What is this "Our," Kemosabe?

Do you ever notice the way our liberal friends talk about "our communities" or "our democracy?" This week, in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, they are talking about "our children."

What is going on here?

I've been wondering about this because I have just had this feeling that our liberal friends are putting something over on us with this "our" stuff. After all, how come they don't talk about "our gunowners?"

I've decided that the "our" shtick has to do with the necessities of liberal politics. In the first place, liberals have a problem with the nation state. So liberals cannot really talk about "US democracy" because that builds up the nation state of the United States of America. Liberal politics is built up around the principle of anything-but the nation state. So using the catchphrase "our democracy" conveniently elides the 800-pound gorilla, that the US is a nation state and it is built upon a cult of the nation and its Anglo-American roots, its revolutionary war and its Constitution.

Similarly, when liberals talk about "our communities" they are eliding the uncomfortable fact of their identity politics, that liberals encourage their supporters to think of themselves as other than Americans, and instead to think of themselves primarily as blacks, Latinos, women, LGBT, etc. -- indeed as any group brought together by activist politics. Thus "our communities" conveniently assembles together all the incompatible identities flying the flag of convenience of identity-group liberalism. Strictly speaking, blacks, Latinos, feminist women and gays have nothing in common. Indeed, given that they all want something out of the administrative state, they are all existentially in competition for the state's resources. But they are held together because of the power of the educated-class liberals that lead them and discipline them.

I think that the "our" designation is also a manifestation of Georg Simmel's "more feminine sensibility" that has changed the western public square in the last century. I think that women like to think in these more inclusive terms, as thinking of all acquaintance as part of "our family" and any disagreement as a scandal, whereas men are more apt to be comfortable with divisions and ongoing disagreements as part of the nature of things.

I think that conservatives and alt-righters should be forthright about celebrating America the nation, and work to de-legitimize the cunning evasions of the "our" concept. We should talk about the US, about American democracy, American law, US patriots, the common heritage of responsibility and contribution to the national idea, and so on. And we should talk about race and gender as all very well in their way, but as dangers that divide us and potentially blind us to our common humanity and our participation in the service culture of the market economy and the great family of the nation state.

See, I think that the war on the nation practiced by our educated class and the global elite generally is utter folly. The nation state is the last best hope of humans, thus far. It has provided a means of identity that is larger and more inclusive that the old identity of tribe and clan. Right now there is no prospect of a larger identity, such as pan-Europeanism or globalism, quite simply because we humans do not all speak the same language. Meanwhile the educated-class support of identity politics threatens to break up the hard-won unity of the nation state, with unimaginable consequences.

Despite the constant war on the nation state you can see that it has a lot of power to inspire and to bring people together. That, after all, is what Make America Great Again is all about.

Rummaging Around at Powells Bookstore

We are down in Portland, Oregon, for a couple of days, and naturally the first order of business is a visit to Powell's City of Books on Burnside Street. It's right down the street from Whole Foods.

It is, of course, a great bookstore, although it didn't have a couple of items on my Amazon Wish List: Simon Leys' Chinese Shadows  and Peter L. Berger's Social Construction of Reality. Well, I can understand Powell's not having the Berger book, since maybe Berger is a bit too right wing for lefty Portland. But the Leys book? Hard to figure.

Here's a couple good things about Powell's. In the Philosophy section they have big dividers announcing, say, books "By Plato" followed by books "On Plato." And that goes for all the prominent philosophers, past, present and future.

Now, in the Psychology section, Jung and Freud are abstracted from the general run of psychology and occupy a special section all on their own, facing an information desk. Jung is on the left and Freud is on the right. Hmm. So what is that all about, given that Jung is probably right of center and Freud left of center. Does that mean that Jung is considered the first among equals in the Powell's universe and Freud second? Or what?

I tell you what I worry about. How long can Powell's survive downtown in Portland? Let's face it; books are not the kind of business that can justify occupying prime downtown real-estate. Let's leave the decline of Borders and Barnes and Noble; those guys have their own problems. A more vital concern is my own favorite HalfPrice Books.  In Seattle HalfPrice is retreating from downtown to the suburban strip mall. It used to have a store right close to downtown Seattle on Capitol Hill. That store closed years ago. HalfPrice used to have a store in the University District. That store closed a year ago. Now I have to drive 20 minutes to get to a HalfPrice book store. It's an outrage!

Still, the internet has been good for the book business. Used to be that a used bookstore was a musty mess of the old and the irrelevant. But now, with an active pricing system for used books from Amazon to Abebooks, every used bookstore knows the price on just about every book imaginable and knows exactly what to feature on its shelves. And it shows.

Well, I got a book by Thomas Kuhn, the "paradigm shift" guy, on his further reflections on his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Remember that his main line was that science was a social endeavor, and that scientists are social beings. Thus science advances as the old generation dies off and can no longer enforce its orthodoxy. The application to climate science is obvious. We have seen, in the Climategate emails, how climate scientists enforce orthodoxy. And we see how funding drives the scientific community, for modern science lives by funding from government, and government funds the agenda that enhances its power.

Today, I think, I am going to go to Powell's and look at its "Activism" section. Yes, in lefty Portland, the culture of activism is alive and well and it has a whole section on How to Do It. I suppose that my interest in Activism is not really the how-to, but the why. What is it that motivates people to launch themselves into the practice of politics as a saving faith?

You know my take on Activism. I think that the rise of the market economy has radically altered the nature of politics, and the warrant for government force. I think that the modern era is founded upon the new and radical reality that the basis of human cooperation must be the surrender to the market and its prices, rather than surrender to the local lord and his power. The Soviet Union and Maoist China did a controlled experiment on this, and proved that political power is a dead hand. And yet we have this great movement, what I call the Great Reaction, with what amounts to a religious faith in the use of political power.

I don't get it. But I certainly do get the importance of Powell's Books, even if it can't forever survive in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Federal Budget: Best of Times or Worst of Times

Today there are a couple of commentaries on the federal budget. One is from Goldman Sachs, worrying that interest cost will eat the budget, and one from Stephen Moore, with the idea that "Obama cut the deficit in half" is crazy.

What's a mother to think?

The simple answer is: Yes.

Yes, the federal budget will dissolve in huge interest costs if nothing is done, and in the worst case if nothing is done we will end in hyperinflation, à la Venezuela.

Yes, it misses the point to say that Obama cut the deficit in half on his watch. Because the federal debt doubled on his watch.

OK. As President Eisenhower said, if you can't solve a problem then make it bigger.

Our big problem is that we spend a trillion dollars a year and more on government pensions. And we spend nearly a trillion and a half dollars a year on health care for old people and the poor.

The first problem is a monstrous injustice. We are saying that the needs of older, retired Americans come first, rather than the needs of young families that are getting the next generation off the ground. On my idea of justice, individual people are responsible for their own retirement savings and they retire when they can afford it. Of course there are going to be people who run out of money through no fault of their own. We, whether we the government or we the charitable or we the children, can take care of that without breaking the national bank. There is an additional benefit to this plan, apart from its justice. And that is that the economy would be borne aloft on a huge flood of savings.

The second problem is also a monstrous injustice. It is nice to provide health care for older people, and it is nice to provide health care for the poor. The trouble is that when you decide to do it with government it means that you do it with administrative bureaucracy. And that means, according to the theory of regulatory capture, that the health system gets run in the interest of the health care providers rather than the interest of health care consumers. It means that the health care system gets mewed up in thickets of government protocols and mandates and credentialization. So the health care system becomes incredibly expensive and learns how to respond to government mandates rather than consumer preferences. I don't know what health care would look like if it was basically driven by consumer demand, i.e. what individual consumers, backed up by catastrophic health insurance, wanted with their individual spending on health care. Maybe someone should write a book or make a movie. But we the government and we the charitable and we the children could still take care of people that couldn't afford health care through no fault of their own.

So my view is that the government should not occupy the commanding heights of pensions and health care. Pensions and health care are important social functions that should be the responsibility of individual people, who would be much the better for taking care of their own instead of having it taken care of, rather badly, by the ruling class. Put it this way: saving for your own retirement builds character.

Regarding the deficit and the debt, the basic facts are that in 2008 the US went through a once-in-a-generation financial crash, where the credit system almost seized up. In such a situation, according to Reinhart and Rogoff in This Time is Different, the national debt usually doubles. That's because the way to get out of a financial crash in which the whole credit system seizes up is for the government, through the central bank, to act as lender of last resort and basically nationalize the credit system for a while. And that is what happened: with TARP (at $700 billion in lending) and with various credit guarantees totaling $20 trillion, the government stabilized the financial system. And it was all in place before Obama was inaugurated in January 2009. I would say that Obama enacted the wrong policies in  2009, with a Keynesian stimulus and then the dead hand of Obamacare. But at least we enjoyed a modest recovery from the Crash. It could have been worse.

Yes, but how do we prevent this sort of thing in the future?

The proximate cause of the Crash of 2008 is that the financial system discovered, rather too late, that the derivatives based upon the mortgage bonds of government housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not sound because the mortgage bonds of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not sound. In the 1990s and 2000s the government mandated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lend, more and more, to sub-prime borrowers. By the time of the crash, over 50 percent  of mortgages financed by Fannie and Freddie were to sub-prime borrowers. This is a problem, according to Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street, published in 1873. The credit system is founded upon two notions. The first notion is that borrowers are able to service their loans. Obviously, sub-prime borrowers are not really able to service their loans if interest rates rise or if they lose their jobs. The second notion is that loans should be properly collateralized so that if the borrower fails to service the loan then the lender can sell the collateral to recover his principal. If people in the market start to question the ability of borrowers to pay their loans and/or question whether loans are properly collateralized then you get a crisis of confidence and the credit system seizes up. So, in 2008 we had borrowers that could not service their loans and we had low-down-payment loans that could not be properly liquidated. Really, we are lucky that the Crash of 2008 was not much worse than it was.

So what, you might ask, should government look like in the best of all possible worlds?

It is simple. The national government should only spend money on defense. In the case of war it should raise taxes and borrow money. After the war it should cut defense spending and reduce the debt. That is all. And its central bank should help finance the war and act as lender of last resort in the case of the once-in-a-generation financial panic. That is all. The government should not use its power to game the credit system with loans to its supporters.

Of course, this is all fantasy. The reality of life on this planet is that we the people are always petitioning the government to pull our chestnuts out of the fire when we get into a little trouble. But that is mere bagatelle compared to the sins of the ruling class. The ruling class is always using the government to fight the war to end all wars, whether fighting the Kaiser, fighting the Nazis, or fighting racism, or fighting global warming.

And it will be ever thus.

The Real Trump Budget

It took me a week, but I finally took a look at the Trump budget on my special federal budget feature on usgovernmentspending.com.

The table below shows budgeted outlays for federal spending for the next six years, starting with the current fiscal year, FY 2018.

Year $ billions	FY 2018 Outlays	FY 2019 Outlays	FY 2020 Outlays	FY 2021 Outlays	FY 2022 Outlays	FY 2023 Outlays
Pensions	1,044.5	1,107.5	1,181.7	1,251.4	1,331.5	1,404.4
Health Care	1,182.4	1,225.3	1,291.6	1,316.4	1,423.8	1,467.8
Education	111.6	112.5	104.5	96.8	98.2	95.9
Defense	867.8	949.9	987.1	995.5	1,022.3	1,030.3
Welfare	354.0	347.9	345.7	351.1	363.0	366.6
Protection	42.3	42.3	44.2	45.3	46.2	47.6
Transportation	94.4	94.0	93.3	92.4	69.4	66.8
General Government	55.2	53.8	53.0	50.9	51.8	50.8
Other Spending	110.6	110.1	48.0	43.9	22.6	15.7
Interest	310.3	363.4	446.6	510.4	567.7	618.5
Total Spending	4,173.0	4,406.7	4,595.9	4,754.1	4,996.5	5,164.6

Do you see what is going on? Pensions, health care are steady as she goes. Yay seniors! Defense shows a minor increase. Education and Welfare show minor decreases. Transportation is going to take a hit. Yay bullet trains to nowhere!

But look at Other Spending. It's going to be reduced by 90 percent! But what is it? Well the big numbers are Mortgage Credit at -$35 billlionish, which I assume is income from Fannie and Freddie the mortgage giants, and an innocuous item called "Adjustment for Budget Control Act Caps (Non-Security)" that goes from zero in FY18 to -$60 billion by FY23. Yeah. I don't have a clue what that is, but I am sure it is some kind of shenanigans.

Hey, but look at Interest. It is going to double from $310 billion in FY18 to $618 in FY23.

But the bottom line is this. Pensions, i.e., Social Security, and Health Care, i.e., Medicare/Medicaid, are the only things that matter, because they amount to over $1 trillion a year and they are going to continue going up.

Everything else, the stuff that people scream about from year to year, is peanuts.

But nobody is proposing to do anything about Social Security and Medicare. Because we baby boomers insist. Grandpa says that he already paid in to Social Security; grandma says they'd better not touch "my" Medicare.

But here is my lament. With the $10 trillion we added to the national debt after the generational financial crash in 2008 we coulda privatized Social Security. Just saying. And you know what that would have done? It would have created trillions in private wealth for ordinary people. Instead of just getting a check from the government they would have their own accounts at Vanguard and Fidelity, and would be passing a lot of that money on to their children.

As the song says: "Ain't it all a blooming shame."

Federal Budget: Well, What Do You Expect?

After updating my usgovernmentspending.com with the new Trump budget, I am looking around me to see what other people think.

Here, for instance, is Donald Lambro complaining about "wasteful spending," such as Scott Pruitt flying first class, and the stupidity of $13 billion to fight opioid addiction and $18 billion for the wall, and the fantasy of imagining that we can cut $250 billion from Medicaid and $200 billion from Medicare.

Then there is Angelo Codevilla complaining that the extra $81 billion for defense isn't going to fix anything, not the waste in Afghanistan or the waste on the F-35 fighter. And we still don't have a decent anti-missile defense.

I'm sure that our Democratic friends are squawking like stuck pigs about little children going hungry in "our communities" and how this means the end of "our democracy."

But here is the big picture on the federal budget spending, with pensions (i.e., Social Security) in red, health care in green, defense in gray, and welfare in yellow. All other spending is at the bottom in blue:



Here's the link to usgovernmentspending.com if you would like to muck around with this chart.

What you see in the chart is that basically nothing has changed, overall, in the last 25 years. Nor is it likely to change. Oh sure, there is a significant cut in defense spending in the 1990s. You see a steady increase in health care, starting in 2000. But the size of federal government spending started at 20 percent of GDP, swelled up to nearly 25 percent of GDP in the Great Recession, and has now declined down to about 20 percent of GDP again. So nothing has changed over the last 25 years.

We are going to continue with Social Security instead of letting Americans plan and save for their own retirement. We are going to continue with Medicare instead of letting Americans decide for themselves how much of a drug cocktail they want to spend their life savings on at the end of life. And we are going to continue the great and glorious Pentagon establishment and its flashy procurements despite the nagging suspicion that it is all going to flush down the toilet if we ever get into a real shooting war.

And everything else in the federal budget is chump change, even the dreaded yellow line of welfare (exclusive of Medicaid, CHIP etc.) at the top of my chart.

Here's what I think about all this. First of all, one fine day the whole federal budget will go south. Maybe it won't happen on our watch, maybe it will. But one thing is certain. If you or I have been relying on that government free stuff to keep coming, we are going to be in a world of hurt when the balloon goes up. For senior citizens like me it means "eating the paint off the walls" as they said after the end of the Soviet Union. And notice how they aren't saying anything about how senior Venezuelans are doing in the current meltdown. I wonder how the old folks are doing there, what with food scarce and health care non-existent?

Then there is the other problem. All these government programs are incredibly rigid and non-responsive. They go on forever without changing, without adapting to changing conditions. Until it's too late. The market system adapts every day to changing conditions, and we each have to adapt too, in our jobs, in our homes, in our families. Yet we have mewed up some of the most important social functions in government programs that cannot be changed.

How should we prepare for the financial challenges of life, from losing a job to educating the kids to saving for retirement? Who knows, because today we pay for most of it through inflexible government programs. And yet it is through meeting the challenges of life that we develop our humanity.

Yes, but what about the people that can't take care of themselves through no fault of their own? Surely we need government programs to take care of them.

But does government really take care of people unable to take care of themselves? Does it really help people to allow them to live for years without work? What about the crazy mass-shooters? What about the white working class dying of despair and opioid addiction? What about the miseries of people that lost their homes in the real-estate crash? What about the teenagers that can't get jobs because of the minimum wage? What about the huge cost of health care, courtesy of government regulation and credentialism? What about the abysmal educational achievements of African American kids after half a century of affirmative action and diversity programs?

See, I think that the point of humans as social animals is that social cooperation is about reducing the incidence of force. It is about people coming together and helping each other without someone saying: do this or else. Right now we have a federal government spending about 20 percent of GDP on the principle of force, because government is force, and state and local spending another 15 percent of GDP. Then we have the regulatory state that regulates everything that moves.

In my view, if you want to understand our problems then you have to start by thinking through what happens to a society when 35 percent of its interaction is under the knout of force, when little children are forced to go to government schools, when workers are forced to send 20 percent of their wages to government, when the relationship between worker and employer is fouled by an incomprehensible tangle of regulation.

Our lefty friends make a big deal about "militarism" and wasteful military spending. They are completely blind to the militarizing of everything else in this so-called "welfare" state.

People look at the federal budget and complain that nothing has changed. Then they look at school shootings and demand that the government "do something." Right now the US Senate is busy voting down all the possible immigration reform bills, so it looks like nothing will happen on that front.

People talk a lot about problems: sexual harassment in the workplace, marginalization of minorities, you name it. And each item on the agenda requires an increment of force.

I think that the problem is the opposite of what the activists say. I think the challenge is to find ways of dismantling the vast edifice of force that we have constructed over the last century, of which the federal budget is Exhibit A. I think the challenge is to implement new paths of social cooperation -- without resorting to the hammer of force.

Can Men and Women Recover Their Lives from Leftism?

The last few months have seen the remarkable emergence of psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, whose bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has found a particular audience in young men. Peterson is, of course, recalling young pajama boys to responsibility from their parents' basements.

The other puzzling phenomenon is the rise of special snowflake girls at our nation's universities during the Obama years. They seem to be insisting on safety: from sexual harassment and from unwelcome ideas. This is not surprising to me. What Women Want is protection. All the rubbish about women being superheroes and rough tough corporate execs is just that: left-wing rubbish. The point is, I think, that a woman cannot go about being a woman unless her safety is provided for.

There is no mystery about this. The central activity of women in the world is the birthing and the raising of children. To do this, a woman needs a quiet, safe place to care for her little ones. That is why, for instance, recent opinion polls report that a clear majority of mothers want to stay home with their kids. No kidding! The fact is that women don't like the free-for-all of the sexual revolution; they don't like ultra competition; they don't like business startups; they don't like the open outcry of the battle of ideas; they don't like being separated from their young children.

This is not to say that women should be forced to stay home, forced to stay out of trouble, forced to live modest lives. Not at all: the essence of freedom is the right to make a complete mess of your life and go against all sensible cultural memes without being put in the stocks. But I think that it is a cruel injustice to teach girls that they ought to be adventurous and career oriented and live life just like a man.

Of course, the cultural force that teaches women to be "independent women" and to live against the wisdom of the ages is the modern phenomenon of the left. I do not know exactly why it is that the left teaches, nay, bullies women to be unwomanly, and men to be unmanly. I suspect it has something to do with the blind leftist hatred of everything bourgeois and middle class.

I suspect that we are approaching a crisis in the cultural authority of the left. This was highlighted for me in a piece on the cultural divide between left and right. It shows that since 1994 the right has moved a little to the right, but the left has moved a lot towards the left.

In my view the movement to the left is getting beyond folly to real social damage, and is creating such emotional stress for individual leftists that it will soon reach a breaking point.

The point of the left has always been the idea of liberation from the iron cage of existence. Why should people have to suffer when the means of their liberation is available? In the Marxist utopia we should be able "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner." In the early 21st century, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exults over the wonders of Obamacare:

"As you hear from these stories, this is a liberation...  This is what our founders had in mind--ever expanding opportunity for people.

"You want to be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever --  an artist, you want to be self-employed, if you want to start a business, you want to change jobs, you no longer are prohibited from doing that because you can’t have access to health care..."

See, I think this has things exactly backward. I think it is a wonderful thing for people to take risks and attempt to live the creative life. But I strongly believe that such risk-takers should do it on their own dime, and not force ordinary people to subsidize or pay for their risk-taking. The fact is that universal healthcare enslaves everyone in a mandatory government program so that some people can be liberated from the responsibility of managing their own risks.

Let us analyze this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. In my theory the People of the Subordinate Self are liberated from exploitation and oppression when they come to learn and practice the virtues of individual responsibility. It is a hard thing to do, and many people prefer to live as virtual serfs, as government program beneficiaries or as government bureaucrats with lifetime tenure, rather than accept the burdens of responsibility. Likewise, in my theory the People of the Responsible Self rise up into a life of creativity from a base of a responsibility. They do not imagine themselves being liberated from responsibility if they decide to become "a photographer or a writer or a musician."

But in the crazy-cakes world of the left the artist or the feminist or the gay is endeavoring to liberate herself from the shackles of responsibility; indeed she is really a victim for being forced by society to observe its bourgeois norms. This kind of thinking is an almost irresistible temptation for someone on the left because the default program of the left is the liberation of helpless victims from exploitation and oppression. It is only a small step from advocating for ex-slaves or victims of the patriarchy to imagining oneself, who so longs to escape the coils of responsibility into the ethereal heights of creative art, to be just as much a victim as the real victims of society.

I think it is best to regard all liberation, except in the strict sense of liberation from actual slavery or serfdom, as a fantasy. We are humans, social animals, members of society, and that means that we should endeavor first of all to contribute to society and build up a credit balance in the bank of cooperation before we draw it down in a risky creative venture. For any well-born would-be creative to regard themselves as a victim, because the government has cut grants to the arts, or because they can't afford health insurance, is laughable.

Indeed, if there is real privilege is these times it is the privilege we create that allows people to do experimental things, in art or in business, at all. In most societies down the ages experimentation was regarded as a very present danger and was stopped in its tracks. Because when an experiment goes wrong it often causes real hardship to others in society.

In my view both the alt-right and the safe-spaces left are experiencing the same thing. Something is wrong, so we must return to the old ways to find safety and reconnect with responsibility.

David Brooks Does Not Get It

Back in the good old days when he worked for the Wall Street Journal in Europe, writes David Brooks, there was nothing but good news. German unification, fall of the Soviet Union, etc. But now we see

the return of ethnic separatism, the rise of authoritarian populism, the retreat of liberal democracy, the elevation of a warrior ethos that reduces politics to friend/enemy, zero-sum conflicts.

Back in the good old days we had the Wall Street Journal celebrating "dynamic entrepreneurs and America’s heroic missions." Now we have FoxNews "with its daily gospel of resentments" and President Trump's "warrior mentality" and "constant race baiting." We have descended into clan warfare.

Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors.

OK. So what is David Brooks missing? He writes as if the agenda of the left doesn't exist; he writes as though conservatives have no warrant for resentment and warriordom. But, enquiring minds want to know, how come conservatives got all mad and warriorly?

So let's tell the story of the last half century in another way. Back in the 1980s we conservatives felt that the Reagan revolution had established the idea that the market system ought to prevail because theory and because practice. Theory said that socialism and the administrative state could not work and the record of the Reagan years proved it in practice. But then came Bill Clinton saying he was a New Democrat but then immediately setting his wife to legislate a total administrative state solution to health care. Then came left-wing race and gender politics -- after the Civil Rights Acts supposedly solved the problem of government discrimination -- that encouraged Americans to think of themselves as clan members rather than Americans. Well, voters taught Clinton a lesson in 1994, and then elected George W. Bush who promised a "compassionate conservatism" that would square the circle between conservatism and liberalism. Wonderful! Everybody would live happily ever after. Except that liberals hated George W. Bush and everything he stood for.

Then came Barack Obama and a determination to fundamentally transform America with good old administrative state solutions to health care in Obamacare and to finance with Dodd-Frank. Plus left-wing race and gender politics and climate change politics.

Conservatives realized that we were chumps. If we behaved like good guys then what Margaret Thatcher called the "ratchet" would continue to inch America to the left, with bigger and bigger government and more powerful regulators and race-and-gender liberalism bullying us and stigmatizing us as racists, sexists, homophobes, and wave upon wave of immigrants to swamp our inheritance of Anglo-American law and democracy. We realized that conservatism wasn't working. We realized we had to fight back.

Now let us make clear what we mean by conservatism and liberalism. Today, conservatism means the nation state as the imaginary clan of all the people living in a nation state, understanding that we are all Americans first, fellow citizens of a city on a hill, the last best hope of mankind on Earth. But today liberalism means a global elite organizing its supporters into sub-national clans: the clan of African Americans, the clan of feminists, the clan of gays. And these clans are represented as helpless victims of the dominant white male hegemony.

Now I would say that the conservative notion is a good one. It builds upon the most successful script for organizing people into a political community, the completely fanciful and confused notion of a national people with a glorious history and language and culture that goes back into the dawn of history. And conservatism holds high the astonishing Great Enrichment of the market system, allowing economic relations to develop into astonishing prosperity without too much bullying and economic repression from the government.

I would also say that the liberal notion is a bad one. It starts with the notion of a global elite of educated, evolved people that know best, and uses identity politics to stir up and exploit the race and gender resentments of its supporters to make war upon the ordinary people that identify with the nation. There is, of course, an evil genius in this strategy that comes down to us straight from Philip of Macedonia and Julius Caesar: divide and conquer.

There is an honorable reason for the global elite/identity politics model. After World War II the global elite decided that it had to step in and excise the cancer that produced the poisonous nationalism of Adolf Hitler. The solution was to combine the nations in supra-national organizations that would be controlled by the global elite. So far so good. But politics didn't just go away. If nationalism and the nation state was to go away, something would need to replace it. And what replaced it was identity politics. Political leaders would not advance the cause of the nation; instead they would cater to the cause of the minority.

In other words, the educated and evolved elite encouraged what David Brooks now calls "clan warriors" because in politics you have to appeal to some common denominator, and if you are not going to play to patriotism, the clan of the nation, then you play to other clan: race or gender or class.

Now, ideally, we humans would all rally to the notion of humanity, the notion of humans as one global clan. But that time is not yet, primarily because of the fact that humans speak different languages. So politicians are going to rally us to some lesser group, to a nation or to a lesser tribe.

In my view the nation is still the best way to rally people into some kind of unity.

So here we were in the election campaign of 2016, and the top two Republican candidates were Ted Cruz, that proposed to rally conservatives against liberals, and Donald Trump, that proposed to rally all Americans to Make America Great Again, with walls and less immigration that would put America First.

Do you see the brilliance of the Trump notion? He does not set American against American. He puts Americans against non-Americans. And he fights for ordinary Americans and celebrates them as he did in his State of the Union speech.

In a way it is encouraging that David Brooks doesn't get this. One assumes that none of his liberal friends get it either.

You see the really dirty secret of what President Trump is doing is that he is speaking to the folks that liberals want to hive off into resentful identity politics silos. He is encouraging them to think of themselves first of all as Americans, as in E Pluribus Unum, in a glorious effort to Make America Great Again. Imagine if he succeeds!

Now, in my view, the global elite agenda is utter folly. Just because you stop rallying people to their nations, it doesn't alter the fact that in politics you always rally the people towards something. Since you cannot rally ordinary people to the idea of global humanity, not yet, you have a choice. You can rally them to the nation or rally them to something smaller.

And when you rally people to something smaller you are likely to break up the nation states of the world into something smaller and meaner. As in a Scotland independent of Britain, or Catalonia independent of Span, or California independent of the US.

But hey, as long as David Brooks does not get it, then Donald Trump gets to celebrate the notion of America with all of us normals while the liberal globalists wander around scratching their heads wondering what went wrong.