Politics is Not About Issues, But Status

Why have Republicans and conservatives failed to reverse the tide of leftism? The answer is simple, according to Joe Katzman. Politics is not about ideas, or issues, or justice. Politics is about status.

Analysis: Leftism is a status machine. A very, very successful status machine. Conservatives have lost status battle after status battle, often because they fought it as a policy battle. It rarely is.

In other words, if you parrot left-wing talking points you gain status. If you try to argue the merits of an issue, you lose status. But if you are sensible you read The New York Times or any women's magazine. These are all about communicating status clues to the status conscious.

That brings us immediately to Donald Trump. Trump's whole shtick is to humiliate "Chuck and Nancy" and the Fake News media. In other words, his game is to lower their status in the eyes of his supporters and possible supporters.

Status and hierarchy are chemical and go all the way back to lobsters, or rather the common ancestor of humans and lobsters. You could say it is part of the basic equipment of social animals, the reduction of conflict by status and hierarchy negotiation.

So that means that status is upstream of religion is upstream of culture is upstream of politics.

Now do you understand why Donald Trump won the support of the white working class and other deplorables? He proposed to raise their/our status by attacking the status of liberals, lefties, Democrats, and the mainstream media.

Yes, I suppose that's a corollary of the lobster status argument. You may not be able to play the status game yourself, but you sure can vote for a guy that does, or at least support the lobster that has high status.

This forthright argument, put forward by Joe Katzman, helps me understand what I am trying to do with my writing. I want to put everything lefty and liberal in a bad light by insulting it, i.e., reducing its status.

(Hmm. So the male Culture of Insult is really a status game, reducing the other guys status by a sham fight of words. And is Trump good at insults. But, of course, women hate it, because their status game is the woman's Culture of Complaint.)

So when I deploy my catchphrases, from Government is Force, to Politics is Division, to System is Domination, to Identity Politics is Neo-Tribalism, to the Welfare State is Neo-Feudalism, all I am trying to do is to reduce the status of government, politics, and lefties on all the ships at sea, by insulting their ideas and their sacred objects as cheap tricks and second-rate rubbish: false idols.

But to get to the bottom line: is Trump's campaign working? Well, according to Katzman,

American belief in the credibility of their news media is now at about 32 percent. That’s the lowest ever polled, and an 8 percent drop from the lowest point of the 2008-2015 period. The media has lost audience, and a lot of power. 

And even noble Facebook has taken note.

Facebook has tried to fight these trend lines by flagging items as “fake news.” Recently, the social media giant decided to stop. Too many people sought out flagged articles. 

Notice an interesting thing here? Back in the day, liberals were the spunky outsiders speaking truth to the establishment. But now that they own the media, the universities, the schools, the culture, they are the establishment, and so plucky outsiders are now the ones that speak truth to liberals.

And they don't like it.

OK, so why didn't anyone think of this before? Well, they did.

In fairness, Newt Gingrich had some success in the 2012 primaries, and Ted Cruz has also tried. But they lacked the full array of tools. Worse, they didn’t understand how to make the media their enemy.

In other words, they weren't good enough at the game of insult.

And that leads directly back to my catchphrase Politics is Division. The art of politics is to find your enemy, and rally the people behind you to attack the enemy and reduce their status by beating them in an election. Hey, you could use a Rule or two from Saul Alinsky.

Rule 5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Rule 13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." 

Just saying. 

Solving the Immigration Problem

America needs about 1.1 million immigrants a year, experts say, because American women aren't having enough children. Thus we have a labor shortage on the one hand and too many people needing end-of-life entitlements on the other.

However, writes Kay Hymowitz, whereas a century ago America could use millions of unskilled immigrants, today it ain't so.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920.

 Today, she writes,

Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs... Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States.

That's why other countries, like Canada and Australia, have implemented a skills-based immigration system. It is much harder for low-skilled immigrants from sh*thole countries to make it in First World countries than it used to be.

However, I know a Haitian immigrant, a health-care aide, who is raising two boys to go straight into the professional middle class. But she's insulted that Trump calls her homeland a sh*thole.

The problem is, of course, the population problem. What is wrong with American women that they are not having enough children to replace our population?

There is nothing wrong with American women; they have been doing what they were told to do.

American women have been told to get and education and a career.

American women have been told to approach sex the way that men do.

American women have been taught to abort an inconvenient child.

American women have been taught to divorce annoying husbands instead of nagging them into obedience.

American women have been taught to devalue suburban housewifery.

American women have been taught to experiment with lesbianism.

All these things may be wonderful and progressive but you can see that each one of them tends to reduce the number of children born into the world. And each of the items that women have been carefully taught are cultural trends that happen to appeal to the educated class that aspires to a higher, more creative life than mere childbearing and childraising.

Hey, if American women average 2.5 children per lifetime then we could start exporting a few folks as immigrants to other countries and see if they like it.

Actually, I am not totally against immigration. I feel that if a country does not experience a certain influx of foreigners then it gets old and staid. Or it descends into childlessness like the Roman Empire.

And really, civilizations rise and fall all the time. In their youth they are brash and expansionary. In their prime they bestride the world. In their decline they get overrun by barbarians.

I just don't want the barbarian invasion on my watch. Or my children's watch. Or my grandchildren's watch.

We talk grandly about assimilating immigrants even as our liberal friends celebrate diversity and divide the races with identity politics. Anyway, we none of us agree on what immigrants should be assimilating to. The descendants of the 1900 wave of immigration are still significantly different from each other in political and cultural orientation.

Meanwhile there is the underrated influence of the market economy, which has its own culture of service and of getting along with anyone that is trustworthy.

But I tell you what. The stories that are coming out of the #metoo movement show that women really don't want agency; they don't want responsibility. They want to be princesses in a world that just understands their needs and provides them. Hey, they might decide they don't like the meat market of the sexual revolution. They might decide they don't like a life in a cubicle. And so they might start a movement back to hearth and home.

They might even decide that everything that liberals taught them was a lie, including "and" and "the." But I think that women are too trusting for that. Only guys, and few enough of us, understand that everything we are taught is "bullsh*t."

Oh yeah. I wonder what men could do to help get more children on the ground and solve the immigration problem.

Understanding Initiation from the Ancients

I was down in the Bay Area last week and got out alive with my skin and a book from Copperfield's in Petaluma. The book was Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation.

Very good, but the whole book revolved, for me, around the Introduction, where Eliade asserts the basic difference between us and the ancients. Why is it, he asks, that we do not practice "initiation" into adulthood, whereas all the ancients did? The answer:

Modern man's originality... lies precisely in his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos.

You could say that we moderns orient ourselves by reading history, by gradually building up a knowledge of the world, by the gradual accumulation of innovation and discovery over the decades and the centuries. But ancient man had no history, no libraries of knowledge and sacred books. And yet ancient man needed to know the meaning of life, the universe and everything just as we do.

So ancient man devised the initiation, a process whereby the youth was indoctrinated in all the tribe's knowledge of the world. Ancient peoples do not have a history, but a "sacred history" in which all events are projected back into a primordial time of gods and heroes. Let us put this out in long form:

[T]raditional societies tend to project every new acquisition [of knowledge or history] into the primordial Time, to telescope all events in the same atemporal horizon of the mythical beginnings.

Thus the point of initiation of boys into manhood:

It is to this traditional knowledge that the novices gain access. They receive protracted instruction from their teachers, witness secret ceremonies, undergo a series of ordeals. And it is primarily these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation -- the encounter with the sacred. 

You can see that for a traditional, preliterate society the transmission of the Knowledge to the new generation is a vital task, intimately connected with the survival of the tribe. Indeed, the smaller the tribal unit the more critical is the transmission of knowledge, because if any one young man or woman fails to get the message it may mean the end of the tribe. In our larger societies, this urgency is not so immediate. A significant fraction of a generation can twirl away into folly without bringing the survival of society into question. These fools will just fail to wive and thrive, and drain away into the sand. Or perhaps, occasionally, some one or two of them will discover something transformational, and the new knowledge will be incorporated into the sum of society's understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, the idea that we have abandoned intiation is crazy. We still have initiation, only we call it "school" "university" and "education." That is how we teach the young the Knowledge, the right ways of thought and action, all the right things approved by our ruling class. So nothing has changed. And as for "ordeal," we now have mandatory classes for the young in diversity and inclusion and white privilege.

Naturally, I want to use this information in my quest to understand and demolish the reactionary culture of the left, where I identify identity politics as neo-tribalism and the welfare state as neo-feudalism. It seems to me that the culture of activism, against which I rail with frequency, is a process of initiation, similar to the ancient practice, that teaches the young the left-wing knowledge, and all the correct faith and action in connection with the ancients like Marx and Engels, particularly the faith in the sacred practice, the "ordeal" of "peaceful protest."

Yes, because public protest is not something that people naturally do. The good old "riot" much feared by our bourgeois ancestors was, or tended to be, an instinctive outbreak of madness in response to hard times. But our lefty friends have institutionalized the riot into the sacred observance of the peaceful protest with its very well developed chants, responses, liturgies and processions.

We are, after all, not so very different from our ancestors. Evolution and genetic changes are measured over millennia, according to scientists, and the agricultural age is no more than several thousands of years old, whereas our modern era is no more than hundreds of years old.

And that is why I maintain that our modern lefty reaction is as natural as the birds and the bees. Of course the modern era, with its call to abandon tribe and subordination, has inspired a vast movement of rejection. We are still tribal, feudal, and need to be initiated into the Knowledge in order to take our places as adults.

But for us radicals and revolutionaries that want to introduce our fellow humans, ever so gently, to the new ways and ideas, the lefty reactionaries are a heavy burden to bear.

How To Prepare for the Next Downturn?

Really, poor President Trump has barely got the ink dry on his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before his supporters are worrying about inflation and bubbles.

Here's Ben Stein worrying about his money.

You cannot have an economy at full employment, with severe labor shortages, without having inflation. When you start to get that inflation, the last thing you want to do is goose the economy with huge public works programs and lowers taxes and fantastic money creation at the Fed. You, Mr. and Mrs. America, are NOT going to like severe inflation. It hurts like hell. The usual way to fight it is by buying and holding good real estate.

Well, yes, except that real estate is already pretty high and, after a bubble pops, real estate goes down with everything else.

Or there is Steve Sailer. He's not worrying about inflation but about what will cause the next crash. Stocks could do it, as in 1929. Or Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is obviously a brilliant innovation, but even the smartest new innovations in currency often cause problems initially.

As in John Law, who wrecked the French economy with his brilliant paper money scheme backed by shares. Or maybe it could be China. Or Enron-type corporate scandals, or Student debt. Or mortgages again.

The problem is that prices, for stocks or houses or gold or just about anything, are already pretty strong. So what do you do?

I'd say the first thing is that you can't time the market, whether it is stocks or real estate or Bitcoin. The bubble is only obvious after the crash. Personally, I felt that real estate was overvalued for decades. Yet you could have made good money all through those decades, and would have done all right if you had debt levels in 2008 low enough to ride through the bust.

Everybody says that stocks are too high. Maybe they are, and maybe if there is a downturn you are going to see your stocks underwater for several years.

My feeling is that I don't want to be in paper money or bonds. Bonds have no upside, only the downside of higher interest rates and/or inflation. That's because the way that governments deal with bubbles and crashes is by printing more money. So if you hold dollars you are charitably helping the high-fliers recover by reducing the value of their debt. Some years ago I read an article about the German hyperinflation. If you had stocks or gold you lost money, but you still survived. But if you held Reichmarks you were wiped out. And that means that if you were a good solid 19th century bourgeois with your 5 percent government bonds you were wiped out.

The other thing is that you don't want to be sold out by debt. If you have a mortgage on your house then you have to keep paying the mortgage, otherwise you lose your house and its equity. If you have borrowed money to buy stocks or Bitcoin then you can be sold out if your stocks or your Bitcoin crashes.

The main thing to avoid is "ruin," according to Black Swan guy Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

My experience in the 2008 crash was the realization that I could not be wiped out -- i.e., ruined -- because I did not have any debt. So stocks went down by 50 percent. So they came back again, because the stock market is the present value of all future profits from the nation's public corporations. If economic growth resumes after the crash then the stock market recovers.

Of course, if the economy does not come back, as in the Soviet Union or in Venezuela, then you need to get your money/assets out, and the government will do everything it can to stop you from doing that.

What will happen with the Trump economy? Nobody knows. But we do know that nobody can repeal the business cycle. There will be a recession in our future, and the government will fight it by printing money.

What Do We Do About Big Tech's Big Left Bias?

Well, it's a scandal for President Trump to talk about s***hole countries, but it's on the up and up for big tech to censor "shitty people," as Facebook has censored a chap for writing a book called The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. And as Google has allowed lefty employees to "blacklist" white conservative employees on their corporate media.

I must say that I feel a bit flummoxed by this. I mean, haven't we all been subjected to decades of liberal drivel about how there is no way to objectively determine what speech is OK and what speech is bad and that censorship is just about the worst thing in the world.

Yeah, I know. That was when liberals felt in their bones that they would lose in a game of speech censorship. Now they seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no downside to an aggressive campaign to censor conservatives, alt-rightists, "haters" and "shitty people."

Look, this is nothing new, nothing remarkable. Humans are social animals and one of the things that social animals do is control lower-status animals by methods short of outright violence. So high-status animals use their social power to beat up on low-status animals.

Right now liberals are the high-status animals, and they have wonderfully indoctrinated the tech billionaires and their bribed apologists to join their social set, or else. So big tech is unreflectingly beating up conservatives with AI algorithms and by denying ads to conservative YouTube videos.

There is a word for this: injustice. It is also, I suspect, bad business, because if there is one thing that business tends to do it is to avoid riling up the customer. I believe this has to do with the settled science that a happy customer will tell three people but an unhappy customer will tell ten people about her experience.

And so I repeat: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. My target audience for this notion is not ordinary mortals like you and I. It really is directed at people that think they have a divine -- or secular -- mission to bend the arc of history towards justice. My argument is that anyone that is trying to make the world a better place with the kindly help of government is probably a person that is creating injustice. Further, anyone that is proposing a magnificent system of justice that will save the world from oppression and injustice should look very hard at his program to tease out the many ways in which his perfect plan would in fact increase injustice rather than create justice.

That is why my Perfect Plan would merely have as its first overarching goal a desire to help immigrants to the city rise up into the middle class. I do not think that government programs are likely to help in this; I rather suspect that non-governmental assistance and guidance, particularly from evangelical churches, is the better way. My second overarching goal of my Perfect Plan would be to instruct the educated elite, the People of the Creative Self, not to use their cultural and status power to beat up on ordinary middle class Americans and stigmatize them as "shitty people." Or deplorables.

I am only saying this to be kind and generous to our liberal friends. In my judgement the "political correctness" culture of the liberals is going to prompt a huge movement of rage against the monstrous injustice of liberal cultural hegemony.

Because that is the point of my catchphrase. What people feel and get angry about is being on the receiving end of injustice, i.e., government force. So don't spend any time thinking up glorious plans for justice. Just chip away at the odd egregious injustice. And avoid the temptation to think that "we are become as gods."

No, Filibuster and Balanced Budget Amendment Won't Do It

Christopher C. DeMuth is one of the grand old men of conservatism, having served at the American Spectator and run the American Enterprise Institute think tank for years.

As we all are, DeMuth is disturbed about our "fractured politics" and longs to do something about it. In a speech at AEI he proposes, 1) to end the modern filibuster, and 2) to enact a balanced budget amendment.

I'm sorry, but to me Christopher DeMuth is missing the point. Politics is about bigger things than the petty obstructionisms of the filibuster and the glorious goal of fiscal rectitude. It is about what happens after the welfare state.

And if we want to play the blame game then, yes, conservatives are to blame for the current mess. You can see that in the deficit numbers over at usgovernmentspending.com. The federal deficit started up in the messes of the 1970s and continued high in the Reagan years of the 1980s. That's when conservatives decided we were not going to continue as dutiful tax collectors for the welfare state.

Not surprisingly, Democrats hate this. The neo-feudal welfare state is a great way to capture the votes of those new to the city, the immigrants that first came from Europe and now come from pretty well everywhere else. Rural people look to a strong benevolent master to look after them. Anthony Trollope defined the type in Cousin Henry, although his master is a woman:

The tenants had known her as the future owner of the acres which they cultivated and had entertained for her and shown her much genuine love. She had made herself acquainted with every homestead, landmark, and field about the place. She had learned the wants of the poor, and the requirements of the little school.

 That is how Democrats think of themselves, as kindly proprietors of the poor and the marginalized. Only, in truth, the federal budget is not all about the poor, but the middle class, for 50 percent of the federal budget goes for middle-class Social Security and Medicare. We conservatives say, great: everyone wants to help the poor, but not if it means that 50 percent of the federal budget goes for Social Security and Medicare. It stands to reason that, whatever the benefits of pension and health care programs for America's seniors like me, middle-class entitlements should not break the budget. It stands to reason also that the political system would always want to avoid facing up to the huge obligations of these fixed and immovable middle-class entitlements. Until it is too late.

As the old New Deal consensus has broken down the Democrats have responded by tightening political discipline. The meaning for me of all the political correctness is that Democrats need to frighten their supporters in order to get them to the polls. Obviously the 90 percent Democratic votes from African Americans is proof of that. The whole point of President Obama's race thingies, like support for Trayvon Martin and the race incident in Ferguson, Missouri, is to keep African-Americans strong in the fear that we are one election away from a return to Jim Crow. The only way to get 90 percent of any group's vote is to scare the stuffing out of them.

That is why we seem to be in a kind of a witch-hunt/reign of terror. Political hysteria is a natural step in the political process when things aren't going too well for your side. Earnest partisans ask themselves why the movement has not reached the Promised Land. The answer is obvious: saboteurs and wreckers, or in our modern parlance, racists, sexists, and homophobes.

And obviously, when an idiot like Donald Trump can become president, then it is time for the Resistance!

Now, I am a peaceable kind of guy, and I really don't like bust-ups. But nice, responsible reform is not the way that politics works, not now, not ever. That's because government is force, and the total assembly of government programs are nothing but a testament of force, enacted by the ruling class to reward its supporters. The revenues for Social Security pensions are obtained by forcing the American worker to cough up about 12 cents of every dollar earned. The Medicare benefits are obtained mostly by forcing wealthy Americans to cough up a substantial part of their incomes, so that the top 1 percent of federal taxpayers supply 40 percent of income tax revenue.

I don't see that any fiddling with the filibuster rules, or balanced-budget amendment is going to fix this problem. If you look at history the only way that any governmental problem gets solved is when it runs out of other peoples' money, and maybe not even then.

The reason that Donald Trump was elected is because the white working class finally woke up to the fact that the Democratic Party regards it as deplorables and expendables. And has done so ever since Archie Bunker was launched on TV in 1971 as the quintessential working-class racist sexist bigot. But the white working class still wants its Social Security and its Medicare. So nothing will change.

In my view, so long as the great middle of the American people want to be looked after by a kind land-owning squire rather than band together in non-governmental forms of social assistance, so long will the present neo-feudal big government welfare state continue. Until it breaks.

It might break because the non-white majority prefers the neo-tribalisms of modern Africa over the nation-state capitalism birthed in Northwest Europe. It might break because it runs out of money and the leaders of the time prefer to destroy the economy, as with Venezuela, rather than admit its errors. It might break because we got into a war and tried to continue the middle-class entitlements while waging global war on the Russians or the Chinese.

But one thing is sure. The present "fractured politics" will continue until somebody cries "uncle."

That James Damore Guy!

I'm still marveling about the central notion in James Damore's suit against Google. That Google has, as policy, a system of blacklisting, to allow its employees to cut themselves off from employees they don't like. (Is this just in political discussions, or does it extend to business as well?)

But you can understand it, if you listen to YouTube's Susan Wojciki, "part of the team at Google that decided to fire Damore." She talked to her kiddies at dinner. I think that her kids were asking her if it was true that women just don't quite cut it at face-to-the-monitor techie stuff.

I’ve spent so much time, so much of my career, to try to overcome stereotypes, and then here was this letter that was somehow convincing my kids and many other women in the industry, and men in the industry, convincing them that they were less capable. That really upset me.

Don't look now, Susie, but if you say something "upset" you, then you are promoting the stereotype that women act upon their feelings and not upon the facts. You are also promoting the stereotype that all upscale Bay Area notables are empty-headed morons without a idea in their heads except to advance the liberal party line. Oh, and by the way, have you ever investigated the original Greek meaning of "stereotype?" Before liberals got in charge, the Greek word "stereos" meant solid.

Of course, it is not really that scandalous that Google would discriminate against white male conservatives. Corporate types are always rumbling about "corporate culture" in corporate-speak, and I'd say it is only a couple of steps from promoting a corporate culture to rooting out dissenters. The whole point about a corporation is that it is, as its name implies, a body of people in which hierarchy and top-down management rules, and not the prices of the market.

But here is my bigger point. It starts with the notion of German sociologist Georg Simmel a century ago about what would happen when women came out of the home and into the public square.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I must say that when I wrote this three years ago I was still "questioning" about what women in the public square meant.

It means that corporate culture is moving away from the male notion of the brotherhood, in which the question of feelings are subordinated to the goal of the operation, towards a culture in which feelings and relationships are more valued and enforced. The whole point of military training, for instance, is to train natural fight-or-flight instincts into fight-only instincts. The idea is that the rank-and-file soldier -- and therefore corporate warrior -- should be prepared to risk his life in the service of the brotherhood or corporation, and actually put his life on the line when ordered to. This is male culture. It is not female culture.

Any social unit that is governed not by a male sensibility but by a female sensibility is going to produce a corporate culture very different from the "once more unto the breach" mentality of the warrior band. It is going to produce a corporate culture much closer to the Google model than the model of Henry V's army in front of Harfleur.

There are other differences. I remember a woman friend complaining that the men wouldn't listen to her on a non-profit board she had recently joined. That's another difference between the male sensibility and the female sensibility. Men assume that they get a right to speak only when their deeds show that they are worthy of respect and that they have something to contribute. A woman expects to have the right to "share" from the moment she gets on the board.

Now I am a profound admirer of women. And I firmly believe that the feminine sensibility has its place in human affairs just as the male sensibility has its place.

But here is a heretical notion. Just as the male sensibility of smash through to victory is not the only way to do things and is wildly inappropriate in many cases, so the female sensibility of sharing and of replaying the high-school-mean-girl culture is not the only way to do things, and is wildly inappropriate in many cases.

However, you better not say stuff like that at Google. Because diversity and inclusion and stereotypes.

Hey, how about doing something about the liberal stereotypical behavior of lock-step political loyalty and unfriending anyone that disagrees with you, as this gay guy from a liberal, Jewish family experienced when he started to become conservative? What about diversity, inclusion, and stereotypes?