Could We Stop This Game of Removing Presidents?

In my political lifetime I have seen four efforts to remove a President of the United States from office: for Nixon it was Watergate; for Reagan it was Iran-Contra; for Clinton it was Monicagate; and now for Trump it is Russiagate. Note that each effort has involved Special Prosecutors.

I think it is about time we stopped this dangerous game, because sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt.

The fact is that Democrats were mortally offended when Richard Nixon was elected president. They had all convinced themselves that he was an evil Commie witch-hunter (my first liberal boss had a Nixon three-dollar-bill coffee mug) that had been sent to proper oblivion in the stolen election of 1960 (yeah, stolen for Kennedy by the Democratic Chicago machine: you could look it up).

If anything, Reagan was worse. Democrats persuaded themselves that Nixon was evil. But Reagan was an "amiable dunce," per Clark Clifford. How could a man like that be elected president? So they made hay with Iran-Contra, the diversion of funds by chaps like Col. North using money from selling weapons to Iran to fund the Central American anti-communist contras that Congress wouldn't fund.

Then the Republicans got back on the Dems by impeaching Clinton over lies he made in connection with young White House intern and daughter of a donor Monica Lewinsky. Only they couldn't convict him in the Senate: it takes a two-thirds majority to remove a president in the United States Senate. This effort rebounded on the Republicans as the Democrats won a few seats in the 1998 mid-terms, almost unheard of for a midterm election in the second term of a president.

Now we have the Democrats running their third removal effort in the last 50 years, against Trump on the strength of the Steele Dossier that was opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign.

I will tell you what is going on here. It is all about the end of the Democratic dominance from 1933 to 1968, and the refusal of liberals to understand that the world has changed. Liberals think that they have been ordained by some secular god to bend the arc of history towards justice using government programs and political power and activism. For 50 years it seemed that they were right, doing wonderful things like pro-union laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights. Then, the day after all this was complete the American people turned away from the liberal project and elected Richard Nixon in 1968. The liberal world has never been the same since, and liberals can't understand why all those deplorables fail to agree that liberal governance has been the best thing since sliced bread.

OK, if you are a liberal then the world looks like the result of your wonderful wisdom. Imagine an America without pro-union legislation! Well, I can, and we maybe would not have lost all the jobs in union-dominated steel and auto if unions hadn't gotten special privileges. Imagine a world without Social Security! Well, I can, and the result would probably be that many more Americans would be saving with Fidelity and Vanguard and dying with a nice little nest egg for their children. Imagine a world without Civil Rights! Well, at least we wouldn't have the vile race and gender politics of Affirmative Action followed by Diversity and Inclusion.

In fact, a survey has shown that ordinary Americans really don't hate rich people much these days. But they really have a problem with the educated snobs in the administrative state that regulate them and order them around. Thus Donald Trump.

Now I have a proposal to my liberal friends. And that is: Give It Up. Your golden age is past. These days we are dealing with the unintended consequences of your wonderful ideas: with government spending that is all mewed up paying pensions to old people while young people get into ruinous student debt; with vile race politics encouraging the kind of tribalism that the nation state was designed to marginalize; with top-down administrative government that is bound to fail because Mises: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and because Hayek: that no bureaucrat from Washington DC can outperform a million producers and consumers interacting through the price system. Also, of course, liberals have gravitated from enacting policy by legislation to administrative regulation by the bureaucracy. It is just too hard to pass beneficial legislation these days.

I encapsulate all this in my catchphrases: government is force, politics is division, system is domination. In the best society you want as little of these three wonders as possible.

It is telling that liberals in the last decades have been hard at work on a cultural project to deny their opponents a voice in the public square, by calling them racists, sexists, homophobes, and haters. Thus we have AntiFa that regards any non-liberal gathering as a fascist hate rally. Now we learn from James Damore's suit that Google has a policy that allows its lefty employees to blacklist co-workers on corporate communications whose opinions they don't like. Denying your opponents a voice is not going to end well, liberals.

I encapsulate all this in my catchphrase: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

Here's a brilliant idea, liberals. The whole idea of democracy is that, instead of having civil war, like in the good old days of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays with Prince Hal facing off against Harry Percy and may the best man win in single combat, we have the sham war of elections. Instead of battling barons, or even mobs in the street, we have politicians battling it out in rallies, in political commercials, and in debates -- and latterly in insult tweets. It is the nature of this repeated sham fight that power alternates between parties, so that when our side is defeated we can say that while we are all Americans and should go home after the election, well, "wait until next time." Sean Trende has written that it is extremely unusual for one party to win the presidency more than twice in a row.

(Notice that after 1968 that Republicans won five out of six presidential elections. I wonder why?)

Democrats have basically not conceded the last two change elections that went against them after a two-term Democratic president. In other words, they object to the Sean Trende two-term rule. In 2000 they contested the Florida results, and Al Gore never properly conceded and never told his people to go home. So we had Democratic activists hopped up right through the two terms of Bush. Now we have had Hillary Clinton who failed to come out on election night and concede the election, and her supporters have responded with their "Resistance" and the various hysterical notions that Trump was colluding with the Russians, or that he is "mentally ill," or something.

The point is that if one side decides to stop observing the rules and habits of the democratic fake-war game then the other side is going to cotton on, and you are not going to like the results. That, to me, is also the lesson of Trump.

The conservative movement of the mid-to-late 20th century operated on the assumption that politics was a game of ideas: each side pitched its ideas to the electorate and may the best ideas win. But that ended in part with Bill Clinton, who ran as a moderate and then pushed government-healthcare Hillarycare on us. He got his hat handed to him in the 1994 midterms when the first Republican Congress in 40 years got elected. Then we had Barack Obama, elected in a normal change election, who decided that Americans had voted for "fundamental transformation." No they hadn't, and the Republican Congress and the Trump presidency are the result. Now we have the anti-Trump Resistance that seems to think it can use the deep state to spy on its opponents and run President Trump's troops through the ringer of a special prosecutor. In a vague way, even anti-Trumper David Brooks can see there is a problem with this.

Look, the point of democracy is that government power goes to the chaps that can persuade the electorate that it is either Time for a Change, or Four More Years. That is all. Democracy says nothing about justice or arcs of history, or the wonders of a compassionate educated elite that graduated from all the right elite colleges and scored all the right internships. In fact, because of the fact that democracy is just a trial of strength: my millions of voters vs. your millions of voters, we should not assume that any democratic government is elected to do anything more that reward its supporters for their votes. I like to remind everyone about this with my catchphrase that They are all Idiots. That's why we have change elections, when the voters get tired of the old idiots and decide to elect new idiots. Call it Rotating Idiocracy.

You may think that Trump is an idiot, and you may be right. Only one thing: he is hatching what amounts to the full conservative agenda, the ideas that conservative thinkers and think tanks have been incubating for the last 50 years, from reduced tax rates (because settled-science marginal economics, vintage 1870), to rollback of administrative regulation (because settled-science "regulatory capture," vintage 1955). But one thing is certain. Chaps like Barack Obama and the crazy-cakes gender studies professors are the real idiots, because they are going against the settled science of the last century, that big government is a real problem, because it cannot compute prices.

I add, in addition, that big government does not work because government finds it almost impossible to do reform. Once you have set up a program that distributes benefits to the voters it becomes almost impossible to reform or reduce it, for the simple reason that people adjust their lives to take advantage of the free stuff offered by government and strongly resist the notion later on that they should get onto their bikes and go get a job so they can pay for the benefit themselves. That is the difference between government and the private sector. In the private sector businesses and consumers must adjust their plans every day, based on the signals from the price system. But the whole point of government is to sidestep the price system, to set up a rigid regulatory system that grinds on with the same rules, year after year, rain or shine. Until the whole thing breaks down.

It is a vile conceit that my party has a monopoly on virtue, or that your party has a monopoly on hate. Politics is simply division, the game of demonizing the opposition and getting 51 percent of the vote in the next election. Conceit aside, the probable truth is that the administrative state and its one-size-fits-all government entitlement programs is past its sell-by date.

The only question is whether we will transition to the new order peacefully, or through the wringer of inflation and riot and revolution. Removing the other guys' president ain't gonna get us to those sunlit uplands, I guarantee, so stop it you crazy-cakes.

That is all.

Another Shoe Drops on Obamacare Repeal

Right here in the middle of the end of the world of Fire and Fury another shoe drops on Obamacare. The Trump administration has published a proposed regulation to allow individuals to band together to purchase health insurance across state lines -- without all the mandatory Obamacare free coverage.

The new regulation, which was published in the Federal Register on January 5, will be available for public comment for 60 days. When it goes into effect, it will allow small employers to band together for the purpose of buying health insurance in the large group market. Specifically, it will “allow employers to form small business health plans based on geography or industry” and permit such plans “to serve employers in a state, city, county or a multi-state metro area.” It can be used to “serve all the businesses in a particular industry nationwide,” and also allows sole proprietors to join small business health plans. 

Here is what a critic of the Trump policy has to say.

Currently… associations that offer coverage to small businesses or individuals have to follow ACA rules, which require coverage of 10 categories of essential benefits, and limit what factors can be considered in charging premiums. The new regulation would largely exempt association plans from these rules, allowing them to offer insurance to small businesses and sole proprietors that is cheaper but also covers less[.]

Yay! If you are an individual policyholder or small businessman.

By the way, the difference between health insurance and government "health insurance" is that the government version always has free stuff thrown in to hook the bubbas. Hey, why not when the government is paying anyway.

Seriously, we can now do a review of the wisdom of the original Obamacare plan. It had a problem, learned from the debacle of Hillarycare. Most Americans already have health insurance and they do not appreciate being forced to pay more to subsidize people that don't yet have insurance. So the sell on Obamacare had to be that nobody was going to pay more, and there would be no serious impact on "the deficit." That meant that the Obamacare subsidies could not all appear on the federal budget; instead chaps like Jonathan Gruber had to come up with cunning plans to force the subsidies to be paid by people buying health insurance so they would pay for a good chunk of the benefits distributed to Democratic voters who were supposed to benefit from the extension of health insurance.

But since many of the Obamacare benefits were "off-budget," and even fashioned through regulations, that makes them much harder to defend, and much easier to reverse.

Clearly it is very difficult for Republican politicians to put together a straight-up repeal of Obamacare; that is what the failures of the fall of 2017 were about. It is not so difficult for Trump bureaucrats to repeal Obamacare step-by-step through the administrative state.

(Here's an interesting take. When Trumpists talk about reining in the administrative state, the mainstream media doesn't really get it. Well, of course. The issue of the administrative state is a thing in conservative think tanks and policy analysts like Charles Murray writing books like By the People. For liberals the administrative state is not a bug, it's a feature.)

But it all comes back to the liberal narrative on President Trump. If this guy is a complete idiot, and mentally ill, and colluding with Russia, and watching TV all day, how come he is able to preside over this massive roll-back of the administrative state, and figure out that, if you can't repeal Obamacare by the front door you can repeal it by the back door? How come?

It comes down to the basic question. Donald Trump is not an idiot; he merely plays one on TV.

It is Trump the Chaotic Idiot Week Again

Dear Jonah Goldberg is still going on about how useless Donald Trump is. In the week of the White House tell-all gossip book, Fire and Fury, Jonah tells us that it is nothing new. We already know that the president spends hours a day "in front of a television." We already know that "the president struggles to complete a line of thought without being distracted." We already know that the president represents himself as the world's foremost expert on everything but he has never been seen "actually talked expertly for more than a minute on any public policy without the benefit of a teleprompter."

Hmm. Remember how everybody knew that Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce that did not know the details of policy. And remember how Barack Obama represented himself as a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, etc.?

We really cannot know how much of the Trump Administration is Trump and how much is the people he has appointed or how much is serendipity and accident that the right people got into the right places. Or that when you staff up a Republican administration you get the same people from the same think tanks every time.

But the rule of thumb is that, if it happens on Trump's watch, he gets the credit and he gets the blame.

For instance, President Clinton came into office after a mild recession and presided over 8 years of strong growth. You may say that issued more from a Republican Congress that deregulated and cut taxes, but it still happened on his watch.

For instance, President Obama presided over a decade of weak growth. He gets the blame, although I have read that after a big credit panic like 2008 it usually takes the economy a decade to get into its stride again.

Now, according to my view, the actions of Trump administration in rolling back regulations and cutting business tax rates are going to have a strong pro-growth effect on the economy. Also, the recovery of housing prices is going to make it easier for business start-ups to use their home equity as capital. And if all that happens it doesn't matter if the president watches TV or tweets juvenile insults or doesn't understand the details of policy. The good things will have happened on his watch and he will get the credit. That is all.

On the other hand any delay in returning interest rates to normal now that the economy seems to be firing on all cylinders could allow a boom and bubble that could burst before the president runs for reelection in 2020. And that would be the president's fault, just as the current stock bull market is to the president's credit. And don't ask me what happens if and when the Bitcoin bubble bursts. But the president will get the blame.

The truth is that political leaders of every stripe are pretty unsavory characters. Think of JFK, serial adulterer; LBJ, who had hideaway offices in the Capitol to entertain females and got to be senator from Texas courtesy of Box 13; Nixon, an arriviste that "everyone" despised; Bill Clinton, another serial adulterer and a notoriously corrupt politician. Oh then there was George W. Bush, who seems to have been a nice guy. But what good did it do him?

Then there is Barack Obama that got elected twice on the strength of Illinois court divorce records that mysterious went public. What a guy! And we still know nothing of how things went down in the Obama White House.

No doubt Donald Trump is a monster. Politicians and big businessmen usually are. The bottom line is whether their governance benefits the American people and puts the economy on a secure upward arc.

Everything else is gossip and bad faith.

Peace Be to the Deplorables

Item Two of my Perfect Plan is that the People of the Creative Self should be compassionate and understanding of the People of the Responsible Self, in the same way that the People of the Creative Self demand that the People of the Responsible Self be compassionate and understanding of the People of the Subordinate Self.

Put into everyday language, we demand that the educated elite stop beating on the Deplorables as racist sexist homophobes, just as they demand that "the rich" stop exploiting and oppressing the traditionally marginalized. Sauce for goose is sauce for the gander.

You see, I think that the biggest problem in the world right now is the conceit and the sense of entitlement in the educated elite. On the one hand the educated elite is afflicted with the conceit that they are the lions, the movement, the chosen (as in Skip Marley's "Lions") to lead and lift the marginalized out their eternal slavery. And that is to be done by political power, the kindly attentions of the chosen to provide benefits and entitlements to said oppressed and marginalized.

I would say that the record of the last 150 years is that the more that the educated elite succeeds in getting political power to lead and lift the marginalized the worse it is for the marginalized. Oh yeah, it was great to help the working class and give them free education, and union rights, and government pensions. For a while. But now look at the white working class: abandoned by their patrons in the educated elite as Deplorables, and desperately short of the middle-class skills and culture that you need to wive and thrive in the modern economy.

Or women. What has the sexual revolution and women's liberation and careers for women really done for women? The divorce revolution has allowed men to cast aside their wives; the sexual revolution plus abortion on demand has forced women to surrender their young bodies to men, and allow men to love without commitment. Oh and it has pitched many a woman into a life of regret about the babies she "got rid of." What is the point of careers for women? Don't people understand that "career" is a cunning plan to get men to compete for the spoils of corporate office rather than the spoils of war? It is crazy to teach young women that "careers" are the highest and best thing in life. One day, women will discover that the whole women's liberation movement is a crock. And they they will be angry. Oh wait, they already are.

Or blacks. What has the civil rights revolution done for blacks lately? And what did the First Black President do for blacks? No doubt the police have it in for blacks. But maybe that makes sense, given that black men murder at a rate about eight times greater than white men. I dare say that your average policeman is well aware of that. But to act on it is called "profiling" by the educated elite. No doubt that many murders go unpunished in inner cities. But that is because witnesses are intimidated from testifying in court, per Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. And no doubt the police harass the local gangbangers: that's because the gangbangers can only be prosecuted for "breaking windows" when witnessed by a police officer. Meanwhile Latinos seems to be taking over the homebuilding industry. And the educated elite seems much more interested in the plight of the "gender-nonconforming" than the continued marginalization of blacks. One day, blacks will discover that the race politics of the Democrats is a crock. And then they will be angry. Oh wait, they already are.

No, the educated elite should not be leading the marginalized into an orgy of marginalization and a Skip Marley fantasy about being the chosen, the movement to lead the marginalized to glorious vengeance. Sorry chum, the dreadful oppressive capitalist class has just spent 200 years flooding the world with cheap products for the masses. The capitalist Deplorables are in the business of inventing new products and spreading them around for all to enjoy, and they are very good at it. How bad could it be?

Then there is the other war of the educated elite upon the Deplorables, the culture war that declares the cultural norms of the bourgeoisie to be suffocating and patriarchal for the glorious educated elite and their creative spawn. I've been reading Peter Gay's Why the Romantics Matter in the past few days and it reminds me that the war on the responsible middle class has been going on for 200 years, with the various Romantic movements defining themselves by their difference from the awful, dull, patriarchal, rule-obsessed, kitschy, tasteless middle class.

The point of difference between all the Romantics -- and that is why I call them People of the Creative Self -- is the difference between ordinary middle-class individualism and what Charles Taylor calls the "expressive" individualism of the educated creative elite. Call it the difference between responsible individualism and creative, "expressive" individualism. All your artists and writers think that the ordinary middle class stinks, because of what My Fair Lady's Alfred P. Doolittle calls "middle-class morality."

No doubt, from the lordly height of a Lord Byron or various other scions of wealthy families that could afford to become artists and writers, the middle class is rather mean and pathetic. But I think that attitude fails to put itself in the place of the Other. And understanding the Other is the beginning of wisdom, according to Schopenhauer.

The center of gravity of the middle class is the merchant class, people who live their lives trading goods and services, and this way of life goes back to the founding of cities, 3,000 years ago. The whole point of a merchant is to be trustworthy and responsible, so that people will trade with him. It obviously is a Big Thing, because the religions of responsibility -- Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity -- started their emergence about 3,000 years ago. The idea was and is that humans are responsible individuals, responsible in particular to God, who will judge them at the end of days. In my view Christianity is most particularly the religion of people just entering the middle class from rural idiocy and the rough comfort of the village and the blood kindred. I have a quote that I like to use to illustrate this, the words of a preacher in the Great Awakening of the mid 18th century.

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

This is exactly the point of the People of the Responsible Self, to experience yourself as a responsible being for whom the abdication of responsibility is a damning sin.

Now, the People of the Creative Self are always tempted to regard this experience of people just learning how to make it in the city as rather small beer, a thing for little people, Deplorables really, that lack the courage and the fortitude to step out into the uncharted waters of a creative life.

OK, then why is the same not applicable to the People of the Subordinate Self that want to live by handouts from their political patrons? Get a life, kid! Stop gang-banging and get a job!

I have been dipping into Jungian psychology recently, and touched Jung's idea of "individuation," which means the difficult process of getting to understand yourself, in a gradual process, as an individual person with your own particular character and history. What Jung is not saying is that creativity is the only thing, and that a refusal to use the means appointed to be creative is a damning sin of the patriarchy.

It's a sad thing, to me, that everyone seems to be attacking the middle class. It is a difficult row for the middle class to hoe, because, as I insist, the defining thing about the middle class is that it is not that interested in power, and yet, beset by the educated elite on one hand and the underclass catspaws of the educated elite on the other, it looks like the middle class is going to have to take up the weapons of power in order to defend itself and its responsible culture.

I would tell our liberal friends in the educated elite that they really don't want to get the middle-class Deplorables angry. That's because the culture of responsibility and trust has the potential to be more powerful than anything the creatives or the victims are capable of doing.

I say, Peace be unto the Deplorables, if you know what is good for you.

The Two Reactions: How Do We Deal With Them?

In recent weeks I have been developing the idea of the Two Reactions against the modern world, and that is the way to understand the Left. It is the most natural thing in the world that the staggering social and economic changes of the last 200 years has provoked a movement of reaction against the modern phenomenon of wage labor and market capitalism. What I call the Double Revolution is utterly strange and disruptive to the old ways of the world.

So the left has raised the banner of identity politics, a neo-tribalism that reenacts the culture of the tribe that is mobilized forever against the danger of the neighboring tribe that wants "our" land. Naturally, there is in every one of us still the spirit of the hunter-gatherers and their existential need for tribal unity.

And the left has raised the banner of the patron/client relation, symbolized for us by powerful lord and its grateful retainers, a neo-feudalism that reenacts the culture of the agricultural age in which farmers needed military protection from raiders and pirates that might descend on them and steal their grain stores, for every agricultural village must store grain for the next year from the harvest until the next crop is harvested and is therefore always vulnerable to plunderers.

Our lefty friends imagine that their fight against "fascism" is proof enough of their virtue, yet they seem to be utterly blind and deaf to the truth that their identity politics, their encouragement for people to identify themselves by race or gender rather than by citizenship, is pure racism and sexism, the very thing they rail against.

Our lefty friends imagine that their welfare state is the acme of compassion and justice, yet are blind and deaf to the creaking inefficiency and injustice of a system that pays billions out to well-to-do retired folks like me while taxing young and less well-to-do working people to pay for our benefits. Of course they do: they are the guys that get to occupy the commanding heights of the welfare state in comfortable sinecures and pensions that issue from their hard-gained credentials and connections.

There is a spirit in conservatism that longs to roll up tribalism into a global community that gets beyond race or gender or class identity, but I do not think it is practical to expect humans to do that. We humans are tribal; the question is how to channel our tribalism into beneficial channels that don't set us against each other within our current political boundaries.

There is a spirit in conservatism that longs to roll up the welfare state and replace it with a non-governmental system of private charity and mutual-aid societies in which people are responsible for their own social insurance. But I do not think that it is practical to assume that everyone can do that. There is clearly a big part of each human that wants to snuggle up to a powerful lord and have him take care of making us safe.

So my mind proceeds to wonder how we can accommodate our instinctive tribalism but without the bloodthirsty naming and shaming that sometimes escalates into witch hunts and Reigns of Terror. And I wonder how we can accommodate people that do not want to try the rigors of the marketplace but want to live a life of safety.

And I come to this from my recent reading of Jungian psychology that emphasizes the continuing role of the unconscious and its vast underworld of instinctive "archetypes" or scripts for living. Obviously we cannot consign the unconscious to the dust bin of history. It is a vital part of us; indeed recent science says that the brain seems to make decisions about 1.5 seconds before the decision appears in our conscious mind. So what is that all about? Does it mean that our glorious consciousness and rationalism is all a mirage and a delusion?

But then it occurred to me that we have already accommodated the tribal and the feudal impulses in our modern world. After all, we are humans, we are not as dumb as we seem.

In the stead of tribalism we have invented the nation state. Instead of the actual ties of the blood kindred we have the fantasy of a nation united by its language, its culture, its glorious history, and the memory of the Fallen, those who died to Make Us Safe. How cool is that? There are a lot of people that sneer at the nation state. They should cool their jets; it is nothing less that amazing that we could have transformed the culture of the actual tribe into a myth of the imaginary tribe made up out of whole cloth by clever thinkers and propagandists. And that is the problem of the globalists; they have not thought through how to create a transnational demos to which ordinary people can pledge allegiance. Their transnational experiments cannot succeed unless they create a demos for their transnational creations. I like to joke that we humans will not create a global political community until we have to fight a war against the Martians or the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

What we need to work on is how to keep tribalism inside the guardrails. The problem right now is that our global elite has discouraged a nation-level identity politics on the grounds that we must never allow fascism to rear its ugly head. But its strategy to retain its power has encouraged and normalize sub-national identity politics with appeals to labor unions, Black Lives Matter, the Latino La Raza, women's liberation groups, and environmental groups. Hey, groups like that are natural and physical, but should not have special privileges, as unions did for a century. And when the ruling class encourages sub-national identity politics it is playing with fire.

In the stead of feudalism we have invented the corporation. Instead of the subordination to the local lord we have subordination to the corporate hierarchy, with its pretty safe employment prospects, its chance for advancement, and its basket of benefits and pensions. If you don't like the uncertainty of employment at will, you can get yourself into a nice safe corporation with an HR department and a code of conduct. In my view, it is not really safer to work for a corporation than to accept the rigors of employment at will, but it sure feels like it.

What we need to work on is how to keep the neo-feudal baronies from plundering the rest of society. It is clear that the industrial corporations of the 1950s in concert with industrial labor unions were allowed to raise prices and wages above the market level, and this was unjust. But then, in another proof of God's existence, the proud privileged steel and auto industries got soft and entitled, and got sucker-punched by emerging German and Japanese corporations in the 1970s. Then they ran out of money to pay their defined-benefit pensions. We could have avoided that if we had kept the corporations and labor unions honest and written beneficial legislation to prevent labor unions from forming a combination against trade and prevent corporations from getting carve-outs from politicians and regulators. Today we have the scandal of government employees earning way above the levels in the private sector and getting defined-benefit pensions that threaten to bankrupt states like California and Illinois. The truth is that people may run from the market and its prices, but they can't hide, not forever. Eventually everyone of us must surrender to the will of the market and its prices, and it is the job of a good ruling class to teach the people the truth of the emergent phenomenon we call the price system.

Is this possible? Can we contain the tribal and the feudal impulse within safe channels, with wise recognition of their profound humanness, and cunning strategies to keep them from plundering us all?

We should all hope so.

What the Trump Skeptics of 2016 Got Wrong

Over at the American Spectator libertarian Ross Kaminsky admits he was wrong about Donald Trump (he voted for Evan McMullin) back in 2016. Donald Trump has emerged as a "president of consequence."

So I got to thinking about why chaps like Kaminsky got it wrong, and why chaps like me got it right.

Nothing wrong with being wrong: it is impossible to predict the future. Everything we do when we look to the future is a leap of faith. And obviously Ross Kaminsky had no faith in Donald Trump. The reason is obvious: Donald Trump ran as a populist, and for a hard-core libertarian like Kaminsky or a traditional conservative populism is foolishness at best and the first step to totalitarianism at worst.

But now that President Trump has governed as a pretty mainstream conservative/libertarian we can see that the populism was in part a ruse. To win the election Donald Trump understood -- either consciously or unconsciously -- that he had to appeal not just to the normal Republican base but to another sector of the electorate that wasn't libertarian or conservative: the white working class.

Imagine that: to win an election you have to be popular.

Trump promised to Make America Great Again and to fight against the free-trade policies and the immigration policies that had brought the white working class low. And he promised to bring jobs back.

Now we doctrinaire libertarians and economic conservatives would argue, from our deep understanding of economics, that the way to Make America Great Again would be to lower tax rates and cut regulations, and we were troubled that Candidate Trump did not really spell that out, but just talked in generalities about a great tax cut and draining the swamp.

Let us assume that Donald Trump is not an idiot, but just plays one on TV. This Donald Trump would understand that, in order to bring the white working class into the Republican camp, he would have to de-emphasize the details of tax-cutting and regulation cutting, because the white working class has been fed lefty propaganda for generations about evil corporations that get tax loopholes and screw the worker and the consumer. The Republican Party has obviously failed in the past to sell the white working class on traditional economics, so Trump would have to soft-pedal the pro-business aspect of his agenda.

So Trump campaigned on Making America Great Again and assumed that when his tax-cutting and regulation-cutting hit the street they would provide enough of an economic surge to deliver on the basic promise of Making America Great Again -- by creating jobs and lifting wages for the average employee -- and never mind how he got there.

In that he was obviously right. The average voters understand bupkis about economics and tax rates and regulations. They just regurgitate catch-phrases, and most of the catch-phrases come from the left, thanks to the schools and the media. But the average voter does respond to an improving economy, and that response seems to kick in at about 3 percent growth per annum.

The other thing that Donald Trump has done that people like Kaminsky -- and many others -- do not like is the insulting and the tweeting.

Maybe so, but it has to be understood that the nice polite conservatism of George W. Bush and the establishment Republican Party has not worked. While we act all nice, with white gloves and all, the left amps up the insults.

After all, what could be more insulting than to call everyone right of center a racist, a sexist, and a homophobic bigot? Not to mention a hater and a xenophobe? Whatever may be the right and the wrong of left-wing propagands, a politician of the right cannot allow his supporters to be attacked and humiliated in this way. He must fight for his supporters.

Now, a lot of nice polite people don't like the Trump Culture of Insult. Of course they don't. It goes against the polite culture of the bourgeois middle class. But I argue that the default culture of men is the Culture of Insult that comes from the male honor code of courage under fire. And if politics is not a war of insult I don't know what is.

For instance, "Chuck and Nancy" have reacted to the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as the end of the world. Sen. Schumer (D-NY) has said that Republicans would "rue the day" they passed the bill, and Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) has warned of "Armageddon." Really? And Trump is supposed to smile sweetly in response?

In reality, the Trump insults are nothing like enough. What is needed is a full-frontal culture war on the left's neo-tribal identity politics from a solid cultural fortress that defends bourgeois culture, understands the problems of the marginalized, and drives past the educated elite's culture of creativity to something higher and nobler. Problem is that the genius needed to build that solid cultural fortress has not yet emerged from the brow of Zeus, and so we are stuck with guerrilla tactics, worrying at the flanks of the dominant left and keeping them off-balance with Trumpist insult tweets.

One fine day, we righties will emerge trailing clouds of glory with a religious faith that understands the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in a way that satisfies everyone: from the folks just emerging from rural idiocy into the immense challenge of life in the city; to the middle-class bourgeois that obeys the law, goes to work, and follows the rules; to the educated elitist that wants to do something creative with their life.

But that day is not yet.

Meanwhile, as Donald Rumsfeld said, "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

You also go to war with the general you have, not the general you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Basic Training for Women in the Workplace

If you read the stories of the victims of Pervnado you encounter the same story, again and again. When the victim in question was touched or otherwise subject to a male's power play, she froze.

That is a problem. Either women can take care of themselves in public places or... well, Sarah Hoyt thinks that corporations just won't want to hire women any more: too much trouble. Given that a man can now be fired just on the accusation of a woman, it means that no sensible man will want to be around women in the workplace.

[T]his will give companies pause before hiring women, which will lead to a lot of decent and qualified women being left unemployed.

Oh dear. How come the feminazis never thought of that?

So I have a solution. Basic Training for Babes in the Workplace.

The problem of "freezing" at a frightening moment is not just a problem for women in the workplace. It is a problem for soldiers in wartime.

Yeah, that's right. Armies have a big problem with training their soldiers not to freeze when frightened out of their wits. So do airlines, when it comes to an emergency in the air.

So what do these outfits do? Perfectly simple. They train their employees to deal with emergencies, to follow orders when the skies are falling, and not just emergencies in general, but what to do, step-by-step, in specific emergencies.

I have experienced how that works in my own life. For several years I was a soaring pilot, flying gliders. The big problem in gliding is what to do if you don't find lift from a thermal and cannot get back to your home airfield. In that case, you have to "land out," probably in a farmer's field. So you get trained how to pick a suitable field, how high up you need to be to do a proper approach pattern, and above all, when to make the decision to land out. In my soaring days I found myself too low to return to base twice, and both times I followed my training and set myself up for a land-out in a suitable field. But both times, as I was flying the approach pattern to land, I found lift and was able to abort the approach and circle in a thermal and eventually return to my home base.

Despite all the fear and adrenaline I followed my training, and I can see why. When you have the option between: heading for home hoping against hope that you make it, and a procedure drilled into you by your training that has a safe result ending up in a suitable field, you go with the "safer" option.

In the aftermath of US Airways Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River after a bird strike that knocked out its engines, I got to read a few articles about airborne emergencies. The experts said that when there is an emergency in the air, flight crew do what they are trained to do.

Then there was Air France 447 that crashed after getting into clouds in the tropical convergence zone. Reading the reports on the accident I was amazed at the cluelessness of the flight crew. They clearly had not been properly trained to deal with a stall situation: so they panicked and flopped around and lost their lives, and the plane, and the passengers.

So, when it comes to women in the workplace we have two options. Either we place women in protected safe spaces, or we train them to deal with a variety of unwanted attentions.

If we decide to put women into safe spaces, then we are saying that the whole business of women's liberation was a failure, because women are just too frail and risk-averse to deal with threats against their person. Bring back the patriarchy.

So the only sensible alternative is Basic Training for the Workplace. I am not talking about martial arts and well-aimed kicks in the groin. I am talking about training women to respond automatically to the kind of aggression practiced by the Harvey Weinsteins and the Matt Lauers of the world. Oh, and the Joe Bidens of the world:



And frankly, it would be a good thing if women just automatically followed their training before worrying about creating a scene, as above or worse, thinking about whether there might be an angle to going with the flow and hoping for a quid pro quo for a bit of nookie.

Oh, and it would really help if the Harvey Weinsteins and Matt Lauers and Joe Bidens of the world knew that women would automatically go to their training instead of freezing.

This is all very well, you might say, but are you sure that women are up for this sort of thing? Isn't Basic Training a guy sort of thing, that issues from the male honor culture and its street manifestation, the Culture of Insult? Can women get beyond their Culture of Complaint and actually do something about male aggression other than complain about it and #metoo about it?

That's a good question. Another thing that came out of my glider pilot experience, was that they found that whenever a woman glider pilot had a frightening experience in the air she was done with gliding. In other words, women tend to respond to a frightening event by never going near it again. Whereas the essence of the male honor culture is the courage to go back into the maelstrom to show that you are a member in good standing of the band of brothers.

I don't know the answer to that. But I do feel that either women decide it is their responsibility to look after themselves at the office or return to the protected status of the patriarchy.

And maybe it is too late, if the Women of the New York Times are to be believed.

OK, so maybe the Women of the New York Times just want Daddy to get their blankie. But when someone else has the job of making you safe, then you are their subject, their creature; you are not an independent woman.