The Big Problem with Politics in the Mature Welfare State

Whatabout those opinion polls that show President Trump behind the leading Democratic candidates? Is Trump in trouble? Dov Fischer, the American Spectator's  resident rabbi, points out the basic problem with such polls. it is this:

The Average American Is Painfully Ignorant, Strikingly Uninformed, and Hopelessly Clueless — Until a Matter Becomes Imminently Personal.

So, the average American is all for Medicare For All when presented by the CJC, the Corrupt Journalist Corps, until she starts to find out what it means to her.

Pollsters find that 70 percent of Americans prefer “Medicare for All” when initially surveyed. “Sure, let’s guarantee ‘free’ health care for everyone — even those here illegally. It’s only right.” Then, after pollsters follow by asking whether the surveyed person would be OK with losing his or her own private insurer option, support plummets to 37 percent. “What? You mean I can’t have my PPO and will have to lose my family doctor or my long-time pulmonary/coronary/neurological/gastroenterological specialist, and will need to go to some clinic where I get whoever they have on duty that day?” And then when apprised that single-payer government health care also will mean enduring substantially increased waiting times just to see a doctor and brutal scheduling delays to undergo an urgently needed surgery, the results suddenly crash to 26 percent. 

Notice the three levels here. First, the abstract unicorns and rainbows level: oh yeah, let's have healthcare for everyone. Second, the "they'd better not take away my doctor/insurance" level. Third, the "waiting in line" realization, what you might call the "imminently personal" stage of understanding.

OK, fine. But let's look at the bigger picture.

The fact is that democratic politics, like politics in any age, is all about what you can get in the world by force. All politics is about loot and plunder, as in my Maxim:

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

In hunter-gatherer bands, it's all about the dawn raid on the neighboring band, for loot, plunder, and women. In the agricultural era it's all about invading the neighboring country to loot them of their grain stores and their women. Or, in Hitler's version, it is conquering the East in order to establish the Germans with land to grow their own food supplies and its corresponding Lebensraum.

In our day, during the industrial era, it's "vote for me and I'll give you free stuff."

In the early days of the democratic era this was a real winner, because the state spent something like 10 percent of GDP on government programs and a lot of that was defence. So it was a no-brainer to sell the workers on social insurance and free education because the workers wouldn't appear to be paying for it.

But, as Irving Kristol pointed out half a century ago, there is a catch. If you are a lefty wanting to help the workers or women or blacks or undocumented immigrants, you pretty soon learn that your plan won't fly unless you deal in the middle class. And there is another catch. The wonderful program to help the workers and women and blacks will end up being skewed towards the agenda of the middle class. So free education, beloved by the workers in the 19th century, turned out to benefit mainly the middle class who were already paying for education for their children. Today, it is clear that education works best in middle-class suburbs where the middle-class mothers are running herd on the school system. Social Security benefits mainly the middle class. Ditto Medicare.

So, when you propose to meddle with Social Security, its middle-class beneficiaries immediately start wondering about the security of their pensions. When you propose to expand Medicare into Medicare For All, its middle-class beneficiaries immediately grasp that they are going to be getting worse health care.

So this really creates a problem for the politicians that have got elected in the last century by promising benefits to the workers and the traditionally marginalized. It worked well when the government was still devouring less than 10 percent of GDP. But when, as now, the government is spending north of 35 percent GDP, then the middle class is going to get the feeling that they are not going to benefit. They instinctively realize that any change in government entitlements is likely to hurt them.

So I would say that the loot-and-plunder operations of democratic politics has gone about as far as it can go. If you start looting and plundering beyond our current level at 35-40 percent GDP you are risking a meltdown like Argentina, or Venezuela.

So, in the current election cycle, our Democratic friends are proposing glorious new vistas of loot and plunder with Medicare For All and student loan forgiveness that sound really cool until you get beyond the unicorns and rainbows and start realizing how, at the imminently personal level, it's going to hurt the average middle-class voter.

Now there is another approach to this, that is exemplified by the Green New Deal. This is a quasi-religious program, to heal the world of its vile sludge and make it new again. It sounds wonderful in its unicorns and rainbows aspect, but when it comes to the nitty gritty, with gas prices in the stratosphere, paying for a complete do-over of the electrical generation and transmission system, etc., average people are going to find themselves paying big bucks -- for what?

And yet, it has to be, politics must operate on a basis of loot and plunder, as it has always done.

My question is: how do you do loot and plunder in the digital age? Clearly the loot-and-plunder of the industrial age as reached its limit. But what comes next?

I have to admit that I have no idea. 

Suppose Education is All a Scam?

A month or so I went to Stratford-on-Avon in Britland and visited the schoolroom where William Shakespare allegedly went to school.

The spiel of the guide was that, back in 1570 in Stratford at age 8, the average boy started work. Or he went to a school with 40-50 boys of all ages in one room with a single schoolmaster. And what they learned was Latin and Arithmetic by rote and recitation.

Oh No! Rote learning! But that made sense because there was only one schoolmaster and you had to pay big bucks for paper. Plus, if you had a problem you asked the older kid sitting on the next Form to help you.

But then I got to read Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. Clearly the guide's spiel came from this book.

But Greenblatt added another wrinkle. Parents liked the idea of their kids not starting work and learning Latin because of the prestige. And the uselessness. Latin wasn't really going to give you any useful skills. But it sure proved that your parents could afford it.

So you tell me. How much of modern education is all about showing "I can afford it." I mean everything from kindergarten through grad school?

Because if we were purely trying to be practical, and save money, I reckon that the practical thing to do would be for the neighborhood women to get together and teach the kids the Three Rs: reading writing and arithmetic. And then the kids would become apprentices at some employer, that would be mandated by the ruling class to teach the kid a useful trade and extend their education, subject to the most frightful penalties for non-performance. And the employer would bear the cost of the training. Of course he would because he would be the beneficiary of the low wages paid to the apprentice and the skills evenutally acquired by the apprentice.

Hey, I think that kids should start work just about as soon as they have completed their Three Rs. Unless.

Unless your parents want to demonstrate their wealth and status and have you learn useless stuff like Latin and French and History and Music and Social Studies and Ruling Class Ideology.

I mean: that was the point of young ladies in Jane Austen novels becoming a "proficient" in the piano and in singing. They were "accomplishments" that a young lady was expected to have if she hoped to attract a husband. To say nothing of that all important dowry.

And, really, isn't that the point of sending today's Woke young activist feminists to college? Accomplisments? Maybe not. Maybe the point is the dowry, that upper-middle-class young men won't marry a woman unless she has a professional credential, worth at least $80k a year in salary. Or is the minimum level these days more like $120k?

See, I reckon that if you are the average white working-class people your goal is a job, a house, a family. But that is not enough for the upwardly bound. That is why the average selective college makes its applicants jump through all the ridiculous hoops writing essays about their experience in charitable work and basically starting their own charitable foundation and planting trees in the Himalayas. Accomplishments. Just like the young ladies of old.

Also, I suspect, it is necessary to gild the lily of the average boring jobs in the administrative bureaucracy of the ruling class -- academia, lawyering, foreign service, foundations, art -- and represent them as creative, caring, compassionate careers. Completely different from the average dead-end job of the average deplorable. Not.

And, of course, the whole point of the big-government administrative state is to provide meaning for the lives of ruling-class scions, so they have deplorable boobs to order aound and punish when they step out of line.

No really. Imagine an America without a big-government state. What would average dull scions of the nobility do then, poor things? No creative careers -- boring jobs -- for people of no particular talent. No opportunities for ordering the plebs around. It would be a very living hell. For dull scions of the ruling class.

I think the opposite is true. I think that nobody has a clue about educating children. I think that nobody has a clue about what teenagers and young adults should be doing. I think that nobody has a clue about how to organize work and career and blend it with the real work of humans, which is wiving and thriving.

But this is what I think. I think that the neighborhood women should get together and cooperate to allow the kids to learn the Three Rs. And I'll bet that the kids of literate parents would automatically learn the Three Rs without too much trouble or much educational expertise in their mothers. As for the children of the lower class, well I'd say that is the job of us, the educated class, to organize on our own without benefit of government monopoly.

I think that skills training should be done by private business, who are probably the folks most likely to know what skills we should be teaching the kids and what skills will be needed around the next corner. And let's put kids to work as soon as possible. And become Really Useful Citizens.

As for the folks wanting to display status, I'd say all power to them. Let them spend fortunes on getting their prestige kids into prestige schools to learn prestige things and accumulate prestige contacts. But hey, if there aren't prestige careers in the administrative state -- that afford the scions of the rulers plenteous opportunities to order the deplorables around and pat the ruling-class Little Darlings on the butt -- then these scions of the rulers will have to get a job and do something useful rather than something prestigious.

That would be an America worthy of the name, and worthy of the American people, and worthy of our beloved Founders.

Sebastian Junger: Why Doesn't He Talk about Hunter-Gatherer Loot and Plunder

Reading Sebastian Junger's book Tribe: Homecoming and Belonging you are treated to the pro-social wonders of hunter-gatherer culture. No beastly inequality and a culture that insists on sharing. As opposed to our dysfunctional rich with their billions and the poor with nothing and millions suffering in loneliness and depression.

But somehow Junger never gets around to discussing the ancient practice of loot and plunder among our noble ancestors. Warriors from our tribe looting and plundering the tribe next door.

Of course, back in the day, there was not much percentage in loot and plunder because the more mobile hunter-gatherers didn't have much to loot.

Oh, except for women. According to researchers, the Yanomamö tribe in the Amazonian jungle did a lot of raiding on each other, and the game was always the same as the Romans and their legendary Rape of the Sabine Women. The Yanomamö warriors were "looting" their neighbors to obatain their women.

In other words, our back-to-nature forefathers were, just like us moderns, intensely interested in the concept of loot and plunder. In Empire of Blue Water by Stephen Talty, about the real pirates of the Caribbean, it appears that the pirates never had an idea bigger than loot and plunder: "they had no faith, no law, no institutions that would hold them together beyond the next raid."

Gosh, I thought. That means they were a couple steps behind our modern lefties, who have built a saving faith and several states that lasted a decade or two on the institutionalizing of loot and plunder, because workers, or women or civil rights.

Actually loot and plunder can last you for a while. The Roman Empire was built on progressive conquest of an ever-larger empire, with each conquest bringing a surge of plunder and slaves to beautiful downtown Rome. This cunning strategy only ran out of steam in the 2nd century AD when the boundaries of empire were so far from Rome that... Well, I wonder what did happen? Did the Roman generals sit on the loot? Did it evaporate on the way back to Rome? Or were potential Roman generals from the senatorial classes no longer interested in the stress and challenge of military conquest in the far east or the far north? More research is needed.

But now! Let's face it, in a democratic society every election is really a market for loot and plunder. Vote for me and you will be richly rewarded. And Republicans play the game too with their tax cut plans.

But do you know? I have no idea how we can move our modern era beyond the modern replacement of actual loot and plunder of the good old days that featured armies paid in plunder with the new method of rewarding voters with free stuff.

I mean, the only issue right now that does not include free stuff for the masses is the Green New Deal. But I am confident that it will fade as soon as average voters get to understand that the trillions in Green New Deal spending and subsidies will go to the educated voters of the mandarin class, not to ordinary middle class voters and workers.

It is comical, really. We make a big song and dance about the glories of democracy and justice and the rule of law. But when it comes to actual elections it is really just an auction of loot and plunder livened up with a bit of three-card monte, or the fooling of the punters into thinking they are going to strike it rich.

Really, if the current administrative state is reaching its sell-by date because there is just not that much more loot that can be promised without crashing the economy, what comes after it?

Is it possible to have a politics without loot and plunder? Is it possible to get beyond my maxim that "government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters"?

Well, all I can say is that no genius has invented that politics yet. But we can certainly hope.

Sebastian Junger: 2008 Crash Was Because US De-tribalised

Back in the day, when we were tribes, writes Sebastian Junger in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, we had a natural solution to bad behavior, such as "tribe members who steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources." It was "group pressure. Not only are bad actions punished, but good actions are rewarded."

But now we have rampant cheating, from Medicare/Medicaid fraud at "around $100 billion a year" to insurance fraud at "$100 billion and $300 billion a year[.]"

All told, combined public- and privtae-sector fraud costs every household probably around $5,000 per year -- or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent.

And then there is the real-estate crash and banking bailout and Great Recession of 2006-08. These "illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion in stock losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half.

So the solution is to go back to the Stone Age and revive the pro-social face-to-face practices of the hunter-gatherers.

I don't think so, and the fact that a good little boy from elite Boston thinks this should be is, I think, one of the major items in the Bill of Indictment against our ruling class.

Because the whole basis of modern electoral politics is loot and plunder. Vote for me and I'll give you free stuff. (Hello Liz! How yer doin' gal?) If you look at our welfare state and the current financial system it is designed to be used as an instrument of power by the educated mandarin class, the people who have been to the right colleges -- Wesleyan in the case of Junger -- and got the right credentials and intoned the correct responses.

And, being as Sebastian Junger is a best-selling author he'd better toe the ruling-class line or forget his best-selling publishing deals and all the publicity that good little boys get from the fake media.

See, back in the day, Americans belonged to mutual-aid societies like the Masons and the Elks. These voluntary institutions run by their members provided a whole array of social services from employment referrals to job help when moving to a new town to "lodge doctor" medical plans to life insurance, death benefits, and looking after members' widows. They were incredibly pro-social and enacted the "group pressure" on defaulters that Junger praises in the hunter-gatherers.

But then the Progressives came along and replaced the mutual-aid system with government pensions and welfare. And I'll bet you that college-educated Sebastian Junger doesn't have a clue about the old system that florished in the 19th century and to which "everyone" belonged.

Instead what we now have is a full-scale loot and plunder operation that we call the welfare state. Scamming the system is the point, as you can see from the behavior of, e.g., the government employee unions in California.

Oh, and about the real-estate crash. That was a direct result of government policy that forced banks to loan to borrowers with small-to-none down payments and bad credit. Because redlining back in the day.

Anyone that knows anything has read Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street written after the failure of a bank on Lombard Street in London in 1866. Here is Bagehot's big idea.

1. Loans must be adequately collateralized so that, in the event of failure to service the loan, the value of the collateral will be sufficient to liquidate the loan.
2. Borrowers must service their loans -- make their payments -- and be seen to be doing that.

Unless these two requirements are met You Got Trouble, as the song says.

But the US government set up a system that violated both these provisions and they directed the government subsidized mortgage twins, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to have a minimum percent of low-quality loans -- low down payment and low credit -- in their portfolio.

But here was the problem. Your pension plans and other regulated financial institutions were only allowed to buy top-rated bonds. How to enable them to purchase the Fannie/Freddie bonds with low-quality loans in them? The answer was derivatives, that attempted to neutralize the extra risk and thereby "create" highly rated financial instruments. Only it all fell apart in the market meltdown of 2006-08. Sorry Charlie.

Oh, and then Little Ben Bernanke choked and didn't think he had the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers.

Yeah, that's one thing that the hunter-gatherers were big on. Punishing lack of courage.

Do you see what I am saying here? I am saying that it is bootless for Sebastian Junger to complain about widespread cheating and fraud, everywhere from welfare to financial institutions.That's because the whole system has been designed by our modern ruling elite to be a scam. So that they could Divide and Conquer amd distribute the loot to their supporters.

And the worst thing is that we had institutions that replicated the pro-social world of the hunter-gatherer era. But Progressives "canceled" that world. And why? Because they wanted to be the Big Boys. They wanted to rule the new world. And they needed to be able to offer loot and plunder to the voters in order to win political power.

The point about the market economy is that it encourages pro-social behavior. It encourages people to offer products and services that other people want and at prices they are willing to pay. It encourages people to trust anyone that is trustworthy. And it requires everyone, every day, to align their behavior with the price signals of the market.

But the fact is that almost everything in the political sector is involved to some degree in allowing people to scam the system. Because marking your life to market is really hard. And, as Junger says, you need "group pressure" to keep that kind of stuff under control.

Now do you see why I call the left, all of the left, a Great Reaction? Because they have this woolly idea of how wonderful things were back in the day. But socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, identity politics is neo-tribalism, and so on.

What hope is there when bright young chaps like Sebastian Junger don't have a clue?

Sebastian Junger's View of Tribes

Sebastian Junger, whose breakthrough book was The Perfect Storm, is a guy from privileged Boston. And by the time he got out of college in 1986 he wanted an adventure. So he hitchhiked out West.

On the way, just outside of Gillette, Wyoming, he met a marginal guy who was worried Junger didn't have enough food, and gave him the contents of his lunchbox. He treated Junger "like a member of his tribe." So Junger wrote a book about Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

This book is about why that sentiment is such a rare and precious thing in modern society... It's about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.

And, most importantly,

It's about why -- for many people -- war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to he a great blessing and disasters are remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.

What people don't like is "not feeling necessary." And these days there are a ton of people that feel they are not necessary. And are alone, and depressed and so on.

Here's something to puzzle over. When the whites first came to North America they started to experience a real problem.

[A] surprising number of [white] Americans -- mostly men -- wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their towns... And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society.

Maybe that's because Indians "lived communally in mobile or semi-permanent encampments that were more or less run by consensus and broadly egalitarian... Anyone who didn't like it was free to move somewhere else."

I was glad to read this because it confirms what I had read from C.R. Hallpike, that hunter-gatherers lived in "bands" and when men got into a row with the other men they would leave and join another band. (Yeah: I'm glad you asked. Whatabout the women? I bet they were being named and shamed and shunned by the other women just like today!)

But, of course, when it came to a fight, the whites rolled up the Indians, starting in 1763 when the Swiss Henri Bouquet rolled up the tribal army assembled by Ottawa chief Pontiac.

Maybe that's the definitive thing about modern man and agricultural man vs. the hunter-gatherers; we industrialist and agriculturalists always beat them in battle. Except at Little Big Horn.

But, I thought, after reading 170 pages of the glories of the North American Indians and our dysfunctional society. Whatabout slaves? Aha! Wouldn't you know, from an internet search:

Indigenous American slavery, rooted in warfare and diplomacy, was flexible, often offering its victims escape through adoption or intermarriage, and it was divorced from racial ideology, deeming all foreigners—men, women, and children, of whatever color or nation—potential slaves.

The Native Americans even got into the plantation slavery business with West African slaves!

In the Southeast, an elite class of Indians began to hold African Americans in transgenerational slavery and, by 1800, developed plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors.

No kidding! But probably, in their Noble Savage innocence, this "elite class of Indians" had no idea about plantation slavery until a racist sexist homophobe white supremacist suggested it.

But aside from this embarrassment -- not covered in his book -- Junger praises the social nature of hunter-gatherer life.

They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group. They would have been utterly intoleratnt of hoarding or selfishness. They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others.

Yes. And they also experienced, according to scholars, 500 violent deaths per 100,000 per year against our 5 per 100,000 per year.

But now, after the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, we have property. And alienation.

The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day -- or an entire life -- mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

Speak for yourself, lefty. I'd say that the industrial revolution birthed a whole universe of communal inventions, from the workplace to mutual-aid societies.

But then along came lefties. They taught workers to hate their bosses. They drafted children into government schools. They replaced the pro-social mutual aid societies with administrative dominations like "social" insurance and government pension plans. And they subjugated the financial system to finance their wars and then their entitlement programs.

Hey! Suppose the men were all "going through the chairs" at the local Masonic lodge or the Elks club. Suppose the women were all involved in home-schooling and cooperative child care with their neighbors. Suppose the care of the poor was delegated to billionaires and millionaires and their charitably-minded wives -- or else! Hey, if that had been allowed to happen everyone would be as happy as clams, living pro-social, meaningful lives.

And that says nothing about the way that employers these days consciously attempt to create the illusion of community in the workplace. And says nothing about the way that the market economy pretty well forces everyone to practice the notion of trusting everyone that demonstrates trustworthiness, or getting along with anyone that demonstrates they will get along with you.

No. I'd say that the reason that people are miserable these days is lefties. Because lefties have harvested all the pro-social roles and said: all social activity is to be controlled and directed by us lefties with wonderful government programs. All you plebs and deplorables have to do is show up to get your benefit. We lefties and liberals and mandarins will do all the thinking and the deciding. Isn't this new world wonderful! (Better say yes, or you will be canceled.)

OK. That's just for a start. More tomorrow.

Suppose Trump Starts Filling 60,000 Seat Stadiums Next Fall

When President Trump fills a 20,000 seat stadium, as he did recently in Texas, there is always a disagreement about the number of folks outside watching on the big screen. Was it 5,000 or 20,000? And are all the attendees working-class white racists, or what?

Well, obviously there has been a bit of srategery going on at Trump HQ, because today there's a piece on RedState discussing Brad Parscale's post-rally tweets.

In the matter of Trump's Friday rally in Mississippi:

Data from Friday’s Mississippi rally:

✅ 16,432 voters identified
✅ 24% voted once or less in last 4 elections (12% in zero)
✅ 27% Democrat
✅ 20% Black
More winning numbers that will help secure #FourMoreYears for @realDonaldTrump!
Continue to outperform 2016.
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) November 4, 2019

So. There were 6,000 folks outside the stadium. A lot of them non-voters, Democrats, Black. Who knew?

Or the tally from the recent Dallas rally:

Incredible data from last night’s Dallas rally:

✅ 53,985 voters identified
✅ 12% have not voted in the last 4 elections
✅ 21.4% Democrat
✅ 11% Latino
These are winning numbers that will help win #FourMoreYears for @realDonaldTrump!
We continue to outperform 2016.
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) October 18, 2019

The thing about rallies is that they are a male thing, a calling of the clan, brought together by the clan leader.

See, what President Trump has been doing all this time is re-establishing the United States as a clan. It is a rebirth of nationalism or, as I like to say, fake tribalism. Put it another way. Humans are groupish. We are social animals, that come together because of the benefits of social ties, which include, of course, protection from dangers, natural and unnatural. And also because we feel good when we are in a group of like-minded humans.

Now, in the last few decades our liberal friends have been establishing groupishness on a different basis. For themselves, they experience themselves as a global elite. So their groupishness is supra-national. For their clients -- the folks I call "little darlings" of the elite -- they encourage race and gender identity, what you might call sub-national groupishness.

Personally, I think that the groupishness encouraged by our educated -- and, may I say, mandarin -- elite is vile and reactionary. I think that the establishment of the nation state as a dominant form of human groupishness is a stunning human achievement. Of course, it has its drawbacks, in that it encourages nation states to quarrel as nation states, and so, when nation state leaders are dumb or something, that could lead to war. But what do you want? Quarrels among princely states? Or between empires? We ain't gonna get global governance, not until the Trisolarians invade from Alpha Centauri.

What Trump has done is revive nationalist groupishness, allowing people to experience him as our great tribal leader who cares about people like you and me. Of course, it's all fake, as is all politics. President Trump doesn't really care about you and me; no more did President Obama or President Bush. But a political leader needs to be good at igniting a feeling of groupishness.

For instance: Sen. Elizabeth Warrn (D-MA). I do not think she is very good at getting people to feel groupish. Her campaign is a campaign of "my plan is..." Very good, if you are a plannish sort of person, as your educated mandarin elitist is, because every plan requires the enlistment of another regiment of mandarins to go out into America and direct traffic.

But Sen. Warren is often described as a "schoolmarm." Implicit in that description is that she does not lift any hearts. She seems to be an "eat your veggies" kind of person. She does not say that America is the greatest country in the world and the American people are the greatest people in the world. Sen. Warren is not the sort of person that you would think could fill stadiums with cheering fans.

So here is what I am wondering. I am wondering what kind of stadiums President Trump will be filling next Fall. And I'll bet that Brad Parscale is wondering that too. Should we be aiming for your average 60,000 seat football stadium? Or should he be aiming for the 100,000 seat class, like the LA Coliseum and the Rose Bowl?

I don't know. I'll leave that sort of decision to the professionals. But what I think is that half the game in politics is the enthusiasm level. Because enthusiasm is catching. Clearly, right now, when President Trump brings his roadshow into town right before an election it raises the turnout. So I dare say that come next October he and his team will be scheduling rallies in states that could go either way, and could go his way with the help of a little push on the enthusiasm front.

And it sure ain't gonna hurt if he is filling 60,000 seat stadiums with a big overflow crowd in the parking lot outside.

Will Medicare For All and Green New Deal Sell?

It is my belief that all political endeavors must adhere to one of two notions.

First is the notion of Loot and Plunder, more politely known as Free Stuff. Vote for me, and I will reward you with loot and plunder taken from...

Well, that is the question. Who are the evil knaves and beasts that deserve to be stripped of their ill-gotten gains to feather the nest of the good guys like you and me? In the old days the bad guys were the village next door. By the time of the Greeks of the Iliad, we were looting and plundering Lyrnessus and its darling princesses on the way to Troy. By the time of Hitler, we are talking about acquiring Lebensraum in the east to the Germans would feel comfortable growing their own food, because it was all the Jews' fault. With lefties we are talking about rightfully looting the bourgeoisie of their ill-gotten gains to give the proletarians what is rightfully theirs.

So Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her Medicare For All is just the latest in this ancient human tradition. We will all get universal health care and the middle class will have no tax increase. Instead the health care will be paid for by the rich and the insurance companies.

Yep, if you believe that, I gotta bridge to sell you.

But here is the dirty little secret about progressive politics. It was enunciated years ago by Irving Kristol, neoconservative Jewish intellectual extraordinaire and father of the present NeverTrunp Bill Kristol. Kristol the Elder said that the secret of progressive politics is that, in order to help the poor, you have to deal in the middle class.

Thus, Social Security. The idea was to help the poor in their old age. But to pass it the Democrats had to deal in the middle class. And today I'll bet that the program mostly benefits the middle class. with a little nod to the poor in giving relatively higher pensions to people with low wages and a limited working life.

Same thing with Education For All. Sounds like a great idea. But where are the school districts that perform well? Right, in wealthy suburbs. And where are the school districts that perform badly? Exactly in minority inner cities.

Now the problem with Medicare For All is the same problem that faced Obamacare, and before it, HillaryCare. The middle class already has health insurance and the middle class likes its health insurance. And it's a strange thing, but the middle class isn't all that keen on paying a ton more in taxes or premiums to pay for the uninsured.

Back in the Nineties, in the Age of HillaryCare, I already knew about Kristol's Law. So it didn't surprise me in the summer of 1994 when the local PBS newsreaders marveled in disbelief at the failure of HillaryCare. It was, they admitted, because the middle class, the Harry and Louise of the insurance company commercials, already had health insurance and didn't want to pay more.

Enter Obamacare in 2009 with the cunning Jonathan Gruber doing the policy analyst work. Obama and Gruber -- and presumably the rest of the deep state -- had learned the lesson of HillaryCare so they first squared the insurance companies and then promised that "if you like your doctor / health insurance you can keep you doctor / health insurance." And you will save $2,500 a year. All lies, but necessary lies if they hoped to pass the program. Now that Obamacare is passed Republicans are afraid to terminate it because all the people getting Obamacare subsidies, every one of them, will go out and vote for Democrats, do not pass Go.

This is Chantrill's Law. Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them.

So now we are offered Medicare For All. Naturally, Sen. Warren has enlisted one of Gruber’s Obamacare accomplices to cobble together a document to make the math on Medicare For All come out --without a middle class tax increase. Of course she has. The only question is whether she call sell it, and whether she can cobble together enough lies, like the lies of Obamacare, in order to pass it in Congress.

But Warren is sailing in a square-rigged ship against a pretty stiff wind. Because the middle class already has health insurance, thinks it already costs quite enough, and is not willing to risk it all on a promise that only the rich will pay.

The other political strategy you can try if you want to Do Something is embedded in my maxim, that "the only warrant for government power is existential peril." This is when the tribal leader rallies the men with the threat that the Mongols are already at the door. Every man must come out and fight, or we will all be killed! This was normal in the good old days, when, e.g., the Vikings would kill all the men in their raids and then sell the women into slavery.

In religion this expresses itself in various prophetic cults and their end-of-the-world scenarios. Currently, with considerable cunning, our global elite is selling the idea of end-of-the-world global warming, perhaps 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The notion was put together by Maurice Strong, who "served as the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme."

Let me ask you. Suppose you wanted the UN to head up a global environmental program with considerable global powers, as a first step towards beneficial and wise global governance? What would you do? Exactly. You would propose an existential peril, amounting to the End of the World, Unless We Act Now.

But, of course, ordinary humans are a bit reluctant to give up everything in order to enlist in the army of some UN bureaucrat, or indeed in anyone's army. You have to really amp up the fear and paint a frightful picture of rising sea levels and dying coral reefs and dead baby seals and extinct polar bears in order to sell the people on your prophecy.

So the question with the Green New Deal, to basically stop all normal life for the next decade in order to completely transform the economy away from fossil fuels to renewable resources, is whether you can make the sale. Obviously it isn't that hard to persuade empty-headed young women who know nothing, like AOC and Greta Thunberg. And many of the liberal women here in Seattle are at this very moment contentedly driving around in electric cars knowing that they are saving he planet. But can the prophets persuade the ordinary man and woman with job and house and family to give it all up: "Will you join in our crusade? / Who will be strong and stand with me?"

In general, it seems, people are quite happy to help save the planet. Unless it is going to cost them money. So, the only way forward is to form a religious movement and stoke it with prophecy. That's the way that humans band together to fight an existential peril.

In 2020, it seems that Democrats are pushin both political strategies, the Loot and Plunder strategy and the End of the World Unless We Act Now strategy.

The only question is the old one enunciated by Harry Percy about summoning spirits from the vasty deep. "But will they come when you do call for them?"