Really, Nobody Knows Nothing

So, after all the threats and backing and filling Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) failed to change the filibuster and failed to get the Democrats' federalizing-of-elections bill through the Senate. Today there's a thumbsucker from Politico to explain that it's all Chuck's deep strategy.

His long arc of aligning Democrats for a bill designed to fight gerrymandering, expand early voting and make Election Day a federal holiday ended up persuading literally dozens of them to change the filibuster — despite previous vows in writing that they would do no such thing.

Which means what? Other than Democrats understand that if they don't change the rules they are toast?

Meanwhile down in California Gov. Newsom is pushing a new CalCare state gubmint health plan, and some wild ones in the state legislature are proposing to double state taxes! I wonder what the people that already have health insurance think of that?

The Zman says that it's the end of the line for the left. Their old ideas had basically burned out by the 1980s. The post-Cold War reboot with cultural Marxism and the woke is basically self-destructing in the current crisis.

Meanwhile there is an argument on the right at The New Criterion between "common-good" conservatism, that proposes to use government power more than the traditional conservatism of the Founders and Buckleyite conservatism. Who really founded conservatism? Hobbes, Locke, or Burke, or what? It sounds like it's the end of the line for the old conservatism and the old conservatives don't like it.

Yes. Where do we go next? Assuming it's not the Sixth Mass Extinction. (It really is curious how "it's the End of the World" has gone from wacko religious cultism that everyone who is anyone sneers at to received wisdom in all the best circles.)

Look, I have no idea what the Next Politics is going to be, but the big challenge for the Next Regime is going to be unwinding all the free-stuff programs of the present regime.

Unless the whole current system crashes and burns, so that people are not saying "you'd better not touch my Social Security / Medicare / Gubmint Pension" and instead are pleading for a political Savior to save something out of the wreck.

I wouldn't wish the latter on anyone, but I'm not sure that political change is possible until people get desperate.

See, what I experience right now is that the Democrats see pretty clearly that it's the end of the road for them. Otherwise why would they be trying to pass everything including the kitchen sink and changing the voting rules as well? There's a pretty obvious "tell" in all that: now or never.

Also, you tell me: do humans tend to believe in End of the World religious cults in normal times or when there are unusual social stresses rending the social fabric? Or do political regimes adopt End of the World rhetoric in the autumn of their rule as a last desperate effort to stay in the saddle?

Or, for that matter, why do people believe in Revolution? What is millennial hope, and where does it come from, in religious or in political terms? And, where is it going to?

Now do you understand why Candide said that now he had to go work in the garden. In the garden? Isn't that what Mr. Craven heard, and what brought him back home to Misselthwaite in The Secret Garden? Is there something deeply philosophical and meaningful about gardens, and maybe it's about time that Chuck Schumer did a bit of planting and digging in his garden. Since Spring is coming up, and all? 

You do have a garden, Chuck, right?

No. The Rulers Really Do Believe

There's a Michael Goodwin piece out today about how the Dems are doing their usual blame game to explain why things are going wrong: Big Grocery, the "supply chain." Or even ordinary Dem voters, per Paul Begala:

“I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, OK?” 

Of course, as I point out, that is the way that the primitive mind works. There must be a fault, and most likely it isn't me, but that guy over there behind the tree.

But I had an Aha moment over the last couple of days, with the Biden administration announcing it was going to have to change the "messaging."

They really do believe their agenda. They really do believe that the planet is going to fry unless we cover the world with solar panels. They really do believe that systemic racism is the worst thing since sliced bread.

That's the way to understand the White House decision to change the "messaging." The program isn't the problem; the problem is just that "we" haven't communicated it properly to the American people.

The crazy leaders aren't the problem; the doubting followers are the problem, as Paul Begala tells us.

As in: Napoleon's crazy idea to invade Russia wasn't the problem. It's the soldiers that didn't fight hard enough at the Battle of Borodino. 

Let's concede that Joe Biden is an average pol that doesn't have an idea in his head. But he knows enough to wish that he had been a civil-rights campaigner and to develop the wish into an actual fantasy of being there. He knows enough to know what the other people around him believe and to imagine that he believes it too. He knows how to recite the responses.

So, the rubbish that the three liberal justices were talking when the Supreme Court was deciding on vaccine mandates: really, those liberal justices really believe!

Justice Sotomayor's reported meltdown over facemasks: yes, she really believes the lies and rubbish that has been coming from government experts for the last two years.

And you would believe too if your only media was regime media and your only friends were liberal friends and your only teachers were liberal teachers.

Now, of course, if you are in politics you naturally embrace ideas that call for bold leadership, that call for you to lead the people to the Promised Land. And, of course, you are tempted to believe in traitors or bad "messaging" when things go wrong.

And so the "march through the institutions" and the canceling of opponents. Because we are right, and they are wrong. And people are going to die if the racist-sexist-homophobe opponents get to set the agenda. So, the only solution is that people like us need to lead all the institutions in society. To save it from disaster.

That is what they believe, and that is what their friends believe, and that is what regime media teaches them to believe.

The Zman has a piece up today on how "the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts." And the way the system works is that, when the people get fed up they can exchange the in-party's experts for the out-party's experts.

But, people like me ask, what if the whole idea of government by experts is a crock? What if, according to the latest science, top-down expertism is folly, because the way the world works is through the emergence of new ideas and new people that just happen to have the right answer? I've just started a fairly accessible book, The Self-Creating Universe by J.J. Clarke, that is sifting all the ideas of the last two centuries to say that the creativity of self-emergence is the way the world works. It will be interesting to see how it deals with politics and the welfare state. After all, the book is written by a guy, a former philosophy professor that doubtless experiences himself as an expert.

Yes, of course the rulers cheat; yes of course they beat up on the opposition. And of course we hold them up to ridicule when they cheat and when they screw up.

But, I think, it is vital to remember that, besides all the cheating and oppression, they still believe. As political and religious leaders have always believed, down the ages. And don't think that Napoleon on St. Helena didn't still believe.

Nobody Saw Inflation Coming? Really?

Here's a puzzler, a piece that asks "Why Did Almost Nobody See Inflation Coming?" Really?

According to Jason Furman, "a survey of 36 private-sector forecasters in May revealed a median inflation forecast for 2021 of 2.5 percent."

Maybe their fearless economic models didn't factor in a doubling of the Fed's holdings of federal debt. Or wave after wave of "stimulus" otherwise known as free handouts. I mean, the federal government doesn't usually go pedal-to-the-metal like that too often.

Furman starts his piece with Queen Elizabeth II asking back in 2008 why "Why did nobody see it coming" with respect to the Crash of 2008.

Well, the answer is that a stock market crash reveals a lot of hidden rocks as the tide goes out.

Plus, of course, there is no telling how the central banks will fail to act as lenders of last resort. In the case of 2008, it was little Ben Bernanke who flinched from bailing out Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Because, he whined, he didn't have the legal authority.

And, with respect to 2008, what are you going to do? You had the Fed pumping out money. You had Congress demanding that Fannie and Freddie hand out low-down real-estate loans to minorities. So, at some point your get this, from usgovernmentspending.com.

Yes. That first peak is in 2003, and nothing happened. Then there's another peak in 2006 when the Fed started fighting inflation and the the Treasury yield curve went inverted. Agency debt, by the way, is principally Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt, which is mostly repackaged real-estate mortgages.

The point is that, if you were sitting looking at the numbers of Agency Debt back in 2000, you would be saying to yourself: Hmm. I wonder when this little bubble is going to pop, as Agency debt was going north of 40 percent of GDP.

As Herb Stein said many moons ago, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But the question is: when will it stop? 

The answer is: nobody knows.

And that is why fearless forecasters tend to get caught on the wrong foot. If you are a fearless forecaster you have to hedge your bets. You cannot say: the world will end in 47 days. Because the world might end in 37 days, or not for 20 million years.

Now, in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 we learned about The Big Short by Michael Lewis. But that book was written after the crash. If the chaps shorting mortgage debt had been wrong, or had mistimed their shorting there wouldn't have been a book. They and their investors would have slunk off back to their holes and we would never have known about them.

Same thing about today's inflation. Anybody could have told you that the money printing of 2020 and the succession of stimulus packages would not end well. But when? And why? In a year? In two years? No doubt there are some fearless investors that have made the right call, and we will be hearing all about them in a couple of years. But, as yet, we do not know how it will all turn out.

The only sure thing, I would guess, is that the Biden boys will screw it up. It's the one thing that Barack Obama got right in his life. "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to (expletive) things up."

Race Politics Ends When We Don't Care

Today is Martin Luther King Day and a holiday in the United States. Rev. King is famous for leading non-violent protests against racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s. It is said that he got his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent opposition to the British in India.

Now comes multiracial Ryan Bomberger to celebrate the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.

A hard-fought Dream has become a reality here in America. The codified systemic racism heralded as “heritage” met its demise because good people—both black and white—refused to stand by and do nothing.

But actually, it should be added, the non-violence concept only works against governments that already accept your premise. The ruling class in liberal America believed back in 1960 in ending racial discrimination. The Brits in India, from just after the "Indian Mutiny" in 1857, knew they would have to get out of India. Just not yet, old chap.

In the years after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s concerns about racism declined, according to Bomberger. But not any more.

From the mid 1970s through 2014 (except during the early 90’s Rodney King riots) 2-4% of Americans cited racism as the most important problem facing our country. It wasn’t until Obama’s second term when it jumped to 13% and 18% after the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Following a bumpy decline, it spiked again to 19% in 2020 under Trump as the rhetoric of Critical Race Theory spread like wildfire, sparking the very bitterness and hatred MLK denounced. 

So what is going on? Is racism increasing as a problem, or is it something else?

My belief is that it is "something else."  And that something else is the need of every politician or political party to have an enemy. It was such a glorious experience for liberals to fight the racist Jim Crow enemy in the 1960s, and it felt so good, that our liberal friends just cannot let go.

The over-under politics of the present day requires an enemy. Back in the day it was capitalism, employers, "robber barons," "malefactors of great wealth" who were pressing down upon the brow of labor. Capitalism, employers, bankers, exploiters were the enemy, and the Democratic Party would save the workers from their malevolence.

The Narrative, of course, to this very day is that but for beneficial legislation -- including wage and hour laws, unions, and government education -- the worker would still be exploited and poverty-stricken. I deny it. I say that the worker would be much better off today if the government weren't taking 35 percent of GDP and redistributing through a gubmint loot and plunder operation. But I could be wrong.

The Narrative today is that but for liberals and progressives the "oppressed peoples" would be as poor and helpless as blacks were in the South during the rule of Jim Crow.

Could that be true? The original Jim Crow was a cultural and political regime that deliberately discriminated against blacks. And there were laws to make sure that discrimination was the order of the day.

But today, our laws say that it is illegal to discriminate against blacks. And the whole of the ruling class is united to stop any re-emergence of a Jim Crow culture. And big corporations are along for the ride.

Yet the dreaded "white oppressors" are everywhere?

Actually, I'd say that 2014 mentioned by Bomberger is a tell. See, the first thing that happened after Barack Obama got elected as the First Black President in 2008 was that Republicans won 64 seats in the 2010 midterms. 

How could such a thing happen? President Obama was the liberal dream come true: I remember my university faculty wife friend expressing her emotional delight in that event at lunch in December 2008. A new era had dawned, so how come the Republicans won back 64 seats in the first midterm after Obama's election? There was only one possibility: racism, flat-out white racism.

It was after that that Democrats started with the race crisis in even -- i.e. election -- years. George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in 2012. Michael Brown was shot by a cop in 2014. George Floyd died under restraint while resisting arrest in 2020.

You might call these incidents merely lower-class small-time criminal blacks getting their comeuppance. Or you might call them representative of systemic racism in the United States. I don't know; more research is needed.

But Democrats and their pals in the media have built a huge narrative on the assumption that these events are examples of "systemic racism" arising out of a culture of "white supremacy" and executed by "white oppressors."

Only, of course the white ruling class of the United States is composed of liberals, progressives, lefties who have been spending the last generation or two doing a Gramscian "march through the institutions" and purging anyone that wasn't a card-carrying lefty. Eevil conservatives need not apply.

So what gives? in my narrative our liberal and lefty friends are finding that they are coming to the end of the era in which there is even a tenuous argument about helpless victims discriminated against by powerful right-wing whites. I dare say they were honestly shocked in 2010 when, instead of confirming the glorious new era of Barack Obama's First Black Presidency the American people voted against pedal-to-the-metal liberal agenda including Obamacare. But they couldn't admit that the world had moved on. And that Americans didn't really want huge new gubmint programs.

And like a businessman facing bankruptcy, they started to cheat, with fake racist incidents blown up into narratives of systemic racism.

There's another aspect to this. Liberals, lefties, and Democrats have spent the last 50 years insisting to black voters that, but for them, Americans would turn back the clock and institute Jim Crow 2.0. You can see how easily this narrative -- any narrative -- can work when you note how eagerly our liberal friends all drank the COVID KoolAid and bought the narrative of the moment on how to fight COVID, again and again. In other words, humans are tribal and they believe the narrative that their tribal leaders communicate to them. Doesn't matter how educated or racist they are. People are groupish and they believe the narrative. They believe the narrative up until the moment that it becomes inescapable that they have been roundly lied to. And sometimes even past that moment, because to abandon the narrative, the saving faith that defines their lives, is unthinkable.

My analysis of the liberal/progressive era involves what I call Little Darlings. Liberals operate their over-under politics by adopting and protecting a class of voters that they encourage to believe are hopelessly oppressed by "the system" and that but for liberal power would be ground into dust. And so these groups become virtual mistresses, serfs, of the ruling class.

But then the ruling class tires of their Little Darlings and leaves them in the lurch, as Democrats did for the white working class after 1965, and as, someday, they will leave blacks in the lurch.

I think the over-under politics with its necessary helpless Little Darlings is a monstrous injustice, for it encourages lower class people to stay as lower class, deriving their life and means of support on government loot and plunder and not from developing middle-class skills and culture. And when I get to set the Next Narrative I will create a politics where upper-class educated white liberals are the enemy, and are to blame for everything that went wrong in the last century.

Wouldn't that be fun! Actually, not really. I don't feel that liberals are evil, just fools and knaves.  They do need to be brought down a peg or two -- in their own best interest, you understand. But not made into enemies.

At the End of the Old Regime

OK. I'm not feeling too good right now. What with 10 percent inflation. What with Dems trying to ram trillions in loot and plunder spending down my throat. What with President Biden going to Georgia to wave the bloody shirt on race. What with Dems trying to federalize elections so they can vote by mail and harvest votes at will.

Then there's the stupidity of anti-racism and DEI at our universities. There is even a curious piece about a Cal State psychologist equating Jews and liberalism and how that is not good for non-Jewish whites and should this guy even be allowed to publish. Or there's this CIA-funded extremism expert who, of course, thinks that right-wingers in the US are just a few guns short of an insurrection. Because international NGOs agree.

Look, I get it. The glorious dawn of progressive administrative government that lightened the sky a century ago has become a dull wintry evening drizzle.  Or, if you like, the glorious nubile young thing of 1905 has become the monstrous old hag of 2021.

The problem is best illustrated by the race issue. Racial discrimination was abolished in the United States 55 years ago.

That means, sports fans, that it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. Does that mean the end of racial discrimination and racial stereotyping? Of course not. But it makes it illegal.

Guess what! That opens opportunities for people that want to make a buck on race. You can lower your wages a bit, so that whites won't show up, but blacks will. Or you can raise your rents so that whites won't want to rent. But blacks, who experience landlords telling them the apartment has "just been taken," will probably pay a premium to get a place to live. OMG! Raacist!

Look, I'll tell you what's racist. Flogging the race issue fifty years after race discrimination was outlawed.

And I get where the lefties and liberals and race-baiters and all the ships at sea are at. There is no politics without an enemy. If you want to strut your stuff in the ruling class you need some enemy to fight against. 

Jews? Hell no: literally Hitler. 

Welfare mothers? Hell no, it's not their fault. 

Black aspiring rappers? Racist! 

Corporations? But corporations are all woke these days. 

Racist whites? Ah, there's an enemy we can live with! 

Climate change? Hoo boy: and then anyone who disagrees with the vital importance of windmills and rooftop solar arrays is an evil climate denier, almost as bad as a Holocaust denier.

Pointy-headed intellectuals? Yes, but that's what George Wallace ran for president on in 1972.

Deep state? Now you're talking.

I tell you, the big thing in the next few years is for the nationalist middle-class leaders to find the right enemy to run against.

The enemy needs to be something of a joke, something or somebody that enables us deplorables to have a bit of fun, but not actually cancel or entrap with FEDS or impoverish with million-dollar legal bills. And certainly not put their heads on pikes.

As I say, the Age of Politics is over, because there really are no enemies at the border, against whom we must unite or lose our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

But how do we civilize politics into a sport, with two teams on the field, league tables, a national championship, and all that stuff. Without actually having a war, and without actually plundering the country for loot and plunder to reward the supporters?

I don't know how to do that, and I wish I did.

The Science Catches Up with Me on the Sexes

For a year or two, based on a lifetime of reading and especially since reading German sociologist George Simmel on women and the public square, I have maintained that men and women have profoundly different cultures.

Of course, being a man I like to make it jokey and insulting, and say that men have a Culture of Insult and women have a Culture of Complaint. Now comes Steve Sailer commenting on a piece in The New York Times and an email from Steven Pinker.

Men can cooperate while ribbing each other pretty hard. I finally watched the fine neo-Western movie Hell or High Water (script by Taylor Sheridan, creator of the hit TV show Yellowstone), in which the outlaws and the law both consist of pairs of guys constantly insulting each other while getting a lot done.

Women, in contrast, tend to compete with each other via snide remarks. So women tend to assume more that of course the authorities should silence anybody who is saying anything not nice.

This was in the context of "studies" that show that men support freedom of speech more than women.

So tell me: Am I right or am I right?

But I have a higher, nobler perspective on all this, which is my analysis of Simmel on women in the public square. He writes that the public square was created by men for men, but that the entry of women into the public square would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But actually, after long and harrowing thought, I decided that Simmel was wrong, and it looks like "the science" agrees with me. 

It is not that women will transform the public square, it is that women do not get the public square as constructed by men. The idea of guys sitting around insulting each other just does not compute for women. Wherever and whenever women get together they construct a culture based on the women's Culture of Complaint where women "compete with each other via snide remarks."

Now it is my belief that the women's version of the public square, of competition by snide remarks, is completely different and incompatible with the men's Culture of Insult. I expect that in the future we will see two cultures side by side, separate but equal. In areas where men predominate, there will be a Culture of Insult. In areas where women are more than 30 percent of the participants there will be a Culture of Complaint. 

And ne'er the twain shall meet.

Also, of course, there is the intersection of another Battle of the Sexes, that Women Expect to be Protected: as women public-school teachers who don't want to get into the trenches of COVID at school. While Men Know They Are Expendable: as men figure that, well, someone has to keep the grocery supply chain going, and if not me, then who?

But what happens in the future? I think that we will see a segregation of the public square into male and female sectors. Men will gravitate to areas where open competition is needed, such as in the culture of the Road Warrior, and women will gravitate to areas where competition is hidden, as with Burke, where "All the decent drapery of life is [NOT] to be rudely torn off."

I tend to be naughty about all this. But I really think that the feminists are wrong about "you go girl" and girl superheroes. As in clueless. That is just not how women interact with the world, and, more important, how women get their way in the world.

I think that this is an important thing to understand. Women don't get what they want and need by fighting or insulting. They get it by "manipulation," with their interpersonal skills with which they get what they want and need short of insult and actual violence.

As my daughter says: "my job is to keep my kids alive." This sounds rather trite. It is not, especially when you remember that back in the day human babies had a 50 percent chance of getting to age one. Really, there is no more important job in the world than keeping kids alive until it is time for them to leave the nest.

The point is, I think, that in the modern era the job of keeping kids alive has got a lot easier. And that gives women the opportunity to do other things than just keeping the kids alive.

But what? That is the question. And, given that all living things advance with two steps forward and one step back -- if they are lucky -- women aren't going to find a new role for themselves without lots of mistakes and heartache.

The Reign of Error

I was reading a piece at American Spectator about Soviet spies in the Roosevelt administration.

One of the things the spies did was get the US and Japan into a war. Why? Because the Soviets in 1941 were afraid of Japan attacking them "in the rear" and setting up a two-front war where they would be fighting against the Germans in the west and the Japanese in the east. They called it "Operation Snow."

The goal of Operation Snow was to influence U.S. policy in a way that would maintain Washington and Tokyo on a collision course. [Harry Dexter] White was told to draft policy and negotiating positions for the administration designed to further antagonize the Japanese government...

Yes, yes. I know. Roosevelt and World War II were the most glorious thing since sliced bread. I mean: Hitler! The Holocaust!

But if Pearl Harbor happened because the Soviets were stirring up trouble, with agents of influence encouraging the US to beat up Japan...

I know I shouldn't feel this, not as an ex-Brit. But I have been coming to feel that the US should have stayed the heck out of World War I. And let the Brits and the Krauts and the Frogs fight each other to a standstill.

Then we wouldn't have had the Treaty of Versailles that punished the Germans, and maybe not the hyperinflation in Germany after WWI and maybe not the opening for the Nazis to rally all Germans together, and maybe that would have meant no World War II and maybe...

Maybe in the 1940s we would have backed the non-Nazi Germans and the Japs in holding Stalin's murderous regime in check. Wow. Imagine that! Think of the movies!

There's another thing too, that you can see if you look at this chart of 20th century federal spending.

Notice how federal spending was about 3 percent of GDP before WWI? And about 5 percent in the 1920s. And then up to 10 percent of GDP in he 1930s after the failure of the federal government to deal effectively with the Crash of 1929 led, inexplicably to a doubling of federal spending. And then after the spending orgy of WWII, it was Katie bar the door, and now here we are with federal spending at 20 percent of GDP for the last 70 years.

Except for the temporary blip in spending in the late COVID disaster. I'm sure that won't result in permanent increases in federal spending. Could it?

Yes, but Social Security! OK, suppose that a wise federal government legislated a mandatory savings program that every private employer had to set up a retirement savings program for their employees, in which, we'll say, employer and employee each kicked in 50 percent. Imagine that!

See, with savings from that older people could mostly finance their own end-of-live health care and nursing care. So no Medicare.

Education? Well, how about the mothers in the neighborhood organize the 3 Rs. I'm sure they are all literate and numerate and qualified to do that. And I'm sure that public-spirited people could organize education for the children of aspiring rappers. And anyway, as soon as kids reached puberty they would bust out of schools and start apprenticeships, and eevil corporations would be legally bound to supplement work training with additional education.

But we don't have that system, do we? And I think there is a fairly simple reason why. It is that the whole point of the Progressive movement a hundred years and more ago was that the point of government was to provide scope for the education and intelligence and status of the educated class. Jobs for Gentry, you might say.

But the problem is that our educated class is really not that good at figuring out what the people need. That's why they got us into two world wars and a Cold War and a war against Muslims, and now a war against climate change. And why they built up an administrative full of Jobs for Gentry.

Actually, they are not that good at anything.

I'd say that World War I was a strategic error. I'd say that the New Deal was a strategic error. I'd say that World War II was a consequence of the follies of the previous 20 years and more. I'd say that the administrative state is a strategic error.

In fact I'd say that the rule of the educated class for the last century has been a Reign of Error, that has Made Things Worse, and will continue to Make Things Worse in the years to come.

But what do I know. I'm just a guy who has read too many books.