

This would seem to imply that the most electorally formidable leftist candidate would combine Bernie Sanders' economic populism [Medicare-for-all, free college tuition, and sharp tax hikes for the wealthy] with modest immigration restrictions (Socialism for Citizens) and Bill-Clinton-style moderation on social issues (keeping abortion "safe, legal, and rare"). 

He's probably right, since this position represents a slightly lefty version of Trumpism, one that is lighter on the economic populism and heavier on the immigration restrictions. But then, Linker adds, there is the problem of the missing left-leaning voters. Why are these people staying at home?

Well, maybe it's because they got their welfare and they got their Medicaid and they got their EBT so what's not to like?

When you think about it the Democratic agenda assumes that you are either a rich kid wanting some street action or a helpless victim that can't even get out of bed in the morning to go apply for a job. But most Americans are people that want a growing economy with jobs, jobs, jobs, and help from the government if things turn south. Because most Americans are not Millennials in their parents' basement or single-parent welfare recipients. They are trying to navigate the internet economy and raise their kids and maybe save for retirement, and it's hard.

And here's the thing. You liberals are supposed to be the educated evolved ones. Well, in proposing Medicare-for-all you are piling a new program on top of the regulated special-interest mess you already created with 50 years of liberal politics that started with Medicare/Medicaid in 1965. Here's the chart from usgovernmentspending.com:



So. Government healthcare has gone from one percent GDP to 8 percent GDP and you chaps want more?

The same goes for free college. You guys are already spending a trillion a year on education, and now you want more?

This is the problem of the administrative state. The settled science says that it stinks, because it can't adapt to new situations or fix its existing problems. But liberals want to double down.

There are two problems with this. First is the liberal conceit that "we are the evolved ones." If you chaps don't accept the verdict of science, that the administrative state is a horrible idea that makes things worse, then you are not the evolved elitists you think you are. Second is the crude vote-buying. Surely you liberals have a better idea than merely pandering to the universal human appetite for free stuff?

Because when the administrative state collapses, as in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Venezuela, it will be the poor that will starve first.

Democrats Hit Reality After GA06

Judging by The New York Times our liberal friends are all getting together to blame Nancy Pelosi for her failure to turn a mildly Republican House seat over to the Democrats in Tuesday's special election.

Reading all the reactions to the Democratic defeat I got to thinking. First of all there is my definition of government that I developed here. It goes:

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

And that is all. I developed the talking point from the ideas of St. Augustine, Mao Zedong, and British politician Norman Tebbit. I also threw in Max Weber, so it must be right.

But one thing I missed out, that came through in the aftermath of GA06 and the victory of the very ordinary Karen Handel. Your average armed minority wants to clothe itself in the "decent drapery" of a saving truth. It does not want to think that it is just a band of political robbers, but members of a highly principled movement that is only reduced to using force to bend the arc of history towards justice because of the evil abroad in the land: landlords, capitalists, racists, sexist, homophobes.

Actually, that's not quite right. If you are a Cesar Chavez or a Joseph Stalin you really don't care about the "decent drapery." You are pretty clear that you are interested in power and anyone in your way is going to be wasted. But even they need an enemy that has to be defeated and destroyed.

However, if you are a rich kid, whether a Karl Marx, a Herbert Marcuse, or one of our modern day progressives that wants to get into activism, you really need your "decent drapery" to cover the nakedness of your grab for power. Never mind that the "decent drapery" is really a provocative getup that is significant for what it reveals rather than what it hides.

However, everyone is human, including especially political activists, so it is understandable that since the election the disappointed Democrats are all beating up on Trump and evil Republican racists, sexists, and homophobes rather than tempting the voters with provocative new free stuff.

Nevertheless, in the final analysis politics is not about me and my feelings; it is about doing what it takes to win elections. So the Good Little Liberal Girl at the Ossoff campaign HQ that was captured in tears when she learned of her candidate's defeat makes the point. Don't get mad (or tearful), get even.

And the point was made by the Democratic big cheeses quoted in The New York Times waking up to the fact that their Blame Trump message was not working. So, echoing Disraeli in his political novels, they were basically asking "what is our cry?" That is what the political operatives Taper and Tadpole always wanted to know in Coningsby and Sybil. In modern political speak the Tapers and the Tadpoles talk about "our messaging." As in:

Democrats scrambled to regroup on Wednesday after a disappointing special election defeat in Georgia, with lawmakers, activists and labor leaders speaking out in public and private to demand a more forceful economic message heading into the 2018 elections.

Of course, the question is: do the persuadable voters want to hear that the government will grow the economy to create jobs, or do they want to hear that the government will tax the rich to provide them with bigger benefits? I have to say that I don't know the answer to that. Indeed, that is why we have elections, to let the voters decide who they want to be their rulers.

Because, as Joseph Schumpeter wrote 70 years ago, under Democracy, the people do not get to rule. They just get to select who will rule over them. Actually, they don't even get to do that. They get to vote for Four More Years or for Time for a Change. And that is all.

Although I don't know what the voters think I can tell you what the settled science says. It says that letting the economy grow to create more jobs is how we got the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years. Giving out free stuff is what conquerors and pirates -- and now socialists and progressives -- have done since the dawn of time. And it doesn't create wealth; it just takes it from one set of people and gives it to another.

Until it runs out of other peoples' money.