Live by the Supreme Court, Die by the Court

President Trump had barely announced his pick for the United States Supreme Court last night before lefty peaceful protesters were protesting at the Supreme Court. They had "STOP XXX" protest signs already printed up for any of the four leading contenders for the nomination.

So. Whichever of the candidates it is, the lefties are going to be out in the streets, protesting.

Do you see the insanity in this? The idea of street protest, as I understand it, is for the unrepresented, the un-listened-to to get the attention of the ruling class. But the people demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court are not those kind of people at all. Indeed, their agenda: abortion, civil rights, gay marriage, are all supported by the ruling class. No need to protest, kids. It is the little people that have a problem with abortion, because of their adherence to traditional Christian teaching. It is the white working class that has a problem with the "civil rights" of affirmative action, diversity and inclusion, because they are its victims. It is the ordinary middle class that wonders what on earth all the fuss is about, pretending that gays and trans are helpless victims rather than scions of the educated class out for a bit of sexual creativity.

The problem is this: if you use the Supreme Court to implement your agenda because you do not want to take the trouble of persuading other Americans to support your agenda, then your opponents can use the Supreme Court to undo your agenda.

See Barack Obama and his "phone and pen" strategy after Democrats lost their majorities in Congress. If you use the administrative state to implement your agenda by executive orders, then your opponents can undo your executive orders as soon as their side wins the presidency, as President Trump's nominees have done. Hey, not such a good tactic!

The wisdom of the Founders was to erect a political system where it was difficult to pass any measure, because you needed to get both Houses of Congress and the President to approve it. But, on the other hand once you had passed a measure it became hard to repeal it, because repeal takes the vote of two Houses of Congress and the President.

So, in the system of the Founders, it is very difficult, say, to pass an abortion law. Maybe thirty years of advocacy and working to form coalitions with other interests. But if you submit to that kind of discipline the end result is worth it. You have a law passed by a majority of the representatives, and you spent all those years working with people to form a broad coalition. And once the law is passed the issue goes to sleep and disappears.

But look what happens when you use elite opinion to fight an ideological battle, and you eventually win your case in the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision with all the liberal justices in lock-step and a wavering conservative added in to make the majority. Why, then you have to stay ideologically mobilized forever, because you never know when a President TrumpHitler will nominate a justice to sweep away your pet issue with the stroke of a pen. And notice this: in the Supreme Court strategy you create enemies rather than friends.

So is it really such a great idea to implement your agenda through the Supreme Court?

So why do liberals do it?

Well, let us start with philosopher William James's "Moral Equivalent of War" article back in 1910. The idea was that since we weren't going to have any wars anymore(!) we needed to elevate the minds and lives of our young people with campaigns to raise their consciousness from the humdrum to the elevated. You can see where this leads: from military campaigns to political campaigns, yea, even to moral campaigns. Thus the scions of the ruling class would not grow up to be great military leaders, but great political leaders, or as we now say: "activists."

Hey, but James had a point. First of all, humans crave meaning in their lives.

The problem with this plan is that it naturally merges the state, which is charged with our physical security, with the church, which is charged with our moral welfare. But, as the Founders determined, a state church was not such a good idea, because it would tend to create a moral monopoly backed by the armed might of the state's monopoly of force.

My feeling is that lefties do not see this, not at all. What matters is the moral imperative of building a truly just society. That is all.

This was brought home to me recently from reading Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe. It is 1917 and all the various political factions are holding tumultuous meetings at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. Then one day Trotsky gets up and announces that the Bolsheviks have seized power. Discussion over. Well, of course. How else would we Bolsheviks build the perfect society to create justice for the workers and peasants?

In other words, most people were trying to work out their differences in the Soviet. But then the Bolsheviks just upped and seized some government offices and said: discussion over. That meant, we now understand, that discussion was over forever, because any return to discussion would surely have meant that the Lenin or the Trotsky or Stalin in power would have had to surrender power to another politician.

By the way, Soviet, or Совет, is a perfectly anodyne Russian word, meaning, as a noun, "council" and, as a verb, to "counsel." But the Bolsheviks turned it into something completely different. That's because, right at the start, they smothered the democratic baby in its cradle, and the normal consultations in meetings of representatives of various interests became rubber stamps that knew to bow the knee to Bolshevik power, or else.

Do you see the problem with the liberal "discussion over" strategy with their rule by Supreme Court? It puts them in the same position as the Russian Bolsheviks. Once you have seized power you have started on the path of no return. You are permanently at ideological war, because you have opted for a policy of force: it is our way, and anyone that opposes us is Hitler. No issue is ever laid to rest, because every issue has been decided by force of ideology.

This, to me, is the explanation of the Democratic effort to derail the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Robert Bork was a known "originalist" who did not believe in deciding cases by discovering a right to privacy in "penumbras" and "emanations" in the Bill of Rights. In plain terms, he did not agree with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. Liberals decided they had to demolish Bork as a candidate; otherwise all their pet Supreme Court decisions would be struck down by a return to the "original" meaning  of the Constitution. But conservatives have responded by teaching all conservative judges never to admit their political and moral opinions against the day that they will be up for confirmation in the US Senate and liable to a Borking.

Again, do you see the problem? Once you have started rule by Supreme Court and force marched your agenda through the court every Supreme Court nomination is a life-and-death matter. That is not the way that politics and representation and constitutions are meant to work.  The idea is to resolve differences and put them to bed so that they cease to become  a source of conflict.

Unless, of course, you believe in keeping moral issues alive forever. Because you like the smell of political gunpowder.

I come back to the science. Someone did a study and found that if you took a bunch of Americans and put them in a room to solve a problem they would do it, and they would do it by giving each person a piece of the solution. In other words, they threw a crumb out to the losers, so they would get something out of the meeting and own a part of the decision.

The whole point of liberal "activism" is that the losers are moral defectives: racists, sexists, homophobes, and they don't even deserve to eat in restaurants in peace.

The problem with that kind of politics is that it gives the moral defectives no alternative but to push back. And that, I think, is the way to understand the Trump phenomenon.

But liberals just don't get it.

I Vote for Amy Coney Barrett

I guess that President Trump will be announcing his Supreme Court pick any moment now. But I want to get my word in first.

I want him to nominate Appeals Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. I realize that she may not be the most conservative candidate in Illyria, but that's OK.

I want Barrett on the Court because I want a conservative women to set the three liberal Mean Girls a-buzzin'.

I want those liberal women judges to be saying to each other "I can't believe she has 7 children." Well, of course, they will, what with Ginsburg (2), Kagan (0), and Sotomayer (0) on the court.

Now, Nietzsche in Zarathustra says that women don't know friendship, only love. I'm not sure about that. But it is certainly true that women don't have buddies. It is certainly true, however, that women are manipulative and vengeful.

So when an Associate Justice Barrett would come on the Court she would face a whispering campaign from the other girls using all the highly developed cultural memes of the high-school clique.

But I believe that Barrett will end up teaching the liberal go-along girls a lesson.

See, it is my belief that women are more inclined than men to go with the program. Girls are good students and they dutifully learn and internalize all that they are taught. Men, in my view, are different. Any man worth his salt always has in the back of his mind, whenever he is in a subordinate student situation, some plan to show the teacher up as an idiot, and to expose everything the teacher is putting out as bullsh*t.

But here's the thing. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Corollary: hell hath no resentment like a woman who wakes up in her 50s and discovers that she has been lied to.

Again, it is my belief that anyone getting the left-liberal stuff in college is being lied to. Socialism is not the wave of the future, it is a Great Reaction back to pre-industrial religion and culture. If you drink the liberal KoolAid you are being taught how not to wive and thrive in the industrial era.

Here, in my view, are the lies that lefties are teaching today's Good Little Girls.

1. Get a career, before marriage. This is all wrong. First of all, the purpose of a career is a male thing, a need to become some sort of a provider so that women will be attracted to you according to the settled science of hypergamy. So, for most women, career is kinda acting. And when women actually get children on the ground they want nothing more than a part-time job that gets them out of the house. Science.
2. Live together before marriage. Trouble is that this is exactly what men like about the Sexual Revolution: get laid without getting hitched. In my view, for a woman to go through her 20s having "relationships" is soul-destroying (and resentment creating).
3. Pro-choice. This is just going with the male excuse: get rid of it, honey. Whether or not abortion is legal, young people need to live believing that any child conceived in their "wild-oats" period gets to live. Otherwise, girls, you are just... well, never mind. As Peterson says, meaning comes before facts, and the meaning of sex is children.
4. The patriarchy. Remember back in the bad old days of the patriarchy when they put women on pedestals as too weak and sensitive to be allowed out in the cold cruel world? So what is the difference with today's "microaggression" and "safe spaces" world advocated by women in the academy? So, just what is so toxic about that "toxic masculinity?"

In other words, everything the left says is a lie, including "and" and "the." Now, I don't know how much of this Any Coney Barrett believes, if any of it. But I am pretty sure, with 7 children under her belt, that she has a bunch of stuff to tell the mind-numbed liberal girl robots on the Court something to teach them a lesson.

And don't forget, all those women know, deep in their hearts even if they can't admit it to themselves, that they have been lied to. Big Time.

Of course, if I had those liberal women on my knee I would certainly be saying at every opportunity: "I can't believe that you believe that!" Here is my Perfect Plan for women.

1. They get to go to school all their lives. They get to audit anything, anywhere, for a modest fee.
2. They get serious about looking for a life partner at about 20, don't go to bed with anyone unless they have practically proposed marriage, get married at 25 and get kids started before 30.
3. They don't send their kids to school, but home-school with the other women in the neighborhood. As for women that send their kids to government child-custodial facility: "I can't believe she did that."
4. As the kids approach double-digits women start thinking about what they want to do after the kids leave home. They start to prepare for a post-kid "career." But most likely this career will involve some sort of community building with the community of women that they have bonded with as they educated their children in common.
5. After the kids grow up women move out into the community to manage and maintain community institutions. Higher status women gravitate more to roles that involve "Lady Bountiful" activity.
6. Then women look after their end-of-life parents and then their end-of-life husbands. In between they do a lot of traveling, including to married daughters and grandchildren.
7. Then they place themselves in the hands of their adult daughters, and make their lives a living hell with their demands and needs until the end of life surrounded with pictures of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
8. Of course, any woman, anywhere can get off this track, and be a doctor, a lawyer, a STEM, a teacher, professor, activist, lesbian, trans, have multiple sex partners, multiple abortions, multiple tattoos, whatever. You Go Girl. But for most of us, getting of the main line ends in tears. Just so everyone knows that.

But what about men? Men, we all know, are expendable. And that is all.

The Downside of Activism -- for Its Advocates

The resignation of Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has thrown our lefty friends into a tizzy. And no wonder.

Their problem is that a change in the Supreme Court puts their whole bookshelf of pro-progressive Supreme Court decisions up for grabs. Abortion! Gay Marriage! Oh no! Fill the streets with rage! Remind the world, as Sen. Diane Feinstein did a while back, that Amy Coney Barrett belongs to a weird cultish Catholic group called People of Praise. Hey Diane! Can you spell anti-Catholic bigotry, kiddo?

I don't suppose a single liberal will get this, but here it is anyway.

It is really not a good strategic idea to implement your agenda through 5-4 Supreme Court decisions. Or regulatory decisions of the administrative state. Because there is no ballast there. There is no drag, no big political effort needed to overturn it. Because another president, another decision.

Take Obama. After the House of Representatives turned Republican in 2010 Obama began "legislating" with a phone and a pen. Great going, Barry! Only now Trump appointees have swept away bushels of administrative decisions with their own phones and pens. Including this week a reversal of all the administrative diversity and inclusion "Dear Colleague" letters in the Obama years that were happily kicking men out of college on the mere accusation of a woman. Because "rape culture."

But when an issue, your issue, is encoded in a Congress-approved law, then the Other Guys have a real problem overturning it.

But just about every liberal in the US believes in activism, using street action and pressure groups to force administrative action on the liberal agenda. Because? Because that is what good little girls are taught in college.

The problem is that when you do that you do not achieve a "deal," in the words of President Trump where all parties get a piece of the action. You surprise the opposition and roll over them. And people on the receiving end don't like that.

So I believe that government shouldn't be able to do regulatory quick fixes, and the Supreme Court shouldn't be able to decide social questions like abortion and gay marriage. That is what we have elections and legislatures for.

Yes but! Justice! And my reply is that, if we are talking about a question of justice then we need to change the hearts and minds of Americans; we need  to debate the issue fairly and squarely, and we need to come to a decision by the elected representatives of the people. Then, and only then, in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "it is final." Let me tell you how this works.

In Washington State, back in the 1980s, the newly energized Religious Right put Initiative 471 on the ballot to ban public funding of abortion. It went down 53-47. Since then, abortion has not really been an issue in Washington State. The people had voted, and that was final.

Here is another idea. We need alternation in office. In other words, at the presidential level, we need a couple of terms of a Democrat in the White House followed by a couple of terms of a Republican. Rinse and repeat. I learned this incandescent truth from a Greek-American, who schooled me about the Greek colonels leaving office in 1974 for a democratic government. What Greece needed, said my friend, was for the newly elected center-right government to get defeated in the next election and surrender power to the lefties. Then what was needed was for the elected center-left government to get defeated in its turn and surrender power to the righties.

Do you see the incandescent importance of this? Every time there is a peaceable transfer of power it defuses, for a while, the deep dark suspicion in the heart of every partisan that the other guys will just kick over the election results and say, you're outta here. The other deep dark suspicion in the heart of every partisan is that when our side loses an election, then we was robbed!

Let me illustrate. Back in Febuary 1950, one Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) began what we now call "McCarthyism" with the accusation that there were Communist spies in the State Department. It turned into the notorious witch hunt for Communists in government about which liberals remind us to this very day. But do you know the key thing to remember? It was that in 1950, in the year of the 1950 midterms, Republicans had lost the presidential election five times in a row. Imagine what Republicans were feeling back then!

Now imagine for a moment, that our liberal friends, here in the midterm year of 2018 two years after losing a presidential election after winning two in a row, had not won a presidential  election since 1992. How do you think they would feel? They would feel that the system was rigged. That the Russians were colluding with the Republicans, that right wing hate groups were everywhere, that the only thing to do was to Resist.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that even if Trump stole the election, even if the Russians were colluding, never mind. The Dems had won two in a row, and now it was time for a change. Because what is more important than election trickery and Russian collusion is that the opposition party gets its turn in power and the governing party goes quietly into opposition. And says "wait until next time."

The trouble with the activism culture is that this profound truth about government gets completely lost and forgotten, because in the activism culture politics becomes all about the Issue and the Peaceful Protest, and the Arc of History, and Justice. The idea that the Other Guys might have a right to exist gets completely lost in the rightness of our cause.

Well, sure. But there is something more important that having your way, and forcing your moral code upon other people, what liberals used to call "legislating morality." It is that we avoid civil war. And that is what elections are all about. Elections are a sham fight, a civil war by other means. Without killing, without rape, without plunder, without Marches Through Georgia. Without a generation of young men sent to their deaths.

You tell me which is more important.

Anyway, my Greek friend persuaded me. Starting in 1992, voting for Clinton, I have always voted for the party that has been out of power for two terms. Thus I voted for Clinton, for Bush, for Obama, and for Trump. And I am utterly convinced it was the right thing to do.

And if Trump wins reelection in 2020 this racist sexist homophobe will hold his nose and vote for the Democrat in 2024. So there.

Dems and Gangs: From KKK to AntiFa

Have you noticed something about our Democratic friends? They seem to be real relaxed about gangs. And that is odd because it is Democratic voters, as in inner cities, that suffer most from gangs. What is going on here?

Let us start with a text from St. Augustine:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made of of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it hold places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.

I think it is worth thinking for a moment about the saint's words. I would say that they could be improved. I would say that the "addition of impunity" is a necessary but not a sufficient part of the definition. I would add the the notion of "the assumption of benevolence" is usual for the leader of a kingdom, for he is normally someone that "cares about people like me." The robber lord revels in his fearsome and evil reputation, but the kindly king wants to be loved by the people he rules and plunders. This is shown in the experience of Mao Zedong in his Red Base in China in the 1930s. He ruled then only by terror. After he became the emperor of China he began to take on the aura of a benevolent demi-god, a Son of Heaven. And when he leveled the country with the Great Leap Forward and purged it with his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was just trying to do the right thing. Right, lefties?

Let us not forget my definition of government:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the people thereof to reward its supporters.

Notice that my definition includes a criminal gang that more-or-less occupies territory and more-or-less taxes the people by its "nice little business you got here, pity if something should happen to it" policy of extracting protection money from people within its territory.

So the point about governments and gangs in that they are in the same business. Now, you may observe that governments very often sign treaties of alliance with other governments. Or they might fight wars with other governments, as the mood takes them.

So it would not be surprising to learn that governments can form alliances with gangs, particularly if we accept my definition of a gang as a government merely lacking "the addition of impunity and the assumption of benevolence." In fact, you might easily come to the conclusion that it is convenient for a government to have a gang hanging around, to do the dirty work with what we now call "deniability" for the kindly king or president. Good cop, bad cop, and all that.

Now let us pass in review the gangs or paramilitary forces with which our Democratic friends have treated over the years. I suppose we should start with Boss Tweed, a Democratic politician of Scots-Irish descent who entered public life in 1848 when he organized Engine Company No.6 in Manhattan. All very harmless, no doubt, just handing out a few bennies to the helpless Irish tumbling off the coffin ships onto the Manhattan docks.

But let it be said that our Democratic friends had a relaxed attitude towards political looting and plundering, right at the start of the modern age.

Then comes the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the South the resistance to the Republican Reconstruction was a Democratic Party thing, and the armed wing of the Democrats -- what in Latin America our lefty friends call "death squads" and on the campus of University of Missouri Professor Melissa Click called "muscle" -- was the Ku Klux Klan. Hey! Call them "peaceful protesters!" They didn't really mean any harm, not unless they had to frighten someone. But the point is that when you are conducting a guerrilla war or an insurrection or a counter-revolution or whatever, you need an armed wing that is not too closely identified with the local notables. But it sure doesn't hurt to have those fearsome gang-landers in the background.

And what about labor unions? Back in the day, labor unions were illegal because they were regarded in common law as "conspiracies in restraint of trade." Which is, of course, what they are. We now permit labor unions because the workers wanted them and the workers have the vote. The power of a labor union is its ability to intimidate the workers at a place of work, to intimidate them not to be "scabs" or strikebreakers. Democrats have had a close relationship with labor unions since the late 19th century, and derive much of their money and organizational muscle from the unions. But really, a labor union is a gang of looters and plunderers. And the interesting thing about a labor union is that it usually gets to be the most motivated in the aftermath of a recession when employers are trying to cut wages in order to adapt to the new market conditions just to stay in business, and the workers are desperate to hang onto their jobs. I would say that this sort of thing is counter-productive, but what do I know.

All through the modern era Democrats have seemed to have a curious relationship with urban criminal gangs. We had Irish gangs, then Jewish gangs, then the Italian mafia. And who can forget the Prohibition era gangs in the 1920s and 1930s? All these gangs seemed to coexist rather comfortably with the Democrats running the big cities? How could this be? I couldn't possibly say.

Now here is an interesting thing: in the Kennedy administration, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy started a war on Organized Crime. How about that? Or was this just the newly respectable Irish beating up on the rather less respectable Eye-talians?

But in the post civil-rights era Democrats seemed to lose interest in fighting gangs. For instance, every big city with a large African American population seems to have a gang problem. And yet the Democratic politicians don't seem to want to "do something" about the problem. Why is this? And now we have Latin gangs and the fearsome MS-13 which, I understand, is a Salvadorean gang.

Today, I understand, the problem of the US border is intimately involved with the problem of gangs. Gangs bring drugs and people over the border; they are intimately intertwined because the people are used to carry drugs. Not only that, but it seems that the drug cartels amount to a de facto government in huge parts of Mexico outside Mexico City. You may have noticed that our Democratic friends want to disband ICE, and open the border. Hello?

Let us assume that the gangs and cartels are predominantly lower-class outfits, doing the dirty work of trafficking in drugs and people that more perfumed people are reluctant to do. But then we come to "activism" and "peaceful protest" which is an activity of the best and brightest. Here there is a whole universe of political activity from environmental groups to race-based activist organizations like Black Lives Matter and La Raza.

What then do you call the Occupy Movement, the Black-bloc, and AntiFa? These groups are obviously condoned by Democrats as "peaceful protesters" and activists whose hearts are in the right place. Unlike the truly peaceful protesters of the Tea Party that were deliberately harassed by the Obama administration acting through the IRS. Imagine the IRS harassing AntiFa!

So how do you make sense of this brief history of Democrats and gangs? I think the simple thing to understand is that Democrats and the left believe in the saving truth of political power, and political power spans the whole spectrum from upper-class politicians from Ivy League schools to the election-day muscle in the inner city, whether we are talking about the Irish carving out a place for themselves in the Gangs of New York period, or the KKK taking back the South from the Yankees, or the gangs that help organize and pacify the inner cities for the pols at City Hall. On this view I think that Occupy and AntiFa are just upper-class conceits, pretty boys and good little girls playing at "activism" while the dirty work is done by others lower down in the activism hierarchy.

See, if you are a middle-class professional, a businessman, or even a white working-class deplorable, you are really not interested in political power, because your life is mostly defined by your work in the market economy, and your family and work relations, and you can live pretty well the life you want by going along with the market and its prices and its trust. So, for you, there really is not point to intimidation and street action. Hey, let's work it out and make a deal. But our lefty friends believe in political power.

Here's the thing, expressed by a couple of folk today. We are going to be at war with Mexico, which is going to fail worse than usual under newly-elected AMLO. That means more gang action. And more Mexicans fleeing the violence to the US. And more violence at the border. What do we do about it? Invasion? Occupation? Exporting democracy that worked so well for Iraq? Special Forces hunting down gangs like ISIS? Yet the Democrats want to open the border and shut down ICE.

Here's the big thing that I think is coming down in the next few years. Do you notice that the law does not apply to Democrats? Hey, Occupy and AntiFa are just mostly peaceful protesters. Illegal aliens are to be protected from federal law enforcement. Hispanics in the Central Valley can strew garbage around, but don't you dare use a plastic straw. The homeless get to camp out in the cities against the law. Labor unions get to muscle workers, and it's OK. Hillary Clinton gets to expose national security secrets with her illegal emailing of classified documents, and hey, she was just careless. Oh, and diversity and inclusion administrators get to administer colleges and corporations according to race and sex in violation of the spirit of our civil rights laws.

I don't think that this lawlessness is going to end well for Democrats. And that is why I have created my maxim to explain it: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice." See, liberals think that justice is something that their political action is going to create, and I think they have it backward. Government doesn't create justice. On the contrary, the primary product of government is injustice. Of course it is, because government is force: you want to work, to sell a product, to drive a car? First you gotta pay the government so it can reward its supporters.

And this injustice machine often needs the help from its informal "muscle," the chaps at the KKK or its modern instantiation AntiFa.

Proud of America on the Fourth of July

I have loved America since the first morning that I woke up in Denver in December 1965 after flying from England to spend Christmas with my parents. This is what I saw, from my parents' apartment at  8th and Clarkson, on that glorious morning as the sun prepared to rise into the gin-clear mile-high sky:

Hey! What is not to like! And pretty soon we were heading West on the 6th Avenue expressway into the mountings. That's the Rocky Mountains to you.

When I went back to Limeyland after my trip I was startled to find out that my fellow Brits were unimpressed. OK, I said to myself: I'm outta here.

Oh, all right. I didn't quite say that, because I hadn't yet learned to talk like a baseball umpire in the movies. But you get the point.

Ever since I have loved America, more and more. And I have often shed a tear for Britain, the land of my childhood.

Now, Reuters does an annual poll about Americans being Proud to be an American, and Reuters is anxious to tell us that, for the first time there is no longer a majority of Americans that are Extremely Proud of America. The poll question is thus:

How proud are you to be an American -- extremely proud, moderately proud, only a little proud, or not at all proud?

The all-time high was in 2003 after 9-11 when a full 70 percent of Americans declared themselves Very Proud. Ever since Very Proud has been going down. Even the existential moment of Barack Obama's first Fourth as president did not provide an uptick.

The folks least proud to be an American are Democrats, college graduates, and liberals. Gosh, I wonder what that is all about? I mean, Only In America can a crass real-estate developer from Queens get to be president! And yet only 23 percent of liberals are now Very Proud to be Americans.

Extreme pride among liberals has dropped nine points in the past year and 28 points since 2013.

What is wrong with these people? Don't they have compassion and respect for the ordinary real-estate stiff?

But really, this is not surprising. All my life I have observed that my liberal friends affect a supercilious skepticism with regard to the glory of America. You might say that among liberal college graduates it is fashionable to be skeptical about America. I mean. Whatabout slavery, racism, toxic masculinity?

And given that liberals run the schools and the university, what else would you expect but that Good Little Girls like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with BAs from Boston University would be non-patriotic Democratic Socialists. What Good Little Girls learn in school is to follow the neo-tribalism of identity politics rather than the more elevated tribe of the nation. Because Hitler.

And really, I can't say that I am particularly proud to be an American. Rather, I feel blessed beyond all measure to be an American, to enjoy the immense fortune of being an American and the residual legatee of chaps like George Washington, the man on a white horse than won the revolutionary war, served two terms as president and then went home; Alexander Hamilton, the "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar" that served as Washington's chief of staff at age 25, wrote a good part of the Federalist Papers and founded the US financial system. And so on.

How could we deserve such political leaders?

To me, the terrifying thing about America is that, again and again, we have gotten just the leaders we needed: Reagan, to clear up the follies of the Johnson and Nixon and Carter years. And now Trump, to clean up the follies of the administrative state in the Obama years.

For my judgement is that we are dealing with a Great Reaction, that wants to return to the past, with the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-piracy of using the government to loot and plunder your fellow men and women. What is so wrong in these hearts and minds that they return to the failures of the past for their inspiration?

In my view we are witnessing an almost titanic struggle in our time between the worship of politics-as-salvation and the emerging culture and economy that rewards people for simply contributing honestly and faithfully to the welfare of all in the market economy.

It is natural and physical that people should look to the past for inspiration, and natural and physical that they should be skeptical of the utter miracle of the last 200 years of the Great Enrichment.

But all of life is an act of faith, to live and grow in the hope that things will work out. And the greatest act of faith has perhaps been the faith of the Founders in their Declaration of Independence that a free people could govern themselves, and did not need to submit to the knout of a supercilious ruling class in order to secure safety.

And that is something to be really proud of.

The Globalists Still Don't Get It

There's a perfect article from Der Spiegel castigating the German interior minister Horst Seehofer of the CSU for holding up Bundeskanzlerin Merkel over immigration. Why, they say, he could wreck the CDU-CSU relationship and let the right-wing populists, the Alternatif für Deutschland, into power. Says Der Spiegel:

The fallout from Sunday night's drama will have consequences that go far beyond the power-sharing agreement. It could have dramatic consequences for Germany's entire political party system. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD) have already sunk to below 20 percent in public opinion polls. And the CDU itself is now headed in the same direction.

The party that has emerged as the primary beneficiary from all this is the Alternative for Germany (AfD). There's no better gift the CDU and CSU could give the right-wing populists than to tear each other apart over refugee policy.

Oh no! Not that!

Notice the basic assumption. The junior  partner in the CDU-CSU coalition should not put the whole thing at risk, not if it means letting the AfD into power. Because fascists.

Or you could put  a different meaning on Seehofer's actions. You could say that unless the CDU-CSU coalition moves to accommodate the German people on immigration and their desire to keep Germany German, then it doesn't matter what Seehofer or Merkel does. The German voters will elect another party that does believe in protecting their homeland and their way of life. On this view you could say that Seehofer is desperately trying to jerk the CDU-CSU coalition in the direction of political survival before the hole in the side completely overwhelms the bilge pumps.

Today I was reading John Derbyshire marvel that there are actually 21 percent of white people in the US that are in favor of open borders. How can they possibly not see that open borders means the end of the US as they know it?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Most people don't read, don't think, don't go beyond the conventional wisdom in their circle. And, I would say, this is particularly true of women, who are much more social than men and much more sensible and sensitive to other peoples' views in their social circle, and much less inclined to express unconventional thoughts.

Actually, I would go further, based on my personal experience. I have been reading and thinking about life, the universe and everything ever since, in 1974, my lefty cousin visited me down in Kent, Washington, and I realized that I needed to have ideas to counter the nonsense I was hearing from her. But I would say that I have only recently begun to have a personal world-view that is not just completely derivative from some other thinker.

OK. Let's suppose that I am a little above-average on IQ, etc., but not astonishingly so. It took me 30-35 years to get to the point where I could really synthesize ideas into my own personal framework. And I read a lot.

So of course 21 percent of white people in America are in favor of open borders. That's what they hear from the media, from their college professors, and from their fellow knowledge workers in corporate and deep-state America. And they know that expressing some idea a bit too far from the norm could cost them.

Why, for instance, would all the nice liberal ladies in my neighborhood be driving Toyota Priuses and Nissan Leafs, and displaying #WeBelieve yard signs? Not because they ever had a thought in their heads, but because they are Good Little Girls that pick up the Zeitgeist and appropriate it as their own.

The only reason that I am different is that I say to myself: what's the point of just parroting what everyone else is saying? Especially if I have the conceit of being some kind of a writer.

So of course the chaps at Der Spiegel still don't get it. Of course the 21 percent of whites in the US don't get it. That is the way of the world. It goes along in the same old way, until one day, it doesn't.

By the way, "Spiegel" is German for mirror. When you hold up a mirror, all you see is yourself.

The Fault, Dear Liberals, is in Your Religion

The conspirator Cassius famously says to Brutus:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

He means that it is not fate that ruins us but our failings.

So here we are with liberals in terminal hysteria about Trump. What gives?

This time, I don't think it is fate, nor even the personal failings of a tired and incompetent ruling class. It is the very ideas, the secular religion taught to all Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls in our schools all across the land.

Poster girl for that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist that won, on June 26, 2018, the Democratic Party nomination for Congress in New York's 14th Congressional District that includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. Alexandria is the daughter of an architect, and grew up mostly in Westchester County. She got her BA at Boston University. So of course she believes in socialism, in activism, and all the rest; if she believed anything else she would be a notable rebel, going against her whole upbringing. And Good Little Girls very seldom do that; it's in the genes.

When you see pictures of "protesters" these days they usually seem to be well-brought-up young women. Why is that? It is because well-brought-up young women all go to college and they all ingest the "activism" culture that is being taught in the various Studies curricula.

As you know, my whole life and every word I write is devoted to explaining and exploding this leftist nursery tale. To paraphrase Marx,

It is high time that [normals] should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of [activism with a return to common sense].

But I get it. I understand who the left are and how they got there.

To begin with, in 1848 when rich kids Marx and Engels wrote their Manifesto it was reasonable to assume that the rising bourgeoisie would become a ruling class like the feudal nobles and thus, instead of the exploitation of peasants by nobles we would now have the exploitation of workers by capitalists.

Then Marx wrote Das Kapital that used classical economics to prove that the whole capitalist experiment would end in "immiseration" as profits were slowly squeezed out of the system and the workers took in in the solar plexus.

Makes sense, doesn't it. Only Marx turned out to be wrong. Dead wrong.

In the first place, it turned out that the bourgeoisie and their top dogs, the capitalists, were not that interested in power. Did the workers want the vote, labor unions, and social insurance? OK. You got it, even though it plays merry hell with the ability to adjust to the dictates of the market. It didn't even take bloody revolution to get it. That happened after, in Russia and China, in the aftermath of defeat in war.

In the second place, the promised "immiseration" did not take place. Oh sure, individual industries rose and fell, and the workers lost their well-paying jobs (and the investors lost their money). But there was always an economic revolution around the corner to rescue the economy and drive it to further heights. Hello fracking.

Yeah, the Great Enrichment, that has increased real per-capita income in places like the US from $3 per day in today's dollars to $150 per day. There has never been anything like it, ever. And certainly not in the old feudal era.

But. The idea of activism, of rich kids turning to revolution, baby, in order the right the wrongs of the "excluded and the dispossessed," caught on big time. Marx and Engels: rich kids. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse: Frankfurt School rich kids. Sixties radicals: rich kids. Michael Moore: not quite a rich kid, but he is now.

Really, it makes sense. If you are a rich kid you have a real problem finding a life that has meaning. You could just retire to an estate in eastern Connecticut and let the private bankers take care of the money stuff. Or you could go to parties in Manhattan. Or you could get New Age religion. Or you could go into activism and become a "author, social activist, and filmmaker" like Naomi Klein, daughter of a physician. Much easier than doing a business start-up that might end up losing all Daddy's money. Yeah. My feeling is that political activism is not that hard. You don't really get judged on your results, but on your effort.

Yeah. I don't envy your modern rich kid. There's a lot of potential downside and, what with the reversion to the mean, not so much upside. And mere marriage and children! That's for deplorables and nannies.

The problem is that the warrant for 21st century activism is a lie. Back in 1850 there was an excuse. Nobody knew back then that the capitalists were not that interested in power, that Rockefeller would retire at 50 and invent modern philanthropy. That Ford would allow the unions, after the Battle of the Overpass, to loot his car company and eventually turn Detroit into a hollowed-out shell. That Gates could be shamed out of Microsoft and crank up his Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation ten years earlier than he planned.

And nobody knew in 1850 that the slaves would be freed, that women would get the vote, that Jim Crow would eventually be tamed with the civil rights movement. But now we do, and the only sensible reaction is that activism, the threat of street action and revolution baby, is not warranted. The activists are believing and living a lie.

That is how I make sense of the lefty hysteria we are experiencing right now. Their activism is utterly superfluous, because in the modern state, if you have a real grievance, the government will eventually get to you and do something about the injustice that is raging in your breast.

But activism is what they do, it is their faith, their religion. And what would happen to them if a yellow-haired Nietzsche should come forth and declare "Your God is Dead!"

In my view, the whole left cultural and religious experience is a Great Reaction, as follows:

1. The welfare state is neo-feudalism, a nostalgia for the agricultural age.
2. Identity politics is neo-tribalism, a nostalgia for the hunter-gatherer age.

There is a sword of Damocles poised over every lefty, and inscribed upon its flashing blade is the awful motto: your activism is a lie.

No wonder our lefty friends are upset.