Now It's the Emerging Republican Majority

I just did a Google search to check the name of the Judis and Teixeira Emerging Democratic Majority, the book that told Democrats back in 2004 that they were going to own the future with minorities, women, the educated and young people.

But a funny thing happened with the auto-complete when I typed in "judis ". It auto-completed to "judis emerging republican majority." OK, now it doesn't. Not any more. Not after I forced it to "emerging democratic majority."

Because now any fool can see that there is a real good chance that Republicans will own the future, by appealing to a middle-middle constituency of the ordinary American middle class: people without fancy educations, but that have worked to rise above the subordinate working class and that have started to identify as Americans rather than hyphenated-Americans. The people I call the People of the Responsible Self.

And that is why all the human props that President Trump called out in his first State of the Union speech were demonstrably middle-middle kinds of people. And they noticed. The parents of the two murdered girls were noticeably affected. One mother observed how moving it was for the president to notice a nobody like her, and how he kissed her on the forehead. Well, yeah. There's one born every minute. The president was using all the folks in the gallery as human props, and they better understand that. But he was also sending a message to all the middle-middle people in America: I care about people like you.

Earth to Democrats. If you are a middle-middle American then for the last decade you have probably been starting to think that the Democrats don't care about people like you. In the olden days, Democrats used to win the "cares about people like me" question hands down. But now Democrats care about people that put out #WeBelieve yardsigns and the identity politics victims. Not the middle-middle people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

Notice that, if you are a liberal then you don't have to follow the rules, you either don't work or your work is special, and your clients don't have to obey the law, as in the homeless and illegal aliens in sanctuary cities and "peaceful protesters." People notice this. Middle-middle people notice this. They noticed it fifty years ago when The Kids were tearing it up in the Sixties. That's why President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew were able to mobilize the Silent Majority into a 60-40 blowout in the 1972 election. In those days, of course, the Democrats owned the Congress, so they were able to kick President Nixon out of office for shenanigans that would be regarded just as boys-will-be-boys when the Obama administration did it. But I don't think today's Republicans will be the pushovers that the 1970s Republicans were.

The astonishing thing about Donald Trump, for me, is that he has run as a populist nationalist, but governed as a conservative libertarian. Nobody could have expected, when Charles Murray published By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission in 2015, that the next president of the United States would spend his first year sending a wrecking crew to dismantle the regulations of the administrative state. That's why Murray's book proposed a kind of guerrilla war on the administrative state. He didn't expect to see a president in the near future that would execute on his anti-administrative state agenda; he thought it would take a bottom-up insurgency dedicated to making life difficult for the bureaucrats that just wanted to get through to their pensions.

But here is the thing. No Republican since Ronald Reagan has been able the play the populist card and also bring the ordinary middle class and the white working class with him. But in Trump the white working class trusts. Strictly speaking, the white working class is supposed to be suspicious of the big corporations. But here Trump has cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. OK, the middle-middle started out thinking that the tax cut wouldn't benefit them, as taught by the mainstream media. But now we seem to be seeing an economic breakout on the corporate front. Corporations seem to think that the future is so bright they gotta wear shades. And the middle-middle is noticing.

Who knew? Well, we green eye-shade guys kinda hoped. Because we muttered to ourselves about marginal tax rates and blah-blah-blah. But we didn't really expect the staggering response of the corporations to the tax rate cut. Yeah. Remember back in 2012 or 2013? Obama said that he would go for a corporate tax rate cut. So he coulda been a contender, and perked up the economy and got Hillary Clinton elected. Much better than siccing the FBI on the opposition.

OK, I know. All this talk of emerging permanent majorities is pure folly, partly because people start to believe it. Sean Trende is right. Party strength tends to fluctuate about the middle, and when parties lose badly they course-correct. And it is rare for a party to win more than two presidential elections in a row.

But I dare say that the Democrats are facing a reappraisal in the next few years, rather like the awful experience from 1972 to 1988 when they lost four out of five presidential elections. I wonder how long it will take them to get the message.

We Have Nationalism Because Humans are Tribal

Today Jonah Goldberg does a piece where he can inveigh both against the left's idea of nationalism and the Trump idea of populist nationalism. Jonah dislikes "nationalism and populism of the Left and the Right, regardless of the brand names they hide behind."

Jonah takes off against liberal Elizabeth Bruenig, who argues against nationalism thusly:

America simply isn’t a nation-state; it was neither conceived to nor can it foster the “organic” nationalism Trumpish conservatives now seem fixated on. Nations are made up of people who claim to share certain unchosen characteristics: language, ethnicity, historic religion, mystical destiny. In America, not only is it the factual case that we do not share such things, but it’s rather the point of our existence as a country — or was, once. Liberal democracies prize freedom and self-determination, so it follows that Americans are made by beliefs and choices, not by blood and tongue. American nationalism can shatter lives and breed violence, but it won’t ever amount to the creation of an American nation. Such a thing does not exist. 

But nationalism has been central to liberalism, according to Jonah, from the original Progressives and their "moral equivalent of war" to the nationalism of the New Deal to President Obama gushing over "Seal Team Six as a model for domestic life."

If we have to have some form of nationalism, Jonah would prefer the "benign nationalism" offered by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.

I would argue, of course, that all these folks are wet behind the ears. Here's how.

Humans are tribal social animals. The reason for this is simple. In the hunter-gatherer era, that only began to end when agriculture was invented in China and/or the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, humans were organized in small tribes that defended their patch of land from all the world. So the humans had the attitude of Seal Team Six, defending the tribe's land to the death. We may say that tribalism is deeply encoded in our DNA.

OK, so then came the agricultural era, gradually displacing hunter-gatherer tribes over the last 5,000 years. There is less need for tribalism, except in the fierce marcher lords that defended the frontiers of agricultural empire. Everyone else could just be a nice subordinate peasant. In Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays we see the last hurrah of England's marcher lords as Harry Percy, marcher lord on the border between England and Scotland, and Worcester, marcher lord on the border between England and Wales, made war against the King of England. The larger political unit of England may make a lot of sense, but your marcher lord still had a lot of tribal leader left in him, and he made a lot of trouble.

The nation state is a solution to the marcher lord problem. In England the nation state began with Henrty VIII disarming the nobles and creating a national army. So now marcher lords were no longer leaders of potential rebel armies; the king was the only guy with an army. Instead the nobles began to "improve" their lands and make more money so they could afford to cut a dash in the court of the capital city.

But if you are not going to have tribes any more, but instead a nation, how do you inspire tribal humans to feel like they belong to the nation state instead of their ancient local loyalties?

The answer is that you create a national myth. This is an ancient practice. In the olden times, described by Mircea Eliade in books like Rites and Symbols of Initiation, you had a tribal history compressed into a sacred story of the founding of the tribe, by founders that were really gods. And the sacred story was taught to the youngsters at puberty in rites of initiation.

In Britain they have a national myth about Britain being an indivisible nation going all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. In France they believe in Charlemagne as the founder. In Germany they believe in Karl der Große, which is German for Charlemagne. The Germans also had the cult of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which creates a history of the Germans as the true heirs of both the Roman Empire and Christianity, which is something of a joke since the Germans were never part of the Roman Empire. All these nationalisms are really remarkably ingenious efforts to create a tribal myth, a cult of the nation, using the concepts and tropes used back in tribal times when humans really were organized into real tribes where everyone was related by blood. In all these myths, the notion is developed that we are all descended from the same stock going back into the mists of time. Even though we aren't.

Now let us invoke the shade of Enoch Powell, the notorious British politician that first raised the spectre of immigration in his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968. He was basically saying that immigration would dissolve the notion of Britain as a nation state with its special sacred history, and that could lead to civil war. Although Powell was branded as a racist and a bigot, he was in fact a classical scholar that rose from private to brigadier in World War II working in military intelligence, and then became a Conservative member of Parliament.

Powell also said that the European Union could never work because there was no such thing as a European demos or people that thought of themselves as Europeans.

Actually Powell was not quite right on that. In Europe, the educated elite does think of itself as European. But the average German, or Frenchman, or Brit, does not. The broad mass of the average middle class still identifies with the nation, not the continent. And that is a problem for the European project; it is the reason why Brexit and Marine Le Pen and the AfD exist.

The bottom line is this. Every government, when it wants to embark on some national project, will find that it has to appeal to some sort of collective identity, some sort of notion of the tribe writ large. That is why Jonah Goldberg got to write a critique of our Progressive rulers in Liberal Fascism as semi-fascists wrapping themselves in the American flag when they wanted to unite the nation in World War I and the New Deal and then World War II.

But the leaders do that not because they are fascist villains, but because they have to find a way to unite the people when they want to get them to consent to some great collective project. Thus  the lefty and anti-war Barack Obama discovers the virtues of Seal Team Six, the special forces warriors that winkled out Osama bin Laden.

Now, the ruling class in the US, like the ruling class in Europe, has felt itself in the last few decades rising above the surly bonds of nation into the ethereal heights of globalism. And most educated people go along with this. Thus my liberal neighborhood is plastered with #WeBelieve and Hate has No Home Here yardsigns. That takes care of the educated elite. For the lower orders, the ruling class practices identity politics, which I call neo-tribalism. In other words, the ruling class must use some way of uniting its supporters into a collective identity. If it doesn't want to invoke the notion of the nation, then it has to use something else, and that something else has turned out  to be racist and sexist and gender-non-conforming identity politics, with all opponents branded as racists, sexists, and homophobes. Go figure!

The problem with the ruling class's globalism combined with race and gender identity politics is that it leaves out the ordinary broad middle class, people that are neither educated nor immigrant nor race-identifying. You can see that this could create a bit of a problem if, say, the ruling class wanted to lead the nation to war against some existential threat. What gods to you invoke? What ancestors? What national unity?

Into this hole have stepped Donald Trump and the neo-nationalists in Europe, to the consternation of the globalist educated ruling class and the identity politicians representing racial or gender subcultures. Who are these gate-crashers? Are they fascists, or ethno-nationalists, or populists, or white nationalists, or what?

The answer is: none of these. They are politicians, opportunists. They are trying to create a new approach to the virtual community of the nation. We humans do not live in small enough communities where we can be unified by appeals to actual tribal and kindred loyalties, so we have to be mobilized and unified by a fancy of belonging, to the national flag, to the idea of the nation as family, to the idea of the American people. Really, to anything that stirs the chords of memory, the instincts of the tribe, in modern people.

Donald Trump in his State of the Union Speech on January 30 was trying to birth a new form of unity, the unity of all the ordinary Americans overcoming their private challenges: the guy with a small manufacturing firm hiring and training a black welder, the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans, the families devastated by criminal immigrant gangs, the couple adopting the child of a drug addict. Do you see the genius of this? The fact is that the great majority of Americans are not educated liberals with their #WeBelieve signs advocating climate change and gay marriage. They are not tribal immigrants that have not yet assimilated into the city culture of the exchange economy. They are ordinary people that just want to wive and thrive, get a good job, find a house they can afford and raise a family. And they want to believe that their way of life is good and worthy. President Trump is trying to create a sense of community in these ordinary people, that they are the real "America" and that Trump is trying to "Make America Great Again" for people like them.

I think that the argument over nationalism, from the proposition nation to benign nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, to the awkward elite combination of globalism and identity politics misses the point.

The point is how to unite modern citified people working in the exchange economy into some fancy of a collective identity that makes them feel they belong, as hunter-gatherers once belonged to their little tribe. Our liberal friends don't like Trump's approach for obvious reasons. If the Trump approach  succeeds it puts their globalist/identity politics model on the scrap heap of history.

The question is: do our liberal friends have a better idea? Watching our Democratic friends sitting on their hands as President Trump made a pedal-to-the-metal appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans, honoring their modest, but sincere, achievements, I would say that they are out of ideas, out of gas, and out of joint.

And then there is Jonah Goldberg, who is comfortably against the nationalism of both left and right, although open to some kind of benign nationalism. OK, Jonah, where is your cunning plan to find a better, nobler way to create some sort of cultural myth that people can believe in and unite around? 'Cos yer cain't beat something with nothing.

SOTU: Trump Celebrates Middle America

I understand the rage and the confusion that our liberal friends are feeling this morning. Last night President Trump gave a State of the Union speech that had absolutely no shout-outs to the liberal agenda. Nothing about protecting gays from Christian bakers; nothing about transgender bathrooms, nothing about the innocence of the Dreamers.

I agree with the liberals: what was advertised as a unifying speech was in fact a clever and cunning attempt to divide the American people.

Let us analyze the speech in the light of my reductive Three Peoples theory. Was there a word for People of the Creative Self, artists and writers and activists? No there was not. Was there a word for People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants and victims? No there was not.

Instead the whole speech from beginning to end was a riotous celebration of the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the laws.

If you are a well-born white liberal living in some urban ideopolis, Trump doesn't care about you. If you are a helpless illegal immigrant brought here as a child, Trump doesn't care about you. But if you are an ordinary middle-class American, with a job and a house and a family, then Trump absolutely loooves you.

Oh, and if you are a legal immigrant, that went through the process step by complicated step, then Trump is speaking to you.

Trump's love was made manifest in the call-outs to the human props in the gallery, the tradition that Ronald Reagan started in the 1980s. Everyone of his props, from the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans to the black parents of two girls killed by MS-13 to the couple that adopted the baby of a drug addict to the North Korean defector with the crutches, everyone of these people were and are ordinary middle-class people doing the right thing, and they were, of course, every color of the rainbow. There were no "activists" and no "victims." And, of course, Trump finished with his memorable celebration of the Capitol itself, which stands under a statue, standing atop the Dome, of Freedom.

Wow. I didn't know that. But now I do.

So what Trump was doing was encouraging more Americans to identify as good ordinary Americans doing the right thing, rather than identify as specials, whether special snowflakes or special activists or special victims, which is what you get night and day from the mainstream media and the Hollywood media.

So no wonder the usual suspects were flummoxed last night, and no wonder Joy Reid complained.

Church ... family ... police ... military ... the national anthem ... Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for. #SOTU

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 31, 2018

Well, exactly. The whole point of the Sixties and political correctness and identity politics is to marginalize and eventually eliminate the tropes and the culture of the middle-class nation state. The whole point of what Donald Trump is trying to do is re-valorize the middle-class culture that most non-elite Americans identify with and that "we" want lower-class Americans to aspire to.

And let us now mention my Perfect Plan, which is a set of marching orders for the Ruling Class, people like Joy Reid.

Part One of the Perfect Plan is for Joy Reid to help and encourage the lower-class to rise up into the middle class, on the notion that to live a happy life in a nation state of the exchange economy you need to get with the bourgeois culture or you are going to be miserable. In fact, of course, Joy Reid does the opposite.

Part Two of the Perfect Plan is for elitists like Joy Reid to act with compassion and understanding towards the ordinary middle class, like the folks that the president called out in the gallery. In fact, of course, Joy Reid sneers at people like that as evidenced by her tweet.

See what I mean? President Trump's speech was completely aligned with my Perfect Plan. Strategically he is trying to put the Joy Reids of the world on the back foot, by encouraging all Americans to identify as patriotic responsible middle class Americans, the People of the Responsible Self, and by giving to ordinary middle-class American identity and dignity and respect that the liberal elite is determined to deny it.

The liberal ruling-class strategy is designed to marginalize and demean the ordinary middle class, by celebrating the upper-class creative culture of artists, writers, and activists, and by celebrating the world of the victims. This was brought out by the Democratic response to the SOTU by Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA), who talked about marching and protesting in support of the Dreamers. And about transgenders.

Yeah. Marchin' and protestin'. Not a word about that in Trump's speech.

Here's my bottom line. Trump is obviously making a mega-play for the ordinary middle class, the people we saw in the gallery in the House chamber. Will he succeed in bringing the ordinary middle class, the "working families" that the Democrats talk about, into the Republican tent?

The answer is: We Don't Know. That's why we have elections.

The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice

I've been quietly minding my business developing my ideas of the modern Double Revolution, in physics and in the market economy, and the Great Reaction, in the left's return to the old world, pre-revolution, in reaction to the unbearable force of the Double Revolution.

But this morning I happened on a piece by David Gornoski, who reports on his YouTube interview with Jordan B. Peterson. Gornoski raises the issue of sacrifice, specifically the Christian abolition of sacrifice, the culmination of a process that begins in the Old Testament with the substitution of a ram in the place of Isaac in a sacrifice that Abraham makes to God.

In other words, it used to be that humans would sacrifice their most precious possession, the son or the livestock, in order to propitiate the gods. But now God sacrifices his own Son, so we don't have to.

The concept of innocent sacrifice is developed by René Girard in his concept of the scapegoat. The idea is that human communities avoid the descent into the chaos of the war of all against all by picking out an innocent scapegoat, and in sacrificing that innocent scapegoat they end the war of all against all by collectively turning their rage against the scapegoat.

It is this that Christianity attempts to end, but only tentatively, as we can see in the eruptions of witch-hunts down the ages. It is this that the left has returned to in its scapegoating first of the bourgeoisie in which the rage of of working class is to be resolved, and in the demonization of racists, sexists, and homophobes to resolve the rage of the traditionally marginalized.

Of course I have been writing about this for years, as in "The Left Returns to Sacrifice" back in 2004. I said:

The lefty twentieth century exhibited a return not just to real sacrifice but human sacrifice, the kind that went out when God told Abraham to sacrifice that ram instead of his first-born son.  Wherever left-wing regimes held sway, whether in a socialism-in-one-country version or in a national-socialist-German-worker version, millions of humans were sacrificed to atone for the sins of the world in the most gruesome manner imaginable.

Then, in March of 2016 I wrote that "The White Working Class is the Designated Scapegoat of the Ruling Elites." Yeah, and that was way before Hillary Clinton had spoken about "deplorables." Here is what I said:

Let us turn to René Girard and his Violence and the Sacred. On his theory humans have learned to end escalating violence between factions by sacrificing a victim, a scapegoat. All of the hate and the rage of a divided community is diverted from hating each other and onto the newly selected victim. Somehow, at the civil rights revolution of the Sixties, the white working class got selected as sacrificial victim. Thus the necessity of Archie Bunker, racist, sexist, and bigot, that Norman Lear wanted to teach us all to hate.

Actually, now I think of it, the scapegoating by the left is a tactic to avoid internal violence between factions on the left and directing all their rage on an external scapegoat: the white working class, the patriarchy, racists, sexists, homophobes.

Here's a Google Ngram chart to make the point.

Notice that all these lefty insults took off after the civil rights revolution? Hey kids! Surely 75 percent of the problem of racism and sexism would have been solved by the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And yet there was a mere ripple of "racism" before 1965, and almost nothing about "sexism" and the "patriarchy."

How could this be? Well, I don't know. But it all makes sense if you think of the left as a Great Reaction, and a reactionary return to scapegoating and witch-hunts in a movement of neo-sacrifice.

So, as of right now, we can say that the left represents a Great Reaction characterized by the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

Because that is what the sacrifice of the scapegoat is all about, it is the clarification of all social and tribal rivalries into the fascist dictum of "all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." To make that work, to totalize everything into the state, you have to unite the mob against a sacrificial scapegoat.

Notice how Donald Trump is completely against the Great Reaction. Is he a feminist? No. He is for women, he is for men, he is for everyone. Is he a racist? No, he is for the American nation state, to make America Great Again. And he is removing the stake from the heart of the white working class.

It is obvious, in retrospect, to realize that the astonishing Double Revolution of our era, in physics and in the Great Enrichment, should have provoked a Great Reaction in the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

The point is that the exchange economy removes the need for bloodthirsty tribalism, because the means of existence no longer depend of the food-growing land that must be protected against all odds, because the need for a great lord to shelter us from the Vikings no longer applies, because the society that interacts through the exchange economy no longer needs to vent its rage on designated scapegoats.

But it takes a while for everyone to learn the new ways and get with the program.

And that is why I propose my Perfect Plan for the ruling class. First, it should gently teach the workers and peasants how to wive and thrive in the market economy and learn its ways. Second, it should treat the ordinary middle class with compassion and understanding rather than contempt and marginalization.

Yes, What Is Education For?

I guess that my take on education is simple: "bring back child labor." Because after all, nobody is going to be sending the kiddies down the mine or tending textile machines any more. Hell no. We got adults for that.

So just what is child education for?

In The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money economics professor Bryan Caplan says that all education does it provide a signaling function. It tells an employer that here is a person that follows instructions long enough to actually graduate.

There's a good interview with Reason editor Nick Gillespie here.

What's to be done? Here's what the blurb says:

The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers.

 Hmm. The first one will never fly because the one thing that government cannot do is cut spending. See Venezuela.

The second one will probably be useless because what does a government bureaucracy know or care about what practical skills to teach kids? Almost certainly the schools will end up teaching skills that will end up being no use in five years to job applicants. Schools are incredibly conservative. I learned Latin when I was a kid, and actually quite enjoyed it, although I never got to e.g., reading Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. The reason that Latin was still in the curriculum in the mid-20th century was that way back, at the time of Erasmus, pretty well all educated writing was done in Latin. The Bible was in Latin. Then came Luther in 1522-34 translating the Bible into a fairly colloquial German. And the King James Bible in 1611 translating the Bible into English. Newton wrote his laws of motion in 1687 in Latin: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. But then scientists started writing papers in their native languages. David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature was published in 1740 in English.

But 300 years later private schools in England were still teaching Latin. Go figure.

Meanwhile there is the home-schooling movement. I read this movement as a typical movement of women getting together to educate their kids in common. In other words, some of home-schooling is kids working at home on basic literacy and numeracy. But another part of it is mothers getting together to provide enrichment for their kids and their friends' kids.

So my Education Plan is this:

• Bring back child labor. The reason for child labor laws is to protect adults from low-wage competition. Most kids should quit school at 12-13  and go to work.
• Force employers to subsidize skills education for their employees. This would be courses for which employees could quickly get certification in various skills.
• Allow inner-city schools to continue as dysfunctional hell-holes where the purpose of the school is to provide jobs-for-life for the employees. Until it becomes such a national scandal that Something Must Be Done.
• Create a cultural movement so that all Good Little Girl mothers will be afraid that if they don't home-school and stay home with their kids they are Bad Mothers, and that their friends will be saying nasty things about them.

Modern education started partly with the ruling class wanting to indoctrinate the kids, and partly from the workers wanting free education for their kids to learn their letters and numbers. Naturally, the whole thing just growed, so that now the only thing the schools do well is indoctrinating kids in ruling class ideology.

Way back then, say in the early to mid 19th century, this approach had a point. But now most people are functionally literate and could easily figure out how to get their kids literate. Hey! Liberals wanting to be activists could run literacy schools in the inner city. You don't need a government program to make sure kids are as literate as their parents. There is a program inside kids that wants to grow up and be independent and know everything their parents know.

And if you ask me, the last thing we need these days is to give the ruling class access to our kids and teach our kiddies the vile ruling-class ideology of neo-tribal identity politics and neo-feudal entitlement politics.

I know. You moms are all horrified at the notion of kids going out to work. Well here are a couple of counter-narratives.

First, in 1913, in "Why Children Work" schools inspector Helen Todd found that working children preferred to work rather than go to school. See, the kids reported that their employers treated them much better than the teachers at school. Of course, these were immigrant children that the teachers knew were dumb and stupid.

Second, I read a narrative by a woman years ago that recalled how she loved going to work as a kid. It was a family thing: the whole family walked to work every day. I don't recall the details of what work the kiddies did. But it seems that child labor was not the horror story that the activists like to tell.

Yes, education all comes down to the mothers. And so I have this to say to the world's mothers. 

You send your kids to school because that is what you have been taught to do. By sending your kid to the government school you get a star as a Good Mother. But suppose your kid gets damaged by school? Suppose that it is mostly a waste of time? Suppose your kid gets traumatized by the bullies and the lowlifes at school? Suppose she gets indoctrinated in ruling-class propaganda that will make her into a hopeless snowflake? Suppose she gets out of college with a useless gender studies degree and ends up working as a barista at Starbucks? Well, then I would say that you were not a Good Mother, but what the Jungians call the Terrible Mother, the one found so frequently in Grimm's fairy tales. What then?

Yep. Let's all get a clue and send the kids out to work. They might learn something.

The Real Corruption in FISA-Russiagate

What are the fundamental factors that have led to the folly of Russia-gate and the foolish Special Prosecutor investigation of "Russian Collusion" in the 2016 election?

I'd say it is a combination of Clinton corruption of the Democratic Party, President Obama's weakness, and Hillary Clinton's strategic blindness and incompetence.

Let's work backwards, starting with the decision at Clinton HQ not to concede the election.

It really was very stupid of the Clinton people to raise the Russia collusion narrative. Why? Because it has put the Clinton e-mail issue back in play.

Look, if Hillary Clinton had simply conceded the election and gone home to Chappaquiddick then the Trump administration would never have reopened the Clinton e-mail scandal. It would have left sleeping dogs lie.

There are always hot-heads in the tent of the general telling him to keep up the fight even after the war is lost. But it is the job of a wise general to know when the game is over and tell his hot-heads to cool it. Hillary Clinton didn't do that, because she is a fool that doesn't have a strategic mind.

Instead she did the one thing that could end up causing her real harm. By raising the Russia collusion issue she allowed the whole question of the use of the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign to be opened up and the whole question of the corruption of federal law-enforcement agencies.

So now there is the question of just what the Clinton campaign was trying to do with the Steele Dossier and the FISA spying on the Trump campaign. I suppose that the campaign -- and the Obama administration -- needed to know what the Trump people "had" on them.

Of course they did, because the Clinton operation is a profoundly corrupt operation that has infected the whole Democratic Party. Let us leave aside the petty corruptions of the Clintons when they were back in Arkansas: Whitewater, cattle futures and all. The problem the Clintons had when Bill Clinton stepped down in 2001 was how to keep the Clinton political operation running at full steam so that it could elect Hillary Clinton president in 2008. And then with the failure in 2008, where Hillary was beaten by a political neophyte, the Clinton political operation needed to keep going for another 8 years before the next presidential opportunity. That costs money.

So the Clintons set up a pay-for-play operation with the Clinton Foundation. They needed a fair amount of money to keep all their operatives on-side, and they did that, during the 2010s, using Hillary Clinton's influence as Secretary of State. That meant, among other things, that Hillary Clinton needed a private e-mail system that she could control.

Then we come to the weakness of President Obama. I think that, as the years go by, we will come to understand President Obama as a profoundly weak man. Benghazi, Syrian "red lines," the Iran deal. These are the actions of a man afraid to wade into the messy struggles of power. So he allowed Hillary Clinton to have her e-mail server and compromise national security, big time. Really, how weak can you get?

Do you see how the president's weakness plays out in the whole mess? In 2015 the Clinton e-mail server issue comes out because the private e-mail arrangements were exposed by the House investigation of Benghazi. That ended up putting the FBI in an impossible position. Obama could hardly allow his heir-apparent to get mewed up in a prosecution for violation of classification regulations. So his administration got the FBI to pass on the whole affair. The president got the FBI and the Justice Department tangled up in shenanigans to let Clinton off the hook.

And in an administration characterized by a weak leader at the top you would expect weak and malleable functionaries all the way down. So there was nobody with the cojones to stick up for the law. You would expect to find, in such an organization, a foolish couple like Strzok and Page texting each other as though their indiscretions would never see the light of day.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

They said that Bill Clinton was an extraordinarily good liar. But most of the rest of us are not. That is why it is best, wherever you are, not to lie, not to duck your responsibility, not to engage in corruption. Probably you are not up to the challenge of dealing with the tangled web you create.

I am beginning to think that the corruption of the Clintons, the weakness of Barack Obama, and the stupidity of Hillary Clinton is turning into the perfect storm that is going to create enormous damage to the Democratic Party through the rest of the Trump administration.

The problem for all political parties is that the base always wants to take you into the weeds. And this is certainly true of the Democratic Party with its identity politics and its extreme position on immigration, and its fantasy on climate change and its faith in the wonders of the administrative state. The lesson of the 20th century is that the secret of politics is to occupy the middle, and represent the nation. That is why even the socialists and communists have always practiced "socialism in one country." But our present ruling class believes in anything-but-nationalism, because Hitler. So it keeps running off into the ditch of globalism or sub-national tribalism, until sternly brought back to reality by the election returns.

I'd say that by 2024 we will see the mainstream media bringing us the New Democrats that are as patriotic and pro-American as any damn Republican ever was.

Meanwhile, it's going to be a struggle for the Democrats to clean up the corruption that Clinton and Obama and identity politics have created. That's because every woke activist and Good Little Girl raised to ideological idiocy by our university finishing school system is absolutely blind to the mess that their leaders and teachers have created.

Women's Marches, Cathy Newman, and the Culture of Complaint

This morning my sister sent me a photo of a woman in a woman's march wearing a t-shirt and tights covered with glam shots of Hillary Clinton.

You know what I think? I think that women's marches are all about: what clothes do we wear? Pink pussy hats? Oh no, that is so last year.

And then we get Cathy Newman, the BBC Channel 4 slasher presenter who got all frightened when on-line trolls started reacting to her "So you say that women are less intelligent than men" journalism. Which is to say that even for the pugnacious Cathy Newman, Women Need Protection. They just are not programmed to be reckless about their physical safety.

My gal Sarah Hoyt has a piece out on women's marches, answering the question of why? Why are all these women out marching when we really don't even know what they want? Sarah says that's just the way women are.

You see, just like testosterone boosts your self confidence and your ability to feel good about yourself, female hormones boost your ability to bond, your desire for group cohesion, and your not-perfectly-rational wish to belong.

So you get a group of women, and it’s easy to get them all to march out for no particular reason and with no end in sight.

You’re invited by friends, because “we’re all doing it.”  And you go, because your children or your mom or stuff.  Because your friend told you “we have to do it so the children don’t have to” or because “isn’t your mom homeless.”

And unless you’re rock bottom stupid (some people, male and female, are) you know it doesn’t make a wit of sense.  But your friend is so sure.  And if you ask questions or point out it makes no sense, they’re not going to talk to you again.  There’s going to be a rift, and who are your kids going to play with?

OK, now let's blend this in with my notion that men have a Culture of Insult, and women have a Culture of Complaint.

The male Culture of Insult is a sham fight that is communicating the possibility of something much worse, a real fight, in which the men involved will not be throwing insults but actual blows against each other. This is why, for instance, legislatures have rules that forbid the members to insult each other on the floor of the House. In the House of Commons they have to refer to the "member from Barsetshire" and in the House of Representatives they have to refer to the "gentleman" or "gentle lady." Members are not allowed to refer to each other by name and they are not allowed to insult each other. It is understood that insults can easily become fighting words and that the whole point of legislatures is to conduct civil war by other means, jaw-jaw intstead of war-war, in Churchill's felicitous phrase.

The female Culture of Complaint is a sham fight of a different kind. The threat in a woman's complaint is that down the road there lies the withdrawal of affection or the expulsion from the mean-girls clique. I like to say that the typical complaint is the complaint made to a woman in a one-on-one chat about a third woman not present: "I can't believe she said that."

The problem comes, I believe when we advance the two cultures from the bar-room brawl or the kaffee-klatsch to politics. To men politics is the Culture of Insult writ large; to women politics is the Culture of Complaint writ large.

But there is a problem. Politics is the division of the people in a community into two sides for a sham fight that always threatens to escalate into real civil war. That's because government is force; every Act of a legislature is an act to force some people to pay money to other people, and the people of the receiving end of government force don't like it. Politics is in fact an instantiation of the male Culture of Insult.

But now we have women voters and women live in the Culture of Complaint. When a woman complains about something she expects her best friend or her husband to do something about it. And woe betide the person that pushes back against the complaint. As Sarah Hoyt says:

And if you ask questions or point out it makes no sense, they’re not going to talk to you again.  There’s going to be a rift, and who are your kids going to play with?

But hey girls, government is not the same as your husband that responding to your complaint because he wants a quiet life, and government is not the same as you and your neighborhood friends that accommodate each other to keep the neighborhood content. Government is force; government is men with guns.

Now scientists have noted that the big expansion of government in our era commenced, pretty well, upon women getting the vote. And indeed, beyond government pensions, which certainly issue from the time when government was exclusively a man's thing, the great sweep of modern government is providing things that women want, most notably health care, welfare, and education.

But you see, I think it is one thing for a woman to complain to her husband that he needs to get another job so she and the kids can go to the doctor. It is another thing to force everyone to fund government-run health care.

And in my view most women don't get this. Perhaps this is because of the eternal situation of women. It doesn't matter whether you have a patriarchy or the final glorious destination of the arc of history fully bended towards justice. Women Need Protection. Yes, even mad-dog presenter Cathy Newman. And as soon as a woman has a baby on the ground she needs help. This means that women are eternally subject to whoever provides protection. Despite all the talk about the patriarchy, women expect men to protect them, and that makes women subordinate to men -- or to the government of men with guns.

And what do women do when they want something? They complain. Women don't earn as much as men? Complain. Women aren't getting all the cool tech jobs? Complain.

Now I believe that we should limit the use of government force to situations where force is the only option. I do not think that government should Do Something in response to peoples' complaints.

But how do we get out of the present situation where the ruling class is glad to have women complaining and identity politics victims complaining and poor helpless crony capitalists complaining,  all so that government can force the rest of us to pay up and hope that the complainer just shut up for a month or two?

As the song "The Panic is On" goes,

How could he?
What is the reason?
I don't know.

Yes, it's a very sad situation about a woman whose lover has left her. And a really great song.

I don't know how we solve the problem of women's marches, Cathy Newman's need for protection from internet trolls, and most of all the escalation of the women's Culture of Complaint into ruling class ideology.

The only thing to do is to believe in Jung's "collective unconscious" and hope that One Fine Day a political ground-swell of deplorables will arise out of the bowels of the Earth and solve all our problems.