Mandatory or Discretionary? You Make the Call

You may know, or you may not know, that federal spending in divided, like Gaul, into three parts. There is Mandatory Spending, which does not require an annual appropriation by Congress. There is  Interest Payments, which go without saying. And there is Discretionary Spending, which is legislated every year by Congress.

At usgovernmentspending.com our crack analysts have just completed a Mandatory Spending Analysis page. Here is a look at the overall picture from 1962, the first year of the Historical Tables that are published each year by the Office of Management and Budget.

 The overall story is that year after year, the Mandatory side of the budget keeps getting bigger. And the main reason is the expansion of health care programs, which are mostly Mandatory.

And, of course, the defense budget is almost all Discretionary. Go figure.

Actually, it makes sense. All government is force, and the number one government program, after selling the debt, is paying off supporters. This has been true at least since the good old days of the Frankish Empire operating out of Trier in western Germany after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

And, I have determined, the only government program that ever gets cut is the defense budget after a major war. Everything else is sacrosanct.

So you may think that, probably, the only thing the government should spend money on is defense.

Because if you, the great leader of the nation, create a program that can never be cut, well, you are an idiot.

Oh well, I guess that's why they say that history goes in cycles. Because political leaders are members of the Lina Lamont Fan Club. Their motto, like hers, is "What d'yer think I yam? Dumb or somep'n?"

A Word of Advice to You Wokerati

Oh dear oh dear. Yesterday on CNN with Jake Tapper House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, of President Trump, that "his denial at the beginning was deadly" and that as he "fiddles, people are dying."

Oh dear, Speaker Pelosi.

Denial? You mean when he shut down travel from China on Janary 31 and "everybody" called him a racist or a xenophobe?

Fiddles? You mean to get direct flights of masks and stuff from China as The New York Times reports?

A commercial aircraft carrying 80 tons of gloves, masks, gowns and other medical supplies from Shanghai touched down in New York on Sunday, the first of 22 scheduled flights that White House officials say will funnel much-needed goods to the United States by early April as it battles the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak.

Or maybe you chaps are thinking of President Trump's reckless endorsement of the choroquinine drugs for use in fighting the CCP virus. So that two or three clueless Democratic governors issued warnings to doctors. Only now the FDA has endorsed the use of chloroquinine drugs.

Look, here's some advice to you wokeratis, activistes, revolutionistas, and progressives. Lay off the identity politics for a month or two. Because it doesn't play with the voters during a virus war when humans naturally respond to their basic instincts and rally behind the tribal leader that is charged with protecting them from danger.

Your identity politics is brilliant. It is a brilliant way of conducting politics and mobilizing marginalized, pre-civilized communities in the service of the progressive agenda. And I use the word "pre-civilized" advisedly, meaning people that have not yet learned how to wive and thrive in the city and its market economy.

Politics is division, and if you are in the political arena you need to hang your hat on some issue that divides people into "us" and "them." Humans are natural political fighters, squabbling over the least little thing.

But when there is a war on, then humans stop the squabbling and look for a leader to lead them to safety. Right now, whether you progs like it or not, that leader is President Trump.

When this whole CCP virus mess is over, then you chaps can go back to identity politics as usual. Maybe during the hiatus you chapettes will think of some cool new pejoratives with which to demoralize and cancel the opposition. After all, your racist-sexist-homophobe jag is getting a little stale, I'd say.

But I should warn you. President Trump is going to be making a big play for the minority vote in the next few weeks, and he is going to be telling them that he is their president too and that he cares about them just as much as any American.

So when this whole thing is over, and President Trump is reelected in November and the House returns to Republican control, you may find that the ground rules of political combat in these United States have undergone a sea change.

See, my line is that World War II united all the various European urban ethnic groups in the US into 100 percent Americans. Because? Because for a couple of years the politicians needed cannon fodder rather than political division. And because humans naturally unite in a war.

I suspect that something similar will happen as a result of the Great Virus War. Could be wrong, of course. You chaps managed to transmogrify President George W. Bush from a hero to an idiot in four short years, from the hero of 9/11 to the idiot of Hurricane Katrina.

Like I say. I could be wrong. But I wouldn't count on it, if I were you. It may only have taken four years to break the unity of 9/11. It took 20 years to break the unity of WWII with the Sixties and the Sixties Kidz. I'd say the unity of the Great Virus War will last longer than four years but less than 20 years.

Or, of course, President Trump may effect a fundamental transformation of American politics and make the Republican Party into the Commoner Party of all races and genders, leaving the Democratic Party as the party of the rich educated wokerati and the poor helpless victims. And then you guys would really be in trouble.

But who knows?

Good Luck With That!

With the Corona Contagion just starting to take off in the US, My Pal Kevin D. Williamson says: "Goodbye Green New Deal." Because after two weeks of partial shutdown Americans are already getting restive. Yet the Green New Deal proposes decades of shutdown and subjection to administrative diktat. Good luck with that, he writes:

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

Because, of course, life must go on. And the dead are soon forgotten, except by their Moms. Did you know, for instance, that the death toll from the 1918 Spanish Flu was way more than the butcher's bill in World War I? The truth is that the world is a mayhem of death and destruction. And life goes on.

But let us think of other things that are going to go the way of the Dodo.

Whatabout the New Urbanism, the cult that we are all going to live in yeasty "creative" urban environments full of high density housing, public transit, and woke cafés? Forget that!

See, back in the day, cities were so unhealthy that their death rate always exceeded the birth rate. Only since the discovery of the Germ Theory have cities begun to be even half healthy.

It is pretty obvious, e.g., New York City, that city life cannot exist alongside with social distancing, because you cannot get far enough away from other people to be safe. Whereas in the countryside...

Remember how liberals have been telling us for half a century that it was the eeevil oil companies that invented the suburbs? Probably not. Probably the suburbs were invented by women that wanted a nice safe, green place to raise their children.

Could the administrative state be another victim of the Wu Flu? It is pretty obvious that the health directorates, whether the World Health Organization or the Federal Drug Administration, are "not fit for purpose," as the Brits say. The reason, of course, is that the Follow the Leader administrative hierarchy is grossly inferior to the Have a Go (® Deirdre McCloskey) creativity of the market economy. You read, right now, of all kinds of people coming up with ways to make ventilators, or sew face masks, or stitch smocks for health care workers. To say nothing of the various drug cocktails doctors are mixing up. Nobody told them to do it. They just had an idea and decided to Have a Go. And it looks like President Trump is pretty good at waiving regulations aside so life can go on.

I also suspect that the four-year campaign to destroy Donald Trump is reaching its sell-by date. Here is Steve Sailer retailing the truth about Donald Trump. What, writes Scott Alexander, is it that real-estate moguls do? Answer: they are very good liars. The reason is that none of the participants, from banks to investors to renters, want to sign on the dotted line until they other guys have signed.

The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. 

This was written in 2016. Before the USMCA, the China Trade Deal, etc.

The other thing, it seems to me, is that Trump seems to be smart enough to be a couple of weeks ahead of the conventional wisdom: restricting travel from China early enough so the media could still be outraged by his xenophobia, but just in time to show he is "doing something" before the whole world demands that he "do something."

And isn't that really the secret of political leadership? To be just a little ahead of the curve but not so much that you look like a kook?

What I would really like to see is the delegitimizing of the educated Gentry and the realization among Commoner truckers keeping the supply chain going, and supermarket employees keeping the food chain working, and health care workers tending the sick, that they are the real America. And God bless them. I get the feeling that those folks are finally getting the respect they deserve, and they know it. And rightly so.

The other thing that can't come too soon is the delegitimizing of the mainstream media, the Democratic operatives with bylines. Back in the day journalists were cocky and insolent Commoners rather looked down upon by the educated as uneducated hicks. But then -- with Watergate? -- journalism became cool and all the Best People crowded in. Now we know the truth is that journalism by cool Gentry is a lot worse than journalism by barely educated Commoners. And now it looks like cool journalism is getting its comeuppance.

Really, of course, nobody knows nothing, and the future will be much different from our hopes and our fears.

And in the end, we all die.

Pelosi's Far-Left Bill: The Bigger Problem

Yesterday I proposed that Nancy Pelosi's horrible fund-all-the-lefty-wish-list never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste bill was maybe just her way of showing the lefty activist community that their agenda just wasn't going to fly. Not this week. Try again later, wokies.

Today I am reading a lot of commentary outraged at the rank partisanship of the Dems, and how horrible it is, etc. Yes. Of course it is. Partisanship is what politicians and activists do every day.

But let us understand the bigger picture.

The Dems really believe in legislating their progressive morality. They really believe that we need laws to enforce diversity in the work place, and that these laws can make America a better place.

Do you see the difference between a law that makes racial and sexual discrimination illegal and a law that penalizes failure to achieve government-set racial percentages in the workplace?

Do you see the difficulty of making judgements based on percentages of different races and sexes in a particular corporation or workplace? For instance, did you know that well-born white women have really entered the life sciences in battalion strength but not so much in computers and engineering? So, how does the government judge the situation at, say, a microbiology department at a university and a Silicon Valley startup? Who gets harassed and fined? At what point?

Well, we know. They set up a bureaucracy with quasi-legal authority to judge and harass corporations that don't meet their moral standards. As the bureaucracy feels appropriate.

My point is that once you get away from a pretty black-and-white situation -- as in not hiring a guy because he is black where there are incriminatory statements on record -- you have a problem. How do you deal with the vague and uncertain question of whether a particular racial and sexual breakdown can be reliably dealt with by government prosecutors and the courts? Or government administrators?

Government is the agent for protection from existential peril. Morality -- churches, activist groups, women´s gossip networks -- is the means of doing social control over things that are not questions of life and death. And, per our beloved Founders, it is best to separate the organs of force from the organs of morality.

And the fact is that the progressive movement instinctively understands this. That is why it represents each of its agenda items as a matter of life and death.

But most moral issues are not a matter of life and death, and they should not be encoded into law.

Many of the commentators outraged by the Dems' shenagigans are demanding that we teach them a lesson at the ballot box. And certainly they need that.

But I return to the basic Breitbart notion that politics is downstream from culture. And the John C. Wright's  expansion that culture is downstream from religion.

Then there is a further argument that religion is downstream from social animals. In other words, the whole point of religion in the broad sense is that social cooperation with moral rules is a lot less bloody and expensive than deciding everything with a fight. Jordan B. Peterson makes the point in his 12 Rules that even lobsters have a social hierarchy, so that lobster males don't fight over every little thing. But the Good Little Girls interviewing him on TV had no clue what he was talking about.

So, how soon do you think that our liberal friends will get this? Take, for instance Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch, whose job in life is to search out "far-right" offences to progressive morality and name and shame the perpetrators. What would it take for her to see the error of her ways?

Well, we know the answer. It is contained in books like When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. Every religion, every ideological movement, is a prophetic movement, predicting some kind of perfect world in the future. And when its prophecy fails it doesn't give up, not right away. Indeed failure initially encourages a deepening of prophetic enthusiasm. But after a while the adherents start to fall away.

Now I think it is reasonable to say that the basic left-wing prophecies have failed. And the intensified enthusiasm of today's wokerati is, in a way, a marker of that.

What we need to do is show our lefty friends, again and again, that their prophecies have failed. That's the basic thing, that wherever leftism has been tried it has failed. Oh, we'll never persuade the leaders. But the followers...

Two other things.

First, to establish the notion that almost all the progressive agenda is about status and honor for the educated Gentry, as proposed by Curtis Yarvin in his "Clear Pill." It is not about saving the victims; it is about power and glory for the activistes. We need to establish every day that the moral preening of progressives is just that. Moral conceit.

Second, to attract victims from the rank-and-file of Gentry Clients and invite them to come on over and join the Commoner class. Like I say with my Little Darlings concept, the fact is that the helpless victims beloved by the progressives are beloved only while they are useful to the progressive power project. When they are no longer useful they are dropped like an overage mistress. The idea is simple. We Commoners care about people like you. The educated Gentry doesn't care about people like you.

Here's a way we can start. We can classify every progressive activist group as a church. And we can critique every lefty initiative as an effort to "legislate morality."

Actually, I think our lefty friends would be much happier if they formed a church and said woke confession to each other every Sunday. But they are too dumb to realize that is what they need.

And for tomorrow and next month, it sure wouldn't hurt for President Trump to be experienced by the average American as "doing the right thing." And it will really help if he restarts the economy real soon.

Suppose Pelosi Was Crazy LIke a Fox

Everyone is agreed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was acting like a prehistoric progressive fossil when she intervened in the good old American coronavirus pork fest to interject a bill larded up with progressive rubbish like mail-in voting and $15 minimum wage and more windmills and diversity, diversity, diversity.

But maybe she was really acting like a sensible philosopher of political contagion.

Think about it: here she is in San Francsico mansion for a well-earned rest, and dealing all week with all manner of lefty activist groups each with their own bauble that they wanted to hang on the coronavirus Christmas tree.

Now think about it. The sensible, practical thing to do would have been to have an aide get on the phone to Schumer's aide and get them to sneak a few goodies into the Senate bill. On the Q.T. That is what an experienced practical politician does.

But she didn't do that. Instead she arrives in DC like Queen S*** and demands that the whole of Washington, DC comes to a screeching halt and introduces a bill that is a caricature of "far-left" fever dreams.

Immediately all hell breaks loose, and guys like me call their senators and representatives demanding that they cut the c*** and act to save the economy. I have to admit that I have never called a congressional office before. Then next morning I called 'em again and left more messages.

So Nancy caves.

But suppose that Nancy Pelosi all along has been trying to deal with her crazies by giving them what they want so that they can see for themselves that pushing the lefty agenda is a quick way to political Jail, do not pass Go. Why, it might even reelect Trump and return the House to the GOP!

Suppose she has been telling each lefty group along that this just is not the hour to push the progressive agenda. Hey, she tells them, wait until the next Democratic president is inaugurated. Then we can push your agenda. But, she says, if you insist I'll go back to DC and get your issue in the bill. But I don't think it will end well.

But what does she do? She piles all the lefty rubbish into a heap and lights a firestorm, and the whole thing goes up in flames.

I ask you. Is Nancy Pelosi really that stupid? I don't think so. I think this was an effort to clear the decks until after the election. Or better still 2024.

I was reading Jonah Goldberg this morning and he had a half-sensible thing to say.

One of my priors is the idea that our political parties are overdue for a major transformation. The coalitions that constitute them are unstable and combustible. The ideas that once bound them together are frayed.

Well, Jonah, I would say that the Republican Party is well on its way to reinvention as the Commoner party, Donald J. Trump, proprietor.

But the Democrats! They are the party of the educated Gentry pretending to be in it for the victims. Only their entire agenda is really just Gentry posturing and moralizing: it all comes down to jobs and status for the Gentry and its fads and enthusiasms. It is all about restoring Meaning to the lives of north Seattle liberals now that the moral posture of driving a Prius has become a little stale.

It's already obvious what the future Republican Party is going to look like.

But the Democrats? Good question! How do you square the moral preening of educated professionals with the needs of immigrants busily working their way up and the descendants of slaves now camping out in decaying cities?

Quite honestly I don't have a clue.

But I have a message for the immigrants and slave descendants. Jobs, jobs, jobs.  You'll find them in the Republican Party's economic agenda. Democrats really don't care about people like you.

Just Because I Made a Little Joke

A while back in American Thinker I penned a piece about "Women, the Public Square, and Cancel Culture." In it I made the point that I had spent years pondering that women don't like the public square, and if we give them too much opportunity they will abolish it. See the "cancel" culture and microaggressions and safe spaces. Oh, and I made a little joke:

In other words, women don’t confront someone that has insulted them [in the public square]. No. They complain about it to a third person, as in “I can’t believe President Trump tweeted that.” And the complaint ripples through the “hive mind” of the community of women, and sooner or later the culprit is named, shamed, and shunned. Or, as we now say, “impeached.”

A couple of days ago I was searching Google for my use of "Culture of Insult" and I found that back on December 10 that AT piece had been featured over at Right Wing Watch in a piece by Kristen Doerer: "Women in the Public Square Are to Blame for Impeachment, Right-Wing Blog Says."

As Foghorn Leghorn said, so many years ago, "That's a joke, boy." I think I am going to send Kirsten Doerer an email:

Attn: Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor

A couple of days ago I came across your report on my thoughtful article at American Thinker on women in the public square.

Do you know? I think that the headline of your piece "Women... are to blame for impeachment" was what we postmodern thinkers call "overdetermined."

As Foghorn Leghorn said, so many years ago. "That's a joke, boy."

Of course, I realize that, racist-sexist-homophobe as I am, that I would not be as sensitive to modern readers like you as I might have been.

But jokes and pejoratives aside, I was trying to think through a serious question. What if women are different than men? What if women cannot stand the free-for-all of the public square? What then? What happens to the free exchange of ideas? What happens to politics? What happens to the culture?

What do you think? What speech is acceptable, what what speech is to be named, shamed, and shunned? You tell me.

Of course, my larger point, encapsulated in one of my maxims -- at https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2019/01/assorted-opinions-and-maxims.html -- is that progressive activism and the left in general represents a Great Reaction, an attempt to re-politicize the world in an age that can probably do with a lot less politics. Here is my short version: 

"Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice, social justice is good old loot and plunder."

My point is that all the progressive instincts are a lunge back into the past. If we think in Jungian terms we would say that the left is mining the collective unconscious for ancient archetypes, and using them in a project of power.

But I want to talk to you directly about activism. As Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch I imagine your experience yourself as a progressive activist, fighting for justice against the forces of bigotry and superstition that abound on the right.

But I think that "activism" is similar to medieval knight-errantry. I was re-reading some of the medieval romances and I realized that the romances are an absurd effort by minstrels toadying to the feudal barons to make them into noble disciples of Christ saving damsels in distress in between epic feasts. But in fact they were thugs.

I'm here to say that your average revolutionary, whether Robespierre, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Franco, Castro, or Pinochet is a thug. So in my view anyone with a misty idea of being an activist and fighting injustice is probably kidding themselves. Because politics is a game for thugs. Actually, I have a maxim for that:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

My point is that it is all very well to be an activist for human rights and justice and fight against injustice. But I am here to tell you that many people on the receiving end of your fight for justice are going to experience it as injustice.

In that case, would you be right or would they be right?

Hey! If you are ever in Seattle, get in touch and let's have coffee!

sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

Hey whaddya think readers? Ain't I a stinker! As Bugs Bunny would say.

Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion

Here was I, cruising along unconcernedly as a seagull with my notion of the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint when suddenly I realized I had got it all wrong. Or at least only half right.

Because the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint are only half of the story.

And I shoulda known it. What a fool! Fortunately my unconscious mind got me sorted -- as the Brits say -- about 4:00 am a couple days ago. Really, what would we do without our unconscious minds pointing out the "glitch" in the Matix?

What I realized was that, with the notion that honor in men is courage, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, that there are two sides to the coin. Let's reproduce the key quote again.

[I]n spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- courage for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surface of popular culture that has done so much to efface it.(p.5)

(But as late as the movie On the Beach in 1959, with Gregory Peck as the captain of a nuclear submarine in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon, the male characters are all constructed around the courage archetype and the female characters around the chastity archetype.)

Obviously, I now realize that male honor -- courage and the reputation for courage -- comes in two cultures. There is the positive side and the negative side. There is the Culture of Courage in the Hero and there is the Culture of Insult in the Adversary. I get that from Jordan B. Peterson in his Maps of Meaning.

So, when men are hurling insults at each other, they are not as good as they could be. Because the Man of Courage, the Hero, is above all that.

Hmm. And here I have been encouraging men to throw the insult of racism right back in the face of the pathetic liberal pejorator (perjorator is one who hurls pejoratives: I just coined it). Obviously, in the Culture of Courage, our Hero would not throw the insult right back. On the other hand he would not cringe either, and whine that he was not a racist, no, because some of his best friends are black. Still, to throw an insult at a vile liberal pejorator requires a significant degree of courage, particularly if the liberal pejorator gets in touch with HR and gets you fired.

But what would the pure Hero, sans peure et sans reproche, do? I'll have to think about that.

Now let's get to the female side of the equation, where honor is chastity and the reputation for chastity. Here, obviously, we have a Culture of ChastityPraise and a.Culture of Complaint. But whatabout the archetypes? I don't know where this will end up, but I think we have to start with Good Girl and Mean Girl. The practitioner of the Culture of Praise is the Good Girl, the Virgin, that is pure and innocent and sees nothing but good around her. The practitioner of the Culture of Complaint is the Mean Girl, of high school memory, who is always poking holes in the chaste pretentions of the other women in her community of women. That, after all, is what the iconic "I can't believe she..." remark is all about. Don't imagine that the the girl next door is a sweet innocent, 'cos I got the goods on her.

The point about the Hero and the Culture of Courage is, to return with Bowman to the savage, the defense of the border which can be psychologized into the border between Order and Chaos. The point about the Good Girl and the Culture of Praise, with Bowman, is the management of the hearth and home. If we go back to our chimpanzee friends, the males are defending the band's territory so that the females can bear and feed and rear the baby chimps. That's according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. The Good Girl is doing all the things that need to be done about the hearth -- Latin: vesta, as in Vestal Virgins -- or, as we say, keep the home fires burning.

The point is that in the Culture of Praise the Good Girl is getting on with the things that need to be done with good cheer, while in the Culture of Complaint the Mean Girl is busy critiquing all the other women because they aren't doing the things that need to be done, according to the judgement of the Mean Girl. The Mean Girl is perfect, of course.

So, in this analysis, the Culture of Insult and the Culture of Complaint are both perversions. The Insulter is faking the courage of the Hero, and the Complainer is faking the innocence of the Good Girl.

Notice that Insults and Complaints are easy peasy; anyone can do them. But what does the courageous Hero do? What does the chaste Good Girl do? Good question.

See, living the life of Courage or of Praise is hard. That's why the Hero has to go on a Hero's Journey to find out what it really means to be a hero. And the chaste Good Girl? Despite the pretensions of the Heroine's Journey and all those unbelievable superheroines around these days, the life of a woman is lived moment to moment; she doesn't get to go off into the underworld for a spell. That is why women are eternally agonizing about the right thing to do. There's a word women use for this, but I have forgotten it.

Well, obviously this is just the start. Who knows where it will lead?