What to Say to People That Want More Government

Introducing his latest piece on the nightmare of California, Steven Greenhut introduces a Good Little Girl:

At a conference examining California’s housing crisis, one of the more liberal audience members expressed her frustration at those of us who even talked about free markets... Couldn’t we just get back to discussing government regulations and programs?

One of my pet prejudices is that women, more than men, actually believe what they are taught in school and by their friends. Men, I feel, are a bit more skeptical. Since we are famously expendable, we at least affect a certain disbelief for the conventional wisdom that might choose to sacrifice us on battlefields to the gods of the ruling class.

Evidently the woman in question is a Good Little Girl that learned to mouth liberal pieties not later than her sojourn in the nunnery of her undergraduate college.

But what she is saying is that voluntary trust and cooperation are for the birds. Only government force and prescription will do. She is calling for the clunking fist. Of course, nobody ever told her that. She has been raised to belief that the application of government to social and economic problems is to correct the vile injustices of the market system.

But markets are about free exchange: governments are force; politics is division; system is domination.

Yeah, and here's a piece that reports that millennials lose a lot of support for the welfare state when they are told how much it costs.  No kidding.  How could they have got through K-12 without knowing that?

So what are we to say to the Good Little Girl that gets up at a community meeting and says, enough of talking, I call for force!

How about something like this:

Madam, I can't believe you said that! Do you not realize that you are saying that peaceful cooperation cannot work, and that only force gets the job done? You are echoing the cry of every young hunter-gatherer that ever called for a dawn raid on the neighboring village, every Viking that called for a run up a river in England to steal the grain, kill the men, and sell the women and children into slavery. You are echoing the vile dictators of the 20th century, of left and right, that called for the supremacy of the political leader, whether the supremacy of a Stalin, of the Thought of a Mao Zedong, or that Austrian chap. And these men had over 110 million humans killed, not counting war deaths.

Have you not been taught the science? That Marx's economics was exploded back in 1870 with the marginal revolution? That an Austrian Jew predicted, in 1918 less than a year after the Bolshevik revolution that socialism, the ownership of the means of production by the rulers, could not work because it could not compute prices. That another Austrian told us that 10,000 administrative and regulatory bureaucrats could not out-think and out-plan millions of producers and consumers? That an American academic told us that regulation could never work because it would always result in regulatory capture of the regulators by the folks they were supposed to regulate?

In our age we have seen income rise by more than ten times. What has done this? Surely not government, the fount of force, but the unexpected and unsought for inventions of the last 200 years: the textile revolution that brought cheap machine-made clothes to the poor; the steam revolution that brought trans-continental migration to the poor; the medical revolution that brought death-rates for women, and especially women in childbirth, below the death rate for men; the machines that diminished the premium for physical strength and allowed women to participate in the work-for-wages revolution; the contraception revolution that allowed women to control their fertility for the first time ever.

Madam, I beg you, with all my strength, not to pray to government and its God of Force. Have faith  instead in your fellow humans, their ability to cooperate, their capacity for trust, their commitment to dealing one-on-one for mutual benefit, provided the rules are set up to reward fair dealing and trust, and above all their commitment to work with each other without invoking the divine intervention of the lightning bolt of government, and its terrible twin, Force.

Have faith in people, not in force.

Who is the Most Riled Up for the Midterms?

I'm not that much up on the details of political campaigning. But I do understand that part of it involves motivating your side to get to the polls, and another part of it involves demoralizing the opposition so that they are too discouraged to go to the polls.

So, the question is: how does the Mueller investigation work out for the midterms? Does it demoralize the Republican voters or does it rile them up? I have no idea. I suppose that the Manafort conviction and the Cohen plea bargain are supposed to demoralize the Republican faithful. But does it?

On  the other side is the censorship of conservative voices on social media. I wrote about this yesterday as a kind of cluelessness of the social media companies that up to now have been censoring conservatives because that is what the lefty activist groups like Media Matters have been demanding. So, for social media and for other corporations, the path of least resistance is to accede to the demands of the lefty activists. But, I argued, the censorship of conservative voices riles up the conservative faithful, and may encourage a bigger turnout of Republicans in the midterms.

The normal result in a midterm election is for the president's party to lose seats in Congress. That is basically because the president's supporters are usually happy with things, and thus are not all riled up, and thus do not all turn out to vote. On the other hand the opposition party's supporters are all riled up, outraged at the monstrous corruption and injustice of the current administration. Take the Reagan era from usmidtermelections.com. The Democrats gained 26 seats in 1982, 6 seats in 1986, and 8 seats in 1990. In the Clinton era the Dems lost 54 seats in 1994 but gained 8 seats in 1998.

Yeah, what was going down in the 1990s? Well, Hillarycare was on the ballot in 1994, and that rallied Republicans from far and wide. And the Clinton impeachment was on the ballot in 1998, and that rallied Democrats to support their president.

So what happens in 2018? On the one hand, as I said, we have the Mueller investigation. Does that rally Democrats or does it rally Republicans? Or both?

On the other hand, we have the social media attack on conservatives. Does that rally Republicans railing against social media injustice, or does it encourage Democrats uniting against white supremacy? Then there is immigration. Does that unite Republicans against illegal immigrant killers or does it rally Democrats against separating children from their parents?

Then we have the improving economy. Does that help Republicans, or just put Republican voters to sleep?

Because I am a conservative partisan I naturally rally to the conservative and Republican side of these issues. I would like Republicans to hold Congress and for Trump to win reelection in 2020, and for the Democratic left to be well and truly humbled as the left was after the Reagan era. But I realize that the world is full of people that disagree with me, and it may well be that we are going to see a revival of the left: a Democratic "blue wave" in the midterms and a rounding defeat of President Trump when he runs for reelection.

Of course the standard conservative fear right now is that if the Dems win the midterms and the social media companies continue to censor conservative voices then any non-lefty voice in America is finished, because, after all, anything that disagrees with the lefty line of the moment is "hate speech." No doubt that kind of fear is an overreaction, because, after all, nobody is going to start rounding conservatives up. I mean, this is America!

All true, except for one thing. Republicans and conservatives believe that politics and government are blunt instruments that aren't good for much more than defending against enemies foreign and domestic. But our liberal and Democratic friends believe in politics as a saving truth. Bully for them. But that means that they believe that force is appropriate to move America towards that saving truth of a world free of oppression and exploitation, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Because government is force.

So what do you do when your guys think that force is seldom useful, and the other guys think that force --  instantiated through politics and government -- is a saving truth?

Unfortunately the answer is obvious. You have to meet force with force until the other guys cry uncle.

And I don't like that at all.

See I Think That Social Media Censorship of Conservatives is a Good Sign

I know that we are all supposed to be outraged by the censorship of conservatives on social media.  Because where will it all end?

But I think it is the best thing ever. Because I think that gradually, over the next year or two, the social media guys will wake up to the fact that they are being rolled by the left, and they will realize that the left has tricked them into a whole world of hurt.

The point is that that social media are presently the useful idiots of the left's campaign to silence the opposition. Here's a report by WND on the plans of left-wing group Media Matters to target the social media guys to eliminate "right-wing propaganda and fake news." Back in January 2017.

In other words, without the impetus from lefty activist groups the social media guys would never have thought to start censoring "hate speech" and violent rhetoric. The social media guys are kids educated at the nation's elite colleges and they, not particularly interested in politics, just accept as received wisdom whatever is coming down in the elite media.

So of course they would fall into line and accept that any group that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a "hate group" ought to be banned from social media. They don't get that the SPLC is just a fundraising operation that makes its bones by getting nice liberal ladies to pony up cash to fight discrimination, so there must be hate and xenophobia out there. They don't get that the whole of lefty "activism" is just a rich-kid excuse to avoid getting a real job.

Because it is much more fun fighting injustice than figuring out how to serve your fellow man in the marketplace. Do you  see the difference. All you need  to be an activist is to repeat the slogans taught you by your "studies" teacher and go out and preach. But to be a success in the marketplace takes smarts, courage, luck, persistence, and a genuine desire to be of service to other people.

So we have had PragerU censored and shadowbanned, the crank Alex Jones pretty well removed from social media. And various mainstream conservatives censored, as detailed by Breitbart News.

I get it. I really do. This is just a replay of the descent of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror. The problem was and is that the promised heaven on earth of secular lefty politics never lives up to the advertisement.

So when the promised heaven on earth doesn't show up, what do you do?  The answer is obvious. If you think that the application of politics is the requirement for a just society and the first application of politics doesn't do the job, why the solution is more politics!

What lefties from the French Revolution on down to today's AntiFa cannot get into their tiny little minds is that there is very little that politics can do to make the world safe for the oppressed. And the more you apply political force the worse it gets.

Today's lefties have convinced themselves that it is conservative hate speech that is preventing the arc of history from bending towards justice. So if you ban conservative hate speech then you can move forward to the Promised Land. Yay!

Well, you can try that. Stalin tried it. Mao tried it. Stalin gave up his purge when he needed the Russian people to defend Mother Russia from the Nazis. Mao never gave up with his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but eventually he died and his successors lifted the weight of oppression from the shoulders of the Chinese people enough to bring the Chinese economy from $2 per person per day to the present $30 per person per day. Imagine!

The current lefty revival will also fail. But not before it ruins the lives of millions of people.

Meanwhile, the left is doing the deplorables the compliment of trying to silence our voices in the public square. We will see where that gets them.

That is why I insist that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

And there is nothing quite like silencing voices of the other side in the public square to get people of the other side all riled up.

You would think our lefty friends would understand that.

But they don't. And they still won't understand when the social media guys start de-leftying their algorithms. And they will still not understand when the social media guys start to realize that SPLC and BLM and AntiFa are left-wing thugs that lie about everything and are messing up their nice social media business.

Science is a Social Activity, Pt. 742

One of the startling things about the modern era is that, by admitting that we don't have a clue about the gods, about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, we have paradoxically learned more about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything than we ever imagined.

OK, so back in the Age of Reason we figured we had it all figured out. I suppose that was what Descartes was all about. But through the British empiricists and skeptics we finally arrive at dear old Kant, who famously declared that we could not know things in themselves, only appearances.

Does that mean that science is impossible? Not at all. It means that science is merely a theory about things in themselves. If the theory is a good fit with the appearances of things, then it is a good theory, and we can go ahead and use the theory to, e.g., make LED lamps based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is true.

But then we have Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The point here is that every theoretical system begins with assumptions. And then there is Tarski's theorem about the undefinability of truth. The short meaning of this is that science will always involve guesses and leaps in the dark, not the careful unraveling of reason and logic.

Or, if you like, Thomas Kuhn's assertion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is a social endeavor, where most scientists most of the time act like conformists, staying within the boundaries of accepted doctrine, and only occasionally do total crackpot scientists dare to step outside the consensus to propose a new theory, or paradigm, that brings the consensus science into question.

The dear old Atlantic has a confirmation of Kuhn's notion. It's an article by Bianca Bosker "The Nastiest Feud in Science" about the brouhaha among paleontologists about the great dinosaur extinction -- or Ct-P extinction event to us chaps in the know -- 66 million years ago. Was it an asteroid strike, right here in Yucatan, as physicist Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980? Or was it a 100,000 year outbreak of volcanism, belching volcanos pouring out all manner of eevil pollutants just like in the modern era with our fossil fuel mania, as proposed by rough tough Swiss-born Gerta Keller?

Yes, you knew there had to be a rough tough kick-boxing girl scientist in there somewhere. Otherwise no article in The Atlantic. Because everybody knows that the real scientists were women all along, like Einstein's wife. Remember her?

As you can imagine, where liberal academicians are involved, the whole argument about the Ct-P extinction event has been a 30 year pissing match where partisans have deep-sixed academic articles they didn't like and used their power to retard the careers of rising academics that didn't properly toe the line. In other words, exactly like climate science.

Yeah. Read the whole thing.

All very interesting. Because we humans love to obsess about the End of the World.

But I must say that the takeaway for me was the notion that these scientists sure are having a ball spending money on our dime. Who wouldn't grab at the opportunity to travel all through the Deccan Traps in India, where a lot of the volcanic lava back then seeped out into the innocent environment and where you can get a look at the evidence by finding useful rock outcrops and confusing the natives.

See, I think it is time to do a radical reform of the universities. And my first priority would be to stop government financing of research. Really, research is a rich man's hobby. For chaps like Darwin. Or Einstein in between important bureaucratic deadlines working as a patent-office clerk.

And the study of "toxic masculinity" and the rest of the lefty racist sexist agenda should be for rich girls to play Mean Girls with other Mean Girls. But not with money taxed from deplorables.

All this stuff, from Yale-Harvard graduates getting a lock on Supreme Court seats and NYT house racist slots to the general uselessness of all the people  in the foreign policy/intelligence bureaucracy, is just jobs for the scions of the elite -- the kind of guys satirized by Trollope as Sir Raffle Baffle -- and I don't hold with any of it. It is all bullshit.

Yeah, it would be really cool to know how the various extinctions occurred. Asteroids, Deccan Traps, Aliens. You name it.

But really, people should be paying for the opportunity to do this stuff. It's a game for rich kids, like wineries and the new craze for craft breweries and distilleries. And I'm all in favor of it: science and craft breweries.

I just don't think that anything improves when it is associated with politics. It's the old story. When you mix ice-cream and ordure, the resulting mixture is ordure.

And you can tell what is going down in The Atlantic article about extinction events when it inevitably gets into climate change. Surely, Bianca Bosker, you are better than that.

Like I say, the only warrant for political power is existential peril. If the Persians aren't messing with the Hebrews or the Mongols aren't messing with the Russians or the Nazis aren't messing with Jews, or good faithful progressives, then the only thing to scare the ordure out of people is climate change.

And I don't hold with that.

Yes, But What Message are People Receiving?

You read a lot in political media about "messaging." This has to do with the notions and ideas that you, the political actor, want to implant in the minds of the voters. As I understand, messaging has a lot to do with riling up your supporters and demoralizing your opponent's supporters.

But what message are the voters actually receiving? For instance here is a piece about a poll  of millennial women aged 18-35. A full 54 percent of them did not identify as "feminists:" this in a group of which only 19 percent identified as Republican. What is going on? Well,

Leah, a 22-year old independent, told Edwards, “I feel like the movement has been largely taken over by far-left wing activists that make it nearly impossible for me to identify with.” 

Or this:

A 25-year-old Republican named Stephanie, whom Edwards spoke to, even went so far as to say, “I don't think women in the modern western world are oppressed.” Stephanie continued, “I think modern feminists try to create a boogeyman out of what they call the patriarchy and hunt it down, but it's not necessary.... Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses. Acknowledging that is not sexist.”

In a way, it is shocking that young women can actually believe this, since the whole culture is mobilized to convince them of their victimization. How did they escape the indoctrination? Perhaps it is because the left also operates a counter-narrative of female empowerment. So which is it? Oppression or empowerment? Is a Good Little Girl supposed to feel like a victim or as a powerful free agent?

Perhaps political actors should think more about the message that is inadvertently transmitted by your supporters. In this piece about "Nice Ladies Leaving the Democratic Party" people just don't like the totalitarian mindset of lefties that abuse you as soon as you disagree with them. So, for many women,

The Democratic Party no longer fits their personalities, their values, or their self-image as loving, caring, tolerant human beings. The coup de grace is when they realize they are not free in their liberal social circles to utter one word of doubt or criticism of the party line. If they do, they find themselves attacked and ostracized.

This refers to a significant issue. Politics, civil war by other means, is a male thing. It is an application of what I call the male Culture of Insult. You attack you opponents and punish people for disagreeing. But the female Culture of Complaint does not deal in direct insult, but in indirection, using my classic line "I can't believe she said that." In the Culture of Insult you don't directly attack people that violate the party line. You tell you friend that you can't believe that she said that.

Here's another way that men and women differ. Women expect to be allowed to participate and "share." Period. Men believe that they have to prove themselves before they are taken seriously. When I was on non-profit boards years ago, I would always assume that it would take me a year to be taken seriously and listened to. But I had a female friend that was insulted that she was not listened to the moment she joined a board and wanted to "share."

So I would say that a lot of the day-to-day activism tactics of the left really turns women off. And I would suspect that the bully-boy tactics of the street arm of the Democratic Party, AntiFa, really upsets the average woman. There is nothing that terrifies a woman so much as a gang in the streets. Of course. For woman, going back to hunter-gatherer days, a band of men means trouble.

That's the reason why nobody knows nothing, not in the election of November 8, 2016, not in the election of November 6, 2018. Because nobody really knows the message that the voters are receiving and processing. And that is especially true in an age like ours, where people know that certain opinions are acceptable and other opinions are not to be endured by the ruling class. People are social animals and are acutely aware of what is permitted to deplorables. But they also develop notions of what life would be like in a better world where people like themselves got to say and do what they thought and felt.

And the problem with enforcing correct opinion is that you never know what people really think until they go into the voting booth and pull the lever. That is why, years ago, certain wise men proposed the notion that Congress should write no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. No mention there of impermissible "hate speech."

Rule One for a wise ruling class is that you want to know what the people are thinking and saying, even Alex Jones of InfoWars. Otherwise the day may come when you get blindsided by an assembly of the people petitioning for a redress of grievances that you had forced underground.

And then it may be too late.

No Lefties, Politics is Not the Answer

The lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was not planned. Not legislated. Not even expected. Nobody saw it coming except some Brit in 1685 that took a look at the new manufacturing and wrote that

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

Carew Reynell was the guy's name. Ever heard of him? Didn't think you had. Me neither. In fact Reynell had it wrong. We are 30 times richer than 1800. And not much enrichment happened between 1865 and 1815 because the Brits were busy conducting a Second Hundred Years War against the French.

The point is that the Great Enrichment was a succession of what George Gilder calls Surprises, economic revolutions that nobody saw coming, whether the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the oil revolution, the electricity revolution, etc. Not only that, but the political system usually tried to  stop the revolutions, as it is presently trying to do with Uber and AirBnB. Of course it does. Politics is about power, and the ruling class using the power of government to enrich itself and its supporters. Economic revolutions upset the balance of power and threaten the rule of the ruling class.

You can see why economic revolutions are a Surprise. Take the current possibilities of "blockchain," the technology behind the Bitcoin cybercurrency. You tell me: is this going to change the world, blow current government finance out of the water, or is it a flash in the pan that is being hyped by a bunch of nerdly cyberpunks?

The question is the same as asking about Apple Computer back in 2001. On December 8, 2000 Apple stock closed at $1.08. Today, August 16, 2018, it is trading at $213. So, if I had bought $10,000 of Apple stock for Christmas back in 2000 I would have stock worth about $1,970,000 today. But hey, who was thinking about that back then? Apple hadn't even produced the first iPod yet. And when they did, it was just something that The Kids were interested in.

So, I dare to say, it is not politics that has radically improved peoples' lives over the past 200 years. It is chaps like Steve Jobs, and the nobodies that invented the Spinning Jenny, and that started drilling for oil, and that figured out the relation between electricity and magnetism and then brought electric light and the telephone to every household. And the mechanic Henry Ford that started the process to bring the price of the average personal automobile down to about three to six months of the average worker's wage.

Yet the believers in politics never rest. Here is Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a proposal to put corporations completely under the knout of politicians with her Accountable Capitalism Act. Here are the folks in California trying to gin up state-wide rent control.  And there is this piece by Steve Baldwin about the myriad ways in which President Obama tried to increase Democratic and political control of America.

Actually I understand what is going on. These folks are trying to make the world safe, to nail down their idea of the safe and just society, and defend against disruptive and dangerous irruptions. And what we humans are instinctively programmed to do is defend our "patch of land" from all who would threaten it.

But the world has changed. Now we live in the market economy. Now the threat is that your corporate job will be canceled by the next economic revolution. But that is pretty mild compared with the Mongols sacking your town and killing all the men and enslaving all the women.

People aren't willing to settle for the uncertainty of the market. They want everything nailed down. If they are renters, they don't want to pay more when housing demand goes up. If they are homeowners they don't want their view spoiled by a new housing development. If they are workers they don't take kindly to pay-cuts and layoffs during a recession. And there are always Sen. Warrens and President Obamas to give voice to their rage.

My sister wonders how come the Founding Fathers had a better understanding of human nature than today's experts. How was such a group of intellectual giants possible? I think the answer is that the bourgeois thinkers in the 17th and 18th century were consciously trying to tame the power of kings and aristocrats, so they built a system to limit political power of the Old Regime. But our modern ruling class cannot get its head around the notion about someone else getting power. I mean, darling, imagine some rude, crude monster like Trump getting power. Not going to happen, not on our watch!

Now you would think that the smart guys would say: yeah, our ideas are great, but suppose some yahoo were to become president and use our powers against us?

The fact is that Trump has done exactly that. Obamacare was too complicated to be fully encoded in legislation, so most of it was left for "the Secretary" to enact in regulations. Guess what: Trump has unwound Obamacare with regulations that reverse the regulations of the Obama guys. No fair! Illegal! So write a couple of tame professors in The New York Times. Well, then, you chappies, the Obama boys should have taken their time and written the entirety of Obamacare in the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Actually, it's worse than that. The problem with government programs and big entitlements is that you can't reform them, because the beneficiaries will resist to the knife any attempt to reduce their benefits. You the rulers have to cheat. With Medicare a bunch of "reforms" were passed deep in Obamacare that nobody campaigned on and that amounted to stealth rationing. We are talking about Sarah Palin's "death panels" and the protocols of Medicare Hospice, in which the "system" decides at some point to throw the switch and have you starve to death, courtesy of Medicare, while telling the family comforting words about their "journey."

I'd say that when you pass significant Medicare changes without getting the consent of the governed, or pressure universities to institute special administrative panels to attack "rape culture" on campus without even going through a formal regulatory process, you are committing injustice. But that is the problem with the modern state. It is doing so many things that the bandwidth of the legislature is not broad  enough to legislate it. So it ends up doing stealthy stuff behind the curtain. I call that sort of governance is simple injustice.

But there is none so blind as he that will not see. As progressives flop around from one power grab to another they fail to see the bigger picture. That politics makes most things worse. That the regulatory state serves only the powerful and the well-connected. That the Great Enrichment happened while nobody was looking.

And that the need to defend that "patch of land" to the last man went out with the agricultural age.

The problem is that if our ruling class would ever come to the realization that its use of political power is cruel and unjust it would have to confront another problem: what use is the ruling class, anyway?

But that is the point about ruling classes. After the first generation, the revolutionaries, they are all idiots.

"America Was Never That Great." Oh Really?

So now New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo has come out and said "America was never that great." To groans from the audience. And now he is trying to "'splain" his remarks.

Really, you wonder about guys like that. Because he is playing to Trump's strength.

The point about Trump's "Make America Great Again" is that it speaks to all Americans as Americans. It divides the world into Americans and the Rest.

Remember my maxim: Politics is Division. If you are a politician you want to divide up the electorate  so that you get the majority and the other guy is left with the rest. If you are the president of the nation state of the United States of America that is exactly how you want to divide the world. America vs. the Rest. People that want to make America great again vs. people that say American was never that great. Our optimism vs. their pessimism. Our hope vs. their fear. And so on.

Moreover when the economy is firing on all cylinders and black and Hispanic unemployment rates are at all-time lows, why then the slogan Make America Great Again seems to set exactly the right tone.

I mean. Why would you say America was never that great when the economy is growing at 4 percent and very likely more?

Let's reset back to Obama's Hope and Change.  It was great in 2008 because of the mess of Iraq and the Great Crash. Only thing is that Obama didn't deliver. He didn't revive the economy (because he spent money on keeping teachers in their jobs and he increased regulations rather that shaking out the reins and telling business to go get it); he didn't realize the hopes he ignited in black voters. And his change with Obamacare was an abject failure and a lie.

But in 2008 Hope and Change was a great line and Republicans hated it. Of course they did.

Today in 2018 Make America Great Again is a great line and Democrats hate it. Of course they do.

In my view Make America Great Again has another side. Most Americans are never going to amount to anything. We can aspire to a good job; we can be good fathers and mothers. But we are never going to see their names up in lights. So our chance for immortality (aside from having children and grandchildren) is that America does well, so we can bask in the knowledge that America is the greatest country in the world and the American people are the greatest people in the world.

But if you are a credentialed member of the ruling class, you think differently. For instance, you will very likely spend a part of your life in some gig in a foreign country, as a visiting professor, or working for your employer for a couple of years for a foreign subsidiary. The boundaries of your world are not the shores of the US. You belong anywhere, because you belong to the global elite. Visas and residence permits are not a problem for people like you. So it is not surprising that academics and journalists and writers tend to be globalists.

If you are a member of a minority, still feeling your way from agricultural idiocy to urban competence, then you are probably tribal in your sense of belonging. You are not ready to make your primary identity as American, but identify with your tribal group. Our modern minorities like blacks and Latinos are merely the latest in a long story. When the Irish came to the US they became Democrats because the Americans of British ancestry were usually Republicans. And they became Democrats because it was Republicans that were creating public schools to cure them of their Catholicism. If you read Teddy White and his Making of the President books, you will find long disquisitions on the Irish vote, the Italian vote and the Jewish vote. People carried their Old World loyalties into the New World. Today we don't talk so much about the Irish and Italian vote so much as the deplorable white working-class vote.

So when Trump tweets about record low black and Hispanic unemployment here and again here, what do you think he is doing?  He is trying to get blacks and Hispanics to feel that they are a part of America, participating fully in the economy, and he is tempting them to identify as Americans rather than as blacks and Hispanics. The dirty dog.

Oh, and, of course, the whole Trump thing about illegal immigrants and borders plays to the natural tribal instinct that Our People are OK, but the people beyond the border, not so much.

My point is that all politics is about Us and Them; the only question is who counts as Us, and who counts as Them. The liberal line is that Us includes the enlightened and evolved and the marginalized victims and the Them is the racist sexist homophobes. Trump says that the Us is the ordinary Americans that want to make America great; the Them are the people that say America was never great.

All I say is that one of these slogans is the smart one and the other is the dumb one. Which one do you think?