No, Political Power Does Not Effect Beneficial Change

I was looking for a quote to hang today's post on, and here it is, from William Voegeli. He is reviewing The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla:

[Lilla] wants the Democratic Party to abandon identity politics for the sake of its electoral viability. Effecting beneficial changes requires wielding power, he argues, and in democracies, securing power means winning elections.

The current liberal politics of "prayer meetings", "therapy sessions", and "seminars" are not the way to do it. And the problem is that once you open the can of identity politics sooner or later the whites are going to want in.

Thus Mark Lilla, who wants liberalism to return to a golden age before identity politics. No doubt, but the age of liberalism without identity politics was the age of Big Thinkers imagining a glorious future without having to deal with the grubby reality of getting elected by democratic majorities. Then came the birth of working-class identity politics in the mid-19th century, invented by the left. By the end of the 19th century practical politicians like the conservative Lord Salisbury understood that you did not get to the Happy Land of "wielding power" unless you had first bribed the voters right before the election. For someone to imagine that liberals can dispense with identity politics is a fantasy.

But that is not my point. My point is to point out another fantasy, that the whole notion of "effecting beneficial changes" with political power is a chimera.

Oh yes. There are some things you can do with political power. You can write laws to make it difficult for the politically powerful to use their power to fill their pockets with loot. You can write laws to make it easy for ordinary people without connections to get good jobs without hacking through a forest of credentialism and having to pile up a mountain of debt. You can make it illegal for government to discriminate on the basis of race or gender. And you can get serious about the notion that government exists to protect its people from enemies foreign and domestic rather than line the pockets of its supporters.

But beneficial changes? How do you know, pal? What makes you think that your beneficial changes are going to do anything more than put some money in the pockets of your supporters? And what about the people that think your so-called beneficial changes are going to make things worse? Got any settled science on that?

Let's look at the most consequential beneficial change effected in the modern era. It is, as I keep saying, the Great Enrichment that has brought us in 200 years from $1 a day per-capita income to $100 a day and very likely more.

Which politician did that? Which political party did that? Which Big Thinker did that? I am talking about the process of winning elections and then writing laws to effect beneficial change.

The answer is: none of the above. OK, there was a chappie back in 1688 in Britland that said: wow, with all this new manufacturing we could be ten times richer than we are. But I think it is ridiculous to suggest that anyone in Britland then or later actually went into office determined to effect beneficial change to make us ten times richer. Let us take the followers of the classical economists that rolled back the English Poor Laws right after the Great Reform Bill of 1832. They thought they were abolishing a great evil; their opponents ever since have regarded such economism as a monstrous evil.

When Britain repealed the Corn Laws in the 1840s, it was at least partly a street fight between the new cities that wanted "the cheap loaf" and the country gentry and peasantry that wanted a high price for grain. And when child labor was prohibited it was at least partly about adults wanting to remove the competition of low-wage children from the labor pool.

And what  about the glory of New Deal liberalism, with its Social Security and its Medicare? What happens when those beneficial changes run out of other people's money?

In other words, when it comes to politics, beneficial changes take a back seat to simple power plays, because that's all most people understand, and that's what drives most people's votes.

In fact, I would argue, most of the beneficial changes of the last 200 years happened by accident, and if the political players had known what was happening they would have strangled the changes in their cradles. That stands to reason, because the powerful tend to be people benefiting from the current correlation of economic forces. Any change is likely to demote the current ruling class ever so slightly from its current hegemony. And the whole point of a ruling class is to stop that sort of thing cold.

The left belongs to a tradition with a faith in the ability of politics to transform the world. Instead of creating a voluntary community of the like-minded and working on good and evil within that community and reaching out to others to persuade them in the truth of their vision, the left has another vision. Its way of transforming the world is to implement a vision of good and evil is through force, the force of government.

And the way you get to do that these days is that you bribe your favorite identities with identity politics, and then persuade yourself that you are "effecting beneficial changes" as you distribute the loot to your followers.

But where in this philosophy do you get to decide how much is enough? When you you decide that all your effecting beneficial changes have gone a bit too far? Is it when your entitlement boards of trustees report that in 20 years benefits will have to be cut? Or when your National Debt goes over 100 percent of GDP? Or when inflation starts picking up as the government has to print money to pay the benefits? Or does it take a vote of the people to cut their benefits?

One little thing you might like to take into consideration is that, on my superficial investigation of government spending, the only spending that ever gets cut is military spending. It's amazing. After the war, governments do tend to cut military spending. But health care spending? Education spending? Pensions spending?

Good luck on that pal. Nobody thinks that cutting their own richly deserved government benefits amounts to "effecting beneficial changes."

I can't imagine why.

The Folly of Exhuming the Graves of the Past

If you are sitting there wondering what all the fuss about Confederate statues is all about, then I have a simple answer for you.

It is all about virtue-signalling.

Or more exactly, it is all about calling out people that turned out to be on the wrong side of history.

And, of course, it is all about the fact that modern leftism is a secular religion, in which public deeds are judged as personal moral actions.

In other words, in lefty world, your political positions and acts are judged as though they were personal moral positions and acts.

And that, in my view, is utter stupidity, since politics is division and government is force, and therefore nobody involved in politics should cast the first stone.

This came out rather clearly to me in a book by a recovering French lefty, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times. He opens the book with a conversation he had with Nicholas Sarkozy, in the run-up to Sarkozy's successful campaign for the French presidency. Sarkozy was a friend, but Lévy couldn't vote for the center-right politician. Why not? Well, because of the four political events that define Lévy as a political person.

And what are those four events? Thank you for asking.

First, the Vichy regime. Should we "forget Vichy's crimes...?" Of course not.

Second, the Algerian War. That was the last colonial gasp of the West in the 1950s in which France put down an insurrection in its North African colony, and then walked away from the mess it created. Should we stop "beating our breasts" about this criminal brutality? Certainly not.

Third, May 1968, the student rebellion in Paris. Should we judge it a black hole "sucking up everything that was solid" in traditional and Gaullist France? Certainly not: it was a "happy moment: new freedoms, novel power for women to do what they wanted with their bodies... modernity."

Finally, The Dreyfus Affair in the early 20th century. That was about the Jewish army officer that was degraded and imprisoned for espionage. Dreyfus was almost certainly innocent. Was this about "Tradition, Authority, Nation" or a case of the reason of state losing its way?

Do you see what I see? I see a mindless attempt to separate the sheep from the goats. It wants to know: Do you have the right thoughts? Or are you a deplorable?

Just for contrast, here is what I think are the Big Issues for France over the last century.

One, the incompetent failure to manage the rise of Germany. France got into three wars with Germany, in 1870, in 1914, and in 1939 and lost them all. Well, it would have lost them all if it weren't for the good old USA. Now I would say that the big question is: what went wrong that France could be so stupid?

Two, the folly of France's corporatist, managerialist state and economy in which nobody can be fired, and that nobody can be hired, and France's farmers get to loot the rest of the country. It actually works OK for the top 25 percent with good college degrees. But anyone else better get a government job and hang on tight.

Three, the folly of Muslim immigration. The record on immigration in the US over the past century and a half is that, in the early stages, a new immigrant group barricades itself in an ethnic ghetto until its members acquire the skills and cultural knowledge to venture out into the wide world.  It was nip-and-tuck that the US managed to integrate the Irish, the Germans, the Italians into the Anglo-Saxon culture, and I think that World War II did it. But now the best and the brightest encourage immigrant groups in their instinctive separatism.

See, my idea is that the correct policy for the last 150 years would have been: first, encouragement of a moderate nationalism; second, education of the working class and immigrants to understand and accept the market economy and submission to the verdict of the market in prices and wages; and third, a moderation of immigration to make sure that assimilation is the only strategy that pays for immigrants.

And the left has been on the wrong side on all these issues.

Now I do not say that the moderate left is as bad as the leftist monsters -- the Lenins, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros -- that created a river of blood and a harvest of sorrow for at least 100 million humans in the 20th century. But I still think that the butcher's bill for moderate leftism will be horrendous.

But meanwhile we are busy exhuming the graves of the past instead of preparing sensibly for the life of the future.

President Trump Makes it Double Clear on Race

If you hadn't got the message from President Trump's first response to Charlottesville, or the second, or the third, the president made it official last night at a rally in Phoenix. The mainstream media take is that he "ranted and raged."

Trump told us don't hold with no liberal demonization and race-ification on race. He thinks we should all love each other as Americans. Whoever we are, wherever we are from. Just to be sure, he quoted liberally from his previous remarks, just so we all get the point that, on Charlottesville, the fake media has been doing all it can to find fault with him.

Of course it has.

It is becoming clear that President Trump did something strategic with his response to Charlottesville. It is almost as though he had been waiting for an opportunity to change the national rules on race.

The president's line is that both sides in Charlottesville were thugs and that we are Americans, we should love each other, and we should not give into the haters on each side.

You would think this is a narrative that all Americans could rally around, but you would be wrong. If you were listening to NPR this morning, as I did in Uber on the way to the airport, you would be listening to the morning Activism Report with the usual stuff about the eevils of Monsanto and PCPs. And you would also hear about Black Lives activists as though they were the most moderate folks in the world.

Of course, according to NPR, every left-wing extremist is the most moderate person in the world, just doing their activism as every other liberal in the land. And everyone right of center is dabbling with right-wing extremism, maybe even Fascism!

President Trump has basically declared war on that ideological line. No wonder the mainstream media is pissed off.

And really, it only makes sense. The whole point of the Trump candidacy and presidency, as I keep saying, is that ordinary middle-class whites and working-class whites have been the liberal whipping-boys for the last 40 years, and that is monstrous and unjust. On the other hand liberal whites are special, on the liberal view, because they are activists. So they are not included among the Deplorables, that we all deplore as racists, sexists, and homophobes and eevil enablers of Monsanto.

Of course, Trump is taking a risk here. The safe thing to do for Republican and conservative notables for the last 50 years, ever since the Democrats switched from white racism to black racism, is to cringe before the liberal accusation of racism and avoid getting stamped with the scarlet letter R.

Yes, it's comical how everything old is new again. Back in the day, we were all taught by our college teachers what an innocent victim Hester Prynne was, when all she did was fall in love. But now, the women in the liberal village are busily plastering other people with scarlet letters. Who could have predicted it?

Of course, liberals are bound to fight to the death on the race and fascism issue. It is their nuclear weapon, the very foundation of their ideological firepower. Without the ability to demonize ordinary Americans as racists and fascists and drive them out of the public square liberal power would deflate to nothing, If that happens liberals would have to persuade rather than demonize. And that would be too hard.

So I'm right behind President Trump as he battles to change the rules on race. As I wrote a few days ago, there are laws against discrimination of the basis of race. So I'd say that if there is a problem on race it must be because the enforcement bureaucracies are asleep on the job.

And the point is that the passage of anti-discrimination laws misses the point. The big deal about Jim Crow was that government actually passed laws mandating discrimination by race. The problem in the South was that eevil businessmen were too inclined to treat people as people, not as members of races. So there had to be a law to stop them from mixing up the races in the pursuit of profit.

If, today, the average employer is disinclined to hire young black men in baggy pants, so that their wage rate falls below that of young black men and others that do not dress like gang members, then a market opportunity arises for employers to hire such young men at a lower wage, and maybe make big profits. Maybe.

And the dirty little secret is that employers are more interested in profits than in race. That's why the South had to pass those Jim Crow laws.

So I'm all in favor of President Trump's policy of a pox on both their houses. I imagine that he is banking on some poll data that shows the average American is sick to death of watching rich-kid liberals doing their activism thing and getting fawning coverage from the mainstream media.

And here is my big prediction. I think that all the Trumpian emphasis on love and everyone coming together as Americans is going to play particularly well among women. Women really don't like young men marching and rioting in the streets. It makes them feel unsafe.

I can't imagine why.

Is This the Sixties All Over Again?

When I was a lad, I came to the United States in 1968 and of course I was a Democrat. I went to a Humphrey rally in Seattle at the old Arena in the Seattle Center.

But Nixon won.

Then, four years later I remember watching PBS as they lovingly attended George McGovern at his family's summer place right before the Democratic National Convention.

Then Nixon won 60-40.

I started to think that maybe there was something here that I didn't understand.

By 1976 I was a US citizen and I voted for President Ford.

In 1980 I attended a Republican presidential caucus out in the suburbs leaning to Bush, and was startled by the Reagan contingent, of men that looked like they were technicians of some kind.

So really, nothing has changed. We still have rich kids going to college and getting radicalized by their lefty professors, and rioting in the streets. And we still have the white working class and the ordinary middle class who want nothing to do with rich kids playing at revolution in the street.

I am talking about Black Lives Matter and Antifa. These groups are not the desperate cry of the downtrodden masses, but rich kids playing politics with other peoples' lives, as rich kids have always done down the ages, whether Harry Percy mixing it up with Prince Hal or Karl Marx issuing a fatwa against capitalism.

The question is: will the Left walk off a cliff like it did in the Sixties and Seventies? Or will it be different this time?

The answer of course is that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Let us look at it this way. Leftism is the religion of the educated classes in the West. The Sixties was an eruption of left-wing secular-religious enthusiasm that was not shared by the average American. It took two Nixon presidential wins, and two Reagan wins and one Bush win before the Democrats realized that they had to tack back to the middle, with the most talented politician of his generation, Bill Clinton.

Looking back it is pretty obvious that, once Bill Clinton was elected, the educated class started moving back left. Because it's their religion. The left demonized George W. Bush just like they demonized Richard Nixon.

Then came Barack Obama, sold as a bright young moderate African American, although we now know that we was pretty far left. I dare say that if Obama hadn't been African American his leftist policies would have led to defeat in 2012. But to oppose Obama meant that you were a racist, and so Obama won reelection, but with less of a majority that in 2008.

So now we have a Republican president reviled by the left, again, and one that the left is openly proposing to impeach, again.

So, if history rhymes, we should expect that it will take five or six presidential elections before the Democrats get the message, again.

Here's what I think. I think that the reality of modern democratic politics is bribing the electorate. Arch-conservative Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain in the late 19th century knew this, and was happy to pass a free-education bill right before an election to garner working-class votes.

But I think that the ruling class wrinkles its nose at this unpleasant smell. It would rather inhale the sweet smell of noble intent: to rescue women and minorities from exploitation; to save the planet from climate change. It would rather not think of the reality of its entitlement politics.

But really governing is just the shabby deal of bribing the electorate with their own money, and giving the scions of the ruling class cool jobs in the State Department or the EPA.

And the average voter just wants a quiet life unperturbed by wars and financial crashes.

You can see that there is a profound gulf between the agenda of the ruling class and the ordinary voter. The ruling class wants to strut and fret its hour upon the stage; the voter just wants a quiet life improved by some free stuff from the government.

Who will win out this time? Nobody knows.

Teaching Young Men NOT to Fight

The big problem of the human race, ever since the dawn of agriculture, is giving young men something else to do.

You see, in the hunter-gatherer age every young man was enrolled in the Border Patrol. When he wasn't patrolling the border he was probably making and repairing weapons.

But then came the agricultural age and a lot fewer young men were needed to patrol the border, which was now assigned to border specialists, called "marcher lords," that retained the necessary fierceness required for survival in borderlands.

But what about the rest of the men? What would they do, now that their services were only occasionally needed for warfare? The answer was simple. They would be needed for plowing. It turned out that women, who were perfectly good at most agricultural tasks, suffered miscarriages if they attempted the heavy work of plowing. And so, indeed, throughout the agricultural age, men found new roles doing the heavy and dangerous work. What a relief.

But then came the industrial age and much bigger political units, featuring the nation state. Now even fewer men were needed to be soldiers, and very few were needed for the backbreaking labor on the farm. For a while, at least, men were used in the backbreaking work of mining and work in iron smelters and steelworks. But then came the day when machines started taking over most of the heavy work from men. Now what? Perfectly simple. Men would now sit staring at computers all day building computer models rather than actual buildings and models.

But the truth is that all along, what young men really like to do is get out in the street and break a few heads, and there are always older men encouraging them in this reversion to instinct.

Here's another problem. For the last two hundred years, in the Great Enrichment, a new idea has sprung upon the world. It is that people should negotiate their differences through the price system instead of by war or by government force. But almost immediately a reactionary movement arose, that we call the Left. It argued that the peace of the price system was a sham. In fact, the left argued, revolutionary force would be needed to abolish the price system and its exploitations so that people could live in perfect harmony without the malevolent influence of prices.

No doubt. Except that the Southern racists found it necessary to write segregation laws to prevent businessmen from treating people like people on buses, and in the job market.

And where there is discrimination in the workplace, is there not an opportunity for a canny entrepreneur? Suppose that an evil software company refused to hire women software engineers? Would it not pay an entrepreneur to hire women, and pay them less because of the market marginalization of women, and make bigger profits than the companies that only hired men software engineers? Or is something else at work?

The truth is that none of us really like the results of the price system. And so we get government to rectify the situation, by force. And another truth is that men are natural warriors and rather like being called to the colors and having a nice big dust-up. The price system makes it very difficult to have regular, satisfying dust-ups.

No doubt that is why the left keeps erupting every generation onto the streets. That male fighting instinct keeps erupting in another cohort of human males. Right now we have Black Lives Matter that enacts not very peaceful protests because it doesn't like the way that the police harass young black men on the street. And we have Antifa that believes that violence is the only response to hate speech. Of course they do. There are always young men coming up that can rationalize their natural instinct for war. Only these days they say that they are fighting for peace and justice.

And there will always be new grievances. That's because the price system doesn't care. If employers are mildly prejudiced against young black men in baggy pants, then the wages for young black men in baggy pants will be a bit lower than for white young men that look like they will follow instructions. It ain't fair, but it isn't the end of the world. Then there are the little old ladies that insist on hiring only female certified nurse's assistants to look after them. What about the perfectly nice male CNAs? Distcrimination!

But after all the Sturm und Drang, there is still the problem of what to do with young men and their natural instinct to march towards the sound of the guns.

That is the basic problem of civilization: how to tame the young men from fighting and turn them to working, from military victory to market share victory.

And when our liberal ruling class turns a blind eye to the violence of left-wing activist groups that are trying to subvert the price system, or blow up minor cases of discrimination into major political conflagrations, they are turning the clock back to a more violent world.

Even as they pat each other on the back for their devotion to justice and compassion.

Trump is Doing What He Was Elected To Do

In all the left-generated outrage about Charlottesville, let us not take our eyes off the ball.

Donald Trump was nominated to be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party because he did what national Republicans had been afraid to do. He took out after the politically correct, and said things you are not allowed to say on race and sex. For that even Ted Cruz, who was running as the bad boy of the Republican Party, attacked him.

Then Nominee Trump ran against the Hillary Clinton, who represents everything about the corrupt status-quo, and beat her by running up majorities in states that the Democrats assumed were safe for them, attracting votes from the nominally Democrat white working class and other deplorables.

Given how he ran for president, his response to Charlottesville was right down the middle, blaming both sides and saying that there are good people on both sides.

One thing he did not say: even Trump dared not say it. White nationalist and neo-Nazi and KKK groups are a minor problem, because they have no support from the intellectual elite. But a racist group like Black Lives Matter is a problem, because it gets fawning coverage from the mainstream media and the intellectual elite, not to mention funding from the like of George Soros's foundations. But you will notice that the president did not call out Black Lives Matter by name.

And then there is Antifa. You will note that our liberal friends used to write about "peaceful protesters." Then when activists started attacking Trump supporters they began to write about "mostly peaceful protesters." Now they write about violence on both sides. However, do not doubt that white supremacists and KKK and neo-Nazis are the worst things in the world.

It would be funny, if it weren't so sad. Liberals condemn loser white racism yet actually encourage black racism led by rich-kid blacks. And the rank-and-file liberals go along and nod their heads to the utter incoherence of the political catch-phrases that are ladled out by their leaders and thinkers.

Look, I get it. Politics is Division. The stock-in-trade of political activists is to find issues with which to divide people, because that is how you get votes and get elected. Wealth is a hardy perennial. Class had its day for about a century. Race is as good as anything. Hey, you can even exploit the eternal battle of the sexes. Nobody ever went wrong by attacking greedy bankers and oily moneylenders. And you can get a lot of mileage out of the charge of treason and collusion with the Russians.

The whole idea of social animals is that we do not use force against the people in our community. Thus politics is always a threat against the peace within the community as we enact threats and accusations against the Other in our community during the sham fight of an election or a "peaceful protest."

The big problem in our age is not the resentful remains of the Confederate South, or the yahoos that have learned that the way to get attention is to wave swastikas around. The big problem is the reactionary movement of the left that believes race and gender politics, dividing the races and sexes, is the way to bring on a paradise on earth. Hey, I thought that the whole idea of the nation was to get beyond tribalism.

And this after 200 years of the Great Enrichment, in which the culture of surrender to the will of the market and its upstart innovators rather than to feudal barons and ideological buccaneers has increased per-capita income by 3,000 percent for everyone.

Like I say. The great achievement of civilization is to wean young men away from their instinctive love  of threat displays and border warfare and channel their energy into plowing, and latterly into work for wages and the titanic battle for market share.

But when young thugs are battling in the streets for bragging rights about Confederate monuments then something is going wrong.

Yes, So Who Will Win in the Battle of Identity vs. Nation

So this week I read that Fox couldn't get Republicans to come on TV and support President Trump on Charlottesville. But I also read that Steve Bannon told a lefty journalist:

The Democrats … the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.

Meanwhile the Z-Man analyzes the globalists and their notion that when the migrants have migrated all over the world (i.e., into the West) that a global government would be staffed by the same folks that staff the UN: the "rich brats of the world’s political elite."

There also seems to be a suggestion out there that the left's attack on Confederate, and now Founders monuments, is part of some cunning plan from deep down in the liberal-Democratic nexus. The idea is that blacks believed that the Obama presidency would unload tons of loot on them, and it didn't happen. So now they are hopping mad and the Dems need to channel their rage into something.

Or it might lead blacks to give up on politics and start dying of despair, like the last lot that were betrayed by the progressive elite: the white working class.

But it does raise the question of which is better at winning the hearts and minds of the people: identity politics or nationalism?

Let the world note that the three great evil geniuses of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all found the need to combine their millennial socialism with nationalism. For Hitler, it was National Socialism; for Stalin it was Socialism in one Country. And Mao stood at the Gate of the Forbidden City and apparently did not tell the Han people that "the Chinese People have stood up."

But these were practical men, who would do anything to seize power and then keep it. The theoreticians of the left have always been opposed to the nation state, believing in a single paradise on Earth without boundaries and nations. And so they have always been working on undermining the notion and the fact of the nation by organizing people into sub-national groups: class, race, gender; or supranational groups like the UN and the EU.

On both cases, note that the same people will get to be the rulers.

My idea is that this war on the nation is the most foolish thing in the world, and I like to say that the world-be global ruling class took exactly the wrong lesson from all the nationalism and the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s.

My point is that, despite the stupid World War I, the inflations of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the suffering peoples of the west were successfully rallied to support and fight for their nations. The German workers, perhaps the most radicalized of any by the socialist wave, all rallied to Germany and fought for the Fatherland, twice. The British working class that had gone on a General Strike in the 1920s nevertheless rallied to Britain in World War II. In the US all  the divisions of the 1930s were healed and everyone rallied to fight for victory over the Nazis and the Japs. I have a 12-CD set of World War II songs put out by Tin Pan Alley, all singing the praises of the war.

Yet after World War II the global elite decided "never again." The people cannot be trusted not to be fascists, they decided, so we must step in and neutralize the fascist bug.

Actually, what the first half of the century proved was that, no matter how badly they were governed, and how badly the ruling class screwed up, the people could still be rallied and unified to support and fight for their nations.

It is clear from President Trump's actions, and from the words of Steve Bannon, that the president is trying to rally the people once again to the notion of nation. And that the rest of the ruling class is opposed to the idea.

Are Trump and Bannon right? Or is the rest of the ruling class? I don't know. All I know is that "nation" is a very powerful idea.

Maybe it is too powerful for some people, and that is why they want to knock it down.