Collusion? Schlemusion, says the Deep State

Rush Limbaugh was more than usually upbeat this morning as he spake through my car radio. Because it looks like the Deep State has got to the point where it is abandoning its Russia Collusion attack on President Trump. He quoted Mara Liasson from one of the weekend shows saying that she didn't think "Russia is a voting issue." And another Deep State creature Josh Dawsey, said it was all too hard for the voters to understand: "it’s a complicated storyline."

In other words, the Deep Staters realize that the Russia Collusion game ain't gonna fly. Apparently they thought that their full court press would demoralize President Trump and cause him to resign.

Really? Like I said a white back: Donald Trump has been in a room with 40-odd bankers that had the power to shut his Trump Organization down and send him back to Queens unless he persuaded them otherwise. Compared to the holy terror of that experience what are a few Deep State bureaucrats and campaign operatives?

But here is the utter stupidity of the Deep Staters. They started this. If they hadn't gone after Trump then we wouldn't be in the position that now we are going to be investigating all the top DOJ and FBI officials of the late Obama administration, and going back to the Clinton emails, and the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One.

Because otherwise, in a spirit of gentlemanly honor, the Trump administration would never have reopened the Clinton email case or even taken any interest in the pay-for-play operations of the Clinton Foundation. OK, scratch that. In a spirit of honor among thieves, the Trump people would have let sleeping dogs lie, and if they didn't the Deep Staters would have kicked up a huge fuss about using government to persecute their opponents. McCarthyism! Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!

And, what makes it worse for the Democrats, this whole DOJ-FBI suborning issue is going to play out for years, as we go through the grinding of the legal gears on the whole thing.

And all along the way, President Trump is going to be tweeting about it. Hey, I wouldn't be surprised if, by October 15, he is the only person to the right of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) whose Twitter account isn't suspended.

I mean. Think about it. President Trump will have the right and the bounden duty to say at every turn: "They weaponized the government against me and my campaign. This is the worst political scandal in American history, and we have to do something about it to save America." And who could disagree?

I put the whole thing down to the notion of revolutionary activism that has moved the left ever since The Communist Manifesto. Things are so bad that only revolutionary violence can cure it. So the rule of law means nothing; so peaceable change of power means nothing. The only thing that matter is Justice! Even if we have to burn the place down to get there.

And this in an era when capitalism has increased the per-capita income of everyone in the West by 30 times.

No, lefties, you are clueless. What matters is to avoid civil war. And the way you do that, as Greek American philosopher George Maroutsos explained to me 40 years ago, is that the only thing that matters in a democracy is that the right-wing governing party allows the left-wing opposition to beat it in the next election and peaceably surrender power to its lefty opponents. And then, eight years later, the lefty party allows the right-wing opposition to win the election and peaceably surrender power to its right-wing opponents.

That is the way you avoid Venezuela. It could be a good idea. Maybe they should try it in Cuba.

That is what really matters, and the big problem right now in America is that at the last two change elections in the US, in 2000 and 2016, where  the left lost to the right, the left has not conceded the election.

This is not just playing with fire, it is playing with nukes.

And the left doesn't have a clue about this, because arc of history.

Powell 50 Years Later: Migration and Invasion

The standard liberal line about racism in housing is that, as soon as a black family shows up on the street, the white people start to head for the exits. Raacism!

But Enoch Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech now enjoying its 50th anniversary, shows how the game really works. He tells the story of a WWII war widow that turned her house into a boarding house as widows have done since time immemorial.

She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

But the widow was not willing to rent rooms out to black immigrants. So her house stayed empty, and she started to experience aggression and hostility from her new neighbors. We do not know her eventual fate. We do know there are now rape gangs in Rotherham and Telford in England, and the authorities are hesitant to act, because racism.

Let us convert this into the US experience. Every wave of immigrants establishes itself in an urban neighborhood that has seen its best days, and is starting to decline. Or maybe the neighborhood is ageing, and all the ambitious young people have already moved out to fancier neighborhoods leaving their ageing parents in the old family home. The immigrant new wave, being as yet unadapted to city life and city skills, uses physical aggression to establish itself, and of course usually has a gang component, as in Irish, Jewish, Italian, black, Mexican, and now Salvadorean gangs. So anyone with half a clue gets the hell out while they still have equity in their homes. The last to leave are widows, because.

Of course, this is the way that wars and migration have always operated, since the dawn of time. I am reading today about the expansion of the Bantu tribes out of West Africa.

When the Bantu first expanded out of west-central Africa several thousand years ago, they had a profound influence on the indigenous rainforest hunter-gatherer populations they encountered … Even today, the overwhelming pattern is that Bantu men mix with pygmy women …

This aligns with my own reading, about hunter-gatherer tribes, in War Before Cilivization. A tribe existed as long as it had men to defend the border; after that the women got distributed into neighboring tribes. Then there were the Vikings sailing up the rivers of Britain 1,000 years ago. They took the food, killed the men, and sold the women and children into slavery in the regional slave market  in Dublin, Ireland. Until 1066 and all that. But the Normans were Vikings!

Today, the black LA suburb of Compton is fast transforming into a Latino community, and the Latino gangs are helping to intimidate the black women householders into getting out of town.

Of course, it's easy for a rich bitch like me to take a lordly view of all this. I left Britland fifty years ago for the greener pastures of the US and Seattle. And what with one thing and another, Seattle has transformed itself from a Boeing and Weyerhauser town to booming Amazon City, via Microsoft. So, if you are already a resident, your boat gets lifted by the rising tide. That makes life easy.

But what about the folks on the wrong side of the curve? Hey, maybe for a season the ruling class makes a fuss about them. Like it did for the working class. Like it did for blacks. For women.

But politics is a moveable feast. Yesterday the working class was worthy and deserving; today it is racist and bigoted and deserves to die. For a hundred years Democrats held the line for the white racist South. Now it agitates for the northern black racists. Tomorrow?

Rule One about life, the universe, race, class, gender, and everything is that the politicians and the culture warriors don't care about you. They only care about your vote. And they only care about your vote if it will help them to win this November.

I like to say that all stories are survivor stories. That's because the stories of the dead die with them. I realize that the story of my own family is also a survivor story. My father's family got out of Russia in 1918. So what would have happened if they had stayed? My mother's family was in Japan up until 1940 and got out to Australia. My own parents married and had their children in India, and then migrated to Britain in 1948 after Indian independence. All this seems unexceptional and anodyne, but only because my family always had the sense, or received sensible advice, or the pure luck to get out while the going was good.

So here am I, in Seattle in 2018, as the murder rate in London, England starts to surge about the murder rate in New York City.

All in all, I think I am the luckiest guy in the world. But other people are not so lucky. And the truth is that the unlucky people just slide below the waves and are never heard from again.

The Problem is not just the Tyranny of Experts

I think all of us except Bill Gates and the World Bank can agree that the post WWII global development shtick has been a mixed blessing. At the very least it has signally failed to raise its beloved beneficiaries out of poverty.

So William Easterly's The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor is a good way to stroll through the efforts throughout the last century to bring less-developed countries into the modern era with the help of experts and development banks and government programs.

Today, anyone can tell that the combination of liberal experts, charitable foundations, international organizations, free money, and local dictators is bound to end it tears every time it is tried.

But Easterly introduces us to a few wrinkles in the story that I did now know. For instance, back in the 1920s a group of Yalies, YMCAers, and the Rockefeller Foundation got together to have a conference about race relations between the US and the Orient in the wake of the US Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924. But the US government didn't want a lot of negative publicity about race so when the Institute for Pacific Relations opened its first conference in Honolulu on June 30, 1925, the US side was committed to lowering the rhetoric on race, not to mention the extraterritorial rights of the white man in Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. that the Chinese wanted to talk about.

So in the end they settled on development. Rather than talk about racism the western elitists would form a condominium with the local power structure and plan technological improvements directed from above and, after World War II, financed by international organizations like the World Bank.

After World War II there was a new reason not to talk about race. The US agreed not to talk about colonialism if the Europeans agreed not to talk about segregation. Everyone could agree on more jobs for experts and more development loans for the Third World. Very civilized.

But since the development plans were executed through the local post-colonial power structure they got hopelessly tangled up in the tribal politics of the former colonies. For instance in Ghana the cocoa planters were mostly from the inland Ashanti tribe while President Nkrumah was from the coastal Akan tribe. Hey kids! How about we fund the development plan with a tax on cocoa growers! Oh by the way, back in the old days:

The Ashanti were among the African kingdoms that sold slaves to the Europeans; the coastal Akan people were among their victims.

So the Ashanti deserved to be taxed into oblivion.

But what about the people? Easterly returns again and again to the "rights of the poor" that the experts and the local dictators blithely ignored as they divvied up the world between them.

Sorry chum. The rights of the poor have nothing to do with the case. That's because in tribal and/or agricultural societies there is no such thing as "the rights of the poor." In a tribe you sit somewhere in the local tribal hierarchy and you are completely defined by that and by traditional ideas of what anyone is owed by the tribe. In agriculture you are the creature of your feudal lord, and enjoy "rights" only in an informal way: you accept the suzerainty of your feudal lord, and he observes when convenient the customary rights such as grazing rights on the so-called "commons" that you have gradually obtained through his inattention.

The problem of "development," of helping the folks that have not yet made the transition from an income of $3 per day to the present US $140 per day, all in today's dollars, it not a problem of expert technique or of rights. It is a question of culture.

Simply put, if you want to wive and thrive in the modern economy you must transform your culture utterly from the normal subordinate culture of the agricultural age and the simple hierarchy of the tribal culture into the responsibility culture of the city. Instead of working to grow food on a patch of land you will work for wages in the market economy. Instead of marrying if you get to inherit someone's land or get some land from the feudal lord, you will need to establish yourself in some job in order to attract the babes. Instead of just following traditional folkways you will need to be able to buy and sell, rent and borrow in the market economy of the city. And you will have to transition from the old rights of membership to the new rights under law.

This is a huge transition, the biggest transition that humans have ever encountered. The marvel is not that billions are still living at $3 per day. The miracle is that, in 200 years, the people of Europe managed to go from $3 to $140 without blowing up and failing utterly. Really, a couple of world wars was a small price to pay.

Now, I have some interest in this. I wrote a book The Road to the Middle Class which argues that if you want to make the transition from country to city in double-quick-time you need to acquire the culture of modern religion, education, mutual aid, and law. If you get propped up by the neo-feudal welfare state you get stuck in limbo and don't really become a "citizen," one who has acquired the culture of the city. Hello African Americans.

My book is brilliant, of course, and you should read it. But the truth is that what most people do when they migrate to the city is to congregate in ethnic ghettos in the city where they can live in the comfort of their own while they learn how to make it in the city. And they gravitate to the neo-tribal politics of the big city political machine with its tasty garnish of criminal gang. Only after a generation or two in the tribal ghetto do people emerge into the great global upper-middle class of the university degree and the life-long career. At which point they are now ready to become tyrannical experts and tell the newbies how to do it.

The welfare state is a prettied-up version of the big-city machine. You may think of it as a friendly takeover of the machine by administrative experts with elite educations and credentials.

Notice that the welfare state is really the global development expert model executed in one country.

But the welfare state is hopeless, because government cannot reform. Government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters. And the funny thing about supporters is that the one thing not to be endured is any reduction in their rewards. I have written a book, An American Manifesto, that proposes a political arrangement to replace the welfare state, based on the notion of Michael Novak, proposed in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, of what I call the Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. But is doesn't have a hope until we the people are lying dazed and helpless on the ground, finally willing to give up our sacred right to Social Security, Medicare, and free education.

Yep. There is no doubt that experts are easily persuaded into tyranny. But that is only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that we humans, all of us, want free stuff rather than do the hard work of adapting to the new facts on the ground. And we are perfectly happy to elect politicians who will empower the IRS to take the money for the free stuff out of the other guy's pocket so we don't have to change. We call it bending the arc of history towards justice.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Is This Peak Activism?

A couple black guys get all riled up because the Starbucks manager called the cops on them: for using the rest room and sitting around without buying anything.

And then, of course, the black guys called BLM on Starbucks.

As conservatives, we think this is all pretty funny, because Starbucks is a lefty place that usually likes to lecture the rest of us on race and gender. Now they are hoist with their own petard. (Hmm. Who knew that was a Hamlet quote?)

Anyway, our fury over St. David's Media-Matters-directed war on conservative media figures is moderated now that Laura Ingraham is getting a bigger audience after the Hogg boycott. And Ace Hardware is going to advertise on Laura's show after all.

(Good show, Ace Hardware. Because home improvement is such a white guy thing. You really don't want to rile up the white guys that are the core of your business.)

And what about the utter confusion of the "activists" at Duke shocked, shocked that the alumni booed them when they peacefully protested the Duke University president's speech.

Do you not realize, Duke University peaceful protesters, that there are millions of deplorables out there absolutely slobbering for the chance to stick it to you insufferable lefty protesters, but because they have jobs and children and all, know that they need the comfortable anonymity of a big gathering in order to safely vent their "hate speech" on you?

I got an email from a reader today, responding to my AT piece asking "Why Don't WE Turn Populist" and start throwing our weight around at peaceful protests? He agreed, and fantasized about 50 million of  us "emailing protests" making life difficult for the ruling class at "county seats, city halls, congressional and senatorial district offices."

The problem is, of course, that we deplorables don't really believe in politics. We are not like the "mob" that knows nothing but to follow some leader into the streets. And we are not like the college-trained "activists" learning activism at their college seminaries the way that an earlier generation learned how to become Christian ministers.

That is understood in my reductive Three Peoples theory. Sure, the People of the Subordinate Self are going to follow some leader, some powerful patron, that promises them a mess of pottage. Sure the People of the Creative Self see the percentage in getting into the leadership side of politics and leading workers and peasants along a glorious arc of history towards justice. But if you are a Person of the Responsible Self then your whole world view is centered around your individual responsibility to attend to the challenges of your own life, to live, as Jordan B. Peterson writes, at the borderland between the comforting known and the terrifying unknown, and bravely explore the unknown and bring it into the known world.

For the People of the Responsible Self it makes no sense to sit there railing against the bosses and corporate greed. Because there is work to do at the office and a family to attend to at home.

For the People of the Responsible Self it makes no sense to organize the people in "peaceful protests" to fight for justice. Long term, it doesn't help subordinate people to herd them into a neo-feudal estate as "little darlings" of the ruling class. They are no more than soldiers in a political army that will be eventually abandoned, sick and wounded, by the side of the route of march.

But I gotta say that the current febrile moment, where the Good Little Girls and Boys from the activism seminaries are protesting anything and everything, has the feeling of Peak Activism. Their problem is that politics has a very narrow bandwidth. As I like to say, there is only enough bandwidth in a political season for about one and a half issues before you overwhelm the public airwaves and confuse the punters. This is a problem for the activists, because the whole point of activism is to transfix the nation, to stop the clocks for a moment as everyone is overwhelmed for a transformative epiphany of political drama. So, how long can you keep it up at Peak Activism before everyone gets jaded and moves on to the next political attraction?

Hey liberals! Don't forget that the issue of the century is supposed to be the once-in-a-thousand-years tragedy of Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016. And the horror of Trump-Russia collusion.

I am afraid for our liberal friends. What happens over the next few months when the DOJ IG reports dribble out and show that the problem was not Trump-Russia collusion but Obama-Clinton conspiracy to spy on the Trump campaign and gussie up a Steele Dossier on Trump dirt with help from the Russians? I am afraid that the IG reports will demolish the liberal determination to #Resist the Trump administration and throw the rascals out at the midterms.

And what will the Activists do then, poor things?

I Bring You the Coolidge-Mellon Show

Back in the day, after President Harding died in office on August 2, 1923, we Yanks got a couple of chaps in government that you don't see nowadays.

There was President Coolidge, weaned on a pickle according to Alice Longworth Roosevelt. What with the new budget law and all, Coolidge set to work with his budget director, Gen. Lord, to cut the federal budget. His notion was to get it down to $3 billion a year, but as you can see, he never got there.

The reason is that as soon as President Coolidge announced, in the summer of 1927, that he was not going to run again, it was Katy bar the door as congress-critters all converged to Spend More Money, particularly on dams and flood relief.

The other chappie in charge of the nation's finances in those days was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and he believed in "scientific taxation." From our point of view, this might be considered to be nothing more than cutting tax rates, particularly high surtax rates on high incomes. So, with President Coolidge helping, particularly on the spending front, cut is what Mellon did. Here is what happened.

You can see what happened. Despite the swingeing tax rate cuts, tax revenue actually went up by FY 1927. Imagine that. So what happened to the Deficit? Here is what happened.

Golly. Imagine. Surpluses of up to a billion dollars in an age when federal spending was in the $3 billion to $4 billion range.

Well, it was all over pretty soon. Because all those surpluses infected everyone with itchy palms. For you don't get elected to watch the national debt shrink. You get elected to make the good times roll, baby.

And so the feds got into flood control -- after monstrous floods on the Mississippi -- and good old dam building. Hence the Hoover Dam on the Colorado.

The point is, it doesn't matter what the money is spent on. In our era the mania is to spend money on bullet trains and light rail. Oh, and wonderful wind farms. But spend we must.

I guess the point is that Pharaohs, ever since the days of the pyramids, have just loved spending money on gigantic monuments.

But I rather like the government style of the Mellons and the Coolidges. To just sit there and cut spending and taxes. Whatever the beautiful people say.

A Fish Rots from the Head Down

So now, with the first installment of the DOJ inspector general report, the one on former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, we are reminded that the problem all along was the Hillary Clinton private email problem. Presumably, the word from the top was that the FBI was not to treat her like an ordinary violator of classified information rules. And so the top echelons of the DOJ got twisted up like pretzels in order to avoid doing their jobs and prosecuting her violation of the law. There are all kinds of tags about this: Oh what a tangled web we weave... A fish rots from the head. Honesty is the best policy. They all tell us about the difficulty that humans get into once they start to depart from the straight and narrow.

You can see what is going on here. Chicago Rules.

Government, as St. Augustine understood, is the same as a criminal gang, only with the "addition of impunity," for government is, as we say, "sovereign:" nobody gets to boss it around. So the question for any government is how much it approximates to a real criminal gang, and how much it tries to run itself according to the fantasy we all have of a government of laws, not of men. Chicago, the city that wafted Barack Obama aloft, is about as close as you get to government by criminal gang.

It was obvious, from an early time, that government under President Obama was not going to make much effort to be a government of laws. And why should it? The mainstream media would give it the benefit of the doubt, and everybody knew that the opposition was just a bunch of racist, sexist homophobes.

So whenever there was a scandal, of incompetence or of venality, the Obama guys got a pass. You would have to be a saint not to take advantage of that situation and the truth is that President Obama was not a saint. Sorry about that. Anyway, he knows that he and his are on the right side of history, bending the arc towards justice, so the rules are for other people.

Of course the essence of politics is that, as with armies, it is the rank-and-file that take the bullets, not the generals. And so when the word comes down that Hillary Clinton is not to be prosecuted for gross violations of the laws and regulations on classified information, it is the poor saps like Andrew McCabe that get left with the actual dirty work for which people may go to jail. So we have meetings between the Attorney General Loretta Lynch, McCabe, and others trying to figure out what to do about, e.g., the emails on the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner laptop.

By the way, there seems to me to be a common trait among the Comeys, the McCabes, the Lynches, the Abedins, the Weiners: weaklings. You don't get the feeling they are cut out for noble deeds. Fixers, maybe, and not very good ones.

See, if the Obama guys down the line knew that, as far as the boss was concerned, the law was the law, and they had to go where the evidence led, then we would never have had Hillary Clinton get away with her private email system, the email scandal, the attempt to spy on the Trump campaign, and the need for a whole tissue of lies to make it look like there really was a Trump Russia connection. Because the word would have gone out from the Oval Office: no private emails: here we follow the law.

Oh well. It's obvious now what Obama should have done, but then, Obama is a weakling too.

But the fact of the IG investigation and the rollouts of its reports seems to suggest that there are folk in the Deep State that think the Obama guys crossed a line. Maybe they have some sort of institutional pride; or maybe they have a kind of elite snobbery, that regards the Obama people as not quite out of the top drawer, old chap. Otherwise everyone would just clam up and let the crooks do their thing and avert their eyes.

The larger truth is that the Liberal Hour is reaching its conclusion, the Emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and we are heading into a Time of Troubles. And so the rats are scrambling around biting off each others' tails. Whether or not the Trump Russia thing dissolves into chaos and whether the IG report gets better than Page A21 in The New York Times you can see fin de siècle written all over our liberal friends.

But they will be the last to know. Because a fish rots from the head down, and the rot hasn't reached them yet.

Hey, most of my liberal friends are good people. But they would rather stay plugged into NPR and MSNBC and not know the nasty details. People are like that.

When a Lefty Comes to Visit

We have a friend of Lady Marjorie visiting next week: a really nice guy, but a lefty from way back.

The question is: what is the one thing I should communicate to this guy?

I think that the one thing would be my brilliant notion that the whole of left's world view is found in the justification of the left's revolutionary praxis.

My idea is that every new generation of well-born lefties, starting not later than son-of-a-lawyer Marx and son-of-a-businessman Engels, is looking for a reason, a justification, for revolution.

But how? What can justify bloody revolution, or at least "peaceful protest," accusing visiting conservatives of "hate speech" and condemning them to the seventh hell of racism, sexism, and homophobia?

The answer came to me while reading a center-left history of the 19th century, The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. Polanyi wrote that, once the working class in England had got the vote in the latter decades of the 19th century, they stopped rioting and demonstrating. Now, they understood, with the vote, they were inside the system, and the political system was paying attention to their political agenda. No need to take to the streets.

Do you see the point here? If you are a traditionally marginalized group, but you have the vote, then you don't need to riot in the streets, because politicians are interested in serving your interests to get your vote. In that case, there is no need  for "activism" and "peaceful protest," enacting a proposed revolution. The politicians will take care of everything.

Oh no! What will the activists do then, poor things? The answer is simple. They will find a group that is still outside the system, and do activism and peaceful protest on its behalf. That is what the Frankfurt School realized back in the 1920s, when they recast Marxism as a movement not just to bring about a perfect world for workers, but for women and minorities. Thank goodness! The millennarian movement of the left could continue!

And so it goes. After blacks and women, Latinos. And gays, and transgender, and any gender non-binary. But the problem is that, even with transgenders, the left is getting its agenda through; that's because the average western citizen  is really not  that interested in politics. If someone feels aggrieved, maybe they have a point.

So who  is left, outside the system? The answer is right before our eyes. Illegal immigrants and Muslims! Brilliant!

So that is what all the peaceful protesting and activism is about today.

But you can see that there is a bit of a problem where illegal immigrants are concerned. They take jobs away from the white working class, and lower the wages of everyone. Oh yeah! The working class! Whatever happened to those guys?

Well we know. Liberals did a number on the white working class back in the 1970s by showing, in Archie Bunker, that they were all racist, sexist bigots. Thanks Norman Lear!

The question for us normals and deplorables is: do we just fold like we did for workers, for women, for minorities, for gays, for transgenders. Or do we cry Enough?

That is the great question of our time, and that is what I will try to explore with my lefty visitor.

And the bigger question, after 200 years of attending to the grievances of just about everyone -- except fundamentalist Christians -- is it not time to say that the western world has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it listens, through normal political channels, to the grievances of the people. And the problem is really the activists that think that anything in this world can by solved by political power.

Is it not time to admit that the whole question of "activism" is more about the need for well-born lefties to explore the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- for themselves -- and that the "little darlings" they constantly throw in our faces are doing just fine.

Except that the "little darlings" are not in such great shape these days: white working class dying of despair, women reporting less happiness than back in the 1950s.