Where Does Tribalism Come From?

OK. I was wrong.

I thought that tribalism was a hunter-gatherer thing. I thought that hunter-gatherers were tribal for millions of years. And I thought that tribalism, ever since the dawn of agriculture, was "fake" tribalism, with agricultural humans repurposing the tribalism-from-time-immemorial of the hunter-gatherers for the new world of agriculture.

But, in reading How We Got Here from C.R. Hallpike, he tells me that hunter-gatherers were not that tribal. In fact they were pretty individualistic, except when it came to sharing food. When people had a row with the other folks in their hunter-gatherer "band" they just upped and joined another band.

Oh dear! Oh no! That really mucks up my idea that hunter-gatherers practiced the tribe of the kindred and only beginning in the agricultural age did people start to practice "fake" tribalism.

Reading Hallpike it seems to be necessary to understand that the agricultural era should be divided into two. First came the pre-state agricultural age when people lived in fairly independent villages, and then came the state-dominated agricultural age when people were ruled by kings and priests and armies. It would seem that tribalism, as we understand it, flourished in the early pre-state agricultural era. In other words, in the era where people lived in more-or-less-fixed villages headed by a village Big Man but where there was no political organization subordinating the villages to an overall political overlordship. In other words, no state with its king, its army, its priests, and its taxes.

Oh dear. Bit of a sticky wicket, what? How do I bat out of this situation?

I think that the answer lies in the notion that humans will band together into a tribe over anything. We saw that in the recent Kavanaugh nomination process. Everyone lined up either into the pro-Kavanaugh tribe or the pro-Ford tribe. The pro-Kavanaugh tribe gave Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt and believed his story; the pro-Ford tribe gave Ford the benefit of the doubt and believed her story. Most people stayed with their previous right-wing or left-wing tribe, but a few people switched, primarily NeverTrump people that were forced to choose between giving up their NeverTrumpness or switching permanently to the progressives.

In other words, all the tribalisms we know about and experience are perfectly true and valid. We can have a loose hunter-gatherer tribalism, a agricultural village tribalism, an agricultural empire tribalism, a nation state tribalism, an ethnic tribalism, a race tribalism, an identity politics tribalism. You can have Star Wars fans tribalism. You can have urban gang tribalism between the Sharks and the Jets. Humans will rally to anything, as long as it is a tribe.

So this means, I would say, that it doesn't matter how you do it; the skilled political leader will rally people into his fake tribe.

So that means that the arguments on the right about the different kinds of nationalism, from white nationalism to cultural nationalism to Trump's Make-America-Great nationalism, or the different gradations of the left's identity politics tribalism, miss the point.

You can rally humans into any sort of tribe. Just gussy up some sacred narrative and put it out there and make like you are brimming with confidence that you have the way of the future -- or the arc of history -- and get out and sell, sell, sell. Don't complain about the other guy's tribalism; get out there and get the people to believe in your tribalism.

Everything is as fake as everything else: the tribe of the kindred, the tribe of the race, the tribe of the Aryans, the tribe of the gender, the tribe of the nation. Doesn't matter. It is all about the game. What you can put over on other people.

And that is all.

Kavanaugh: There's Nothing Like a War to Unite People

A while back I was thinking about our current divided nation, what with warring identity groups, wars on deplorables and Christians and men and whatnot. But then I thought that there is nothing new here. Today's America is just like the America of the first half of the 20th century, a seething brew of ethnicities. Only back then the seething brew was mostly from Europe.

So I asked myself: how come all the warring factions of yesteryear are not warring any more? And the answer was obvious: World War II.

In World War II the factions of the ruling class all came together and created a myth of united America. And it drafted all the kikes, the eyeties, the polaks, the hunks, the spics, and whatever other nasty words you can think of, and sent them all off to war and put them all in foxholes together (OK, except for African Americans: they had separate but equal foxholes).

What do you think happened? Why, all those fractious young men became brothers in arms, and came back from the war as 100-percent-Americans. It took until the Sixties for the ruling class to divide us all again.

So here is another of my brilliant aphorisms. "If you want to unite the country, start a war." Oh, it's not quite that simple, I grant. You have to get the whole ruling class on board, and that has been a problem since the end of World War II. Liberals weren't really down for the Cold War, and now, well, they are pretty well 100 percent Against America, because racism, sexist, xenophobia.

So we aren't going to get a United States again until we get into a war where liberals figure they better get aboard or suffer the consequences. Remember? They did get aboard for about six months after 9-11.

Now let us extend this notion to the fight over the Kavanaugh nomination.

The fact is that Donald Trump divided the Republican Party. The officer corps thought he was not officer material, but the rank and file loved him. And over the same issue. The GOP officers' mess thought that Trump was too vulgar to be accepted into the bar of the officers' mess (and anyway, he didn't drink). But the rank and file loved that, in the words of President Lincoln about Gen. Grant: "I can't spare this man: he fights." We rank-and-file were sick to death of Republicans caving to Democratic attacks; we wanted a fighter.

So we have had about three years of NeverTrumpers, and a Congress that wasn't at all sure about a President Trump,  probably because they feared that he would make them vulnerable to Democratic challengers. A party divided against itself cannot stand. Or something.

But the Kavanaugh nomination has changed all that. Because now the president and the Senate leadership and the GOP senators have all been blooded in the epic battle to approve the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and fight against the monstrous neo-McCarthy tactics of the Democratic leaders.

You could see the result at the formal swearing-in of Justice Kavanaugh yesterday. Everyone was there, and Sens. McConnell and Grassley each got their standing ovation. The whole Supreme Court was there, from Chief Justice Roberts down to junior Justice Gorsuch. (Did you know that Justice Clarence Thomas is now the senior associate justice? Has is been that long?) President Trump gave a great speech; Justice Kavanaugh gave a great speech. And the Kavanaugh daughters were as cute as buttons.

So now the Republican Party is united. Its officers are now perfectly happy to have Trump in the mess. Its rank and file are all riled up for the midterms, and independents don't like what they saw of the character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh.

Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh for your courage. Thank you President Trump, for hanging in there. Thank you GOP senators for the win. And thank you ruling class progressives for uniting the Republican Party.

Here's what I wonder. How does the #MeToo movement help Democrats with lower-class blacks and Hispanics, the core of their vote? #MeToo is a liberal elite thing. Ditto LGBTQWTF. Ditto illegal aliens. Ditto Muslims. What has the Democratic Party done for its lower-class rank and file lately? And why should that lower-class rank and file come out to vote in November?

And by the way, why would any man -- white, black, or crazy rich Asian -- vote for the Democrats when any accusation by any woman has to be believed and could make him unemployed and unemployable by this very afternoon?

Honestly, I don't know. But maybe the cunning leaders of the Democratic Party know something that I don't know.

Rich Kid Protesters are Not the Cry of the Oppressed

One of the hoariest memes of left-wing politics is the notion of the "protest," the excluded and the oppressed taking to the streets to express their plight and the injustice of their suffering at the hands of the ruling class.

I had an epiphany on this a year or two ago when reading semi-lefty Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation about the 19th century. Once the workers got the vote, he explained, and found that the political system was responding to their needs, they stopped the marching and rioting. People only take to the streets as a last resort, and usually in a hopeless reaction to wage cuts, unemployment and famine.

Oh really, I thought. Who knew?

Because of course in our age we have all been carefully taught that the woods are full of helpless victims, excluded from representation, for whom "protest" is the only way to advertise their wretchedness.

But when you hear of women activists wailing in the Senate gallery, and women activists dressing up as a wall, and so forth, you are not hearing the cry of the oppressed. You are hearing the supporters of the ruling class. This fact is obvious when you look at photos of the protesters. I'm sorry, but I know the difference between lower-class single women working marginal jobs and educated women doing a bit of "creative protest."

In fact, the very creativity of much of modern protest, with people dressed up as polar bears to protest climate change, tells the story. People of the Creative Self are the kind of people that feel that one must do something to make a protest original and creative rather than just march.

It is a fact that 97.2 percent of the "protests" you see on TV or read about on social media are merely the political stage-shows of the educated ruling class.

Put it this way. How would a bunch of the genuinely oppressed get into the Senate gallery? Access to the gallery is through the senators. So any activist group wanting to "protest" the Kavanaugh vote in the Senate gallery would have to go through a friendly Democratic Senator; it would have to have "connections." Get it?

So I believe that the fundamental thing to understand about "activism" and "protest" in these latter days is that the chances are 97.2 percent that you are looking at people supported by powerful interests closely allied to the ruling class.

And of course, these days Good Little Girls, well-born damsels, go to college to learn the theory and practice of "activism" and "protest." So when you see twentysomething girls with their cute protest signs and their cute dress-ups, you are looking at the naive stooges of the ruling class. You might say they are nostalgic reenactors, reenacting the glorious marches and protests of the workers back in the 19th century.

That would make sense, given my notion of the left as a Great Reaction.

But really, these folks are the cadet battalions of the ruling class, doing a spell in the activist trenches before taking their inherited places in the corridors of power. They are like midshipmen in a Napoleonic War novel. Yes, they rough it a bit, and get knocked about a bit by the bullies in the midshipmen's mess and by the officers if they don't learn their navigation, but in due course they will get their commissions and take their wine in the wardroom. While the ordinary seamen still suffer under ruthless naval discipline and once against it is all hands to witness punishment.

As you know, I explain this ruling-class "fake protest" politics with my "little darlings" theory. The left, starting with rich-kids Marx and Engels, has created a politics out of advocating for the oppressed and the exploited. But every group they discover eventually gets enrolled in the "system" and ceases to be useful and political rank-and-file for marchin' and protestin'. Because the warrant for "activism" is always a marginalized group outside the system for whom street protest is the only way to get the attention of the rulers.

Thus, at present, our fake protesters are advocating for illegal aliens and Muslims, because right now they are outside the gates, and not represented within the political system.

Oh and women, because upscale and educated women are the most appallingly exploited and oppressed victims in human history.

But the interesting thing is that once a group gets inside the system, the cadet battalion commanders lose interest in them. Thus, in the United States, the liberal activists lost interest in the working class in the Sixties, and for 50 years the white working class wandered in the political wilderness without someone to advocate for them in the councils of power.

Until Donald Trump.

Note to ambitious youngsters: I dare say that in the coming decades the sweet spot for political careerists will be identifying and then leading former "little darlings" of the left, groups that the left used to lead when they were not franchised and not of interest to elected politicians but are now abandoned because they are no longer outside the system but merely neglected.

Put it this way. Activists represent people "outside the system," because only outsider status warrants street "protest" and marching. Politicians represent people "inside the system" who may be courted and bribed for their votes in the ordinary process of elective politics. But there is always a political middle ground of voters that are nominally within the system but that the elected politicians have tended to neglect over the years.

Meanwhile the one thing to understand is that 97.2 of the protesters you see on TV are fake. They are well-born scions of the ruling class and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Of Course the Left is All About Hate

Shelby Steele wonders about the left and hate in the Wall Street Journal. What's it all about, Alfie?

How did the American left--conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world--become so given to hate?

"It began in the 1960s," according to Steele, "when America finally decided that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings."

Allow me to differ.

You are going to find hate wherever you find politics. The whole point of politics is to rally your people and mobilize them against some existential threat. This is the basic situation of every hunter-gatherer band. It must mobilize its people, particularly its men, to fight against the neighboring tribe whenever necessary. The way this mobilization is achieved is through the hate of the "other."

The existential threat may be human or animal of vegetable or mineral. The same principle applies.

Now, it is my belief that the need for politics in our modern age is much diminished, due to the remarkable characteristics of what we call the price system, a notion of social cooperation that peacefully adjudicates the vast majority of differences between people.

(Of course, the "price system" is not in fact a system, which implies Newtonian mechanism, but an emerging phenomenon by which people adjust their expectations about products and services offered by humans to other humans.)

But our lefty friends believe that peace and justice can only be achieved through politics; it requires lefties to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth, seize the levers of political power, and impose a system of justice, wresting power away from the ruling class, and bestowing it upon the said wretched of the earth, and bending the arc of history towards justice.

In order to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth it is necessary to teach them to hate the perpetrators of injustice, exploitation, and oppression. Because that is how you organize and mobilize humans to struggle against an existential peril. People do not have to be "carefully taught / To hate and to fear." They don't really need to be taught at all. Hate and hear come naturally to humans once they have been introduced to an existential peril.

So of course the left is always ginning up hate.

The left believes that whatever injustice or whatever problem there might be in the world at this instant, the solution is organizing or activism or political action to force a change through a government program.

But that means teaching people to hate, because otherwise you won't get them riled up enough to vote for you, protest for you, and get in the face of the hated people that are standing in the way of peace and justice and emancipation and liberation.

Do you see the problem here? We are seeing it right now with the Kavanaugh nomination.

And this is something that I don't think the left thinks about too much. They get themselves all hated up and mobilized and the activists get out in the street and protest and get in the faces of GOP politicians and maybe shoot up the odd congressional baseball game.

But what if the rest of the community feels threatened by all the protest and the activism? What if they return the hate and the fear of the noble activists and protesters? What if they rally and organize politically against the lefty activists and community organizers?

This is something that I think our lefty friends don't think about. Probably because their activism and their protest is really a religion. And in a religion you don't think that, gee, maybe we should take it easy and not frighten the horses. Your faith is your truth, and the only way to save the world is to propagate the faith and bring everyone into the faith.

Well. I've been wondering for a while whether this latest evolution of the left is going to follow the arc of The Sixties. The Kidz and the activists and the media all thought they were going to change the world, but first thing that happened, the American people elected Richard Nixon to be president with a vice-president that purported to represent the Silent Majority and had speechwriters that composed speeches about "nattering nabobs of negativity."

Is that happening right now, with the Cold Anger being felt by chaps like Conservative Treehouse? Who knows? That's why we have elections.

But the bigger issue is my notion that -- with the advance of the price system and market relationships to negotiate differences and disagreements and lubricate human social cooperation -- we moderns need a lot less politics and a lot less force.

Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe politics and government and force and activism and protest really are the way to make the world work.

But I have a dream. That humans can and will submit their pride and conceit and rage to the market and its prices. And we will all live happily ever after.

Education: Burn It Down

A friend sent me the link to the liberal academic chaps describing how they scammed the "grievance studies" journals by getting a bunch of fake grievance studies research published in the grievance studies academic journals.

There is, I admit, an element of Animal House in this effort: rowdy guys getting a little too rowdy for the Miss Prisms of the world.

But it inspires me to say that the time has come to burn down our entire government education system from stem to stern and start over.

First, the Bill of Indictment.

1. Government schools tend to be tools of the ruling class. In Germany, the government school system was created during the Wars of German Liberation from Napoleonic France. The idea was to build a Germany that was powerful enough and united enough to keep the French on their side of the Rhine. That's where the German Realschule and Gymnasium came from. The Germans invented the research university, again, as a way to make Germany strong enough to beat the French. In the US the "common school" system was developed by chaps like Horace Mann. For chaps like Mann the idea was to defeat the Puritans; for Protestants the idea was to cure the Irish of their Catholicism.
   
   Obviously, this is worked only too well in the US where universities are now secular seminaries that churn out good little boys and good little girls that have been educated to a fare-thee-well to spout the ruling class Narrative and to sneer at deplorables as subhumans.
2. Government schools are almost impossible to reform. The K-12 system was set up a century ago, the university system has operated almost unchanged since the building boom of the 1960s. But what should education be like in the 21st century? What should university education be like? Should we all go to university? Or some of us? Or almost none of us? None of these questions are likely to get a good answer because the government education system is a $1.1 trillion a year monster. You try reforming or updating or improving it. It is impossible to reform because 1) parents of school children are getting it for "free" and nobody ever gives up on free stuff, and 2) the current incumbents, teachers, administrators, unions, and suppliers, are damned if their are going to give up a dime in their benefits.
3. Government-sponsored "research" is welfare for the educated class, and just like welfare for the poor, welfare for the educated is morally and ethically demoralizing. People should have to beg borrow and steal to get a chance to do original research. They shouldn't be on a gray train. Here is my argument, stemming from my reductive Three Peoples theory. The top dogs in my Three Peoples are the People of the Creative Self, people for whom just being responsible citizens is not enough. They long to create, to imagine and construct something original and pathbreaking. Very well. But the would-be creative folks should not be coddled and primped with government dollars and given life-time sinecures. Many all called to a creative life, but few are chosen; for most of us our creative dreams end in failure, or an acceptance of our ordinariness. Thus real creative people will be living on the border between order and chaos: the sacrificial hero. Such a person cannot be an employee of a government university.

My point is that the government education system is incapable of reform.  Indeed, the whole point of a government program is to set up something for the ages.

The only solutions is burn it down. But what will replace it?

Let us begin with education for children. In my imagination it will consist of:

1. Tony private schools for the professional classes. We have this already, only attenuated because many professional people can bend the public school system to provide them with what they want for their children at government expense, e.g., the selective high schools in New York City that are presently under attack from the left.
2. Home-schooling for the middle class. The original idea for government schools was to make the poor literate and numerate. But most moms are already literate and numerate so their children will naturally become literate and numerate because that is what kids are programmed to do: grow up to become their parents. And there is a whole universe of materials and support out there to back up the home-schooling mom, not to mention the Internet. But I do not see home-schooling as being a private thing but a neighborhood thing, with all the neighborhood moms getting together to home-school each other's children and band together for specialty items and field trips.
3. KIPP academies for the poor. What the poor need above all is to learn the cadences of middle-class life, to be responsible cooperative city people, and to "get with the program, Jenkins." That is what highly structured program like KIPP academy do. So who will pay for this? Billionaires, that's who. And I demand that they get medals and awards for their public service.
4. A whole new world of apprenticeships and internships, starting in the early teens. Yes, I believe it is time to kill the evil child-labor laws. After all, right now children are forced to attend government schools and work all day and then go home and do homework, and for this they are paid:__ Nothing! Can you spell INJUSTICE? Look, most people should not go to university. Tertiary education is the biggest scam in world history. Good little girls go to college and major in sociology and English. And then go work for Starbucks as a barista. For that they need to get $50,000 and more in debt? No. I say get kids into the workforce early and let employers pay for specialized and technical education, especially for youngsters with promise. Let there be a ton of easily obtained credentials, like the current certifications and competencies available in the tech world.

Really, how hard can this be? Burn the whole education system down and let a hundred flowers bloom.

And everybody will live happily ever after.

Great Reaction: Slavery and Scapegoating

I argue that our lefty friends are reactionaries; faced with the shocking changes of the industrial revolution, they want to return to the good old days. So we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation. And so on.

But let us simplify things. What the left is doing is returning us to the slavery of the agricultural age, and the mob justice of the tribal village.

Let us look at the fact of the great socialist governments, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro's Cuba. We are talking about slavery. And this is reactionary, because the great characteristic of the agricultural age is its slavery. Oh yeah. Sometimes it was merely feudalism. But the basic fact of the agricultural age was that the farmers needed the protection of their warrior aristocracies to keep pirates and Vikings out of town. And the warrior aristocrats took advantage of them. Big time. Right through the agricultural age the farmers were actual or nominal slaves.

In a way, I think the end of the agricultural age coincided with a kind of apotheosis of slavery in the sugar plantation. Slaves cultivated sugar cane, a fast-growing plant that uses C4 photosynthesis, and the masters fed them maize, also a fast-growing C4 plant. Very efficient!

But the market economy doesn't work with slavery. Not because we are highly advanced and ethical and moral. But because slaves just aren't as profitable as free labor, because you can make more money with workers that use their noggins, rather than just follow the orders of the slave-driver. In the same way, after World War I, the German General Staff decided that soldiers as cannon fodder didn't work; they needed resourceful, responsible soldiers that would know to do the right thing when isolated on the modern lethal battlefield.

But isn't it amazing that our lefty reactionary friends want to return to the top-down, orders-from-the-top culture of the agricultural age! In a word, slavery.

The good thing is that the slavery experiments in the Soviet Union and Maoist China turned out to be staggering failures: not just a failure to match the economic growth of the capitalist countries, but veritable death cultures that starved and enslaved tens of millions of people, and not the peoples of conquered countries, looted and put to the sword by neo-Conans, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" No, the people that suffered under Communism were the people that Communism was supposed to help, the workers! Imagine!

In my view, the resort to slavery is programmed into the left, because politics is war by other means, government is force, and therefore the combination leads to slavery, because the whole point of politics and government is to draft everyone into the political army of the ruling class and forced to live their lives in service to the power agenda of the ruling class. So the politics of the left inevitably drafts the whole nation into the political army of the rulers. And what are draftees but slaves by any other name?

The other thing that goes with the left like ham and eggs is the moral panic. Call it the witch hunt, the reign of terror, the purge, the scapegoat mechanism of René Girard, or whatever you like. We are seeing a classic instance of this all-to-human characteristic in the campaign of vicious slander against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

What has emerged in the moral panic over the nomination of Kavanaush is the purpose of all our legal traditions. The whole point of the law is to provide a replacement for the age-old method of dealing with intra-community conflict. The old way was for the community to gang up on a scapegoat and to invest that scapegoat with all its worries and hatreds and accusations and then kill to purge the conflict and the hatred. Maybe that worked in a small face-to-face community. But the whole point of law has been to provide a more peaceable alternative to the scapegoat culture.

Isn't it interesting that our liberal friends have completely demolished the cultural process of legal procedure in their conviction of Brett Kavanaugh by mass denunciation! And boy, do we now find ourselves reminded of what an amazing cultural miracle is our inherited culture of legal process.

I mean, what a concept! Instead of just fingering a suspect and slitting his throat, actually or metaphorically, we force the accusers to get their story straight, to submit to rules of evidence, to cross-examination of witnesses, to "beyond reasonable doubt" verdicts in the criminal law, and "preponderance of the evidence" verdicts in civil law. How blessed we are to live in this age where we benefit from these immensely civilized notions! We get to appreciate them all the more when our lefty friends gin up a periodic moral panic and demand to dispense with the law's delay.

My point is that when you decide that the price discovery system is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is slavery.

And when you decide that "due process" is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is a baying mob demanding the blood of a scapegoat, the gallows of the French Revolution and the Communist governments of the 20th century.

And that is why I call all lefties reactionaries, and their movement the Great Reaction. They want to return us to the slavery of the agricultural age and the scapegoating of the tribal village.

In Sports: How About Those NAFTAs!

I watched the video of the President's post USMCA agreement press conference, where President Trump presented his version of the new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.

It really is interesting to watch the president switch between reading his official speech text and ad-lib asides, between the "facts" and the "values." Is it a mistake or is it genius? Who knows?

All along, I have wondered if this new NAFTA was real substantive policy change or just atmospherics, good old bubba bait. So I went to the USTR handout.

Of course it is a long bureaucratic doodad, under the following major headings:

• Intellectual property, including drugs and copyright.
• Digital Trade, prohibiting customs duties on digital products distributed electronically (e-books, videos, music, software, games, etc.
• De Minimis, which means waiving bureaucratic flim-flam on small-value shipments.
• Financial Services, making sure that US financial services guys get the same treatment as the locals.
• Currency, discouraging exchange-rate shenanigans.
• Labor, including "rules of origin to drive higher wages by requiring that 40-45 percent of auto content be made by workers earning at least USD $16 per hour."
• Environment, "to combat [naughty] trafficking in wildlife, timber, and fish; ... and to address pressing environmental issues such as air quality and marine litter."

So that's all right.

There is also a provision to allow the US to intervene in trade agreements between Canada/Mexico and third-party countries. That is to stop the current scam where China gets to export products to Canada, do minimum value-adding, and then re-export to the US. That, I had understood, was the big issue with NAFTA, that it allowed, say, China, to have big tariffs on US exports to China, while getting China exports into the US with little of no tariffs because, hey, what could the US say about trade between, e.g., China and Canada?

It was interesting to watch President Trump, and the overall impression he gives of his trade strategy. Basically, it seems to be to raise tariffs to get peoples' attention. Then we negotiate. Another interesting meme: Trump said that his guys would go to, e.g., India, where they charge 100% tariffs on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and the Indian officials would be amazed. Nobody ever came and talked to us before, they said.

I suppose that the way to explain this is that the previous ruling-class policy was to avoid bilateral agreements and instead use multilateral agreements through the WTO and the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership. So you pass the agreement and leave it to the bureaucrats. Obviously, Trump prefers his one-on-one Art of the Deal approach, and it probably works well for him.

But will the new USMCA make a real difference? We shall see. Obviously the optics are that Trump cares for American workers, and judging by the turnout at Trump's rallies, the optics are working.