What Price Force, Anyway

I have found myself in recent months wanting to have a conversation with the liberal that goes something like this:

"We need single-payer health care."

"So you believe that problems are best solved by force."

"Whaddya mean, racist? I just believe in health justice."

"Justice based on force?

"Look, I just believe that everyone has a right to decent health care."

"So do I."

"So let's do it, finally, and get the US into the 21st century."

"So the watchword of the 21st century for you is "force."

And so on.

Hey, I get it. The most delicious feeling in the world, apart from the look in the smiling eyes of the woman that loves you, is Genghis Khan's hurrah, stolen by Conan the Barbarian: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"

Yeah, like the Khan's sack of Baghdad in 1258. In 1257 Baghdad was perhaps the jewel of the world. But not any more, not evermore:

Iraq in 1258 was very different from present day Iraq. Its agriculture was supported by canal networks thousands of years old. Baghdad was one of the most brilliant intellectual centers in the world. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was a psychological blow from which Islam never recovered. With the sack of Baghdad, the intellectual flowering of Islam was snuffed out. Imagining the Athens of Pericles and Aristotle obliterated by a nuclear weapon begins to suggest the enormity of the blow. The Mongols filled in the irrigation canals and left Iraq too depopulated to restore them.

Well, I guess the Mongols needed to teach the Abbasid Caliphate a lesson. Or something.

Force, I think, is the axis on which the world turns: to force or not to force. The whole point of social animals is to create a hierarchy and/or a trust network in which force is not needed. This is a good thing, because force is expensive. See Baghdad, sack of. Or Imperial Russia, demolition of by Bolsheviks.

Or there is China. In 1800 the per-capita income of China was about $3 per day in today's dollars. By 1960 it was $0.50 per day, thanks to a century-long Time of Troubles. Hey, it looks like humans really do not do well when order breaks down and a general era of rape and plunder ensues.

So why is there so much force in human affairs? I'd say the answer is obvious. Used to be that the name of the game was having your own patch of food-growing land, and defending it against all comers. The world of agriculture seems to be something of a zero-sum game. Either you and yours have the food-growing land or you give it up to someone else.

But now things are different. That is because territory and food-growing are not very important. What matters is the ingenuity between peoples' ears and the use to which that ingenuity is put, backed up by the stored energy in "fossil" fuels and the like.

But we humans are still  programmed to believe that the world is a zero-sum game, where you either get it or you lose it.

So why don't we all just get along?

The interesting thing is the bifurcation in world-views on this.  On  the one hand the left believes that War is Not The Answer and that nations should disarm. But the left also believes that cultural and political war within the bounds of the state is the meaning of life, and there is nothing better than firing racist scum and hearing the lamentation of their women on Twitter. Our lefty friends find it not to be endured that some people are sitting on unearned income and wealth and need to be forcibly separated from that wealth in order to sustain the lives of those traditionally marginalized and oppressed.

On the other hand the "right" believes that the market economy basically removes the need for a local civil war. Hey, real per-capita income has increased by 30 times in the last 200 years. Who needs force when the market is floating everyone's boats into the stratosphere?  But in the international arena righties believe there is a need to keep bad actors under control with a muscular foreign policy and gunboats.

So everyone still believes in force. They just disagree about when force is appropriate.

But here is something I worry about. It seems clear to me that all living things need to live with a certain amount of stress and challenge. But where is the sweet spot? We know from settled science that the average man can handle about 100 days of military combat before he goes mad. We also know that the scions of rich families and the recipients of government welfare do not do too well in this world.

In other words, too much stress is bad. But so is too little stress.

Now, the most obvious stress for males, down the ages, has been the stress of defending the border. Is defending the border of, e.g., Apple against Chinese knockoffs, enough to keep men at a healthy level of stress, or is a deeper, more existential level of stress appropriate? Is there, in other words, no substitute for physical danger and adventure? I wonder about that.

The most obvious stress for women down the ages has been the physical terrors of the sexual union, the birth process, and the heart-ache of the loss of loved ones. Is a life where a woman can control her fertility, control her matrimonial status, and in which she does not lose one half of her children in the first year of life too easy?

You may laugh, but one of the interesting facets of modern life is that we all deplore the physical privations of life as recent as 200 years ago. We regard it as monstrous and unjust that humans should be subject to life-threatening stress.

But what happens to humans when we are released from the life-threatening stress of the ages?

The answer from history is: don't worry pal. Civilizations grow old and die, and that is the way of the world, whether we are talking about the Rape of Baghdad in 1258 or the Rape of North America in 1600-1900, or the Rape of Nanking in 1937, or the Rape of Weinstein in recent  years.

Of course nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our present civilization is different! Next stop, Mars.

And maybe blockchain technology will so enforce trust that no-one will be able to "defect" in the old way by cheating people.

But if there is one thing we have learned in the late, great revolution in physics, it is that everything is contingent, and even the lowliest quark doesn't know what it is going to do until its probability function collapses and an event happens.

Of course, all our modern political institutions were imagined back in the Newtonian era of deterministic billiard balls, and didn't imagine the radical  uncertainty at the micro level we now take for granted.

So I guess we don't have a clue what is going to happen next, whether the lion will lie down with the lamb or eat it. And who is the lion and who the lamb.

Put it this way. In domestic life our liberal friends seem to think that nothing short of a totalitarian war on racists, sexists, and homophobes will save us from fascism. But what would be the point of that, lefties? Will it really bend the arc of history towards justice, or just twist it into a pretzel?

In global life we seem to be drifting into a War of the Hegemons between the US and a resurgent China. I see what is going on. China wants  to the the next USA. But suppose the Chinese are missing the point and are setting themselves up for ruin, because the world has changed from 1945. How would we know?

Remember: Reigns of Terror Mean That the Revolution Isn't Working

Everyone is getting riled up for the summer about the left's intransigence. I suppose it issues from the over-the-top dispatch of Roseanne Barr to Outer Slobbovia for making a racist tweet about President Obama's top aide Valerie Jarrett.

I mean. Does Roseanne Barr really matter that much that the identity police have to be called in?

I joined in the fun by sending off a piece to American Thinker based on John C. Wright's observation that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.

Therefore the real battle is over religion: whose religion gets to dominate the "moral consensus," and the cultural arena, and the political stage?

For liberals, right now, dominating the moral consensus isn't enough. They seem to need to utterly own the moral stage. Deplorables need not apply, and will lose their jobs at best and be sent to reeducation camps at worst for any violation of liberal religious norms.

As frightening as this is, you should know that there is a silver lining to the cloud. It comes from The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. He argues that, in any revolution, when things don't seem to be turning out as the prophesies foretold, it is then that the revolutionaries double down and start a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, labeling the opposition as haters, or de-platforming people they hate.

That is the way to understand our liberal friends in the aftermath of 2016. You see this in the reaction of President Obama as reported by underlings; he worries that he came along too early, before the world was ready for him. Our liberal friends really are dumbfounded by the rise of Trump, as are the globalists in Europe. They all thought that they had the whole thing scoped out as the arc of history bends towards justice, and so they cannot believe the nationalist upsurge in Europe, the Brexit vote, the Trump phenomenon.

Never mind the utter foolishness of believing that they could bring all the world to Europe and still maintain their religious, cultural, and political hegemony at the end of  it. That's not the way the world works, old chum.

For the globalists the decline of the white working class in Europe and here in the US is regrettable, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. And anyway, racism. Sexism. The natural reaction of anyone to a reverse is to double-down. It is almost never to say: wait a minute, maybe we are doing it all wrong. Maybe we need to think about the needs of the people we used to champion back in olden times. Because if you admit that, then the next question is whether our moral framework is all wrong.

Now, in my American Thinker piece, and also in a piece last week, I argue that the left believes in a false religion. The left believes, starting with Marx, that the middle class, represented by the capitalist bourgeoisie, is a new political force that will oppress and exploit the workers just like the feudal lords oppressed and exploited the peasants.

But Marx was wrong. The rising middle class was generous to the workers, and allowed the workers into the political system even though the workers have ended up wrecking the good old middle-class world of the gold standard and limited government, because the workers think like peasants not like responsible middle-class burghers.

What I mean is that the bourgeois middle class was willing to live in comity with the working class even though it meant regressing to a neo-feudal politics and a big government that goes against everything that a sensible responsible person believes.

The left believes that it is called to bend the arc of history towards justice by force, force directed at the middle class as the dominators and exploiters of the working class and the traditionally marginalized. And this is vile, because the whole middle-class ethos is to live and let live. That is  how the market economy works and how it  teaches those that live and work in its voluntary association, and to accept the verdict of the market.

I think that the way to interpret the current populist eruption is that the left's plan isn't working. I like to explain that by my line "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." This is to say that it is easy to identify justice, but much harder to reduce or eliminate it on some people without visiting injustice on other people. And my belief that almost any government action or program inevitably involves creating injustice where none existed before. This is memorialized in the Law of Unintended Consequences, that when you pass a law, you are often surprised by the unintended consequences of your law.

But imagine the situation of the left. If my line is correct, and that the whole thrust of the Marxian war on the bourgeoisie was wrong, because the bourgeoisie then and now is not that interested in power, then the whole leftist project, the whole leftist secular religion, is one enormous error.

Imagine what happens to a person when their religion falls to pieces all around them.

What happens is denial. It cannot be true, can it Barack, that your whole world view, your whole faith in the arc of history, your whole religion is a crock.

You can see what is likely to happen. People absolutely refuse to give up on their religion. Better that a million people die than admit that your whole religion to explain the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is a lie. Bring on the Reign of Terror and Virtue.

So here is my take. I think that liberals have no clue how their mild cultural reign of terror is scaring the wits out of average Americans. Average Americans are being taught every day that any tweet, any word out of place could lose them their job. White privilege? Tell that to the miners in Appalachia that lost their jobs. Toxic masculinity? Tell that to the guy bent double under the weight of child-support payments. Undocumented workers? Tell that to the legal residents and citizens losing their jobs to illegal aliens.

The argument in The Anatomy of Revolution is that reigns of terror cannot last, because humans cannot live in the heightened tension of the terror. Pretty soon they ache for a return to normalcy, to ordinary wiving and thriving and the relaxed discipline of ordinary everyday life. And they usually get it.

So if President Trump can return the US to some sense of normalcy, you will find that the average American will reward him with reelection in 2020. And at some point liberals will have to come to terms with that and nominate a neo-Clinton that pretends to  turns away from the ever-leftward ratchet of the religion of the left.

And then, after getting elected the Clinton or the Obama or the neo-Clinton goes full left and a Republican Congress is the result.

Ain't this a wonderful country?

Whither the Culture War Now?

This week a lot of conservatives are worrying about the culture war, as in, what do we do now? Is "revolution," whatever that means, inevitable?

For David Solway, it is "Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures." If lefties are hounding conservatives out of the public square then we should defund the universities, put the ACLU, SPLC, and Planned Parenthood out of business, teach the corporations which side their bread is buttered, and crack down on Antifa.

For the alt-right it is a resumption of nationalism, cultural and economic, and understanding that "immigration is invasion."

For Jonah Goldberg this week, it is a pox on both your houses. I tell you, the conservative old guard is in a world of hurt.

Sorry, but I don't believe that the Clunking Fist is the answer. So what do we do?

First, let us realize our big mistake. We thought after the Reagan Revolution and its staggering economic boom, and the End of Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the battle was won. Obviously, any rational person would agree that the free market and free peoples were the answer. So let's just be nice, as "in victory, magnanimity."  Wrong!

The point is that there is no such thing as "any rational person" and Reason has nothing to do with the case. We are talking about religion here, which I like to back-hand as the search for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Everyone has a religion, even people that don't admit it.

My belief is that we humans cannot actually know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. If we did, there would be no need for life, or anything.  We would just be self-driving cars on the way to Nirvana, courtesy of Google Maps; just sit back and enjoy the ride: in 100 feet, turn right.

In fact, we do not know the meaning of life, the universe and everything, so we make it up. No, wait. Some charismatic individual has a vision; he makes it up into what we call a "religion," and the rest of us go along for the ride.

Here is a brief history of religion.

In the old days humans knew that the whole world was driven by spirits: in the trees, in animals, in charismatic shamans. The way to get on was to propitiate the spirits with bloody sacrifice: corn maidens, first-born sons, and the like, as advised by the shaman.

But then, starting in the Axial Age, religion began to change. The spirits started coalescing into a monotheistic God, he who had created the world for humans to wive and thrive. The good thing for men was that God had sacrificed his Son, so that earthly fathers didn't have to sacrifice their sons; the good thing for women was that God provided the perfect relationship: love God and he would love you right back. But watch it! God ran a divine justice system, so all your bad behavior would have to be paid for in Hell or Purgatory after you died. However, all along, there were plenty of people that believed in the old spirits, but they didn't write books.

But then, starting about 200 years ago, leading lights determined that God Was Dead. They didn't believe that God created the world; they believed that creative people created the world, with science, philosophy, logic, reason, and activism. We humans made the world, and we can make it better. Artists can paint creative visions, writers can create literary visions, activists can implement political visions, and engineers and scientists can create technological visions. But all along there were still plenty of people that believed in the God of divine justice and love, but nobody who was anybody read them or paid any attention to them. And there were still plenty of people that believed in spirits, but they still weren't writing books.

Now I believe that it is utterly ludicrous to imagine that the religious revolution that began about 200 years ago would be resolved by now. That is just not how things work in the human world. What really happens is a chaos of competing visions of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything offered by charismatic neo-shamans to deal with the existential problem that the world has changed. And how.

This means that every one of us needs to be out there pushing our vision of the world and proselytizing all the world over for all we are worth.

One of these movements is characterized by Skip Marley's "Lions."

We are the lions
We are the chosen
We are the movement
This generation
You better know who we are
Who we are

The idea is that there are the chosen -- call them activists -- and then there are the victims. It is the holy calling of the chosen, the activists, to peacefully protest for the victims and liberate and emancipate them and bend the arc of history towards justice. Sometimes peaceful protest is not quite sufficient to get the job done.

Do you notice a little problem with this magnificent vision? There seems to be something missing. What about all the people in the middle, people who are neither chosen lions or helpless victims, people who are just trying to live their lives in the market economy wiving and thriving without being victims or being protest organizers. What about these folks, that we might call "deplorables?"

You can see this problem in the Manifesto of the First Activists, Marx and Engels. In their narrative myth the binary opposition of feudal lords and feudal peasants will be replaced by neo-feudal capitalists and neo-feudal proletarians. Even though the bourgeoisie has created "massive" and "colossal productive forces" it will all end in "immiseration." Back to lords and peasants.

Notice that wherever the adepts of Marx have gained political power they have in fact reduced society to a binary world of nomenklatura and victims, lords and peasants, through their fascist war on the autonomy of the middle class that realizes Mussolini's vision: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Imagine!

So what do we do about it?

Thank you senator, I'm glad you asked that.

First of all, we have to understand society not as a binary entity of lords and peasants, or Nietzsche's masters and slaves, but of Three Peoples: the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants; the People of the Responsible Self, middle-class deplorables; and the People of the Creative Self, artists, writers, businessmen and activists. It is kinda reductive, but not as reductive as the left's Activists and Victims.

In my Three Peoples theory, there are, necessarily three religions, one for each of the Three Peoples. I discuss this in "What Gods Do the Three Peoples Believe In." But there is a problem. The religion of the People of the Creative Self believes that the People of the Responsible Self should be ground into the dust because otherwise they will grind the victims into the dust: "Religion and the Three Peoples: The Big Problem." This, I argue, is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

What is the solution? Perfectly simple. Just as the religion of the People of the Responsible Self requires its believers to relieve the poor, the People of the Subordinate Self, it is high time that the religion of the People of the Creative Self require its believers to be compassionate to the People of the Responsible Self and build their religion of creativity on the shoulders of the religion of responsibility. So, you Activists of the World:

Stop beating up on the People of the Responsible Self! Reform your creative religion so that it is compassionate to the People of the Responsible Self.

Or, to paraphrase Marx:

It is high time that the People of the Responsible Self should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and shame the Lions and the Activists, the People of the Creative Self, into a tolerance for the Other.

What is needed are thinkers who can inspire millions and bring the mindless adepts of the Activists to a dead stop in real time. What is needed are politicians to get right into the faces of the lefty hypocrites on Twitter. What is needed is for all of us to think as deeply as we know how, and act as courageously as we dare on the perilous border between Order and Chaos, advertising the astonishing order of our free-economy and its free-association culture, and battling the chaos of the Great Reaction, the belief that you can understand the world best as divided into masters and slaves, as in olden times.

You know: I think this could be great fun.

Now Holman Jenkins Says They Are Idiots

Over the last year or so I have been developing the idea that the people that govern us are idiots. I mean by that merely that, after the establishment of a dynasty -- which requires at the very least ruthlessness, and probably genius combined with that gift of the gods, luck -- the sons and adepts of the founders are not so bright. Hey, they don't have to be.

This is not that hard. It stands to reason, for instance, that the American Founders had to be extraordinary men. Start with Washington, the military leader that kept the Revolutionary army in the field for six long years in strategic retreat until the opportunity came to defeat the fever-ridden Brits and their allies at the Battle of Yorktown. Then Madison, the man that wrote most of the Constitution. Hamilton, the guy that helped persuade New York to vote for the Constitution and then founded the US National Debt.

The point is that if these men were not extraordinary then we wouldn't be here today as the last best hope of man on Earth.

But after the founding generation, the need for genius and perseverance eases off. And the great offices of state get to be occupied by men of lesser quality. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just the way the world works. But when the need for great men appears again, then "cometh the hour, cometh the man." We hope.

Only, of course, the men that can't rise to the occasion must first be flushed away, as McClellan was flushed away in favor of Grant.

Now at last I am reading Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. say in the Wall Street Journal that all these deep state actors are idiots. In "Clapper Disinformation Campaign" Jenkins proposes that the Deep State actors we have grown to know and love in their ongoing series "Trump Collusion" -- now in Season 2 on Netflix, or is it Amazon Prime? -- are really not that bright.

Jenkins looks back at the Intelligence Community's actions in 2016: Comey's intervention in the Hillary emails, surveilling low-level Trump nobodies, the reopening of the Clinton email business in the last week of the campaign.

There is a term for how this all looks in retrospect: colossally stupid.

Yeah, really. What in the world did the FBI think it was doing? And the Brennans and the Clappers too? Getting into the middle of an election? Trying to compromise low-level campaign hangers-on? Faking up applications to the FISA Court? What man of weight would get into that kind of shenanigans? Your really big men would regard it as below their dignity to play penny-ante political poker.

What is clear is that the Brennans and the Clappers and the Comeys and the rest of them are pretty good at playing bureaucratic pinochle with leaks and smears and tame journalists. Only that sort of thing is, or should be, beneath the dignity of major bureaucratic nabobs.

It is a conceit of mine that I can tell the good men from the fakes. Bill Clinton: a truly brilliant politician. Hillary Clinton: a prisoner of conventional wisdom and her female rage. Barack Obama: a weak man that compensated by cutting corners. Trump: a man who plays an idiot on TV.

Likewise, I have really tried in conversation to tune my antennas to determine whether my opposite is just reciting conventional wisdom that anyone would possess from a college education and exposure to mainstream media, or whether he has actually formulated an original idea.

To me, everything we know about Trump Russia and the counter-intelligence spying on the Trump campaign reeks of mediocrity: dull mediocre place-servers allowing themselves to be sucked into folly and political malpractice, mostly because they were too weak to tell their superiors to go take a hike. Everything about the Deep Staters reeked of weakness: getting old war-horse Stefan Halper to try and compromise low-level Trump hangers-on; queering the pitch of the Hillary private server investigation.

Back in the day Archibald Cox refused to compromise the Department of Justice to please the Nixon people. Not any more, not in today's Department of Justice and today's Federal Bureau  of Investigation.

The only thing to hope for is the God still looks after drunks, children and the good old US of A, and will help us replace the current weak and feeble Deep Staters with men of firmer mettle.

On the other hand, it is really fortunate that the Obama crowd were such weak and feeble yes-men, and didn't really abuse their powers too much. Otherwise they could have really done some damage to the nation.

Of Course President Trump Lies

One of the excuses our beloved mainstream media offers for their 24-7 negative coverage of President Trump is that they are bound by their oath of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Yes. And the most comfortable people in America? Those would be urban liberals with nice sinecures in government and education and it would be the politicians that represent them.

So why were President Obama's lies nothing to our liberal friends? The wafted-aloft First Black President is probably the most comfortable man in America. Whatever he says or does is accepted without demur by the entire mainstream media and all the faithful readers of The New York Times and faithful listeners of NPR. If there could be one man in America that a media truly devoted to afflicting the comfortable would afflict, then that man would be President Obama.

The truth is, of course, that nobody observes that old chestnut about comfort and affliction, not in families, not in politics, not in culture, and certainly not in war. We comfort our side and we afflict the other side, and that is all about it.

So if President Obama told a fib or two about Obamacare it was all in a good cause to bring affordable healthcare to every American -- and non American -- in the USA. After all, to hold the president to the truth might have imperiled the passage of his landmark health legislation, and that would never do.

As Winston Churchill said: "In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

Since politics is civil war by other means, it makes complete sense that politicians lie all the time to protect the truth, or more exactly, The Narrative. That is why there is also the tag: "you can tell a politician is lying because his lips are moving."

What people hate is not the bodyguard of lies protecting their own truth, but the bodyguard of lies protecting the truth, the Narrative, of the Other Party.

Thus liberal mainstream media figures -- all the way down to the humble makeup-artist on an interview show -- are outraged when a President Trump tells his deplorables what they want to hear at one of his notorious rallies. Of course they are. President Trump is telling his deplorables what they want to hear, and what deplorables want to hear from their president is not what liberal mainstream media figures want to hear. When people hear stuff from a politician that they do not want to hear they usually call it "lies."

The problem of "lies" is particularly acute for liberals right now because for decades they have successfully bullied into silence any politician or cultural figure that dared to dissent from their version of "truth." You know the form: disagree with a liberal and you are a racist, sexist, homophobe.

Until President Trump. The whole point about Donald Trump's campaign and his presidency thus far is that Trump dares to say things that you are not allowed to say. For instance, only yesterday the actress Roseanne Barr was kicked off ABC for making a racist taunt against a public figure, Valerie Jarrett, who was President Obama's consigliere in the White House. And the Disney CEO, Bob Iger, personally phoned Valerie Jarrett to apologize. Hey, tweeted Donald Trump:  When am I getting my phone call from Bob Iger when people on ABC insult me?

No kidding. Right now The Rules say that it is intolerable for a white person to make a racist comment about a black person, because slavery, but it is not intolerable for a black person to make a racist comment about whites. And President Trump just violated The Rules.

Now for me, there is no question that President Trump lies. I would say that one of the biggest of his lies is that he has declared an end to Free Trade in favor of Fair Trade. Yet, if you look at his actions, he has seemed to be raising tariffs on China to bring it to the bargaining table to force China to lower its trade barriers against the US. He talked about building a wall, but has not exactly made wall-building the centerpiece of his administration.

If you are a conservative like me you feel yourself belabored by liberal lies all the time: about racism, about the homeless, about climate change, about gays, about education, about entitlements. To me, liberals are always lying about the facts, and also lying about their political goals. Now, for the first time in decades, liberals are getting to experience what it feels like to hear the opposing party tell its truth to its supporters without worrying too much about offending liberals.

So, for me, it is a glorious thing for President Trump to have the cojones to go up against the liberal narrative and live to tell the tale. And I dare say that I am merely one among the millions that feel that way.

This  is absolutely basic. If you are a political leader you must be able to speak The Narrative to your supporters, to tell them what they want to hear. To the extent that the opposition party intimidates you into silence, so far are they preventing you from committing politics, and so far are they forcing you to retreat in the Battle of Ideas and enforce their Narrative on your supporters.

The reason that Donald Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party is that he seemed to be a candidate that would not cringe before the liberal verbal-assassination squad. That has been the complaint of the conservative and Republican faithful for decades. Our leaders are always trying to make nice with the liberals when the liberals never hesitate to call us racists and sexists.

Until Trump.

And of course liberals are beside themselves that President Trump would counter Bob Iger's apology to Valerie Jarrett with a wise-guy retort: hey, when am I getting my call! Liberals have never experienced this sort of a challenge to their world view in their lifetimes. It is just not part of the way things are supposed to be, if you are a liberal.

No wonder liberals are in a complete conniption fit over President Trump. He is daring to speak truth to liberal power.

Why Aren't Conservatives Any Good at Beautiful Phrases?

How come liberals get all the good lines? "Net Neutrality," which means that Google and Netflix get to ride free on the wires of the internet bandwidth providers? Or "Affordable Care" which means that health care is force fed and rationed through an administrative-state regulatory apparatus? Or "common-sense gun laws" which means that liberals get to make guns illegal?

A friend complained about that to me, and I answered my standard line:  conservatives are not that interested in power. That means, of course that conservatives are not that invested in coming up with catchy slogans to persuade people to vote for us so we can give them more government. We reckon that, by and large, the market economy should be left to itself and that if there is anything wrong it will get worked out in the law courts with judges figuring out how to deal with accidental injustices that emerge from the ceaseless innovation of the market system. It is, you might say, a reactive approach.

But our liberal friends are different. Their very meaning of life, the universe, and everything is bound up in their political faith. And you will notice that religion, down the ages, has been pretty good at the compelling phrase. In fact, given that religion is about finding meaning where meaning may not exist, it stands to reason that good phrase-making, conjuring up an answer to the age-old question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is central to its purpose. Let us state this again. It may be true -- hey, it probably is -- that the universe is a meaningless void with the odd particle or two coalescing into something more. But we humans insist on living as though our lives do have meaning. I reckon this is because the definition of a living entity is something that acts as if it has meaning and purpose. And that goes for your average worm and even your average virus as well. Otherwise what's the point?

You can see here the genius of the notion of the separation of church and state. It may be that the latest evolution of religion is the final truth about Meaning. But maybe not. If the former is true, then let the priests should set forth the final glorious phrases about the glorious and heavenly world promised to us. If the latter is true then it is probably a good idea not to link religion, the map of meaning, to the state, which is the apparatus of force.

It may be, again, that the current manifestation of government is the highest and best that can ever be imagined. But maybe not. If the former is true then let the governors and the judges and the bureaucrats have all the scope for the application of government power that they have in mind. If the latter is true then the power of government leaders and functionaries should be strictly limited so that they do not do too much damage before the world is liberated from their imperfect rule by new improved notions of government.

The same thing applies to the economy.

It may be that the present ideas about the market economy and the framework of commercial law is the highest and best that can ever be imagined. But maybe not. If the former is true then we must hold it solid, and not change it, or suffer it to be changed. If the latter is true then we must adapt our thoughts and actions to the truth that the market economy and its institutions are bound to evolve and change, and the arrangements of the market economy should be allowed to develop as new technologies, new innovations, and new forms of corporate organization appear.

I have, of course, just outlined the justification for the Greater Separation of Powers that I have obtained from Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. He argues that the three forms of social power, the political, the economic, the moral/cultural, should not be combined into a totalitarian single entity, but should be kept separate from one another, and any two of them should be prevented from ganging up on the other one.

You may notice that the whole point of most religion down the ages, and most politics, is that extraordinary power is needed, either military or priestly, in order to prevent the world from descending into Chaos and Disorder or Sin and Death. And certainly the modern political/religious movement we call the left believes that it has found the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything and that this meaning -- that mainly involves liberation and emancipation of traditionally marginalized peoples by political activists acting in accordance with Lefty Writ -- can be instantiated through the agency of political power and political movements.

It is the faith of people like me that the lefty faith has been shown by clear and convincing events -- from the fact of the Soviet Union to the fact of Venezuela -- to be one of the most appalling disasters of human social cooperation. Take China. Back in 1800 the per-capita income in China was about $3 per day in today's dollars. In 1960 it was about $0.50 per person per day when in the US it was north of $50.00 per day. It wasn't until China adopted capitalism in 1978 that its income started heading North from the human disaster of $0.50 per day. And this is why we insist that political and moral/cultural power should be limited and should be separated from each other.

More, we free spirits insist that the lesson of the last two hundred years, called by some the Miracle and by others the Great Enrichment, demonstrates that we cannot set up a rigid framework for anything political, economic, and moral/cultural, because the world is changing all the time, and we humans respond to the world's changes by changing ourselves.

But we humans still come up with beautiful words to symbolize our deepest hopes and yearnings, and would be political and moral/cultural leaders indefatigably coin new phrases to capture a vision of what might be.

If only most of these phrase-makers were not liberals and lefties in thrall to vile superstitions that has visited the most foul injustices and disasters upon the human race.

Newt's Five Scandal Theory of Spygate

Perhaps the biggest need surrounding the Gathering Storm of Obama era scandals, the ones that have coalesced into the Russia Collusion scandal, is to craft them into an overarching narrative.

Why? Because as long as they stay fragmented the guilty will get away free and we will not be able to refer back to something like "SpyGate" and know that every living American will know what we mean.

Dear old Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, has come up with a 5-part explanation for the SpyGate scandals, and that effort is a start. Newt says that there are five reasons for the scandals, as follows:

1. 40 years of Clinton Corruption, starting with the fabled cattle futures.
2. The deep state defense of Clinton, instead of dealing with her manifold crimes and misdemeanors.
3. The campaign to undermine and discredit Donald Trump, particularly in the anti-Republican Department of Justice.
4. Deep state resistance to accountability and transparency.
5. Panic breaking out among people that might "find themselves in danger of criminal charges."

You can see how all these explanations are cascading. Without the Clinton corruption, the deep state would not have been forced to defend the Clintons; and the deep-state defense wouldn't have been possible without the DOJ's anti-Republican bias,  and without anti-Republican bias the folly of DOJ Clinton defense would not have led to hiding the ball, and without Clinton defense the deep state operatives would not be panicking about exposure.

But really, it all issues from the Clinton private e-mail system. Without the Clinton e-mail system the DOJ would not have been put in the position of pressuring the FBI to go easy on Clinton, and I suspect that would have reduced the need to know what the Trump campaign knew about them.

In fact I would go so far  as to propose that illegal use of government surveillance and police powers tends always to issue from some petty illegal government action precipitated by a rules-don't-apply-to-me corrupt leader. Once a government cabal starts down this road it tends to get ensnared in its own illegality, as in the Shakepearean tag "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

Or, as they said in the Watergate era, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

May I make a small request of our noble political elite? Would you please stop your corrupt and vile behavior? Because, as in real war, it is the buck privates, the low-level political operatives that get chewed up in the meat-grinder. So if you are in politics to represent the little people -- and what politician isn't -- then the first thing you should be thinking about is the little guy in your campaign  or your administration that is going to be taking the enemy fire rather than you, the political general well behind the front lines.

But still, while Newt's five-scandal theory is a good idea, I am still drawn to Verdi's demand of his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi. Verdi demanded that Piave stop pouring out so many useless words. He wanted them all to be boiled down into just a few, or even the One Word that he would set to music.

That is the challenge of the Obama-Clinton-Deep-State scandals. They need to be reduced to "one word," the one word that every American will henceforth know and associate with something foul, something unclean, "something rotten in the State of Denmark."

I'd say that the One Word should help symbolize what every ordinary American knows. If he or she had been caught mishandling classified government information, they would now be in jail.