My Better Deal for Americans

Last Sunday Chuck Schumer came out with a "Better Deal" program for Democrats going forward. According to IBD it is nothing new, just the usual Democratic program list, including a higher minimum wage, negotiated drug prices, new anti-trust vigor, and corporate tax credits and training for displaced workers.

So nothing new.

Seriously, what should government be doing in the immediate future to protect Americans?

First, what government should not be doing is mucking up the labor market with minimum wages. There is only one minimum wage: $0.00. That is the wage you get paid for your first internship, or the first months of your apprenticeship. Nor should they be mucking about with drug prices. Maybe we should encourage the drug companies to license their drugs, or ease up on the stifling FDA regulation. But mucking about with the price system is baloney. Nor should we start mucking about with anti-trust. What good did it do with Standard Oil? Or IBM? Or AT&T? In all three cases, the government acted just as the market did for the monopoly: by discovering oil in Texas (as in Texaco), by dumping the mainframe world for minicomputers and desktop microcomputers, and by changing the phone world forever. And what good did regulation do for the railroads except put them to sleep for a century?

But I get the Democrats and what they are doing. Government is force, so if you are close to the levers of power, you think about what you can do to use government power to reward your supporters.

But what should, what could government be doing to help and protect the American people?

Let us look at a few Big Problems in the world today.

First, there is the baby drought. In Japan, young people are turning off sex and family. In Germany, 30 percent of adult women are childless. Here in the US the liberal left is anti marriage and family all the way. I am talking about the sexual revolution that makes women into sex objects; feminism, that teaches women not to have children; the whole LGBT cult that leads young people to vote themselves off the planet. And the whole left-wing culture that encourages people to live as subordinate serfs instead of as responsible individuals.

The fact is that the only way for about 97 percent of people to have a meaningful life is to get married and have children. And grandchildren. Unless you are Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs or Barack Obama nobody will remember your name except your descendants. Your claim to immortality will not be in some amazing work of creative innovation, but in the children you created with your wife. Over the past century and more we have taught the sons and daughters of the educated that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is to live a creative life, writing a novel, starting a company, advocating for justice. This is mere conceit. Creativity is having children.

Second, there is the world of work. Everybody says that we will all have our jobs taken by robots, and maybe they are right. But "everybody" has been wrong about just about everything in the last 200 years, so I am not holding my breath.  Let us try to think about this differently.

In the old days of the hunter-gatherers, men defended the borders of the tribe, and women gathered the food and raised the children. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything was to hang onto your patch of territory and create enough children to defend and propagate in that territory. But then the world changed.

In the agricultural age men were not all needed to defend the borders, so what were they to do? Peel potatoes? Fortunately there was something for them to do. It was to plow the fields. Plowing was heavy work and women tended to miscarry if they did the plowing. Yay! Men were not surplus population. But women still did nearly all the work of child-bearing, -raising, and food preparation. And, of course, all the men could be called upon, on occasion, to serve in the lord's army. The meaning of life was to find yourself a powerful lord and be his loyal retainer, and cultivate his fields in return for his protection. But then the world changed.

In the industrial age all men were not needed to defend the borders or even to plow the fields. So what were they to do? Well, it turned out that there was plenty for them to do. They could work in mines and factories. They could work in offices clerking and managing. They could range the world trading and transporting goods and services. They could work out their aggressiveness in the new concept of sports. Women started out doing nearly all the work of child-bearing, -raising, and food preparation, but as time went by children could be dumped off in government schools, and food preparation became absorbed into the exchange economy so that food could be bought rather than laboriously processed and preserved at home. And women started to emerge from 24-7 work at home into the public sphere where they joined men in factory and office. But then the world changed.

In the new age that is aborning, we are told, we humans will not have to do the routine work of resource extraction and processing, and the routing clerking and supervising as of old. So what shall we do; where shall we go?

We don't know. But here is what I think. We will still be social animals, still cooperating with each other in the basic activity of wiving and thriving. We will still be doing things for each other, probably under the price system, or rather the emergent phenomenon of price-driven production and exchange and service. The best way to wive and thrive will be to pay attention to the signals that the price system and other people are giving us. So what do we do? I think the best way is to come up with a list of Don'ts.

Don't think you can hide in a big government or big corporation. These big organizations, like armies down the ages, make promises to you that they will not keep. Because when the going gets tough, the government or the corporation will dump you to preserve itself. So you should live and work out in the open, where you receive the signals of the price system and are obliged to respond to them, right now. The longer you put it off, the deeper you will be in the hole when the big unit dumps you by the side of the road.

Don't listen to the left, on work, on sex, on marginalization, on exploitation, on anything. The lesson of the last 150 years is that the left promised the workers a Promised Land, and then left them in the lurch circa 1965. Then the left promised women and minorities a Promised Land, and I'd say that the results are in. In the west, women are less happy than they used to be, and minorities don't seem to feel any better than they did back in 1965, if you listen to the lefty activists. Don't follow the lefty Moses. He doesn't care about you, he only cares about his power.

Don't worship the god of creativity. Go ahead, be creative, serve your fellow man; find a woman to love and marry her; create children; give back to your community. But don't imagine yourself a s world-conquering creative genius. If you do, you are worshiping a false god, and you will sow tares and misery among the wheat.

You can see that my view of the future has almost nothing to do with government. This is not surprising. There is a reason for this. In the old days, life was always subordinate to the village Big Man or the local lord of the land, or the absolute monarch and his courtiers. But the last two hundred years has seen an astonishing transformation. Now we are all subject to the prompting of the price system, and we have a choice: believe in the local lord, who is not interested in you, but in his power. Or believe in the price system, and do what it prompts.

The point is that the price system is a much better lord than the local political boss. For one thing, it doesn't lie to you. It tells you exactly where you stand, all the time.

Of course, that is why people try to escape from the price system into the neo-feudalism of government or the corporation. They don't want to deal with the truth; they want to live a fantasy.

But you and I are not like that. No Sirree.

Why in the World Would the Russians Want to Back the Fracking Party in 2016?

Obviously the whole Russian Collusion thing is a cover job to hide the fact that the Obama administration was bending the rules for snooping on electronic eavesdropping. As in breaking the law.

Their cunning plan was that the rules allow the Deep State to surveil US persons if they are in a conversation with a foreigner. Thus the Obama administration found an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign.

I'd say that people should be going to jail for that, but what do I know.

The thing that doesn't pass the smell test is the idea that the Russians would want to tip the election to Trump and the Republicans, also known as the Fracking Party.

Here's a little factoid. In 2013 Russia's GDP was $2.2 trillion. In 2016 it was $1.3 trillion.

I asked a convenient young head full of mush what he thought might be going on.

"Sanctions," he asked?

"How about fracking," I replied.

Yes, our brave and noble frackers, chaps like Harold Hamm, have brought the price of oil down from $100 per barrel in 2014 to $50 per barrel in 2017.

If you are a oil producer like Russia, with very little economy other than resource extraction, the fracking revolution has hit you in the solar plexus, taking your GDP down by over 40 percent.

Frame of reference: in the Great Depression the US GDP went from $104 billion in 1929 to $59 billion in 1933. About the same. But it made Republicans into eevil exploiters for half a century, because the Great Depression happened on their watch.

And of course, in oil-state Venezuela, the economy is totally ruined thanks to bus driver Maduro at the controls.

Next question.

Why in the world would Putin and the boys have any interest in interfering in the US election to help Donald Trump win? The one thing that Putin wants is to stop fracking and stop the disastrous collapse in oil prices on his watch. The obvious thing for Putin and the boys to do would be to back Hillary and the Democrats and pour money into green foundations that are shilling for the ruinous renewable energy and high energy price policies of the international left. Because global warming and the frying of the planet! In fact, the Russians do back green NGOs that advocate against fracking.

Fracking, of course, is short-hand for the technology used in the oil and gas world for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that makes it possible to exploit narrow, tight oil and gas bearing formations that would be uneconomical to exploit using "conventional" drilling techniques.

The fracking revolution, in case you missed it, has increased US oil production from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to 9 million barrels per day in 2017. Natural gas has gone from 20 million Mcf to 25 million Mcf. Today, the US is in the middle of converting from an oil and gas importer to an oil and gas exporter.

Remember when Candidate Obama said in 2008 that energy prices would necessarily "skyrocket." Rule One to understand politics: they are idiots.

Back to  the Russian Collusion story. Who in the world  would think that Putin and the boys would back the party whose vice-presidential candidate in 2008 deplorably said, "drill, baby, drill."

I'll tell you.  Someone that thinks that Russian GDP has declined by 40 percent due to sanctions. And there must be millions of people like that.

But here is another factoid. Per-capita GDP in Russia in 2016 is $8,700, just a little ahead of China. US per-capita GDP? $57,500.

OK, So US per-capita GDP is merely 6.6 times the Russian per-capita GDP.  Hey, socialism will do that to you. Now you can see why there are so many Russians in the US.

By the way. Some wag once said that in oil states the people are a cost. You could run the whole country without the people, because all you need is an ATM at the oil export terminal to make sure that the ruling class gets the cream. But in a conventional post-industrial country, the people are a resource. It is their innovations and their production and their work that fills the coffers of the ruling class.

OK. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

A Visit to the Museum of the American Revolution

Yesterday, on our way home from burying Marjorie's mother next to her husband and her son, we visited the new Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

First of all, you will be glad to know that the interior is done in a neo-18th century style that looks and feels appropriately staid and grand.

Secondly, the visitors there were overwhelmingly ciswhiteheteropatriarchal. All except the staff, who included a nice young Muslim in a hijab in the cafe. Imagine!

Third, the ritual bows to women, slaves, and native Americans were not too offensive.

But here are my real takeaways.

It seems to me that a serious revolution must start with a a bunch of rowdies that are all stirred up about nothing at all. Today there is a piece by Michael Barone about the Detroit riot of 50 years ago. It all started when the police arrested a bunch of blacks at an illegal "blind pig" bar. Imagine!

It also seems to me that you need a bunch of talented propagandists and phrasemakers, your Thomas Paines and whatnot. That is in addition to a real intellectual movement, the one that Jefferson & Co. belonged to. A revolution needs constant agitation and it sure helps if the propaganda is top-line material based on valuable thought about society and not stupid superficial stuff like today's intersectional left.

Now we get to the military side of things. There is an excellent video wall display in the middle of the museum; it's a map of the North Atlantic that shows the key events of each year from 1775 to the Treaty of Paris in 1783. It seems to me that the key events were the failure of the Brits to end the rebellion in 1776 when they sent a 500 ship invasion force (yay National Debt!) to New York. Second, was the contribution of the rebel ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, who got the French in on our side. Third was the Brits' attempt to push inland from Charleston, SC into the interior where they ran into trouble with frontiersmen skirmishers. Fourth was the Battle of Yorktown, which was won, I heard recently, by a crack team of rebel malarial mosquitoes that laid the British forces low. Fourth was the entry of Spain into the war.

The point is that when the Brits found that the French and the Spanish were against them, things started to look a bit dicey. Better let the rebels go and hold onto the rest of the British Empire.

Anyway, the whole thing turned out fine as the Brits and the Germans did for the French 30 years later at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and what I call the Second Hundred Years War.

The whole experience at the Museum made me think seriously about what we deplorables really want. We don't like the liberal hegemony, that's for sure. But the question is, what are we prepared to do about it, and do we have the chops, from alt-right crazies to deep political thinkers to a corps of activists that can take the battle to the liberals? And what about allies?

Of course, the other possibility is for the liberals to run out of other peoples' money. That certainly would put the US in a pre-revolutionary situation. I dare say that the US armed forces and police departments would not be as favorably disposed towards the liberals as the armed forces of, say, Venezuela.

But the bottom line is this: do we deplorables have the cojones to challenge our liberal slave-masters?

Is AI the Final Frontier for Human "Jobs"?

Ever since the industrial revolution everybody has been terrified about the End of the Job. And sometimes the terror extended to violence, as in the textile machine wreckers inspired by Ned Ludd.

And of course there was real hardship; there must be in any change, because change means that some people's plans and assumptions about the world will be dashed to pieces, and others will be pleasantly surprised.

Back before the industrial revolution something like 90 percent of people were working on farms. In the US the number is now something like 3 percent. That transition did not unwind in a small, X percent per year, fashion. It never does. It occurred in horrific farm crises, like the crisis in the late 19th century that spawned rural populism on the Great Plains. And of course there was the Dust Bowl that sent millions of farmers to California. Then there is Zola's La Terre all about  the French peasant getting zeroed out by grain from the Great Plains.

Today, everyone is talking about the AI and the robots that will take the jobs of retail workers and truck drivers. And so on. As in "The Mother of All Disruptions" by Kay S. Hymowitz.

Jobs are disappearing or will disappear not just in retail, but in legal services, oh yes, and journalism. And some people are worried about the US going Japan and giving up on sex and babies.

But I think it is best to admit that we just have no clue what is coming, and just get on with it. Let us stop worrying about just which jobs will disappear and why, and develop a culture that accepts change and flexibility in employment.

For instance, at the Hampton Inn in Willow Grove here in the NE Philly suburbs the free breakfast, what I call the bunfight, is run by a kindly black woman. This morning she was sitting at a computer in the lobby ordering food for tomorrow. She seems to have another, health-care related job.

Isn't that some kind of a clue? Here's a woman doing a wait-staff job and a supervisor job and an order-clerk job, and she is computer literate and she has another job where she cares for people in a health care facility.

In a large sense, we are just in another "de-skilling" era. When people were carpenters and skilled artisans and cooks they spent years developing manual skills. In the old days scribes spent years developing handwriting skills. But then came the machine and the printing press, and advanced manual skills were not longer required. The same is also true in many technology fields. Used to be that an engineer had to develop math skills and knowledge to do "calcs," computing stresses and beam sizes. No longer, I suspect, because all the calculating and the sizing gets done on finite-element analysis programs.

The best understanding of work, in my view, comes from longshoreman Eric Hoffer. As I wrote in "A Critique of Social Mechanice," for Hoffer the industrial revolution was an incomplete revolution, so

man had to use his fellow men as a stopgap for inventiveness. He had to yoke men, women and children with iron and steam... There was no escape for the mass of people from the ravenous maws of factories and mines.

Coal miners did not get released from the yoke until strip-mining with drag-line excavators started in the 1950s. But Hoffer is optimistic about the future. It is true, he writes, that factories used to be “agencies of dehumanization.”

But we of the present know that communion with machines does not blunt our sensibilities or stifle our individuality. We know that machines can be as temperamental and willful as any living thing. The proficient mechanic is an alert and intuitive human being. On the waterfront one can see how the ability to make a fork lift or a winch do one’s bidding with precision and finesse generates a peculiar exhilaration, so that the skilled lift driver and winch driver are as a rule of good cheer, and work as if at play.

Could that be the future? That work becomes more like play as we all learn how to operate the automation so that the hard work and the strength and the manual dexterity is done by machines and we humans get on with the social cooperation, rather than doing the grunt work?

Who knows. Nobody knows.

But I would argue that the most important thing is for people to be flexible and adjust themselves to the demands of the market.

Because resistance to the market only makes things worse.

The Paradox That Progressives are the Real Reactionaries

I don't pretend to know the real meaning of Hegel's dialectic. In fact I suspect that the dear chap gets himself lost in its contradictions and oppositions.

But I do believe that the Arrow of History concept, as in Progress, is wrong. Life, the universe, and everything is much more complicated than that.

It is in this sense that I believe that a "thesis" calls forth its "antithesis" and the resultant mess congeals, eventually, into a new "synthesis."

Or, simply put, life is messy.

For instance, it is a wonder to me that the opposition to "advanced capitalism" and its unprecedented Great Enrichment that has increased the income of ordinary people by 3,000 percent in two centuries, wants to build a world of total administrative domination.

See, the way I look at it, the whole point of the economic growth of the last 200 years is that, against all odds, the political powers-that-be were unable to stop the successive waves of innovation, starting with textiles on through the latest turn of the internet.

The characteristic of the old world, before capitalism, was its hierarchical structure. Feudalism was a system of domination and subordination, from the king and his direct vassals down to the meanest serf on a lord's estate.

Then came the 19th century with ordinary people running all over the world without permission. It was in the middle of the 19th century that rich kids invented socialism proposing to reestablish the old regime of top-down control. Only the socialists called it the new regime, in fact the absence of all regimes.

Then we got the astonishing paradox that the socialism that was to liberate the masses from the horrors of capitalism enslaved them with the most murderous and disastrous political regimes in all history.

We had the paradox that just as the intellectual elite of Europe started a movement against slavery the industrial revolution appeared and enslaved the masses in regimented factories.

Or, right now, we have the paradox that the modern left, that insists on the right of protest, ruthlessly suppresses and all speech that challenges its hegemonic narrative. It calls itself the Resistance, but don't you dare resist it.

All this is why I am not particularly distressed that the Republican Senate cannot summon the gumption to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Why I am not that exercised by lefty judges on the DC Court of Appeals arrogating to themselves the right to reverse an administrative decision of the Trump EPA. I am not even that exercised about immigration.

That's because I believe that despite the best hopes of today's political movers and shakers the future will not be what they imagine. And the reason is that they are idiots.

I was taking an acquaintance to the airport yesterday and she complained about the folly of wars. I replied that, up until yesterday, humans had to defend their land to the death because that land grew the food that gave them life. It is only today that land doesn't matter, because you can buy and sell food rather than grow it. So they don't need to defend their patch of land to the death. But it takes time for people to adjust to the new reality. Meanwhile they will react to all setbacks with wars and rumors of wars and by trying to return to the old ways that "worked"

There will be people telling us they are leading us to the future by returning to the failed politics of the past.

I guess my point is that everything in life is trial-and-error and cleaning up after one mistake after another. Whatever your grand and glorious plans, they will be pulverized by reality, as in the elder Moltke's dictum that "no campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy."

To me, the basic fact of today is that the great and glorious top-down administrative state is creaking and groaning in every joint.

And it is going to get worse before it gets better.

What is Trump's Obamacare Strategy?

If you have merely dabbled in strategic thought you will know that one of the key precepts is "do not underestimate your enemy."

This is obviously a challenge for the leaders in any fight, because one way to keep up the morale of your side is to characterize the other side as contemptible worms.

This problem even exists in religion where Satan is represented both as the Prince of Darkness and also as bound to fail because Good Will Prevail in the end. So which is it?

Our liberal friends have a similar problem when it comes to Republican Presidents. Are they idiots or are they evil?  Generally speaking, liberals decided Eisenhower was an idiot; Nixon was evil; Reagan was an amiable dunce; Bush was a idiot; and Trump is an idiot with a combover.

In my view, Trump is not an idiot; he only plays one on TV.

So what about President Trump and Obamacare? We know that Trump signed onto the notion of "repeal and replace" in the campaign. But it seems to me that he has shown a remarkable light touch on Obamacare thus far.

Is that because the president is an idiot, or because he has been waiting for the Congressional Republicans to fail, because only then would he have an opportunity to lead?

I suppose the answer is: we shall see.

At any rate, the president's reaction to the failure of the Republican Obamacare replacement in the Senate seems to tell us something. Tweeted he:

As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!

I think that Donald Trump's Art-of-the-Deal approach to politics is rather unfamiliar to university-trained students of politics. This is because politicians usually try to present themselves as demi-gods, that never have a doubt, and never make a mistake. Thus the original Obamacare was presented to us as a triumphal progress, rather than a savage battle for votes in Congress and a battle of the special interests from Big Health to Big Drug to Big Insurance. But Trump doesn't seem to worry about his moment-to-moment image. He seems to be able to deal with setbacks and tactical retreats.

Will this work with Obamacare? We don't know. But we do know that, as of now, Democrats don't seem to be too worried about the ongoing trainwreck of Obamacare with insurers exiting for state markets all over the place. There have been zero Democratic votes for the Republican plans thus far.

I´d say that until the Democrats decide, all of a sudden, that the world is coming to an end and that We Need Action on Obamacare NOW, that it is useless for Republicans to propose reforms and replacements.

When the Democrats are ready to cry Uncle and demand that President Trump take action NOW, then it will be the moment to ask them: how much am I bid?

Because, you see, it's the science. There's the science of strategy, and the science of the economy, and The Calculus of Consent.  Our liberal friends are in denial about all of them, and they won't change their minds until their political building is burning down.

What's All This About Treason?

Remember back in the day when liberals were really touchy about patriotism? Hillary Clinton spoke for all liberals back in the Bush administration when she said:

I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.

Yes indeed. Then came the Obama administration. Fortunately, the Obamis and their willing accomplices in the media did not question the patriotism of regime opponents. They just called them racists if they opposed the president.

So on the one hand you are not allowed to criticize Democrats for opposing a Republican administration, because, hey, we're Americans and we got rights. But you are not allowed to criticize a Democratic administration because racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Or any other  pejorative that the intersectional SJWs at Activism Central might come up with.

Back in the Cold War it was insupportable to dare to mention the "T" word. Oh No! That was McCarthyism! How dare anyone accuse Alger Hiss of Treason and  spying for the Commies. And how dare anyone say a word against the noble and innocent Rosenbergs, condemned to death and executed -- for what? McCarthyism, straight up.

But now, pore little Donald Trump Jr. has a meeting with a curious Russian character, you know, the lady that was given a special waiver to enter the US without a visa by the Obama Justice Department, and Democrats start talking about Treason!

I  am just starting a book by überlefty Jürgen Habermas about Theory and Praxis and how the purely theoretical approach of the ancient philosophers and the Natural Law chappies had to be replaced by a critical theory that combined both theory and practice in an environment of proper communications where ordinary people are included in the conversation.

But today, we have a "depoliticized public" that is not involved in "a general discursive formation of the public will". Only the left-wing media and Democratic politicians and lefty NGOs are allowed to participate in the conversation. Everybody else is afraid to speak.

That is because liberals and progressives and Democrats and all their activist groups are yelling pejoratives from dawn to dusk; there is no chance for conversation.

When Habermas advances his theory of communicative action, recognizing, after Wittgenstein, that humans are fundamentally communicative folks that use language to interact and cooperate, he is assuming that lefty communication and theory and practice will replace the flawed bourgeois notions of "advanced capitalism."

That is assuming that Habermas is serious about serious non-hegemonic communications. I suspect though that he imagines that non-hegemonic communication is inherently critical and inherently leads to the deconstruction of "advanced capitalism" and its replacement by an egalitarian liberatory society where people are truly free rather that formally free.

Suppose he is wrong, and that open dialog  and conversation leads to a small government society without a starring role for a lefty educated class? What does the robin do then, poor thing?

What the robin does then, poor thing, is to start to shout and sing, and drown out any discouraging word, and starts to call ordinary elite Americans traitors.

The robin is telling us that the whole lefty project is in real trouble, from its theory of society to its practice of centralized administrative systems. And don't forget it was from Frankfurt School lefties that I got my meme of "System is Domination." It really is getting a little old that in a society where the ruling class is all over anyone that dares to challenge its left-wing assumptions that old-fashioned oppression and exploitation are still as bad as ever. Is it really true to say, as this Good Little Girl does:

I believe in liberation. I believe it is our duty to obliterate white supremacy, anti-blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism.

And obliterate it with what? Leftist supremacy, anti-whiteness, anything-but-hetero-archy, socialism, and lefist cultural imperialism?

The fact is that our lefty friends are in a trap. They have been implementing their cultural and political agenda in the name of liberation for the last century, and the truth is that lefty liberation doesn't liberate; its imprisons. They are no longer saying that their top-down centralized administrative dominatory systems are a wonder. So they are reduced to saying that if you touch a hair of Medicad [sic] then millions will die. They find themselves accusing their opponents of treason.

They are in the position of President Maduro of Venezuela that is desperately saying and doing anything to keep his socialist disaster from imploding.

We conservatives, we normals, are often intimidated by our liberal friends, who so confidently expound upon race and sex and equality. But when they are "resisting" the election results for the second time in sixteen years, and when they are starting to accuse people of treason in addition to the regular menu of racism, sexism, and homophobia, then we have to assume that something is going very wrong for them. Confident people, secure in their world view, do not have to accuse and blame. They accept electoral defeat with a wink, knowing that the next election, or the next but one will be "time for a change."

But if the times are out of joint, if the Inconceivable! has happened, if a rank beginner has routed the ruling class despite all its advantages and its patronage, then the ordinary timid peaceful protester and Progressive Activist, Second Class, starts to quiver. Something is going wrong; perhaps the racist sexist insurgents are at the gate.

McCarthyism flourished in the late 1940s after the Democrats had won five presidential elections in a row. Republicans started looking under the bed to figure out what was going on. They suspected treason and espionage and actually they were right. There were people on the left that had let their enthusiasm for a better world trump their loyalty to country. Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy; the Rosenbergs did steal atomic secrets. So maybe the Republicans of the era had an excuse for a bit of paranoia.

But Democrats got paranoid that George W. Bush won in a normal Time for a Change election after two terms of Bill Clinton. Now they are resisting after another Time for a Change election after two terms of Obama. You have to be a particularly dull kind of person not to understand that the political pendulum swings to and fro and this is a good thing that keeps the nation from civil war.

And if your partisans are screaming Treason when the son of the president meets with a foreign national, what is their problem? And what is your problem?