The Liberal Equivalent of Fancy Cars

If you are a upper-middle-class political professional these days, you need to be something other than white. That's what Victor Davis Hanson argues in "The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity." It's like cars for successful guys:

Minority identity has become a brand for the upper middle class in the manner of a luxury car. One strives to drive a Mercedes or Jaguar not because it is more reliable or even all that much more drivable than a Toyota or Honda, but because it signals a particular cachet. And so too wealthy suburbanites often find emphasizing non-white identities useful even if it means occasionally constructing them.

Hey Victor! Whatabout Hyundai drivers? I mean, there is a sense in which Toyota and Honda drivers consider themselves a cut above Hyundai drivers -- not to mention, er, Kia.

But when you think about it, it all makes sense. We all use ways to sort ourselves into the hierarchy to demonstrate "where we are" -- as opposed to "who we are" -- and just as rising corporate stars seem to gravitate to Audis and BMWs it seems eminently sensible for rising political and academic stars to emphasize their specialness with ethnic identity, as everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Beto O'Rourke does.

But my claim to specialness is the conceit to see around the corner, to be wise to epiphenomena like rich kids appropriating minority status -- or luxury car brands, but seeing beyond all that to the real data. I remember, years ago a colleague at work winking that his father, an accountant, reckoned that 90 percent of Mercedes owners couldn't afford it. On the other hand The Millionaire Next Door that owns a few small businesses probably lives in an unexceptional house and drives an unexceptional car. So, if you look at the Mercedes driver, you are probably looking at a faker. I wonder what car Jeff Bezos drives.

The fact that ambitious liberals in politics are faking minority identity is nothing new. I am reading Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn and the truth is that Henry VII made it all up. He was an upstart that got lucky and won the Battle of Bosworth, and then set about creating the notion that the Tudors squared the circle between Lancaster and York to create a new, glorious Tudor dynasty. Actually what Henry did was root out and eliminate all possible claimants to the throne of England and repress anyone that dared to challenge him.

I had known before that Henry VIII nationalized the armed forces of England and thus disarmed the nobles. But it is clear that his father started the process of, shall we say, neutering the power of possible noble rivals. Also, it is clear that Henry VII understood that in England the City of London was where the money was.

What I am interested in is digging up true narratives that lie buried beneath the fake narratives of the ruling class. Obviously, the rise of populist nativists in the US and Europe is one such. The ruling class lost interest in the working class/lower middle class fifty years ago, and has inadvertently, through its celebration of minority rights, visited injustice upon the old working class for whom the welfare state was built. And now, finally, the old working class is revolting, probably too late.

Then just today I read iconoclast Ron Unz declaring that illegal immigration is a lot less of a problem that we are all led to believe, and thus that The Wall is a pseudo-issue. Moreover, Hispanic crime is a lot lower than people think, almost indistinguishable from white crime if you allow for the fact that the overall population of Hispanic males is younger (and thus more criminal) that the population of white males.

Which means..

Which means that probably Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) is right, that a politician should aim to win the support of any and all voters on the premise that all voters want a job, an education for their children, and a safe community.

And that if a politician works hard on that angle, it doesn't matter what car he drives, or what ethnic identity he impersonates.

However, there is this. People don't go into politics to watch the grass grow. The whole point of politics is to rally the people against an existential threat. And if there isn't a genuine existential threat, we can invent one, can't we, climate change activists?

And maybe this is a requirement for a successful Homo Sapiens. For maybe if we all got our wish, and got jobs, and good education for the kids, and safe communities, we would all get weak and flabby, and then, when a true existential threat appeared, we wouldn't have the cojones to deal with it.

On this notion, we need to have troublemakers stirring us up to action and inventing fake existential threats. Just as an army needs to train for war in peacetime, maybe we humans need to live as if Armagedon was just around the corner.

"I Refuse to Answer, Senator, on the Grounds that Your Question is a Religious Test"

In the good old days, Commie lefties hauled up before Congressional committees to confess their commie-ness used to refused to testify. First they refused to testify on the grounds of the First Amendment, but when the Supreme Court didn't back them up they switched to refusing to testify on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.

All educated evolved people agreed that these Commies and Hollywood lefties, particularly including the Hollywood Ten, were taking it to The Man, or what would become The Man a couple of meme cycles later. And their names ought to be up in lights.

Because, Oh My, the horror of it! McCarthyite witch-hunts! Reds Under the Bed! Nobody in McCarthyite America was safe to express unpopular opinions! Oh! the Hollywood scriptwriters that suffered under the Hollywood Blacklist! Never again! Never, never again would America descend to the low it reached during the McCarthy Era!

Only now you are not allowed to speak a word that liberals dislike on America's college campi. You are not allowed to text a word that activist groups dislike on Twitter. And good luck with an academic career if you are to the right of Hillary Clinton. You are blacklisted, because of your racist sexist homophobic bigotry. And serve you right. Hanging is too good for some people, as Captain Hastings once said when some thug damaged his Lagonda.

The latest stop on this neo-McCarthy tour is the religious test for judicial nominees. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked nominee Brian Buescher about his membership in the Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.

"Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization?" and "Have you ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women's reproductive rights?"

Buescher "replied that he joined the Knights when he was 18 years old; that his involvement includes charitable work; and that his job as a judge is to apply the law regardless of his personal convictions."

I say baloney to that answer. I say that the proper response is:

Senator, I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that it constitutes a religious test for public office which is forbidden by Article Six of the United States Constitution thus: that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." And Senator, because I value your continuance in an office of public trust I hesitate to answer this question and thus perhaps put you in possible criminal liability for monstrously violating the spirit and the letter of the Sixth Article.

Of course, the last thing our liberal friends ever imagine is that they are the McCarthyite witch-hunters of the 21st century. Hey, I doubt even that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is old enough that maybe he was around during the McCarthy era, has the smallest smidgen of a suspicion that his questioning of nominee Russell Vought for Islamophobia might amount to a religious test. Said Sanders:

Sanders said, "I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, that this nominee is really not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about." Vought is an elder in his church, married, and has two daughters.

I would simply say that anyone that doesn't have an least a question in their minds about the suitability of Islam in a modern society, not to mention the suitability of left-wing thought in a modern society, is a fool and a knave that never ventures outside the walled garden of NPR and The New York Times.

It has been said that "Nietzsche was the Nazis' favorite intellectual," as if such a statement was an automatic disqualification of Nietzsche's thought. Why is it then that the statement "Marx was Stalin's favorite intellectual" is not an automatic disqualification for any and all left-wing ideas from the Equator to the Antipodes from now until eternity. After all, Stalin was perhaps the most blood-thirsty ruler since Genghis Khan. Unless you figure that Mao Zedong has Uncle Joe beat in the killing department. If the notion that Marx leads to Lenin leads to Stalin is not a red flag about leftism wherever it may be found, I don't know nothing.

But somehow, in 21st century America it is routine for politicians and activists of a certain stripe to marginalize mainstream Christianity while privileging the latest in kooky left-wing ideology.

I don't get it.

But still, it would be fun for nominees to start invoking the Article Six prohibition of religious tests.

Now the Psychologists Come Out Against Traditional Masculinity

When viewing the actions of the left, the charitable thing to do is to echo Christ, and say: "forgive them Father, for they know not what they do." The less charitable thing is to tell the truth, that the left is a sink of cruelty and injustice, and that every word uttered by a lefty is a lie, including "and" and "the."

So  now the American Psychological Association has come out and declared traditional masculinity to be harmful -- to men, as reported by US News.

Traditional masculinity ideology – which the APA says includes elements of "anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence" – can be psychologically harmful to men and boys, the association noted in its 36-page "APA Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men" that's highlighted in the latest issue of its Monitor on Psychology magazine.

Well, yes. If you are a lefty, and believe in the left's reactionary secular faith, and think that middle-class mores of resilience and responsibility are sick and wrong, and believe that the exploration of sexuality in a creative manner is the right and true and only way to live -- provided you are not a certified victim of the patriarchy -- then of course you would think that traditional masculinity "can be" harmful to boys and men.

On the other hand if you believe like me that a fruitful way of understanding modern humans is with my reductive Three Peoples theory then you might have a more nuanced view of masculinity.

You might think that, for boys and men in the ghetto, who are People of the Subordinate Self, the notion of masculinity -- as not takin' no dissin' from The Man "can be psychologically harmful," not to say physically harmful. Because the way the world works in the city is that you do not reduce it to gang warfare, but go forth to find out if you can be useful in the economy of the city, and you offer your services on the labor market of that city. An excessive attachment to "risk, and violence" might make that adaptation very difficult.

On the other hand, like Jordan Peterson, you might think that, for middle-class twentysomething men hiding in their parents' basement, a little courage and risk-taking might be a good thing. When BCC North London luvvie Stephen Sackur talks to Jordan Peterson on BBC HARDTalk he wants to link Peterson's responsibility mantra to alt-right anger. Says Sackur:

Anger is a powerful force in politics, and there is a lot of it about. Donald Trump, Brexit, and a host of populist movements have been fueled with anger by the way things are.

No kidding, Stevie! I remember when the left celebrated the anger of the workers, of the  feminists, of the civil rights marchers, of  the Stonewall rioters. But that was then. This is now.

Hey, Stevie, why do you think that Peterson has struck such a chord (especially with men)? Peterson:

Because I'm having a serious conversation with my viewers and listeners and readers about how to structure their lives individually and the relationship between responsibility and meaning. And it's a level of discourse, or, I would say, of analysis, that people don't often have an opportunity to participate in.

But is it reaching out to men who are angry, replies Stephen Sacker?

Well, no, not exactly. It is giving men who belong to the People of the Responsible Self what they are looking for, a program for them to get out of their parents' basement and become strong and responsible men. Not toxic masculine men, but men programmed and ready to be responsible workers, husbands, and fathers.

You can see the problem, for North London luvvies and lefties on all the ships at sea. Their whole world view is built upon the notion that the responsible middle class is is fact a vast conspiracy to visit injustice on women, minorities, and the victims of all patriarchs and white supremacists. That was what Marxism was about. It appointed itself to the holy task of stopping the bourgeoisie in the act of descending like the angel of vengeance on the poor helpless workers who were toiling away for peanuts in the dark satanic mills and reducing them to "immiseration."

Therefore there must be something wrong with all the culture around the middle-class cult of responsibility: something toxic, something patriarchal, something supremacist. Eeuww!

Only, of course, the workers had migrated from the farm to the mills in the city because they were starving on the farm, and hoped at least to earn enough for bread in the city. And they did earn bread in the city, and much more, because the bourgeois system, of markets and wage labor, by its internal logic, poured a benison of prosperity upon the workers that were formerly starving on the farm.

In fact, of course, my reductive Three Peoples theory -- which is certainly not as reductive as every word out of a lefty's mouth, including "and" and "the" -- also has something to say about the ideology and anger and hate of the average North London media luvvie and the anger and hate in all the lefties in all the ships at sea. These lefties are People of the Creative Self, and their god is the creative self. That is why Nietzsche said that God is Dead. He meant that the old god of responsibility and divine justice was dead because chaps like him -- and well-born scions in Europe everywhere -- no longer believed in responsibility and divine justice as the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. What they believed in, instead, was to be the creator God Himself, creating art, literature, and above all, justice.

Yes, there are a ton of people out there that believe that the most creative thing in the world is to use political power to create a perfect state with perfect equality and perfect justice, ruled over by them and their cronies. Their record thus far is 100 million dead. Way to go, lefties!

As I said, everything lefties say and believe is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Now, it happens that I believe, in part, in the ukase of the American Psychological Association. I agree that if you are a would-be creative then the traditional masculine culture of "anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence" is not for you. You are not planning to be a warrior, willing to risk your life defending the borders of your patch of land against the village next door, or even a soldier in a national army defending the borders of the nation state from foreign marauders. So it doesn't make any sense for a would-be creative to train in the martial arts, to work hard at attaining a reputation for courage, to be adventurous, and make people fear your terrible swift sword. OK, bully for you, creatives. Although you might want to look into Nietzsche, who said that to become an Übermensch, a superior man, you had to be hard. I think he means that the path of a creative artist is not for the faint of heart, in particular because in the creative arts many are called but few are chosen.

But not all people in the world are People of the Creative Self. The qualities that a creative person must develop are not the qualities that People of the Responsible Self and People of the Subordinate Self must develop. And it is cruel and ignorant to marginalize the qualities that these other people must develop if they are to understand the "relationship between responsibility and meaning" in their lives, and so on.

The great contribution that lefties made to the world was to say to the bourgeoisie, back in the 19th century: you chaps should not create a society just to suit yourselves, the responsible middle class. what about the workers? They want and need protective social structures, things like labor unions and wage and hour laws, that may mean nothing to you bourgeois chaps, but are very important to them.

Good point lefties. Now, a word. Have you not noticed that the dreaded bourgeoisie has acceded to the demands of the workers, and permitted a huge welfare state go grow up, even though it is not in the interest and the culture of the middle class, and even though the middle class has to bear most of the cost of the welfare state, which does nothing for them except make it more difficult to afford a house, to start a business, and to provide for the future? You haven't noticed? Dear me, where have you been, leftie?

Now I say this. You lefties and luvvies and creative bigots have basically said: we are going to build a  society that is suitable and comfortable for us, the People of the Creative Self, and you racist sexist homophobic bigots of the People of the Responsible Self can go pound sand.

Do you not see, lefties, and luvvies and creative bigots, that this is cruel and unjust? Because it says that there is no room in the world except for people like you? Is not this the argument you made against the middle class 150 years ago, that the middle class was making a world to suit itself without a thought for the poor helpless working class?

Until you lefties and luvvies and creative bigots start to get a glimmer of this, you are going to find, in the words of leftie luvvie Stephen Sackur, that there is going  to be a lot of anger comin' on. And unless you lefties and luvvies and creative bigots allow a space for other kinds of people, the notorious "other" of which we've heard tell, then the anger is going to grow and grow.

Because most people aspire no higher than a modest life of responsibility and work and family and children and grandchildren. They don't want to get all creative about sex, or about morality,  or about art, or about anything in particular. And they deserve a place at the table too, one little place alongside all the magnificent gilded thrones reserved for activists and artists and politicians, and writers and intellectuals and all the rest of the People of the Creative Self.

I say that this is the defining issue of our age: that the People of the Creative Self learn tolerance for people who are not like them. Or else.

Why Do Millenials Like AOC Believe in Big Government?

How in the world can a young woman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believe in Medicare for all? Or her Green New Deal that would forcibly convert the US to green energy in ten years? How indeed can she possibly be a "democratic socialist" given the track record of socialism for the last 150 years?

I mean. Socialism has resulted in 100 million deaths in the last century. And the latest socialist country to show us the way, Venezuela, is in the middle of going down the tubes, with hunger and misery all around as its national oil company also goes down the tubes.

And why is Venezuela's national oil company going down the tubes? Because, dear friend, then-President Hugo Chávez replaced the oil company executives with political placemen, and the engineers that worked for the national oil company all got up and left and went to work for the oil industry in Columbia.

Why do the millennials believe such rubbish? The answer is that the millennials have all been carefully taught. Universities have always really been seminaries to teach the rising ruling class the ruling-class ideology. Back in the day, the whole point of Britain's Oxford and Cambridge was to teach "Greats," meaning Greek, Latin, and Philosophy, and "Modern Greats," meaning Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The idea was that rising politicians needed to know the classic texts about politics, from Plato to Aristotle and the Roman writers from Seneca to Caesar to Livy to Marcus Aurelius. Because if you read those chaps then you got a feel for how to be a successful ruler. And in the modern era you needed to tack on modern political science and economics because a successful government needed to know how to manipulate those factors in order to rule successfully.

And in Germany they invented the research university in the era of German liberation during the Napoleonic Wars as a strategy to make Germany strong so that it would no longer be conquered by the French whenever the mood took them, as it did during the Thirty Years War, the Wars of the Spanish Succession, and the Napoleonic Wars. You will recall that this German national effort was remarkably successful, and the Germans beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war, World War I and World War II. Only problem was that in WWI and WWII the French got the rest of the world to help them and so the Germans got demolished in the process.

This just shows that the plans of ruling classes often go upside down. As Burns put it:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley.

Who knew?

In our day our ruling class rules by dividing the middle class from the victim class. It teaches the victims to hate the middle class using victim politics. It teaches the latest migrants to the city that the bourgeoisie is out to get them. This worked for the working class, for the blacks, and for upscale women. Now the ruling class is teaching the young heads full of mush to advocate for poor helpless gays, transgenders, illegal aliens, and Muslims against the awful forces of white supremacy.

Who knows, it might work.

But the rise of nationalist "populism" in many western countries suggests that this ruling-class strategy may be reaching its sell-by date.

Meanwhile, well-born youngsters like AOC are being carefully taught in our universities to advocate for big government programs like one-size-fits-all government health-care systems and one-size-fits-all government higher-education systems. Oh and one-size-fits-all renewable energy systems.

It is really not surprising that these youngsters -- especially the women -- innocently believe what they have been carefully taught. Despite the notion of rebellious youth -- very popular when the left saw itself as the rebellious sector -- young people are not, in fact, very rebellious. They usually go with the zeitgeist because young people are genetically coded to go with the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist thing is especially important for the ruling class when it wants to send a whole generation of young'uns to war as in WWI and WWII.

The problem is that what the young have been carefully taught, in my view, is the orthodoxy of a reactionary movement, a movement I call the Great Reaction, that rejects the fundamental tenets of the modern age, which is to reduce political power in favor of market power, and to institute a separation of church and state, that is, religion and politics, which have usually, down the ages, been joined at the hip. In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism author Michael Novak proposes what I call a Greater Separation of Powers between not just the branches of government but between the great sectors of society: the political, economic, and cultural/religious sectors. The idea is to prevent two sectors from ganging up on the other sector.

And I believe that this Great Reaction is not just cruel and unjust, but a strategic error that buries humans in misery and death and destruction wherever it is tried. In other words, every ruling class that tries to enact the agenda of the Great Reaction tends to walk itself and its subjects right off a cliff. You would think that ruling classes would have got the message by now. But they haven't and I think the reason why is that the temptation of temporary political power in the here and now is just too enticing for them. I mean, if you were AOC right now, you would think that everything is coming up roses.

The only question is whether the American people think so too. My guess is that they will not, because life, the universe and everything looks a lot different to an ordinary person just trying to get along with a job, a family, and a mortgaged home than it does to a well-born young person that has graduated from a selective college and has been suddenly vaulted into Congress or is otherwise advocating at some activism NGO.

But we shall see. For me, all this looks like rewind city. Back in the Sixties "the kids" thought that they were bringing in a new era. They were shocked, shocked, when Richard Nixon representing the "silent majority" won two elections in a row against them. So they decided to remove him from office.

Sound familiar?

Only this time, I feel, the Republicans are not going to let Democrats manipulate the system with phoney charges and boot the president out. Been there, done that.

But you never know.

When Things Go Wrong: Humanity's Basic Challenge

Yesterday I struck back against Tucker Carlson's attack on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. When a corporation is in decline, someone has to do something, because most likely the current management ain't up to the job.

So what do you do? Do nothing and let the corporation go broke? Have the government do a bailout, as per "Government Motors" in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008? Have NGO activists take it over? Take a poll of financial journalists?

The bigger question is what do you do when anything goes wrong? Years ago, I learned this at work discussing communications protocols with other engineers. The point is, the other guy said, the only interesting question with data communications is what do you do when there is an error? The case where no error occurs is trivial. The question is: what do you do when something goes wrong? This is a gigantic issue: everyone of us is connected into the internet, and believe me, there are errors going on all the time, and yet you and I are almost unaware of this. As far as we are concerned, the internet "just works."

Believe me, the internet does not "just work." Indeed, the internet was invented by the Defense Department's DARPA precisely to solve the problem of what would happen if a nuclear blast knocked out a section of the nation's communications system so that it didn't work. They had no idea that the protocols they developed would be robust enough to work under conditions of billions of global thermonuclear smartphones, but they were.

Now, the fact about humans is that we don't like it when things don't work. But neither do we like to prepare for disaster. We just prefer to do nothing to prepare for a rainy day and then blame politicians and corporations when something does go wrong.

However, you will note that, when disaster does strike, humans immediately jump in to help. The so-called "Cajun Navy" that helps people in the floods after hurricanes is an example of this. And I am not judging the virtue of the bass-boat guys that man the Cajun Navy. The fact is that, instinctively, many men feel that the coolest thing to do after a hurricane is to launch the bass-boat and get out there to help.

This is the biggest problem with government programs. When advocated and passed, nobody thinks of what to do when things go wrong. And the fact is that it is almost impossible to reform a government program while it is starting to go wrong. Only after it is dead on the floor is it possible to change things, and this is not a bug but a feature. We want the laws to be, ideally, unchanging: an immutable statement of justice and redress. But how do you write a law for something that will change over time, like, for instance, education? The answer is that you can't. What you create, when you create a government program, is a great big expensive monster that cannot respond to change and cannot fix itself when things go wrong. Our government education system was set up over a century ago to educated immigrants to literacy and teach them to be conformable factory employees. But what about the children of people already literate and adapted to the wage economy? What about adapting education to deal with online teaching and knowledge? And so on.

But people, when things go wrong, do something about it. They hate to do it, but they do. And the market economy is infinitely adaptable to change, and is full of emergency protocols, like bankrutpcy, for the time when things go wrong. Probably one of the reasons we all hate the market economy is that we don't like it sounding warning signals way before we are ready to respond.

So why do progressives respond to the mess of health care by proposing a bigger, more expensive, more centralized system, when all the problems are caused by the existing centralized administrative system that creates new special interests for breakfast and is inevitably destined to control costs by rationing?

You can ration the economy with prices, or with rationing. If health care is rationed by price, then it will be constantly trying to deliver more service at less price, as with Wal-Mart and consumer products. But if health care is free at the point of delivery, there will be no price rationing and no attempt to improve and streamline service delivery. Health care will be rationed by rationing. That is all.

Why do progressives refuse to learn the lesson of the market economy? It is because their trade is politics and power. And the way to wield power is to control a resource that people want, and have the power to deal it out to your supporters.

And if you are a Person of the Subordinate Self it never occurs to you that there is any other way to order affairs. If you need something, you go to you lord or your political boss and ask for it. Hey, that's the way the world works -- if you are a serf or a slave.

That is the basic question of our time, and any time. When things go wrong, what do you do? Do you go to your overlord? Do you call in Mitt Romney and Bain Capital? Or do you try to figure it out yourself with your fellow humans?

Our problem is that, in last two centuries, incredible new ways have been invented to solve problems short of waiting for disaster to strike. But most of us still practice the culture of the feudal peasant. We expect our lord to solve the problem for us.

But as I say: when you are an underling, or even a spoiled "little darling" of some political power, there comes a day when your lord leaves you by the side of the road because you are no longer of use to him, and all his promises of protection lie broken in the dust.

And what will the robin do then, poor thing?

No, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital Was Not a Scam

Tucker Carlson takes out after Mitt Romney and Mitt's foolish op-ed in the Washington Post. And there  is plenty to criticize, as I did in my latest American Thinker piece.

But then he starts in on Romney's Bain Capital.

Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became fantastically rich doing this.

Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country.

I'd say that was the Democratic version of Bain Capital. Here's my version.

There are, in the economy, many corporations that are past their sell-by date. They hobble along, racking up debt to keep going, but get deeper and deeper in debt. Maybe they expanded too much in the good times; maybe they cranked up employee benefits too much. Maybe the management sucks. Maybe the employee union has plundered the company to deliver unaffordable benefits. Think of Sears, once the best of the best, showing the world how to do retail and also catalog. But the world has passed Sears by, and now it is going into bankruptcy or a sale to its CEO.

There is nothing remarkable about this. People do it too. They get into debt, and then don't get the pay-raise they were banking on. So they take on more debt in the hope that things will turn around. Only, usually, they don't. And most people lack the intestinal fortitude to make tough decisions to stop the rot: sell the dream home; dump the luxury car.

Same with CEOs. The CEO that inherits a company from the guy that built it into a colossus is probably a man without the vision and the guts to make tough decisions. So he lets the corporation borrow to keep things going, in the hope that things will not come to a crisis on his watch. But if you let a company like Sears keep going down it will eventually cease to exist, all its assets mortgaged, and its employees turned out on the street.

The business model of an outfit like Bain Capital is to buy a troubled corporation for a song and take it private, paying off the public stockholders. Then the Bain guys develop a turn-around plan and present it to the bondholders and creditors: try this or lose everything. The plan will probably involve shedding a ton of employees, employee benefits, money-losing divisions, and haircuts for the creditors. And probably it involves additional debt and new equity investors to finance the turnaround.

The Bain turn-around plan may work, or it may not. If it fails, then the employees and creditors are probably no worse off than if the corporation just subsided into bankruptcy under the old, tired management.  If it succeeds, then most of the employees keep their jobs, but probably not the above-market benefits they used to enjoy. And Bain and its investors make a ton of money.

That is how capitalism works. If you accept a risk proposition, then you lose everything if the proposition fails, and make a ton of money if it succeeds.

In capitalist societies there is a class of people that says: trust us, and we will protect you no matter what. These people are called politicians and activists, and they are liars. Nobody can protect you, no matter what. Not a nation state. Not a corporation.

But capitalism offers options on the risk proposition. You can be a business owner, and accept a heavy risk proposition: maybe enormous profits, or, more likely, losses that put you out of business. Or you can go to work as an employee for a fixed wage. When you do that you are saying to your employer: profits and losses, that's your affair; I just want my paycheck. But it never ends there. If the employer makes a ton of money, the employees will start grumbling: hey, how come I don't get some of da loot? If the employer suffers losses, the employees will resist cuts to benefits: hey, you promised me health care benefits, and now you want to renege just when my wife needs life-saving drugs?

In the old days, people were serfs and peasants; they relied on their lords to protect them from the Mongols and the army of the lord next  door. The lord offered this protection -- until he didn't.

In these days, the people have options. You can go work for government, with life tenure and pensions, but a soul-destroying work environment. You can go work for a  corporation, and hope that it keeps on the up and up.  But hey, even Apple experiences reverses, as its stock has plunged 40 percent in a few months. Or you can work on the assumption that your value fluctuates in the market like everything else. So you keep your eyes open, and adjust your skills to match the economy. And hope that when you plan to retire the stock market is on the up and up and not in the middle of a generational crash like 1929 or 2008.

But the truth  is that the basic feature of humans is that we want our cake and to eat it too. So we are always ready to blame "them" when things go wrong.

So people run around blaming "finance capital" and "robber barons" for the inevitable reverses in life and work. Of course, it is true that the bushes are full of knaves and scoundrels. And some of those scoundrels run private equity outfits.

Meanwhile,  in the last 200 years, the per-capita income of the American people has gone up by 3,000 percent in real terms. There has never been anything like it, ever.

Most Voters are Tribal

There's a piece in National Review by J.J. McCullough warning the anti-Trumpists that his supporters aren't "transactional," supporting him merely for his positions on "the issues."

A November Quinnipiac University poll found that the vast majority of Republicans have enormous, across-the-board confidence in everything about Trump: 82 percent said he had good leadership skills, 77 percent said he was honest, 92 percent said he was intelligent, and 80 percent agreed he was someone who “shares your values.” Trump was given astronomically high approval on the management of basically every issue as well, including 86 percent approval for his handling of “immigration issues.”

Do you see what this means? It means that Trump's core supporters are not basing their support on "what have you done for me lately" but on an overall view of him as their tribal leader.

I should say "our," because my support for Trump has a lot to do with his courage in going up against the educated ruling class tribe, fearlessly defending our tribe of deplorables after the manner of a mythical hero.

And humans have a real yearning for a hero. I wonder why? Not.

Indeed, for me, Trump has been something of a surprise, particularly on the taxes and regulations front. I had no idea that the populist Trump would risk a tax cut that mostly gives a big tax rate cut to corporations. And I had no idea that he had a plan to send in the Grim Reaper to scythe away at administrative-state regulations.

And, he stood firm with the band of brothers on the firing line when the entire left went nuclear on Brett Kavanaugh in the most disgraceful display of fascist tactics in my lifetime.

Yeah, lefty friends. You wanna know what fascism looks like in real life -- as opposed to your fever dreams of the nightmare of right-wing supremacy that you have been carefully taught to hate and to fear by your hard-left teachers and professors? It's you chaps during the nomination fight. I mean, what's more fascist than convicting a guy on a mere decades-old accusation?

And now, dare I say, it may be that the Notorious RBG may not be long on the Court. How do you like them apples, lefties?

The truth is that although plenty of people say they vote "on the issues" we nearly all vote with our tribe.

It's true that, on the left, young worthies like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are all down for free Medicare-for-all and the forgiveness of student debt. (Notice that the former arises out of the insanely expensive and government-regulated third-party health care payment system and the latter arises because of college fee inflation triggered by the government's student loan system.)

But these are not really transactional "issues" but tribal battle cries. Every liberal voter knows that ICE is xenophobia, every word of concern about Islamic terrorism is Islamophobia, every conservative speaking on campus should be de-platformed.

The bottom line on politics is not the tribalism, but how long the loyal rank-and-file hangs on after their leaders have betrayed them.

In the case of the white working class it has taken 50 years after the Democrats abandoned them for a politician to figure out how to lead them -- with a brief intermission for the Reagan Democrats.

But now, I'd say, the white working class is solid for Trump for the foreseeable future. The only question is whether he can tempt in some blacks and Latinos.

And the tribiest tribe in America is the progressive tribe whose natural habitat is the college town or the gentrified close-in suburb. Talk about tribal dances and witch burnings and sacrifices of scapegoats!

I wonder if the Democrats have backed themselves into a corner on Trump. They have taught their tribe to hate and to fear Donald Trump and his tribe of deplorables. Can that win them the 2020 election? Only time will tell.