To Teach Liberals a Lesson, Re-elect Trump

There have been a lot of conservatives this week saying, OK, that's it. we can't be good guys any more. We have to hit back at the left: their violent protesters, as at Berkeley and Middlebury, and now Washington State's Evergreen State College, their suppression of everything conservative; their open vileness towards President Trump in the Kathy Griffin severed head episode.

Chaps like Ace of Spades are saying, OK, that's it; I'm done being nice; I'm going to return blow for blow.

Look, I get it. That's why I now say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, because whatever the ruling class does when it is in power always amounts to injustice.

As in Barack Obama weaponizing the intelligence community against Republicans and non-liberal Americans in general.

The thing is that we don't have enough media to go blow for blow in the You Did It First department.

But the way to sort the left, as the Brits would say, is to keep the House and Senate in 2018 and re-elect Donald Trump in 2020.

And to do that we need the support of decent middle-aged Good Little Girls that right now are repelled by Trump's bar-room persona. They need to decide that the vile lefty Social Justice Warriors are much worse, and they need to be telling all their friends about the husband of a friend that lost his job because he wasn't "woke" enough at work. "I can't believe they did that."

The point is that this happened before. That was what The Sixties was all about. The left at the time thought it was carrying all before it, that fundamental transformation was right around the corner. Only it wasn't.

First, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968. Believe me, that was a shock to our lefty friends, but never mind: the anti-war protests swelled, and National Guard troops fired on peaceful protesters at Ohio's Kent State University.

But then Richard Nixon won reelection in a 60-40 vote over uber-liberal George McGovern, the dream liberal candidate. Liberals were so angry that they ginned up an impeachment against Nixon for doing what every Democrat does before breakfast. You know, like weaponize the IRS against the Tea Party.

But the defenestration of Richard Nixon didn't stop the anti-liberal wave, because Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980, despite being an amiable dunce and a B-movie actor that just could not master the details of "governance."

Sound familiar?

Let the record show that it took from 1968 to the aftermath of 1988 for liberals to realize that their fundamental transformation had locked them out of the White House.

And then, don't forget, the Clintons and the rest of the liberal machine thought that their election in 1992 was Katy bar the door. Only it wasn't. The 1994 midterm was a shocker -- and I was there, volunteering for a GOP House candidate in Washington State -- as Republicans won control of Congress for the first time since 1952.

Maybe Marx is wrong, and history won't repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

But I'd say there's a darn good chance that we are going to see a repeat of the Sixties. And the reason is that the cultural enthusiasm for revolution and "resistance" just does not resonate with ordinary middle-class people.

The reason is not hard to find. Revolution and resistance are conceits of rich kids, Marxes and Ayers (son of a Commonwealth Edison exec) and people that have been converted to liberalism by their college experience. But most people just want kids and a job and a nice home; they do not have a clue what LGBT and intersectionality and critique are all about, and they do not understand the enthusiasms of the social-justice left.

Just remember, it took 20 years, from Nixon to Bush I, for liberals to realize that they had a problem. They had to be beaten by the evil Nixon, by the B-movie actor Reagan twice, by the colorless Bush before they would be ready to think that they had a problem.

How long to you think it would take this time?

Government Can't Solve The Problems We Got

Never mind about the white working class and the collapse of good jobs at good wages in the manufacturing sector.

We know that President Trump's promises to the white working class on that score are empty. There is just not going to be a world in which kids can sorta graduate from high school and go down the street and sign on at the local steel plant for a lifetime job.

But it is worse than that. It's not just manufacturing jobs. Now it is retail jobs. My Man Kevin Williamson tells the grim tale, in a piece built around the jolly old days of  Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the not-so-jolly days of a boarded-up retail mall in Oklahoma.

Retail jobs are collapsing, and that is dead serious because there are millions of people (especially, I suspect, white working class women) who have learned the life of work from an entry-level job in retail. Here is a middle-aged woman looking back on her first retail job.

Now that she is an adult with children of her own, she understands that what she was actually investing in was learning how to have a job. “I had to be accountable,” she says. “I had hours, had to be there on time, had to be clean and dressed appropriately. And I had to interact with people in a way I hadn’t before: In a job like that, you have to answer questions, and if someone is kind of mean to you or critical, you can’t stomp off and cry. I wasn’t a kid at work — I was an employee.”

I think that this is the single most underappreciated contribution of capitalism. Even if the customer is mean to you, you still suck it up. Your job, whatever it is from CEO to retail clerk, is to become a servant of the exchange economy, which is all about serving other people.

But those jobs are going away, say Kevin:

At the highwater mark, there were about 5,000 malls in the United States, and there are now 1,100, at least 400 of which are expected to close in the next few years. 

Ouch. And what about the people getting their first entry-level job at the mall?

What shall we do? Where shall we go?

What we must not do is act like Hillary Clinton.

The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition.

Sorry, Hillary, it's over. And the worst thing in the world when you are over is to have people telling you that everything is copacetic, and nothing needs to change.

Now back to the economy.

The fact is that we don't have a clue what is coming in the next few years: culture, politics, economy-wise.

And yet our political institutions are all set up to service the current economy. Let us start with the education system, a dreadful, slow, mindless government monopoly.

OK, kids, quick! What should we do with the education system to prepare the next generation of kids for the jobs of tomorrow?

Exactly. Nobody has a clue, least of all in politics and government.

Now, my view is that the point of government is that it is designed to prevent change, most obviously the age-old change of pirates and predators appearing one morning and raping and pillaging the place until the men are dead and the women carted off into slavery.

That sorta worked in the agricultural age when nothing changed on the growing-of-food front. Not any more. Today the market and its prices decide everything, whether people like it or not. The reason the market must decide, whether you like it or not, is the Great Enrichment, which has increased per-capita income by 3000% in the last 200 years.

Imagine saying that the one most amazing thing is all history that has really made a difference, is just a trick, a mirage, as the left has been doing for 150 years.

Imagine a government, any government, planning and executing the Great Enrichment. Exactly. It is impossible. Let us just ask what government would have done about the losers in the successive economic revolutions, the machine textile revolution that put the hand spinners and then the hand weavers and I know not what out of work. And then the railroad revolution that must have put Charles Dickens carter, Mr. Barkis, out of work. And the oil revolution that put the sperm-whale hunters like Capt. Ahab out of work.

The point is that, whatever the particulars of each  economic revolution, life went on, and the losers kinda faded away like the handloom-weaver father of Andrew Carnegie.

We are seeing the fading away right now of the white working class, whose men operated the manufacturies and whose women worked in retail.

So where shall we go, what shall we do?

To me, Fact One is that the current ruling class, the educated liberal elite, doesn't have a clue. All it knows is what it wants for itself, creative jobs and the delicious conceit of leading the People of the Subordinate Self towards Peace and Justice.

But suppose the ruling class is wrong? Suppose its approach to education only works for the children of the educated class? Supposing its single-payer health care notion crashes the health system? Suppose that its one-size-fits-all pension system runs out of money?

If we had market-driven education, health care, and pensions, then all these "systems" would self-correct as the world turned. It wouldn't be easy, and people would suffer. But under the current system plenty of people are suffering, plenty of people are going to suffer in the near future, and yet nothing is changing.  The poor have been utterly betrayed by the current system for the last 50 years, and nothing is changing. Scratch a liberal and they have no ideas, except the move the deckchairs on the Titanic and ask for more money.

But now we are on the brink of really big-time change, that no government program or ruling-class conceit has any clue about what to do.

But we do have a "system" that will deal with it. Markets and prices will adapt every day to the changes that are coming. And people that want to do something more than just die of despair will adapt to the changes, and they will wive and thrive.

On thing is for certain. If you are sitting around waiting for the politicians and the wise men to "do something," then you have a real problem.

Ben Sasse Hunting Unicorns

Republican Ben Sasse, US Senator from Nebraska, has written a book, and The Atlantic has reviewed it. The moderate Republican wants to rehabilitate "a shared moral language" for America.

Frankly, it's a little surprising that an elected official could be so obtuse about the political and cultural situation, and start talking about virtue and a shared moral language, in 2017 in the middle of the elite's war against President Trump.

I say that because it ought to be pretty obvious to anyone in the public square that the whole point of the leftist project, from 1848 to today's "woke" progressives, is to slaughter the west's common moral language and its notion of virtue, particularly the seven virtues celebrated by Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Virtues. After the massacre of the western canon the progressives will examine each and every one of us for our faithfulness to the left's vision of "justice" and administer the intersectionality loyalty oath to those that pass the test.

Sorry, Ben. We are way past the possibility of a shared moral vision, at least for now. That is why Dennis Prager today writes regretfully today about the Never Trumpers. Don't these guys understand that we are in a cultural civil war?

Put it this way. I wrote in my American Thinker piece this week that

In my view, the measure of a man is not what he believes at the end of the rainbow of justice, but what he is willing to concede to the other side in the spirit of good will, right now.

Good for Ben Sasse. If he wants to find a common moral ground then he is a good guy that is willing to concede something.

I tell you what I am willing to concede. I am willing to concede that a lot of people want nice safe government-guaranteed entitlements, even though they cost a bloody fortune in payroll and hidden taxes. If I had my druthers I would like to pay my share to look after people who are unable to look after themselves. But I would really like to take care of my own education, my own pension, and my own end-of-life healthcare.

So tell me, what are liberals prepared to concede to conservatives, right now? Would I be that far wrong if I said: Nothing?

The fact is that in war it is the losing side that makes concessions, and only when defeat is staring it in the face. The fact is that we are in a cultural civil war, which has spilled over into a political civil war, and is like to end up in a real shooting civil war.

The reason for this civil war is that the left believes, in the words of Barack Obama, in "fundamental transformation." You will notice that there is nothing in fundamental transformation that admits of a shared moral language. Indeed the whole point is to change the world, not to understand it.

So that means we have to fight.

But fight for what? That is what I am working on, because I start from the idea that we need something beyond the four virtues of the ancients, and the three additional virtues of the Christians. Let us put it in the language of a book I am reading that is trying to mix up Hegel and Heidegger. In this book, The Critique of Pure Modernity, David Kolb is investigating, shall we say, the use of negation in Hegel, that we proceed dialectically through negation and reflection, while acknowledging that the negative is very often almost the same as the original, and the notion of "unconcealing" in Heidegger.

Let us say that the meaning of all this is that the world is always already right in front of us and around us and within us, but yet it is concealed from us. The way to unconcealing is not just from a mechanical investigation,  the method of science, but more tricky and twisty. It involves appreciating that the world is not just mechanical and action and reaction, but that the whole is not just as the sum of its parts and has a uniqueness in which the parts are fully involved in the whole.

Another way to look at it is in the left-brain/right-brain analysis of Iain MacGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. In his narrative myth (in its best sense) the left brain is always trying to reduce the world to a model and a plan of domination. The right brain just takes in the world as it is, without prejudgment.

Now the critique of MacGilchrist is that in the Enlightenment, in Modernity, in Newtonian mechanics, in technology, we have overbalanced in the direction of left-brain reductionism, what Kolb calls, from Heidegger, "universal imposition."

I would say that the whole lefty project is one long universal imposition of the left's model of the world, and you better submit.

On the argument of Kolb and MacGilchrist that lefty vision is only half of the truth, and it will lead to disaster at worst, and a very diminished human experience at best.

That is why I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, the universal imposition of ruling class power upon a subordinate population.

The road to wholeness starts with my notion up above. The measure of a human is what he is willing to concede to his opponent, right now.

Or, to soften this up a bit, what is a man willing to concede, down the road at the end of the civil war, in the peace treaty between the good guys and the bad guys?

Ben Sasse is willing to make concessions right now, but I fear that the time for concession is way off in the future. The last time that the left was willing to make concessions was in 1992 after three straight Republican administrations. I dare say that the same sort of persuasion would be needed this time.

Liberals Wrecking the Law

On my understanding, the modern interest of the state in law issues from the desire of the rulers to appropriate the reputation of law in commercial disputes, and use its prestige in support of state power.

The fact is, as I discovered from reading a history of law some years ago, is that most of law is concerned with commercial disputes and inheritance issues. It was only in the modern era that states began to get into the law-making business.

So now we have legislators and judges poking into the interstices of society pushing their private agendas onto the public square. And as Roget Kimball writes of an Appeals court decision against President Trump's executive order on immigration, the judges break down pretty clearly on partisan lines. You could tell how a judge would vote based on which president appointed him.

As Byron York points out, the decision broke 10 to 3 along partisan lines: the 10 judges who decided against the travel ban were appointed by Presidents Clinton or Obama, the 3 judges who supported the ban were appointed by one of the Bushes.

This, as they say, is not good. And, to add insult to injury, the decision was based on statements that Donald Trump made on the campaign trail. Their decision, the judges imply, would have been different if Trump had not made political statements about immigrants.

I suppose we should take heart from this, that liberal judges are so far into the weeds that they will grab at anything to justify their legislation from the bench. It suggests we are reaching the collapse of liberal judicial philosophy from its own internal contradictions.

The problem for me is that, even if liberal judging collapsed tomorrow, we are so far into the weeds that it will take forever to get out.

That's because the growth of big government and the administrative state and its regulations and its administrative courts -- and of course the liberal lawyering that encourages people to sue people and corporations with big pockets -- has utterly buried the legal system and prevented it from doing its job, which is to adjudicate honest disputes between parties over some messy train-wreck of a business deal or a bankruptcy, to patch up the mess after something has gone badly wrong.

Instead we have liberals and the left endeavoring to use law as the sharp end of their arc of history that bends towards justice. Having first determined some sort of outcome, for health care or relations between the sexes, liberals use law to force their desired outcome on society.

It all comes down to a feeling I have that is growing in me, that liberals really do not understand what they are doing. They have a narrow vision of what they want, in respect of equality and justice, they have protocols of tactics and sound bites, they have the power to impose their will, but they do not really think about the collateral effects of their actions. You have Hillary Clinton and the Democrats protesting the results of the 2016 election without really thinking about what happens to America when election losers do not concede their defeat.

It would be nice to feel that average people would revolt against the liberal culture of politics-all-the-time, and the social and cultural destruction that it meets out.

But ordinary people are just trying to make it from day to day; they must find support where they can, and for many that means attaching themselves to the Democratic Party and its neo-feudal government entitlement apparatus. They must find a powerful patron or suffer extreme marginalization and oppression.

Still, as Adam Smith says, there is always a great deal of ruin in a nation. Unfortunately nobody knows how much is too much, and how much liberal lawyering will end up destroying the law.

Why It Has Come to the Spit-Viper Left

What is it about the world that Russell  K.Nieli calls the Spit-Viper Left? Todd Gitlin, he writes, thinks that the left

may subconsciously feel that reason and argument are no longer on its side. Free speech, a fruitful exchange of ideas, mutual intellectual enrichment — these are not its modus operandi. And those among the most illiberal segments of the Left on college campuses often attract to their protests even more radical and more illiberal supporters from beyond the university, who bring with them a love of violence, confrontation and disruption.

Not to mention lovely money from dear old George Soros.

Well, that's not my line.

My line is that the left is running out of victims for whom it can justify its eternal lust for revolution.

As I say, you have to understand that the left is rich kids looking for a reason to riot. All young men like an excuse to riot, but rich kids need something higher and nobler than simple street riots. That's because they are high-class, not yobbos and deplorables; they have to dress up their adolescent rage in haute couture. No J.C. Penney for them.

But the rest of us can be forgiven for humming the refrain of Elvis Presleyś "Hound Dog."

Well they said you was high classedWell, that was just a lie.

Kids looking for a fight are just kids looking for a fight.

But we have to admire the genius of rich kids Marx, son of a prominent lawyer, and Engels, son of a textile manufacturer. They would gin up the best excuse for a riot ever, and lead the downtrodden workers in their existential battle against the cruel capitalists and the bumptious bourgeoisie that were keeping the people down. The workers were outside the system, without a vote, and Marx and Engels would lead them in a revolution against the power of money and exploitation.

Only the bourgeoisie and the capitalists were not that interested in power, in keeping people down. So when the workers presented their grievances the bourgeoisie realized that, even if the workers would use their numbers to despoil the property owners, it was unjust to keep the workers outside the system.

But if the workers were now inside the system, what price revolution and the intoxication of riot and mayhem for the next generation of lefty activists?

That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and its leading lights, Max Horkheimer and Ted Adorno, sons of rich businessmen, after World War I. These two invented our modern identity politics. They switched the strategic direction of leftist politics from working-class revolution to sexual and racial revolution.

But again, the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power. It understood and respected the claims of women and minorities, and gave them the vote. Hey, and even Affirmative Action and quotas.

And what about gays? Hey, give them gay marriage, said the judges.

Do you see the problem? The whole program of the left is that there has to be brutal exploitation and oppression and the only way to fight it is with resistance and protest. But what is the point if the normals keep conceding the legitimate grievances of the marginalized outside the system?

Good point and if the bourgeoisie has such a record of fairly and generously conceding the legitimate grievances of the marginalized then what exactly is the point of or the need for revolution?

For now, in 2017, we are down to the bottom of the barrel. Who is the left advocating for today? It is advocating for illegal immigrants, insisting that no human is illegal, and for Muslims who want nothing more than to kill little children at rock concerts and make sex-slaves of white working class girls.

If I were a lefty, I would be getting a bit panicky. I would be forbidding anyone from uttering a discouraging word at my lefty university and I would be reinventing the KKK to patrol the borders of the university and keep the racist, sexist, homophobe haters out. And as for the people pushing back against Muslim terror? Why, I would call them evil Islamophobes.

Hey, for once, the left is right. The people resisting Muslim terror really do have a phobia, i.e., a fear, of Islam. Yay lefties! For once you have got it right. Although I would hardly think Islamophobia is a disease, but just a healthy instinct for self-protection.

Now I am a normal kind of person, although a wee bit of a lone wolf. So I can look at a situation in a normal kind of way and respond to it, sensibly and normally. But imagine if I were a lefty.

Exactly. I would be as angry as a Spit Viper. Whatever that is.

Single-payer Healthcare: Clueless

The State of California has been taking a look at a state "single-payer" health plan. The idea is that health care ought to be a "right." Only it will cost $400 billion a year, in a state with a general fund budget of $124 billion a year.

Really does anybody have a clue? Let us count the ways.

In the first place, health care is not a thing. It is not something you can just set up as a government program and leave it.

Of course that is true about everything the government does. You can't just pass Social Security and leave it to the bureaucrats forever. Eventually, Social Security runs out of other peoples' money.

But health care is probably a couple orders of magnitude more complicated than raking in and just handing out money. Which the government is farily good at.

Health care is a universe of needs and products, and it is changing every moment. Now, settled science has discovered that in a universe of wants and of products and services competing to supply those wants there is one certain truth. The only way to manage and to adjudicate between the competing needs and products and services is through a price "system." Only it isn't a system. It is an emergent phenomenon, as they say in chaos theory.

But government doesn't do that. It sets up an administrative system, based on the state of play between needs and products and services on Day One. And then it proposes to administer that system for all eternity.

Only eternity ends up in administrative failure in the not-too-distant near future. Because what will health care look like next year? What will it look like ten years from now? Nobody knows. So that is why we need prices and markets to guide the evolutions, the innovations, the changes that will be coming next month, next year, and next decade. There is one thing that government cannot do, and that it manage change.

But what about the poor? Well, people that don't have the ready are people that must line up and wait for the kindly DMV clerk to get to them. That is the inevitable situation of workers and peasants that rely upon a powerful lord to spread his benison to his faithful followers. That is what a "right to health care" means.

But chaps like me don't want that. We want to pay for our own health care and we want to influence the market in health care so that it responds to our needs, on a day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year basis. Just like the market in groceries.

The assumption about health care is that it is vital, as important as food and shelter. But this is not quite true. In his Rising Life Expectancy James C. Riley explains that there are about eight factors that have contributed to modern life expectancy of about 75 years at birth, and "bio-medicine" is just one of them. Others are: sanitation, income, aseptic childbirth, education of women, vaccination, etc.

We can see the problem that "single payer" health care will get into. We can see it in education, which has been an elite project for the last 100-200 years. The ruling class has always felt that it knew what sort of education their subjects needed. But they have usually tended to propose the system that they prefer for themselves. So we now have a luxurious system to educate good little girls through college, but a lousy system for educating the middle and the lower income groups. But who cares about them? The real clients of the education system are the teachers and administrators. Who cares about the kids?

Now, if we accept that some sort of subsidy is needed, for education and for health care, why not just give the subsidy directly to the people? Why divert it through the special interests, the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the drug companies? Why not just give everyone a subsidy to buy health care as they think fit?

I know the answer to that. Not enough opportunity for graft.

Liberals Do Too Believe in Borders

I was at a good liberal friend for dinner last night. They didn't have a "We Believe" yardsign out in front but they did have the No Borders yardsign: "No matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor."

And during the meal my liberal host opined as how he was opposed to borders.

Of course I was very nice and didn't contradict mine host in his own house. But I got to thinking on the way home.

Wait a minute! Liberals do too believe in borders. They believe that no conservatism should take place inside the borders of a university. They believe that no conservatives should get tenure within the borders of their university. They believe that no Christianity should take place within the borders of a government child-custodial facility. And they believe that no federal immigration enforcement should take place within the borders of a liberal city.

And the liberals also believe in a strong border police. You might almost call it a wall. What do you think all those anti-fa and Black Block protesters are all about? They Shall Not Pass, those nasty stinky deplorable racist, sexist, homophobes. And the liberal KKK will make sure of it. Yes. really, those peaceful protesters are nothing more that the liberal militia, just like the racist militia in the Jim Crow south.

Hey, how about those right-wing militias that the FBIs have to kick in the butt to get them to do anything but grouse around at their local gun range? The left-wing militias are out and about every day marchin' and protestin'. And they are up to the task of intimidating the lifer admininstrators in the university, the ones that actually need intimidating. There is the Berkeley Militia; there is the Middlebury Militia. And you will note that the folks on the barricades are usually little rich kids. Just like the rich kids in Les Mis back in Paris in the good old 19th century.

So the only question is: which borders matter to the ordinary person in Manchester, England, or San Bernardino, or Paris or Nice. Does the average person want to protect the world from corruption by racist, sexist homophobes, or does the average person want to be protected from low-wage competition from immigrants and terrorism from woke Muslims?

You tell me. I've got to go downstairs and finish loading the FY18 budget up on usgovernmentspending.com.