You Only Had One Job, Politicians

The current free-fall of the Biden administration is instructive. Because it shows the problem with modern politics.

If you accept my notion that the job of government and politics is to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic, then the next question is: "what do you do when there are no enemies on the horizon?"

The answer is: "you make them up."

Let us pose the question in a different way. In their creation narratives, that Rousseau developed in his Discourse on Inequality and George Bernard Shaw wrote about in Fabian Essays in Socialism, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is replaced by another event. For Rousseau in A Discourse on Inequality the fateful moment is described thus:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

For Shaw beginning of Sin is the establishment of "the first colonist, the original Adam" into "a vast green plain of a country virgin to the spade". Shaw:

Adam is, as Political Economy fundamentally assumes him to be, "on the make": therefore he drives his spade into, and sets up his stockade around, the most fertile and favorable patch he can find.

Do you see the comedy in this? Both Rousseau and Shaw were city guys; the notion of growing your own food and defending it from others is become a joke. Hey, peasant: food is something you buy at the store. If only they had taken the trouble to tell Hitler that, because Hitler thought that the Germans, the most advanced people in the world, needed Lebensraum in eastern Europe to grow their own food.

But in the bad old days, including the days of chimpanzees, establishing a territory of food-yielding land was not just a scandal of private property, but a matter of life and death. If your little band of chimps didn't occupy and defend its patch of land then the girl chimpanzees didn't have enough food to bear and raise baby chimps. Ditto humans, down to the beginning of the industrial era when Rousseau and Shaw lived where food-growing land isn't an issue any more. What matters is to find something to do for which other people will pay money. It could be writing discourses on inequality and novels like Emile, Or Treatise on Education or writing essays on socialism and mega-hit plays about a London flower girl and a phonetics professor. Or, for lesser lights, it might be inventing power looms that make clothing affordable for poor folks and steam trains that let the poor move about.

What I am saying is that political leaders, whose job it is to protect us against enemies, don't have a job to do any more.

Oh, I know. George Soros's prosecutors are busy encouraging criminals so that in about five years or so some fool politician will rise to power on a platform of fighting crime.

My point is that politicians are running around pretending to be great leaders in an age when we don't need great leaders.

We don't need great leaders to solve the supply-chain problems; we just need someone to undo all the regulations that prevent the supply chain from doing its job. We don't need someone to order everyone to get a COVID vaccination; we just need a little more work on COVID treatments so that people with co-morbidities aren't quite so vulnerable to a disease that is about 5 times worse than the regular flu. We don't need the FBI to be hunting down domestic terrorists threatening school boards; we just need school boards that do their job and don't let rapists into the girls' bathroom.

Our great problem today is that we have ruling classes and political structures that want to act like ruling classes of olden times, fighting the foe to protect us from our enemies. Only, 97 percent of people can and should be just getting on with their responsible middle-class lives without unnecessary interference from elite people with a Savior complex.

What we are seeing right now, as the Biden administration dissolves into mind-numbing stupidity, is an object lesson in governance.

Government is only useful in fighting an enemy. All other human activity can be better done without political leaders wanting to shove themselves out front waving a sword and promising to save us from... well what, exactly?

And when rulers force themselves to the front and act like Henry V at Agincourt they only Make Things Worse.

End of an Empire: Bang or Whimper?

In T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" he writes:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

So. Is that the way the Grand Empire of the United States of America ends?

Today Victor Davis Hanson reviews the end of the Roman Empire and its division into two parts, eastern and western. The eastern, Byzantine, empire lasted for a thousand years till the Ottoman Turks conquered Byzantium in 1453. The western half devolved into feudal Europe -- featuring for many centuries the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation -- and then into the Europe of nations and now the Europe of whom Margaret Thatcher opined, "they're a weak lot, some of them... weak, feeble."

Hanson wonders about an America divided into a Byzantine heartland and Roman coasts.

The Zman looks at the end of the Soviet Empire. He thinks we are seeing something like the rise of the oligarchs at the end of the Soviet Union, and thinks that the rise of our current financial and tech oligarchs is telling us something. OF course, he writes, the oligarchs didn't inherit the Soviet Union.

In Russia, the oligarchs were brought to heel by the one universal source of power. Vladimir Putin, with the support of the intelligence community and the military was able to reassert civil control of Russia.

The career of Vladimir Putin is instructive. La Wik:

Putin worked as a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, before resigning in 1991 to begin a political career in Saint Petersburg. He later moved to Moscow in 1996 to join the administration of president Boris Yeltsin. He briefly served as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and secretary of the Security Council, before being appointed as prime minister in August 1999. 

Makes you wonder if there is someone in the US "intelligence community" with the talents and the ambition of a Putin. And when Putin resigned from the KGB was he acting on his own or with the approval and support of a "deep state" within the KGB? Or what.

Or, can we defang the "deep state?" Theodore Roosevelt Malloch proposes limiting careers of bureaucrats and congressmen and gradually defunding the intelligence agencies. But some of his commenters would prefer a midnight strike.

I don't know. But I would say that the modern middle-class, market-oriented society is different from the Roman Empire and the Soviet Empire, because the middle-class market-oriented society could operate perfectly satisfactorily without its "deep state" overlords.

So I would say that the important question is whether the ordinary middle class could tell the current ruling class to go fly a kite, and make it stick.

Or, more specifically, could the current vaccine mandate and CRT resistance cause the collapse of the current ruling class? Could the resistance tell the FBI to go pound sand, and make it stick?

We don't know.

What Should We Teach the Ruling Class to Do?

My line on ruling classes is that human nature programs the leaders of society to be warriors, fighting the existential foe to save the tribe from extinction.

And I say, following Nazi Carl Schmitt, that politics is about friend vs. enemy. In other words if you are in politics your game is identifying and making war on an enemy. Otherwise you have nothing to do.

That's how I understand the ruling class's current obsession with climate change and systemic racism. Climate change empowers the world's ruling class to lead to lead the whole world against the existential threat of runaway warming. Because fossil fuels. Think about it. It's really a natural, because it avoids the little problem that any problem less than global warming would mean that the enemy is some nation state: Russia or China or some such.

And systemic racism allows the educated ruling class to make war on bigots and racist-sexist-homophobes. What could be funner?

My judgement is that both climate change and systemic racism are less about fighting real enemies and more about finding something for the ruling class to fight against. Because the ruling class is political and politics needs an enemy, per Nazi Carl Schmitt.

Now, I would say that to have the ruling class fighting climate change and systemic racism is an improvement. After all, our ruling class in the last century has been in the business of world wars, starting with college president Woodrow Wilson sorting out Europe in 1917-19. And rich-kid FDR sorting out the world in 1941-45. And various warrior presidents sorting out the Commies in 1948-89.Two generations of young men were sent to war; fortunately most came back. I have come to believe that it was all ruling class conceit and baloney, but that's just me. And if our ruling class is currently all worked up about systemic racists, maybe cancel culture is better than a full-on Reign of Terror or Great Purge or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

But can't we think of something better for our rulers to do? Some way for them to be heroic warriors without actually having a fighting war that wrecks the economy, or a fake war like climate change that wrecks the economy.

Hey I know! How about a war on bureaucracy! A war on useless schools that fail to teach the children of "oppressed peoples" how to wive and thrive in the modern world! A war on racial quotas and DEI? But, of course, there is one little problem. These wars do not establish the ruling class as the political heroes beloved by their grateful peoples.

But just as we have progressed from leaders as actual military fighters -- as in the days of Henry V -- to politicians that leave the fighting to generals that leave the fighting to actual lieutenants and corporals, and now to the fight against climate change that has no real fighting at all, I don't see why we can't make national heroes out of guys that clean up the mess in the bureaucracy. You know, like Donald Trump promised to clean up the Deep State.

And I don't see why we can't make heroes out of the men and women that stand up to the lefty cancel culture "activists," rather than making heroes out of "activists" that are tilting at the windmills of racism-sexism-homophobia in a world where you are a complete fool ever to even roll your eyes at one of the "oppressed peoples" of whom we'eve heard tell.

This is all to say that my idea of the most heroic and noble thing in the world is not to be a warrior hero, real or fake, but a sacrificial hero, someone who sacrifices his life on the border between Order and Chaos so that the rest of us may live. I call it "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

Hey! Sounds like a great idea. The only question is what is the Next Step.

And I have No Idea what to do next.

Climate Science Made Real Simple

Are you pissed off by the climate change boondoggle, that CO2 is a polluting gas that must be curbed when, as anyone with half a brain knows, CO2 is a life-giving nutrient for plants?

Here's a theory of climate that will knock your socks off, from Jack Cashill at American Thinker. "Figuring out the lack of connection between CO2 and ice ages." It explains the whole procedure.

It's a great article and I suggest you read it yourself. But here is my take.

1. Ice ages are provoked by a cooling stage in the Milankovitch orbital cycles that are about 22,000 years per cycle.
2. But ice ages typically go on for 100,000 years. What gives?
3. Once big ice sheets have formed in the northern hemisphere the high albedo of the ice sheets -- reflecting the sun's rays and heat back into space -- prevents natural warming.
4. But the cold is bad for CO2 as the oceans absorb more and more CO2. And the low CO2 level is bad for plants, because CO2 is plant food. 
5. When the CO2 level gets down to about 180 ppm, C3 photosynthesis stops, especially at higher elevations, and that creates deserts in e.g., the Gobi desert.
6. Desert plus wind equals dust storms. You could call it Global Dusting. And dust on ice sheets lowers their albedo, absorbing the sun's heat and allowing the climate to heat up.
7. End of ice age and beginning of interglacial.
8. Return to Step 1.

For me there is one big "thing I didn't know" here.

I knew about the CO2 concentration going down to 180 ppm during ice ages. But it had never occurred to me that the result of that would be deserts and dust storms.

But when you think about it, of course it does! Sahara desert. Dust storms. Why, I read all about that in Biggles Sweeps the Desert as a young'un. In Biggles Sweeps the Desert there is a big dust storm -- "the dreaded haboob of the African deserts" -- in the Western Desert west of Egypt. Biggles and Ginger are caught in the storm while driving a German armored car in the desert.

Of course! And when you get the CO2 level down to 180 ppm and the whole of the northern hemisphere is a bloody dust storm that ends up polluting the sacred ice sheets with dirty black desert dust, well, what you get is runaway Global Warming, a climate change from the frigid Ice Age into a nice cozy interglacial until the next Milankovitch cycle plunges you back into the Ice Age again.

To be continued. They say, however, that we are about 4,000 years from the end of the present interglacial. So that's all right. Plenty of time to stamp out systemic racism before it's too late.

Suppose We Had a Wise and Prudent Ruling Class

I was reading the Zman today inveighing against Democracy, because "one man one vote" and equality goes against the whole of history -- and pre-history.

Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere. 

I'm not so sure. The point about democratic elections is that the voters in a community can divide over governance and fight to the finish in an election rather than a civil war. Much better than the alternative.

There is plenty of hierarchy in democracy, if you ask me. And, as the last election proved, most voters are influenced by high-status influencers, like scientists and intellectuals and the journalists that make everything "real simple" for the masses. The rulers and the talkers set the agenda: there is hierarchy for you.

No, I see the problem in the basic problem of all human governance. The job of a government is to protect us from enemies and raiders. And governments have paid the soldiers that protect us since time immemorial in the coin of loot and plunder.

So just as the sham fight of elections has replaced the real fight of border wars, the entitlement state has replaced loot and plunder.

Really, you can say, what has changed?

Or, more to the point, will we ever change?

Because I see our current problem as the problem that politics and elections inevitably descend into loot and plunder. It's in our genes.

So if we had a really wise and sensible ruling class, it would get together with a nod and a wink; it would still play the game of loot and plunder to pander to the peasants. But when it came to the usual deals in the corridors of power, the game would be reduced to something harmless. Just as an election is an extremely harmless alternative to a real civil war.

But that's not where we are. Over the weekend I read how the $3.2 trillion infrastructure plan -- with free Pre-K and free college and Medicare-for-all -- is a mere shadow of the $30 trillion plan that Bernie Sanders was originally pushing.

See, my reaction is incredulous. Surely, I would say, we now know that the entitlement state is really not a good idea. Maybe it's a good idea to help people in trouble. Certainly it makes sense to deal with the usual and periodic financial crisis. But surely it is time to stop the expansion of routine loot and plunder and think about how we can reform the welfare state. To make it more social and less rigidly administrative and bureaucratic.

I don't think that "the people" demanded the welfare state. I don't think that "the people" have ever had the imagination for that. A "free" universal education system? It takes an educated person to think that up. Ordinary people don't think above the level of labor-union members trashing their employer's factory when the employer wants to lower wages during an economic downturn.

I say that the welfare state was concocted by ruling-class intellectuals because the welfare state creates a lot of jobs for bossy intellectuals and educated middle managers. The attraction of entitlement programs is that We the Special People get to run them.

Oh yeah, sure. When you appeal to The People during an election and ask them if they would like free health care, of course they are going to say yes.

But it is the job of a Wise and Educated elite to look down the road and think: "wow, this is all very well, but how are we ever going to adjust the program to changing conditions and keep it from descending into corruption and incompetence?"

I mean, it's not as if the idea of a useless bureaucracy is new. Charles Dickens was making hay in Little Dorrit with the Circumlocution Office staffed by useless Barnacles and Stiltstockings. This was back in 1855!

I think that a Wise and Educated elite would be thinking about how more people need to be engaged in society contributing to our social welfare, rather than being cogs in a bureaucratic machine and helpless recipients of welfare from a beneficent Oz.

In other words, I believe that we should have a society in which people are engaged in helping each other, educating each other, benefiting each other, rather than voting for a politician to do it all for us: paid for by the rich, of course.

Yes, but, you say. How can the ruling class change direction of society? How can they ignore the will and the appetite of the people for free stuff?

Really? Serious? The ruling class ignores the will of the people all the time.

Look at it this way. Our ruling class has decided that we need to completely change our energy economy, because global warming. Whether or not global warming is true, there is no popular enthusiasm for transformation of energy; it is all ruling class. Our ruling class has decided that the biggest social problem is "systemic racism." But ordinary people didn't come up with that. It was an elite thing, from start to finish.

So here's my idea, ruling class. It's time for you to lead us. To lead us to a more social society. Not a society where you guys get to strut and fret your hour upon the stage saving us from a climate apocalypse, or pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of systemic racism.

Indeed, your enthusiasm for climate change and systemic racism is a "tell." It is a tell that you don't have anything serious to do. That you have had to invent issues like climate change and systemic racism in order for you to have something to do. In other words, it tells us that you are empty-headed fools and knaves that just aren't serious about being a responsible and responsive ruling class.

But to reform the welfare state, to make it more social, more interactive, to give more responsibility to ordinary people to contribute to the welfare of society: what a glorious vision! Think of how the leader of such a movement would go down in history!

Instead of which we are teaching our Good Little Girls to be "activists," to cancel university professors that don't toe the lefty line. To pursue United States Senators into the bathroom.

Really? This is all that you ruling-class geniuses can come up with?

In other words, we have a clueless ruling class pursuing useless ideas that lead nowhere. Hey you guys make the ancien régime of France look like political geniuses.

No, Democracy isn't the problem. It's the rulers that are the problem.

Let's Count Our Midterm Chickens

Yes, I know you're not supposed to count your chickens before they are hatched, but everybody does. And there is this little question of a Midterm Election coming up in a little over a year. In the tradition of "wait until next time" a guy can't help but wonder.

Traditionally, as everybody knows, the president's party tends to lose seats in a midterm, and especially in the second midterm of a two term presidency. Because.

So, guess that the biggest midterm gain was for Republicans since 1900? Any takers?

Yep it was 1938, in the second term of national savior Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Here are the results.

Year	Dem Seats	Dem Gain	Rep Seats	Rep Gain	Ind
1938	262	-72	169	81	4

Imagine! The GOP gained 81 seats and the Dems still had a 93 seat majority.

OK. Enough of that. What was the next best midterm for the GOP?

Exactly, it was 1914 just after Princeton University President Wilson was elected.

Year	Dem Seats	Dem Gain	Rep Seats	Rep Gain	Ind
1914	230	-61	196	69	9

And notice that, even then, the Dems had a 30 seat majority in the House.

OK. Let's get to the third best GOP midterm.

Year	Dem Seats	Dem Gain	Rep Seats	Rep Gain	Ind
2010	193	-64	242	64	0

Wow. We forget what a blowout that 2010 midterm was. Perhaps that's because our noble friends in the media don't like to talk about it too much. Because, after all, if the World's First Black President suffers the third worst midterm blowout since 1900 in the middle of his first term it must be because of racism. Right?

And think of this! Back then, in the dim and distant past, nobody was shouting "Let's Go Brandon" at NASCAR races.

Yes, imagine. Back in the day in 2010 we just had gentlemanly Tea Partiers waving the odd "Don't Tread on Me" flag. Remember how remarkable that felt?

OK, Newt Gingrich, your turn next, with your Contract with America in 1994. But your midterm was only the Fifth Best for Republicans since 1900.

Year	Dem Seats	Dem Gain	Rep Seats	Rep Gain	Ind
1994	204	-54	230	54	0

Remember back in 1994? The deal was that Bill Clinton had run as a New Democrat, a complete moderate, dontcha know. Then he got into office and immediately had a fainting fit. He had No Idea what a mess the federal finances were. So a tax increase was needed. And then he sent Hillary to work on Hillarycare.

Funny how things repeat themselves. Nobody here but us moderates during the campaign but tax and spend to the limit once we get in power.

But at least the Dem lies and obfuscations have got worse over the years. When they were pushing Obamacare they had the decency to lie that we would save money and keep our doctor. Now everything is "infrastructure." Oh, and now the additional spending costs "zero dollars."

So, what will be the result in the midterm in 2022?

I haven't a clue.

But I'd say that anything less that a 40-seat GOP gain in the House would be shameful. A 50-seat gain would be respectable. A 60-seat gain would be "now you're talkin'."

The only fearless prediction I am willing to make is that the Biden presidency will look worse by this time next year.

Rep. Clyburn's "Tell" on Reconciliation Package

One of my maxims is Chantrill's Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. Of course that is just one side of the fact that government programs cannot work because you can never cut them.

Why? Because all government spending is loot and plunder, goodies handed out to the supporters of the regime. No different from the jolly old Vikings. And one thing that supporters of the regime demand is that their checks never be reduced, or, God forbid, taken away.

So when House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) went on TV recently he advocated for cutting down the cost of the reconciliation bill by shortening how long some of the programs in the bill will be in place, because once a program is in place, it will “be difficult to take it away.”

You know when you turn the shelf life of something and reduce the number here, let’s say make a five-year plan rather than a ten-year plan, you know very well that it’s very hard to get rid of these programs that ever are initiated five years out. So, you know that you’ll get your way anyway in that event. Because whatever you get, it’s something that’s hard to take away when they expire, right?”

Is Rep. Clyburn right, or is he right?

He's right until the federal government can't pay its bills. Then the only question becomes will the government start cutting programs or will it just inflate them away with Money Printer Go Brrrrrr.

And that is why Republican voters are always pissed off at their representatives because they have no spine. Cut all these useless programs, we say. Why don't you cut Obamacare? Why don't you cut welfare? Why don't you cut health care for illegal immigrants?

But not Social Security and Medicare, the primary programs for average middle-class people. Heavens no!

Of course, every government program that ever lived has always been justified by its usefulness, its justice, its diversity, its anti-racism, its equity. But all that is really lipstick on a pig. The only thing that matters is handing out stuff to your supporters.

And this really illustrates the utter moral bankruptcy of our liberal ruling class. For all the pretty talk, what they want is to stay in power, and whether they know it or not, the key to staying in power is to offer goodies at the next election.

And I say that every new program ends up Making Things Worse. And more Unjust as well.

Let's go through the programs in historical order.

Education (est. $1.3 trillion in 2020) was supposed to raise the people up. And drive crime down. That's what Horace Mann told us in the 1840s. Well, now it is just a jobs program for unionized supporters of the regime, and more and more does less and less actual education and more and more indoctrination of ruling-class ideology, as in Critical Race Theory. So government education Makes Things Worse.

Social Security ($1.1 trillion in 2020) was supposed to be a fully funded insurance program. But in fact it is just a transfer program from workers to retirees. If it had been a genuine savings program then the savings of the retirees would be creating jobs for workers. And people would retire when they could afford to -- in other words when their savings had created enough jobs for the young'uns to pay their pension.Oh, and get this: retirees would often have wealth to hand down to their children! But, in fact, Social Security will run out of money and then they will either raise taxes on workers, cut pensions on retirees (probably by raising taxes on Social Security payments), or just inflate pensions away. So government Social Security Makes Things Worse.

Medicare (gross $0.92 trillion in 2020) has always been funded mostly by the federal income tax. So it means that rich people subsidize middle-class health care and end-of-life care. Frankly, I'd prefer it if the middle class paid our own health care, and if the rich earned brownie points by helping those who cannot-afford-health-care-through-no-fault-of-their-own. But the main thing would be to have health care not be government-regulated stem-to-stern. Because "regulatory capture," dontcha know. Yes, but whatabout "end of life" health care? Well, don't look now but the experts and the bureaucrats and the scientists are busy stitching up Medicare to make sure that grandma doesn't cost too much at end of life -- as in Medicare Hospice, which in my experience is a conveyor belt to the graveyard. So government Medicare Makes Things Worse

And so on.

But here is my secret hope. I hope that the lefty progressives from Sen. Sanders to Rep. Clyburn to Rep. Cortez are overstepping the mark. I hope that they are making ordinary Americans so mad that the ordinary Americans will elect a Congress and a President to go ahead and repeal everything done during the Biden administration. Just because Let's Go Brandon!

But I realize that I am dreaming of a world that will never be.

But what is life without its dreams and fantasies?