“The Long Drift Leftward”: Addendum

In “The Long Drift Leftward” I offer statistics about presidential elections to demonstrate the drift. I then attribute that drift to three coinciding factors, one of which is the enfranchisement of women and their steadily increasing propensity to vote.

Along comes a post by David Friedman, “Women Voting, Government Expenditure“. He finds that the relative growth of government spending for 13 Western nations (including the U.S.) is related to the enfranchisement of women. Being a two-handed economist, he hedges on his finding.

But putting his finding together with mine buttresses my conclusion (and his).

What Matters to “Suburban Women”?

You hear a lot about the things that matter to college-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class women.

They don’t seem to be real things like these:

  • Riots, crime, and terrorism
  • Marauding illegal aliens
  • Exorbitantly (and unnecessarily) high energy costs
  • Subsidization of things that don’t matter (recycling, EVs, “sustainable” fuels)
  • Rising tax rates
  • Government censorship
  • Subversion of justice
  • Inability to deter China’s growing military might.

No. They care about a hoax: “Climate change”.

And about a “health issue” that most of them would never face (or contemplate) or are too old to need: Abortion.

That’s the mindset that was created by decades of brainwashing in public schools and universities.

You have to wonder why it was so easy to wash their brains of common sense. I’d say it was a fatal combination of hormones, groupthink, and insulation from the world of real suffering that their grandparents had to endure; for example:

Inflating GDP

There are five ways to do it:

  • “Print” money.
  • Make businesses less efficient through regulation.
  • Enlarge government, thus drawing productive resources from private use.
  • Pay people to do nothing.
  • Encourage destructive behavior — rioting, illegal immigration, crime in general — and count remedial spending as part of GDP.

The first four items got liftoff in the 1930s and have been getting bigger and “better” since then. The fifth item has reached critical mass under Biden.

The Growing Age-Based Income Gap

It has been said often that today’s young adults have a harder time of it, economically (and probably in other ways), than the young adults of yesteryear. Is that true? If so, is a new phenomenon?

To shed some light on those questions, I turned to the Census Bureau and found Table P-10. Age–All People (Both Sexes Combined) by Median and Mean Income: 1974 to 2022. I plotted mean income by year for six age groups, with this result:

You can readily see that the rate of income growth for the youngest workers (15 to 24-year-olds) has been slower than that of the older age groups. In fact, the rate of income growth is inversely related to age group. Here are the coefficients of the linear fits to each of the lines in the graph:

  • 15 – 24: 132
  • 25 – 34: 346
  • 35 – 44: 539
  • 45 – 54: 625
  • 55 – 64: 683
  • 65 – 74: 750

Thus, for example, the mean income for the 15 – 24 age group increased, on average, by $132 per year, and so on for each group. (The r2 values are — from the youngest to oldest age group — 0.69, 0.76, 0.88, 0.87, 0.92, 0.95.)

In sum, the incomes of younger workers — on average and most of the time — have lagged further and further behind the incomes of older workers since at least 1974.

I am unsurprised by that. It has often been remarked that those of us who entered the labor force around 1960 had it better than those who followed us. I am certain that the observation would be borne out if there were data going back to 1960 or earlier.

Why is this so? An important reason, but not the only one, is the “law of supply and demand”. Economic growth in the U.S. has long been positive (though at a declining rate in the 20th and 21st centuries). Yes, there have been brief episodes of negative growth during recessions and longer episodes during the Great Recession and Great Depression. But the demand for labor of various kinds has grown over the long haul.

The supply of labor, on the other hand, hasn’t grown consistently (see table here). The population of the U.S. grew by only 7.3 percent from 1930 to 1940, as against 16.2 percent in the preceding decade, 15.0 percent in the decade before that, and much higher percentages before that.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was the main cause of slow population growth in that decade. World War II was the main cause of slow population growth from 1940 to 1950 — only 14.5 percent (slower than all preceding decades but one). Ant the growth in the 1940s came mainly in the latter half of the decade, when the post-war “baby boom” started.

The short of it is that younger persons who entered the labor force during, say, 1955 to 1965 didn’t face as much competition from their peers as did earlier generations. That happenstance served most of them well all the way to retirement.

Younger workers of later years have had it tougher — despite declining population growth since 1960 — because of the sharply declining rate of economic growth after 1970. Each regression line in the graph below reflects the rate of growth for the associated business cycle (the flatter the slope the lower the rate of growth). The 1949-1954 and 1960-1970 cycles generated much higher growth rates than those that followed. Further, the growth rates have generally declined over time; the rate for the 2009-2020 cycle (and beyond) is the lowest of the lot.

Today’s young adults, and those who follow them will be up against a lethargic economy — which will be made even more lethargic by the continued piling-on of regulations and the growth of government. The full amount of damage due to higher energy costs — because of the senseless war on “climate change” — is yet to be felt.

Youngsters should be leading the charge for regime change. But too many of them have been brainwashed in the belief that government (under Democrats) knows best. What it knows best is how to impoverish Americans and make nice to our worst enemies.

Paradoxes Abound

I have written several posts about political and economic paradoxes in the past 18 years. Here are the highlights (with some commentary).

The paradox of libertarianism:

 Liberty rests on an agreed definition of harm, and on an accompanying agreement to act with mutual restraint and in mutual defense. Given the variety of human wants and preferences, the price of mutual restraint and mutual defense is necessarily some loss of liberty. That is, each person must accept, and abide by, a definition of harm that is not the definition by which he would abide were he able to do so. But, in return for mutual restraint and mutual defense, he must abide by that compromise definition.

That insight carries important implications for the “anything goes” or “do your own thing” school of pseudo-libertarianism. That school consists of those libertarians who believe that harm is in the mind of the doer, or who believe that they can define harm while standing on the outside of society looking in. Thus they proclaim abortion and same-sex “marriage” (among other things) to be harmless — just because they favor abortion and same-sex “marriage” or cannot see the harm in them.

I am therefore a conservative libertarian.

  • Conservative because voluntarily evolved social norms are binding and civilizing, and therefore should not be dismissed out of hand or altered peremptorily.
  • Libertarian in a minarchistic way. The urge to power makes a state inevitable; the best state is therefore the one that only defends its citizens from predators, domestic and foreign.

A non-paradox for libertarians:

What if a society’s transition from a regulatory-welfare regime to a regime of liberty were to result in losers as well as winners? How could one then justify such a transition? Must the justification rest on an intuitive judgment about the superiority of liberty? Might the prospect of creating losers somehow nullify the promise of creating winners?

I argue … that my justification for libertarianism — although it is of the consequentialist-utilitarian variety — rests on a stronger foundation than an intuitive judgment about the superiority of liberty…. The virtue of libertarianism … is not that it must be taken on faith but that, in practice, it yields superior consequences. Superior consequences for whom, you may ask. And I will answer: for all but those who don’t wish to play by the rules of libertarianism; that is, for all but predators and parasites.

By predators, I mean those who would take liberty from others, either directly (e.g., through murder and theft) or through the coercive power of the state (e.g., through smoking bans and licensing laws). By parasites, I mean those who seek to advance their self-interest through the coercive power of the state rather than through their own efforts (e.g., through corporate welfare and regulatory protection)….

[A] transition to liberty might not instantly make everyone better off … but everyone could be better off. That’s simply not the case with the regulatory-welfare state, which robs some for the benefit of others, and ends up making almost everyone poorer than they would be in a state of liberty.

Liberty is a win-win proposition for everyone except those who deserve to lose.

The interest-group paradox:

 Pork-barrel legislation exemplifies the interest-group paradox in action, though the paradox encompasses much more than pork-barrel legislation. There are myriad government programs that — like pork-barrel projects — are intended to favor particular classes of individuals. Here is a minute sample:

    • Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, for the benefit of the elderly (including the indigent elderly)
    • Tax credits and deductions, for the benefit of low-income families, charitable and other non-profit institutions, and home buyers (with mortgages)
    • Progressive income-tax rates, for the benefit of persons in the mid-to-low income brackets
    • Subsidies for various kinds of “essential” or “distressed” industries, such as agriculture and automobile manufacturing
    • Import quotas, tariffs, and other restrictions on trade, for the benefit of particular industries and/or labor unions
    • Pro-union laws (in many States), for the benefit of unions and unionized workers
    • Non-smoking ordinances, for the benefit of bar and restaurant employees and non-smoking patrons.

What do each of these examples have in common? Answer: Each comes with costs. There are direct costs (e.g., higher taxes for some persons, higher prices for imported goods), which the intended beneficiaries and their proponents hope to impose on non-beneficiaries. Just as importantly, there are indirect costs of various kinds (e.g., disincentives to work and save, disincentives to make investments that spur economic growth). (Exercise for the reader: Describe the indirect costs of each of the examples listed above.)

You may believe that a particular program is worth what it costs… The problem is millions of your fellow Americans believe the same thing about each of their favorite programs. Because there are thousands of government programs (federal, State, and local), each intended to help a particular class of citizens at the expense of others, the net result is that almost no one in this fair land enjoys a “free lunch.” Even the relatively few persons who might seem to have obtained a “free lunch” — homeless persons taking advantage of a government-provided shelter — often are victims of the “free lunch” syndrome….

The paradox that arises from the “free lunch” syndrome is much … like the paradox of panic, in that there is a crowd of interest groups rushing toward a goal — a “pot of gold” — and (figuratively) crushing each other in the attempt to snatch the pot of gold before another group is able to grasp it. The gold that any group happens to snatch is a kind of fool’s gold: It passes from one fool to another in a game of beggar-thy-neighbor, and as it passes much of it falls into the maw of bureaucracy.

The interest-group paradox has dominated American politics since the advent of “Progressivism” in the late 1800s. Today, most Americans are either “progressives” or victims of “progressivism”. All too often they are both.

The capitalist paradox meets the interest-group paradox:

An insightful post at Imlac’s Journal includes this quotation:

Schumpeter argued the economic systems that encourage entrepreneurship and development will eventually produce enough wealth to support large classes of individuals who have no involvement in the wealth-creation process. This generates apathy or even disgust for market institutions, which leads to the gradual takeover of business by bureaucracy, and eventually to full-blown socialism. [Matt McCaffrey, “Entrepreneurs and Investment: Past, Present, … Future?,” International Business Times, December 9, 2011]

This, of course, is the capitalist paradox, of which the author of Imlac’s Journal writes. He concludes with these observations:

[U]nder statist regimes, people’s choices are limited or predetermined. This may, in theory, obviate certain evils. But as McCaffrey points out, “the regime uncertainty” of onerous and ever changing regulations imposed on entrepreneurs is, ironically, much worse than the uncertainties of the normal market, to which individuals can respond more rapidly and flexibly when unhampered by unnecessary governmental intervention.

The capitalist paradox is made possible by the “comfort factor” invoked by Schumpeter. (See this, for example.) It is of a kind with the foolishness of extreme libertarians who decry defense spending and America’s “too high” rate of incarceration, when it is such things that keep them free to utter their foolishness.

The capitalist paradox also arises from the inability and unwillingness of politicians and voters to see beyond the superficial aspects of legislation and regulation. In Bastiat‘s words,

a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

The unseen effects — the theft of Americans’ liberty and prosperity — had been foreseen by some (e.g., Tocqueville and Hayek). But their wise words have been overwhelmed by ignorance and power-lust. The masses and their masters are willfully blind and deaf to the dire consequences of the capitalist paradox because of what I have called the interest-group paradox [see above].

The paradox that is Western civilization:

The main weakness of Western civilization is a propensity to tolerate ideas and actions that would undermine it. The paradox is that the main strength of Western civilization is a propensity to tolerate ideas and actions that would strengthen it. The survival and improvement of Western civilization requires carefully balancing the two propensities. It has long been evident in continental Europe and the British Isles that the balance has swung toward destructive toleration. The United States is rapidly catching up to Europe. At the present rate the intricate network of social relationships and norms that has made America great will be destroyed within a decade. Israel, if it remains staunchly defensive of its heritage, will be the only Western nation still worthy of the name.

I wrote that almost five years ago. America network of social relationships and norms is (sadly) on schedule for destruction — unless there is a sharp and lasting turnaround in the governance of the country.

A paradox for (old-fashioned) liberals:

[A definition of old-fashioned liberalism is] given here by one Zack Beauchamp:

[L]iberalism refers to a school of thought that takes freedom, consent, and autonomy as foundational moral values. Liberals agree that it is generally wrong to coerce people, to seize control of their bodies or force them to act against their will….

Beauchamp, in the next paragraph, highlights the paradox inherent in liberalism:

Given that people will always disagree about politics, liberalism’s core aim is to create a generally acceptable mechanism for settling political disputes without undue coercion — to give everyone a say in government through fair procedures, so that citizens consent to the state’s authority even when they disagree with its decisions.

Which is to say that liberalism does entail coercion [how much is “undue” depends on whose ox is being gored]. Thus the paradox. (What is now called “liberalism” in America is so rife with coercion [link added] that only a person who is ignorant of the meaning of liberalism can call it that with a straight face.)

Socialism, communism, and three paradoxes:

The only substantive difference between socialism and communism, in theory, is that communism somehow manages to do away with the state. This, of course, never happens, except in real communes, most of which were and are tiny, short-lived arrangements. (In what follows, I therefore put communism in “sneer quotes”.)

The common thread of socialism and “communism” is collective ownership of “equity”, that is, assets (including the means of production). But that kind of ownership eliminates an important incentive to invest in the development and acquisition of capital improvements that yield more and better output and therefore raise the general standard of living. The incentive, of course, is the opportunity to reap a substantial reward for taking a substantial risk. Absent that incentive, as has been amply demonstrated by the tragic history of socialist and “communist” regimes, the general standard of living is low and economic growth is practically (if not actually) stagnant.

So here’s the first paradox: Systems that, by magical thinking, are supposed to make people better off do just the opposite: They make people worse off than they would otherwise be.

All of this because of class envy. Misplaced class envy, at that. “Capitalism” (a smear word) is really the voluntary and relatively unfettered exchange of products and services, including labor. Its ascendancy in the West is just a happy accident of the movement toward the kind of liberalism exemplified in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. People were liberated from traditional economic roles and allowed to put their talents to more productive uses, which included investing their time and money in capital that yielded more and better products and services.

Most “capitalists” in America were and still are workers who make risky investments to start and build businesses. Those businesses employ other workers and offer things of value that consumers can take or leave, as they wish (unlike the typical socialist or “communist” system).

So here’s the second paradox: Socialism and “communism” actually suppress the very workers whom they are meant to benefit, in theory and rhetoric.

The third paradox is that socialist and “communist” regimes like to portray themselves as “democratic”, even though they are quite the opposite: ruled by party bosses who bestow favors on their protegees. Free markets are in fact truly democratic, in that their outcomes are determined directly by the participants in those markets.

The paradoxes and consequences of liberty and prosperity:

The soil in which the seeds of [America’s] decline were to be planted was broken in the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The seeds were planted and nourished by “leaders”, “intellectuals”, and “activists” from TR’s time to the present. The poisonous crop burst blossomed brightly in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, but it had not yet engulfed the land. It continued to spread slowly (and often unheeded) for several decades before racing across the land in recent years. Its poisonous vines are now strangling liberty and prosperity.

These are the paradoxes of liberty and prosperity: Without a moral foundation they lead to their own destruction.

If you value liberty, you do not countenance speech and actions that subvert it. If you value prosperity, you must be careful not to let it breed the kind of idleness (of mind and body) that gives rise to speech and actions that subvert liberty — and thus prosperity.

The Founders understood those things. They believed that the Constitution would preserve liberty and foster prosperity because they believed that Americans would remain religious and moral. They did not believe that Americans would undermine liberty by being soft on crime, by feeding masses (and elites) at the public trough (and at the expense of taxpayers), or by accommodating foreign aggression. They did not believe that Americans would countenance such things, nor that political leaders would suborn and join efforts to ostracize, suppress, and oppress those Americans who oppose such things.

The Founders, sadly, were wrong. The did not and could not foresee these events (and many more not mentioned):

    • A goodly fraction of Americans would spurn religion and become morally slack and complacent about the preservation of liberty.
    • Freedom of speech and assembly would be turned against liberty, to foster crime, lack of personal responsibility, and the accommodation of deadly enemies, within and without.
    • Firearms, always omnipresent in America for useful purposes, would become violent, murderous extensions of a growing tendency to toward psychological instability in a morally rootless populace.
    • Governments, political “elites”, and corporations would celebrate and reward (or fail to punish) persons based on the color of their skin (as long as it isn’t white or “yellow”)*, their pro-constitutional political views (which “exonerate” many whites), and their sex (preferably female or confused).
    • Abortion would become legal and support for abortion would be openly and boastfully proclaimed by political leaders and “elites”. Unborn human beings would be disposed of as inconveniences and treated like garbage.
    • Parents would lose control of the upbringing of their children, who might be cajoled into psychologically devastating treatments and surgeries by teachers and others under the rubric of “gender-affirming care”.
    • Women and girls would be forced to room with, shower with, and compete against males who “identify” as females (or “other”).
    • Intelligence and superior (non-athletic) skills would be denounced as unfair and “white supremacist” (with Asians counting as white).
    • Lawlessness and pathological deviancy would be rewarded (or not punished).
    • Leading politicians and “activists” would bay and howl for the confiscation of arms, under the rubric of “gun control”, when the underlying problem isn’t gun ownership by moral and mental depravity.
    • Political “leaders” would enable and allow a virtual invasion of the country, despite its negative consequences for the “little people” whom those “leaders” and other “elites” claim to champion.
    • The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo-science to force Americans into isolation, disrupt the economy, and burden the poorest Americans because of a virus that would have run its course naturally and less destructively than had it been combated scientifically.
    • The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo science to make Americans (especially poor Americans) poorer in an unnecessary and futile quest to “save the planet” from the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and other productive substances that the majority of the world’s populace will not refrain from using. (Regarding the state of science, see Maggie Kelly’s, “Professors Publish ‘Controversial’ Paper Defending Merit in Science”, The College Fix, May 2, 2023.)
    • Prosperity — a fruit of liberty — would foster the moral softness and the mental laxity that gives rise to addle-pated schemes such as those outlined above.
    • Vast numbers of Americans — having been indoctrinated in public schools, in left-dominated universities, and by the Democrat-allied media — would believe and subscribe to such schemes, which are made palatable by the application of double-speak labels to them (e.g., “defense of the homeland”, “combating misinformation”, “following the science”).
    • Government officials, including law-enforcement officers, would collude with and encourage the press and other purveyors of “information” to distort and suppress facts about much that is alluded to above, to discredit and hound a president (Trump) who opposed them, and to help elect and protect possibly the most corrupt president in America’s history (Biden) because it is through him that the left’s agenda is being implemented.
    • All of this (and more) would occur because almost-absolute power would accrue to the morally (and sometimes venally) corrupt politicians and their powerful enablers who advance and enforce such schemes.

….

In the best of possible worlds, there would be a voluntary return to something much closer to the America that the Founders envisioned. (Even a return to the post-New Deal 1940s and 1950s would do.) …

I don’t mean something like the turnaround in the House of Representatives following the elections of 1994 and 2010 (GOP gains of 12 and 15 percent). I mean something like the turnaround of 1930-1932 (total Democrat gains of 91 percent). In the wake of that turnaround, Democrats went on to control the House for the next 60 years (except for a post-World War II reaction of two years).

But the mass rejection of the GOP in 1930 and 1932 was a consequence of an economic upheaval, the Great Depression, that hit vast numbers of Americans and hit them suddenly and hard where it hurts: in the pocketbook. The policies that are now engulfing the land, onerous as they may be, are insidious by comparison — and are practically ignored or touted as “good things” by most media (including “entertainment” media).

Moreover, “woke” America is the laughing-stock of its enemies. And too weak [under the present regime] to stare them down. The growing unwillingness and inability of America’s “leaders” to deter and fight enemies really doesn’t matter to those enemies. In the end, the will to resist aggression and to accede to the wishes of aggressors depends on the will of the populace to stand together against aggression. That will, in turn, depends on broad (if not unanimous) allegiance to the survival and success of the nation.

There is no longer such an allegiance. The left hates what America long was and will not relent until that America is destroyed. The right hates what America is rapidly becoming at the hands of the left. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I used to believe that an event that threatened the lives and livelihoods of all Americans would re-unite them. I no longer believe that.

I now believe that a national divorce — a negotiated partition of the nation — is a dire necessity. (Its precursor, a concerted secession, is legal under the Constitution.) It would allow a large fraction of Americans, perhaps half of them, to break free of the economic and social oppressions that emanate from Washington. It would also allow those same Americans to defend themselves against invaders from the south and overseas enemies instead of wasting their treasure on the left’s destructive agenda.

Absent a national divorce, everyone will go down with a sinking ship. Across the land there will be declining material comfort, rising criminality, rampant social acrimony, the suppression of views that threaten the grip of the ruling class, the oppression of persons who express those views, and a fascistic arrangement between politicians and favored corporations — those that subscribe to the quasi-religion of “climate change” and the “wokeness” that propels schemes that put skin color, sex (or lack of it), and other personal characteristics above truth, above merit, and above the rule of law.

Which leads me to promote “Can America Be Saved?“, if you haven’t yet read it.

Can America Be Saved?

David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post, offers for our adulation a RAND study, “The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism” (a link in that page leads to a free, downloadable version of the study). Here is some of what Ignatius (“breathlessly”) says about it:

Though the report is mostly written in the dry language of sociology, this is explosive stuff [emphasis added]….

What has led to “the relative decline in U.S. standing,” as the report asks? The opening chapter explains America’s problem starkly: “Its competitive position is threatened both from within (in terms of slowing productivity growth, an aging population, a polarized political system, and an increasingly corrupted information environment) and outside (in terms of a rising direct challenge from China and declining deference to U.S. power from dozens of developing nations).”

This decline is “accelerating,” warns the study. “The essential problem is seen in starkly different terms by different segments of society and groups of political leaders.” There’s a right-wing narrative of decline and a left-wing one. Though they agree that something is broken in America, the two sides disagree, often in the extreme, on what to do about it.

Unless Americans can unite to identify and fix these problems, we risk falling into a downward spiral. “Recovery from significant long-term national decline is rare and difficult to detect in the historical record,” the authors note. Think of Rome, or Habsburg Spain, or the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, or the Soviet Union. “When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”

What causes national decline? The Rand authors cite triggers that are all too familiar in 2024. “Addiction to luxury and decadence,” “failure to keep pace with … technological demands,” “ossified” bureaucracy, “loss of civic virtue,” “military overstretch,” “self-interested and warring elites,” “unsustainable environmental practices.” Does that sound like any country you know?

The challenge is “anticipatory national renewal,” argue the authors — in other words, tackling the problems before they tackle us. Their survey of historical and sociological literature identifies essential tools for renewal, such as recognizing the problem; adopting a problem-solving attitude rather than an ideological one; having good governance structures; and, perhaps most elusive, maintaining “elite commitment to the common good.”

Unfortunately, on this “fix it” checklist, the Rand authors rate U.S. performance in 2024 as “weak,” “threatened” or, at best, “mixed.” If we look honestly in the national mirror, we’re all likely to share that assessment.

So what’s the way out? Rand provides two case studies in which urgent reforms broke through the corruption and disarray that might otherwise have proved catastrophic.

The first example is Britain in the mid-1800s [from which I will not quote]….

A second case study can be found in the United States itself, after the binge of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. That industrial boom transformed America, but it created poisonous inequalities, social and environmental damage, and gross corruption. Republican Theodore Roosevelt led a “Progressive” movement that reformed politics, business, labor rights, the environment and the political swamp of corruption.

“Progressives had a ‘yearning for rebirth’ and sought to inject ‘some visceral vitality into a modern culture that had seemed brittle and about to collapse,’” note the Rand authors, quoting historian Jackson Lears.

The message of this study is screamingly obvious. America is on a downward slope that could be fatal. What will save us is a broad commitment, starting with elites, to work for the common good and national revival. We have the tools, but we aren’t using them. If we can’t find new leaders and agree on solutions that work for everyone, we’re sunk.

The first thing that you should notice is Ignatius’s persistent use of “we” and the ludicrous metaphor of a “national mirror”. There is no “we” (let alone a “national mirror”). There are many “we’s” in America — about as many as there are American citizens.

There’s certainly nothing remotely resembling a consensus about any of the topics addressed by the RAND study. Even the RAND analysts who concocted the study admit as much. But that’s the sum and substance of my praise for their work.

As a guide to the fate of the nation, the study is uselessly superficial. The fate of a nation is like a system of equations with dozens if not hundreds of variables whose values and interrelations are unknown and mostly unknowable. The authors even admit to the omission of what is probably a key variable:

[T]he wider project identifies many ways in which flourishing markets and grassroots (rather than centrally directed) solutions are essential to national competitiveness and parallel ways in which ossifying centralized bureaucracy can choke off national dynamism [p. 42].

Aside from the obvious fact that there is and is unlikely to be a consensus about how to save America, no study of the kind produced by RAND could be useful. Case studies reflect the biases of those who conduct them.

The authors of the RAND study evidently believe that the Progressive movement was responsible for some kind of national resurgence. But the Progressive movement was largely about the aggrandizement of the central government and the proliferation of regulations, both of which have slowed slightly a few times but have never been seriously reversed. There is statistical evidence that the Progressive movement and its aftermath choked economic dynamism (see “The Bad News about Economic Growth“), though the full effect of efforts to combat “climate change” is yet to be felt.

There is ample (and mounting) evidence in the news of the past few decades that government intervention in social and educational matters (the leftist takeover of public education, same-sex marriage, gender fluidity, anti-religious, racist in the guise of “anti-racism”, etc.) is deeply divisive and therefore an obstacle to any kind of revitalization through consensus.

America’s economic decline and social divisions are paralleled by its military decline at the hands of “liberals” and pseudo-conservatives (e.g., the Bushes). I will say little more here; I treat the subject at length in “Grand Strategy for the United States“. I will only add that military decline is of a piece with economic and social decline because it rests on the naive view of the world that is enshrined in leftism and indulged by pseudo-conservativism. (I address that worldview in “Human Nature and Conflict“.)

In a non-naive view of the world, there are four major signs of America’s decline:

  • deep internal divisions about the role of government (the deepest they have been in my lifetime of more than 80 years)
  • deep internal divisions about permissible behavior and the lax treatment of (what real grown-ups consider) anti-social behavior — from drug use to murder and many heinous things in between
  • the aforementioned loss of economic vitality
  • decline of standing (including but not limited to military predominance) among other nations.

Because of the internal divisions — in particular, the division about the role of government — there is no way for government (or elites who are identified with a particular view about the role of government) to unify the nation. As long as the government is large, intrusive, and dedicated to certain behavioral norms (e.g., rewards and lack of punishment for its favored groups, the demolition of long-standing social norms), stultifying economic policies, and inadequate or even abject defense policies — and as long as government pursues those norms and policies (and imports potential voters to sustain it in power) — the nation will remain deeply divided.

There is a way out, though it is a long shot at this point. If more and more Americans come understand what is happening to the country and come to understand why it is happening, there could be a kind of revolution at the polls. The revolution would consist of such an overwhelming and lasting turn to the right that the vast left-wing conspiracy would not be able to overcome it through chicanery.

A second way out, which is a longer shot, is de facto secession leading to a voluntary partition of the country (a national divorce). The de facto secession would begin subtly, with more and more States refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of directives from Washington (e.g., Texas enforces the southern border, Florida and others ignore Biden’s Title IX travesty). If the Democrats in Washington prove unwilling to enforce their directives with armed force (as they haven’t thus far in Texas), further disobedience would be encouraged and it would spread to more and more States and a broader array of issues. Finally despairing of keeping the right in check — especially as geographic separation of right and left proceeds apace — the left might agree to (or even suggest) a negotiated partition of the country. (See VI.A and B in “Constitution: Myths and Realities“. See also “The Supreme Court Recognizes the Legality of Secession“.)

There is, of course, the possibility of a civil war. I address it — and its likely failure — in “How Will Civil War II Start?“. The predicate in that post is Donald Trump’s losing the election of 2024, though that now seems less likely to me than it did only a few months ago (see “Trump vs. Biden: 12“). But if Democrats retain control of the central government (a necessary prerequisite),

all hell will break loose. By “all hell”, I mean the full-scale construction of a fascistic state, which will be accomplished by executive fiat and friendly judges even if the GOP somehow controls at least one chamber of Congress….

All hell having broken loose, (solid) Red State governors and legislatures will engage in acts of resistance of the legalistic variety. These will fail because (a) their success would require judicial support, which will be lacking, and (b) the Democrat administration will simply ignore rulings that are unfavorable to its agenda. (The Biden administration’s flouting of immigration law, work-arounds to blunt the effect of Dobbs, and refusal to protect conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes are harbingers of the lawlessness to come.)

Red State hot-heads will then be unable to resist the urge to engage in futile acts of violence against the regime. The effect will be to justify harsh “anti-terroristic” measures that will result in unbridled censorship and jailing of conservatives for the mere “crime” of pointing out the regime’s lawlessness. But that would just be the start of full-scale suppression of dissent.

Red State governments that try to resist the regime will be found to be unconstitutional according to some kind of legalistic argumentation. The central government will then declare them null and void, invoking the Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government….” (Article IV, Section 4). Armed resistance, where it is attempted, will be squashed by superior force and rewarded with draconian punishments.

So … the answer to the question posed by the title of this post is that Civil War II won’t start. It will be aborted by the pro-abortion party.

That scenario won’t be far-fetched if Biden wins re-election — especially if his win is blatantly fraudulent.

There is, finally, the remote possibility of a military coup against a left-wing regime. Here is my assessment of that (from “A National Divorce“):

Military personnel are disciplined and have access to the tools of power, and many of them are trained in clandestine operations. Therefore, a cadre of properly motivated careerists might possess the wherewithal necessary to seize power.

But … a plot to undertake a coup is easily betrayed. Among other things, significant numbers of high-ranking officers are shills for “wokeism”. A betrayed coup for liberty could easily become a coup for tyranny.

America can be saved and restored, at least in part, to something like the America that I discuss in “What Happened to America?” and “1963: The Year Zero“. But it will happen only if enough voters wake up to what is happening and stage a lasting electoral revolution. And if they do, “we” on the right might enjoy the blessings of a national divorce.

I remain pessimistic but not without hope.

Human Nature and Conflict

The typology of personality is a fascinating but superficial way of looking at human nature and the sources of conflict among human beings. I will begin there before probing more deeply. If you are eager to get to the bottom line of this post, scroll down to “Conflict”.

SOME ASPECTS OF PERSONALITY

Generaloberst Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord (1878-1943) was commendable for at least two reasons. He was outspokenly against the Nazi regime, and he conceived this classification scheme for officers:

I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

Here is my paraphrase of that scheme:

  • Smart and hard-working (good middle manager)
  • Stupid and lazy (lots of these around, hire for simple, routine tasks and watch closely)
  • Smart and lazy (promote to senior management — delegates routine work and keeps his eye on the main prize)
  • Stupid and hard-working (dangerous to have around, screws up things, should be taken out and shot). (This describes the boss whose “leadership” skills prompted me to retire early.)

Personality analysis and classification has since become an industry. It provides pseudo-scientific insights for the misuse of corporate executives and HR departments. And it offers endless hours of enjoyment (and self-doubt and argument) for casual users.

For my own part, I have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) several times since the late 1980s. It is in ill repute, but I have always found it to be reliable, especially in my own case. I am an INTJ, which is I(ntroverted), (i)N(tuitive), T(hinking), J(udging):

For INTJs the dominant force in their lives is their attention to the inner world of possibilities, symbols, abstractions, images, and thoughts. Insight in conjunction with logical analysis is the essence of their approach to the world; they think systemically. Ideas are the substance of life for INTJs and they have a driving need to understand, to know, and to demonstrate competence in their areas of interest. INTJs inherently trust their insights, and with their task-orientation will work intensely to make their visions into realities. (Source: “The Sixteen Types at a Glance“.)

I first took the “Big 5” personality test in 2009, with this result (details here):

Moral profile-personality inventory results

My scores are in green; the average scores of all other test-takers are in purple. The five traits are defined as follows:

1. Openness to experience: High scorers are described as “Open to new experiences. You have broad interests and are very imaginative.” Low scorers are described as “Down-to-earth, practical, traditional, and pretty much set in your ways.” This is the sub-scale that shows the strongest relationship to politics: liberals generally score high on this trait; they like change and variety, sometimes just for the sake of change and variety. Conservatives generally score lower on this trait. (Just think about the kinds of foods likely to be served at very liberal or very conservative social events.)

2. Conscientiousness: High scorers are described as “conscientious and well organized. They have high standards and always strive to achieve their goals. They sometimes seem uptight. Low scorers are easy going, not very well organized and sometimes rather careless. They prefer not to make plans if they can help it.”

3. Extraversion: High scorers are described as “Extraverted, outgoing, active, and high-spirited. You prefer to be around people most of the time.” Low scorers are described as “Introverted, reserved, and serious. You prefer to be alone or with a few close friends.” Extraverts are, on average, happier than introverts.

4. Agreeableness: High scorers are described as “Compassionate, good-natured, and eager to cooperate and avoid conflict.” Low scorers are described as “Hardheaded, skeptical, proud, and competitive. You tend to express your anger directly.”

5. Neuroticism: High scorers are described as “Sensitive, emotional, and prone to experience feelings that are upsetting.” Low scorers are described as “Secure, hardy, and generally relaxed even under stressful conditions.”

Dozens more such tests (many of which I have taken) are available. Some of them can be found at yourmorals.org (free signup).

Personality differences occasion conflict, of course. For example, decisive persons are often frustrated by and impatient with indecisive ones (and vice versa), and extroverts usually don’t understand introverts and the advantages of introversion (e.g., introspection, thinking more deeply about problems).

HUMAN NATURE WRIT LARGER

But personality tests only scratch the surface of human nature and differences among human beings. Consider the following 35 traits:

You can add to that list, I’m sure. But let’s consider the implications of the 35-trait scale for differentiating among human beings.

If each trait were quantified on a scale from 1 to 10 (though the actual range for most traits is infinite) the number of possible combinations would approach 3 quadrillion. That’s more than 300 times the number of human beings now living on Earth. To say that every human being is unique is a vast understatement.

And yet — despite the unquantifiable complexity of human beings — there is a tendency to love, like, admire, dislike, or detest a person because he or she possesses a particular trait or two — or because one is anxious to be “in” with a person or group who loves, likes, etc., because of a trait or two. Even more ephemerally, love, like, etc., be triggered when a person simply says something that suggests a particular opinion or attitude.

These tendencies seem to have been around for a long time — for as long as there have been human beings, and even longer. Fear and ferocity are easily triggered in many species of animals. This suggests that making snap judgements about other persons is an inbred survival mechanism that evolution and socialization couldn’t eradicate and may have reinforced. (Evolution has somehow become thought of as a kind of progress, but it is nothing more than unplanned change caused by external stimuli and random mutations. The belief that evolution represents progress is akin to the anthropic principle.)

Some of the prominent triggers nowadays (e.g., certain political opinions or positions) may be new. But their newness only suggests that the tendency to form snap judgements has found new outlets in keeping with cultural change. In addition to reacting fiercely to perceived threats to life and limb, humans acquired the trait of reacting vociferously (and sometimes fiercely) to perceived threats to their self-image, of which beliefs constitute an essential part.

That isn’t new, either. Nor is the perception new that the actualization of certain beliefs (or dogmas) about such matters as race, religion, government, economics, justice, sex, and morality would result in misery because they would lead to oppression, aggression, economic disaster, social division, or any combination of those things. The correctness of that perception carries the weight of historical evidence, which matters to those who are swayed by reality and not by fairytales.

Today’s divisions about race, religion, government, economics, justice, sex, and morality are just replays of eons-old conflicts along the same lines. They are replays because human nature is immutable. The only thing that changes are the manifestations of human nature in action.

Those who do not grasp human nature in its fullness — the bad with the good — are doomed to be surprised by the consequences of the actualization of their beliefs. Or they would be surprised if the human capacity for self-delusion didn’t blind them to those consequences.

Leftists and “intellectuals” (nearly identical categories) are especially prone to misjudging the consequences of their beliefs because they have spun themselves delusional fairytales about the rightness of their beliefs. I don’t need to (and won’t) relate the fairytales about race, religion, government, economics, justice, sex, and morality. All of those (and more) are amply addressed in this blog (go here and explore) and in the many other reality-based blogs and journals that abound on the internet.

CONFLICT

Here, I will focus on a fairytale about conflict itself. It is the subject of another long post of mine, from eleven years ago, “The Fallacy of Human Progress“. I won’t reproduce it or quote it at length. I can only urge you to read it.

I will conclude this post with a few of the main points from that one. It was inspired by Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011). I can only say the events of the past thirteen years — and especially of the past few years in Ukraine, Israel, and America (to name only a few places) — are proof that Pinker was dead wrong.

The best refutation of Pinker’s thesis that I have read is by John Gray, an English philosopher, in his book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. Gray’s book appeared only eighteen months after Pinker’s and doesn’t mention Pinker or his book. The refutation is therefore only implicit, but just as powerful as if it were aimed directly at Pinker’s book.

Gray’s argument is faithfully recounted in a review of his book by Robert W. Merry at The National Interest:

The noted British historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) . . . wrote, “This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions . . . laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.”

We must pause here over this doctrine of progress. It may be the most powerful idea ever conceived in Western thought…. It is the thesis that mankind has advanced slowly but inexorably over the centuries from a state of cultural backwardness, blindness and folly to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and civilization—and that this human progression will continue indefinitely into the future . . . . The U.S. historian Charles A. Beard once wrote that the emergence of the progress idea constituted “a discovery as important as the human mind has ever made, with implications for mankind that almost transcend imagination.” And Bury, who wrote a book on the subject, called it “the great transforming conception, which enables history to define her scope.”

Gray rejects it utterly. In doing so, he rejects all of modern liberal humanism. “The evidence of science and history,” he writes, “is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion.” In an earlier work, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, he was more blunt: “Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.”

. . . Gray has produced more than twenty books demonstrating an expansive intellectual range, a penchant for controversy, acuity of analysis and a certain political clairvoyance.

He rejected, for example, Francis Fukuyama’s heralded “End of History” thesis—that Western liberal democracy represents the final form of human governance—when it appeared in this magazine in 1989. History, it turned out, lingered long enough to prove Gray right and Fukuyama wrong….

Though for decades his reputation was confined largely to intellectual circles, Gray’s public profile rose significantly with the 2002 publication of Straw Dogs, which sold impressively and brought him much wider acclaim than he had known before. The book was a concerted and extensive assault on the idea of progress and its philosophical offspring, secular humanism. The Silence of Animals is in many ways a sequel, plowing much the same philosophical ground but expanding the cultivation into contiguous territory mostly related to how mankind—and individual humans—might successfully grapple with the loss of both metaphysical religion of yesteryear and today’s secular humanism. The fundamentals of Gray’s critique of progress are firmly established in both books and can be enumerated in summary.

First, the idea of progress is merely a secular religion, and not a particularly meaningful one at that. “Today,” writes Gray in Straw Dogs, “liberal humanism has the pervasive power that was once possessed by revealed religion. Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.”

Second, the underlying problem with this humanist impulse is that it is based upon an entirely false view of human nature—which, contrary to the humanist insistence that it is malleable, is immutable and impervious to environmental forces. Indeed, it is the only constant in politics and history. Of course, progress in scientific inquiry and in resulting human comfort is a fact of life, worth recognition and applause. But it does not change the nature of man, any more than it changes the nature of dogs or birds. “Technical progress,” writes Gray, again in Straw Dogs, “leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.”

That’s because, third, the underlying nature of humans is bred into the species, just as the traits of all other animals are. The most basic trait is the instinct for survival, which is placed on hold when humans are able to live under a veneer of civilization. But it is never far from the surface. In The Silence of Animals, Gray discusses the writings of Curzio Malaparte, a man of letters and action who found himself in Naples in 1944, shortly after the liberation. There he witnessed a struggle for life that was gruesome and searing. “It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life,” wrote Malaparte. “Only for life. Only to save one’s skin.” Gray elaborates:

Observing the struggle for life in the city, Malaparte watched as civilization gave way. The people the inhabitants had imagined themselves to be—shaped, however imperfectly, by ideas of right and wrong—disappeared. What were left were hungry animals, ready to do anything to go on living; but not animals of the kind that innocently kill and die in forests and jungles. Lacking a self-image of the sort humans cherish, other animals are content to be what they are. For human beings the struggle for survival is a struggle against themselves.

When civilization is stripped away, the raw animal emerges. “Darwin showed that humans are like other animals,” writes Gray in Straw Dogs, expressing in this instance only a partial truth. Humans are different in a crucial respect, captured by Gray himself when he notes that Homo sapiens inevitably struggle with themselves when forced to fight for survival. No other species does that, just as no other species has such a range of spirit, from nobility to degradation, or such a need to ponder the moral implications as it fluctuates from one to the other. But, whatever human nature is—with all of its capacity for folly, capriciousness and evil as well as virtue, magnanimity and high-mindedness—it is embedded in the species through evolution and not subject to manipulation by man-made institutions.

Fourth, the power of the progress idea stems in part from the fact that it derives from a fundamental Christian doctrine—the idea of providence, of redemption . . . .

“By creating the expectation of a radical alteration in human affairs,” writes Gray, “Christianity . . . founded the modern world.” But the modern world retained a powerful philosophical outlook from the classical world—the Socratic faith in reason, the idea that truth will make us free; or, as Gray puts it, the “myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world.” Thus did a fundamental change emerge in what was hoped of the future. And, as the power of Christian faith ebbed, along with its idea of providence, the idea of progress, tied to the Socratic myth, emerged to fill the gap. “Many transmutations were needed before the Christian story could renew itself as the myth of progress,” Gray explains. “But from being a succession of cycles like the seasons, history came to be seen as a story of redemption and salvation, and in modern times salvation became identified with the increase of knowledge and power.”

Thus, it isn’t surprising that today’s Western man should cling so tenaciously to his faith in progress as a secular version of redemption. As Gray writes, “Among contemporary atheists, disbelief in progress is a type of blasphemy. Pointing to the flaws of the human animal has become an act of sacrilege.” In one of his more brutal passages, he adds:

Humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith. They see the realization of human potential as the goal of history, when rational inquiry shows history to have no goal. They exalt nature, while insisting that humankind—an accident of nature—can overcome the natural limits that shape the lives of other animals. Plainly absurd, this nonsense gives meaning to the lives of people who believe they have left all myths behind.

In the Silence of Animals, Gray explores all this through the works of various writers and thinkers. In the process, he employs history and literature to puncture the conceits of those who cling to the progress idea and the humanist view of human nature. Those conceits, it turns out, are easily punctured when subjected to Gray’s withering scrutiny . . . .

And yet the myth of progress is so powerful in part because it gives meaning to modern Westerners struggling, in an irreligious era, to place themselves in a philosophical framework larger than just themselves . . . .

Much of the human folly catalogued by Gray in The Silence of Animals makes a mockery of the earnest idealism of those who later shaped and molded and proselytized humanist thinking into today’s predominant Western civic philosophy.

There was an era of realism, but it was short-lived:

But other Western philosophers, particularly in the realm of Anglo-Saxon thought, viewed the idea of progress in much more limited terms. They rejected the idea that institutions could reshape mankind and usher in a golden era of peace and happiness. As Bury writes, “The general tendency of British thought was to see salvation in the stability of existing institutions, and to regard change with suspicion.” With John Locke, these thinkers restricted the proper role of government to the need to preserve order, protect life and property, and maintain conditions in which men might pursue their own legitimate aims. No zeal here to refashion human nature or remake society.

A leading light in this category of thinking was Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the British statesman and philosopher who, writing in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, characterized the bloody events of the Terror as “the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace.” He saw them, in other words, as reflecting an abstractionist outlook that lacked any true understanding of human nature. The same skepticism toward the French model was shared by many of the Founding Fathers, who believed with Burke that human nature isn’t malleable but rather potentially harmful to society. Hence, it needed to be checked. The central distinction between the American and French revolutions, in the view of conservative writer Russell Kirk, was that the Americans generally held a “biblical view of man and his bent toward sin,” whereas the French opted for “an optimistic doctrine of human goodness.” Thus, the American governing model emerged as a secular covenant “designed to restrain the human tendencies toward violence and fraud . . . [and] place checks upon will and appetite.”

Most of the American Founders rejected the French philosophes in favor of the thought and history of the Roman Republic, where there was no idea of progress akin to the current Western version. “Two thousand years later,” writes Kirk, “the reputation of the Roman constitution remained so high that the framers of the American constitution would emulate the Roman model as best they could.” They divided government powers among men and institutions and created various checks and balances. Even the American presidency was modeled generally on the Roman consular imperium, and the American Senate bears similarities to the Roman version. Thus did the American Founders deviate from the French abstractionists and craft governmental structures to fit humankind as it actually is—capable of great and noble acts, but also of slipping into vice and treachery when unchecked. That ultimately was the genius of the American system.

But, as the American success story unfolded, a new collection of Western intellectuals, theorists and utopians—including many Americans—continued to toy with the idea of progress. And an interesting development occurred. After centuries of intellectual effort aimed at developing the idea of progress as an ongoing chain of improvement with no perceived end into the future, this new breed of “Progress as Power” thinkers began to declare their own visions as the final end point of this long progression.

Gray calls these intellectuals “ichthyophils,” which he defines as “devoted to their species as they think it ought to be, not as it actually is or as it truly wants to be.” He elaborates: “Ichthyophils come in many varieties—the Jacobin, Bolshevik and Maoist, terrorizing humankind in order to remake it on a new model; the neo-conservative, waging perpetual war as a means to universal democracy; liberal crusaders for human rights, who are convinced that all the world longs to become as they imagine themselves to be.” He includes also “the Romantics, who believe human individuality is everywhere repressed.”

Throughout American politics, as indeed throughout Western politics, a large proportion of major controversies ultimately are battles between the ichthyophils and the Burkeans, between the sensibility of the French Revolution and the sensibility of American Revolution, between adherents of the idea of progress and those skeptical of that potent concept. John Gray has provided a major service in probing with such clarity and acuity the impulses, thinking and aims of those on the ichthyophil side of that great divide. As he sums up, “Allowing the majority of humankind to imagine they are flying fish even as they pass their lives under the waves, liberal civilization rests on a dream.”

Amen.

These somewhat related posts may be of interest to you: “Evolution, Human Nature, and ‘Natural Rights’“, “More Thoughts about Evolutionary Teleology“, and “Scientism, Evolution, and the Meaning of Life“.

Trump vs. Biden: 12 (Further Adjustments and Updated Results)

UPDATED 04/30/24

The latest results for the so-called battleground States are positive for Trump. I’ll get to those after I review the national polls. I’ll then remind you how Trump can win the election even if he “loses” the meaningless nationwide tally of popular votes.

NATIONAL POLLS

I introduced a new metric in Trump vs. Biden 11: the change in each pollster’s results from poll to poll. For example, Trump was tied with Biden in the Quinnipiac poll that was conducted on April 18-22, and was down by 3 points in the Quinnipiac poll of March 21-25. That counts as +3 on the average date of the later poll: April 20. The full tally for all polls reported at RealClearPolitics since August 2023 looks like this:

Keep your eye on the red line. It spent a lot of time in negative territory from the middle of March to late April. But it’s now back in positive territory.

Now, for the overall polls. I am dropping the “poll of polls”, which aggregates all national polls reported by RCP, regardless of bias and frequency. It is too easy for polls often-published polls with a strong bias (usually pro-Democrat) to make things look worse for Trump than they actually are. (Demoralization of Trump voters is a main objective of such polls.) From here on out, I’m sticking with two, more selective, bias-adjusted measures of the nationwide balance between Trump and Biden.

First is a collection of all polls report by RCP, with two adjustments. I use only the latest results from each pollster, to avoid overrepresentation. I adjust the results by the average of the anti-GOP bias reported by RCP for 14 nationwide polls. I add that value (3.3 percentage points) to Trump’s 5-poll average. Here are numbers, which include the results of all nationwide polls reported by RCP as of today:

 

Trump slipped somewhat from the middle of March to early April. The trend since then is positive.

The other collection of nationwide polls that I am keeping tabs on is a smaller set, in which each poll is adjusted for the amount of bias shown by the same pollster in 2020:

In this case, Trump’s rebound is clear and convincing.

“BATTLEGROUND” POLLS

The other bit of good news for Trump is that he is doing better in the “battleground” States than he was when I last wrote about them (here). All of the polls underlying my previous report were conducted in March. There is now a new round of polls, conducted in April. In general, it looks better for Trump:

THE BOTTOM LINE

Can Trump win the election without “winning” the meaningless nationwide tally of popular votes? Of course he can, thanks to the Electoral College. He did it 2016, when he “lost” to Hillary Clinton by 2.1 percentage points. He almost did it in 2020, when he “lost” to Joe Biden by 4.5 percentage points. And he would have won in 2020 except for “election interference” by the Democrats on a massive scale. You can read all about that here. I’ll save you the trouble of wading through more than 200 links. Here’s the punch line:

Through a combination of information control, partisan management of election processes, outright fraud, ballot harvesting, and failure to apply election laws on the books, the presidential election of 2020 was stolen by a cabal of super-rich elites, crooked politicians, crooked lawyers, and judges who either didn’t want to hear the truth or were blinded to it by partisan considerations. For a systematic treatment of much of the chicanery mentioned in the preceding sentence, see Mollie Ziegler Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Regarding outright fraud, see “Last Thoughts on Voter Fraud” (The Adventures of Shylock Holmes, December 11, 2020) and “The Most Secure Election in American History?” (Gatestone Institute website) for thorough wrap-ups.

Let’s hope that an army of better-armed poll-watchers and lawyers working for the GOP can keep it from happening again.

In any event, it’s my view that if the average of the final ten (unadjusted) polls gives Trump a lead of 1 or more points, he will win the election.

Stay tuned.

Trump vs. Biden: 11 (A New Metric)

In “Trump vs. Biden: 10” I highlighted the tightening of the race (according to nationwide polls). Changes in the 15 days since that post have been slightly in Trump’s favor. Below are results, which I have parsed in three ways:

  • all polls, unadjusted for bias (with polynomial fits for smoothing)
  • the latest version of each pollster’s result, unadjusted for bias
  • the latest version of each pollster’s result, adjusted for bias (using each pollster’s bias in 2020)

Here’s a fourth way to look at the results:

The values represent the change in Trump’s lead (or deficit) since the preceding poll by the same pollster. The typical margin of error for a poll (statistical estimate of the accuracy of the poll) is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Most of the movements are within that range. Therefore, what all of the preceding graphs point to is a race that is now essentially tied.

Well, it’s tied if the polls aren’t picking up “hidden” Trump voters — Trump voters who aren’t telling pollsters their true intentions. If there are enough such voters to swing the election to Trump, it won’t become evident until the votes are counted.

Until then, I can only tell you what the polls are saying.

Compromise Leads to Tyranny

Seventy-four years ago yesterday, Ludwig von Mises addressed the University Club of New York. He ended his speech with this:

Even in this country which owes to a century of “rugged individualism” the highest standard of living ever attained by any nation, public opinion condemns laissez-faire. In the last fifty years [and in the seventy-four years since], thousands of books have been published to indict capitalism and to advocate radical interventionism, the welfare state, and socialism. The few books which tried to explain adequately the working of the free-market economy were hardly noticed by the public. Their authors remained obscure, while such authors as Veblen, Commons, John Dewey, and Laski were exuberantly praised. It is a well-known fact [still true] that the legitimate stage as well as the Hollywood industry are no less radically critical of free enterprise than are many novels. There are in this country many periodicals which in every issue furiously attack economic freedom. There is hardly any magazine of opinion that would plead for the system that supplied the immense majority of the people with good food and shelter, with cars, refrigerators, radio sets, and other things which the subjects of other countries call luxuries.

The impact of this state of affairs is that practically very little is done to preserve the system of private enterprise. There are only middle-of-the-roaders who think they have been successful when they have delayed for some time an especially ruinous measure. They are always in retreat. They put up today with measures which only ten or twenty years ago they would have considered as undiscussable. They will [and did] in a few years [and several decades] acquiesce in other measures which they today consider as simply out of the question. What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies.

The title of Mises’s speech is “Middle-of-the-Road Policies Lead to Socialism”. But in fact (as Mises knew well) compromise (a better descriptor than middle-of-the-road) leads to tyranny. His student and later colleague, Friedrich A. (von) Hayek, argued at length against inevitability of tyranny through economic micro-management in “Freedom and the Economic System” (1938) and The Road to Serfdom (1944). Hayek put it this way in part 16 of Liberalism (1973):

There is, however, yet another reason why freedom of action, especially in the economic field that is so often represented as being of minor importance, is in fact as important as the freedom of the mind. If it is the mind which chooses the ends of human action, their realization depends on the availability of the required means, and any economic control which gives power over the means also gives power over the ends. There can be no freedom of the press if the instruments of printing are under the control of government, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly, etc. This is the reason why governmental direction of all economic activity, often undertaken in the vain hope of providing more ample means for all purposes, has invariably brought severe restrictions of the ends which the individuals can pursue. It is probably the most significant lesson of the political developments of the twentieth century that control of the material part of life has given government, in what we have learnt to call totalitarian systems, far‑reaching powers over the intellectual life.

Where’s the compromise in that? In the United States, it began in earnest two lifetimes ago, in 1887, with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC was abolished in 1996, but by then (and since) its originally limited regulatory powers were (and have since been) expanded upon through the aggrandizement of the original cabinet-level departments of the federal government, the creation of new cabinet-level departments, the creation of a multitude of “independent” regulatory agencies, and the emulation of federal regulatory power by the States and their subsidiary jurisdictions.

None of that would have happened had the three branches of the federal government not collaborated to expand the powers of the federal government beyond their clear constitutional limits and enabled the various departments and agencies to exercise unconstitutional legislative, executive, and judicial authority. Every bit of that represents compromise — unconstitutionally altering the Constitution or allowing it to be altered — for various personal reasons: feeling good by spending other people’s money, power-lust, getting along by going along, wanting to not seem “mean”, and getting elected or re-elected by assuaging the masses.

Consider Obamacare, for example. A key provision of Obamacare — the camel’s nose, head, and shoulders in the tent of universal health care (a.k.a., socialized medicine) — is the vast expansion of eligibility for Medicaid. In the 30-some States that have opted to participate in the expanded program, persons with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line are eligible, including adults without dependent children.

It would seem that only a Simon Legree or Ebenezer Scrooge would deny Medicaid coverage to those millions who have obtained it by way of Obamacare. Or it would until the following considerations come to mind:

  • The poverty line is a misleading metric. It’s a relative measure of income, not an absolute one. Most “poor” persons in today’s America are anything but poor in relation the truly poor of the world, and they live far above a subsistence level. The poverty line is nothing but an arbitrary standard that justifies income redistribution.
  • Other persons, with their own problems, are paying for the government’s generous “gift” to the semi-poor. But who is really in a position to say that the problems of Medicaid recipients are more deserving of subsidization than the problems facing those who defray the subsidy?
  • If expanded Medicaid coverage were withdrawn, those now covered would be no worse off than they had been before taxpayers were forced to subsidize them.
  • Being relatively poor used to be a good reason for a person to work his way up the ladder of success. Perhaps not far up the ladder, but in an upward direction. It meant learning skills — on the job, if necessary — and using those skills to move on to more-demanding and higher-paying jobs. Redistributive measures — Medicaid subsidies, food stamps, extended unemployment benefits, etc. — blunt the incentive to better oneself and, instead, reinforce dependency on government.

I will underscore the last point. The lack of something, if it’s truly important to a person, is an incentive for that person to find a way to afford the something. That’s what my parents’ generation did, even in the depths of the Great Depression, without going on the dole. There’s no reason why later generations can’t do it; it’s merely assumed that they can’t. But lots of people do it. I did it; my children did it; my grandchildren are doing it.

Republicans used to say such things openly and with conviction, before they became afraid of seeming “mean” or losing the perks and powers of office. Principled conservatives should still be thinking and saying such things. When conservatives compromise their principles because they don’t want to seem “mean” or lose perks and powers they are complicit in the country’s march down the road to serfdom — dependency on and obeisance to the central government.

Every advance in the direction of serfdom becomes harder and harder to reverse. The abolition of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is now unthinkable, even though those programs have caused hundreds of millions of Americans to become addicted to government handouts.

And how does government pay for those handouts? In part, it taxes many of the people who receive them. It also pays generous salaries and benefits of the army of drones who administer them. It’s a Ponzi scheme enforced at gunpoint. Despite the seeming benevolence of it all, it’s tyranny. The examples multiply, just as the size, scope, and cost of the federal government (at all levels) multiplies. And the price is liberty.

The best time — usually the only time — to kill a government program is before it starts. That’s why conservatives shouldn’t compromise.

The Long Drift Leftward

One (admittedly crude) way of measuring the nation’s leftward drift is to assign “left” and “right” labels to the presidential candidates in every quadrennial election (including candidates of third, fourth, and fifth parties), and then to determine the fraction of the total popular vote that went “left” or “right”. I have done this for the 26 elections spanning 1920-2020. I chose 1920 as the starting point because that year marks the birth of the modern (post-Teddy Roosevelt) Republican Party — the rhetoric (if not the practices) of which favors smaller government, reliance on free markets, toughness on crime, traditional (Judeo-Christian) morality, etc., etc., etc.

The resulting measure of leftness vs. rightness, to which I will come, is admittedly crude for at least these reasons:

Some candidates have in fact been less “right” or “left” than their predecessors and successors. That is to say, the core measures of “left” and “right” — the percentages of votes going to Democrats and Republicans” — aren’t fixed. GOP candidates since Barry Goldwater, for example, have supported Social Security and its offshoots (Medicare and Medicaid) and one of them (George W. Bush) enlarged it by pushing for prescription-drug coverage when he was president.

Labelling a third (or fourth or fifth) party as “left” or “right” is sometimes iffy. Take, for example, H. Ross Perot’s run for the presidency in 1992, which garnered him 19 percent of the popular vote. His appeal was broad and it is believed that he drew votes equally from those who would otherwise have gone for George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton. But a lot of otherwise-GOP votes went to Perot because GHWB defaulted on his “no new taxes” pledge. Aside from taxes, Perot’s platform was conservative (e.g., balancing the budget, reducing reliance on foreign trade) and his running-mate, James Stockdale, was a hard-core conservative.

With those caveats in mind, consider the leftward drift of the electorate since 1920. First is the election-to-election split:

Next is the election-to-election shift:

Finally, and most significantly, is the cumulative shift from 1920 to 2020:

The Great Depression and the Goldwater-scare election of 1964 were blips. The trend since 1972 is unmistakably leftward. What’s behind the shift, which (for reasons discussed above) is really more leftward that the numbers suggest? I put it down to three things:

Women got the vote and their tendency to vote gradually overtook and surpassed that of men.

The black vote emerged from Southern suppression in the 1960s, and the tendency of blacks to vote gradually increased relative to the tendency of whites.

The young-adult vote got a big boost with the passage of Amendment XXVI, which lowered the voting age from 21 in most jurisdictions to 18 in all jurisdictions.

What’s next? Illegal immigrants will be given the right to vote in more and more jurisdictions, and then they will be granted amnesty and full citizenship. The long-promised permanent Democratic majority will be upon us, and today’s morally bankrupt regime will morph into overt Stalinism.

See also “The Course of the Mainstream“, “What’s Going On? A Stealth Revolution“, “The Fickle Electorate“, “The American Electorate’s ‘Squishy Center’ vs. Liberty“, and “Another Measure of Political Polarization: The Winner’s Share of the Popular Vote in Presidential Elections“.

Israel vs. Iran: 2

The New York Times reports:

President Biden and his team, hoping to avoid further escalation leading to a wider war in the Middle East, are advising Israel that its successful defense against Iranian airstrikes constituted a major strategic victory that might not require another round of retaliation, U.S. officials said on Sunday.

The administration’s position is one of these two things:

  • Disinformation, which is meant lull Iran into the belief that the U.S. doesn’t want war with Iran and will not help Israel if it attacks Iran. (What would happen in the event of a counterattack by Iran?)
  • The real position of the administration, which is meant to deflect Iran from acting against the U.S. or its overseas interests if Israel attacks and Iran counterattacks. (Again, what would happen in the event of a counterattack by Iran?)

I believe the second to be the administration’s real position. It is consistent with its efforts to mollify Iran. It is consistent with the eternal belief of leftists that mortal enemies can be reasoned with and bought off. It is of a piece with the delusion that the elimination of capital punishment and general leniency in sentencing will result in less crime.

In neither case does the administration acknowledge the central fact that Iran (among other countries and non-state actors) wants the elimination of Israel in particular and of Jews in general.

Israel’s leaders today grasp that central fact. If they ever lost sight of it, the events of October 7, 2023, have emblazoned it in their souls. Given that, Israel will not relent in its efforts to eliminate the threat posed by its main enemy: Iran.

The only question in my mind at this point is what Israel will do to accomplish the demise or defeat of the Islamic regime in Iran. For that is what it will take to at least blunt if not eliminate the threat from Iran, and the support that Iran gives to other states and non-state actors who seek Israel’s demise.

Ignore what the Biden administration says about Israel vs. Iran. Keep your eyes on Israel.

Israel vs. Iran: 1

These are my first thoughts about the domestic politics of the conflict. Subject to change as events unfold.

A strong and unyielding defense of Israel, followed by an attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities will clinch the election for Biden, regardless of what happens to Hunter. It will be rally ’round the president (shades of BHO’s “heroics” re Hurricane Sandy in the days before election 2012). The House GOP won’t even muster the votes to send a bill of impeachment to the Senate. Trump will storm and rage to no avail.

If Biden wins big enough, the Senate won’t flip to the GOP and the Dems will win a comfortable margin in the House. More trillions will be wasted on the Quixotic war on “climate change”. The already deep divisions in the U.S. will deepen, but the Dems will be in charge and won’t care.

“Two Kinds of Leftism?” A Footnote

I ended “Two Kinds of Leftism?” with this:

The existing order in America has to be overthrown again and again to keep it from becoming what America has become and is becoming. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” got it right.

Americans have been insufficiently vigilant and far too ready to go along with schemes that aggrandize government power. They have ignored, to their own detriment, the inescapable fact that there is only one kind of leftism: the leftism of government control. That is a thing entirely different from the night-watchman government which protects Americans from each other and from foreign enemies — though even that government must be carefully and constantly circumscribed.

Today, I opened Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. It ends on a similar note:

As far back as 1934, The New York Times [yes, The New York Times] trumpeted NEW DEAL PATERNALISM IMPERILS ALL INDIVIDUALISM. The article describes a speech by Massachusetts governor Joseph Ely at a conference of America’s governors. “There is no stopping short of the end of the road,” Ely said, “and at the end of the road we shall have a socialistic state.” Invoking Stalin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany—all newly minted dictators—Ely pointed out that where these despots ruled, “individualism had passed from the people to dictators making the people the ‘children of government.’”

Echoes of de Tocqueville. One century earlier, the French visionary described the infantilizing effect of a paternalistic despotism in America. Imagining the “immense, protective power” of a state with “absolute” power, and likening such power to “parental authority,” which keeps citizens in “perpetual childhood,” he wondered, “Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?” It would seem that the mortal blow against the “grown-up”—the free citizen—was struck, softly, once liberty was no longer paramount in this country, once ideology began to take precedence over facts, once we traded in the American ideal of “rugged individualism” for the material markers of “the American dream.” If once upon a time Americans subscribed to our Founders’ belief that our Creator endowed us with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there came a time when we expected a package of perks—car, house, Play Station—to sweeten the deal. Suddenly, those perks became darn near an entitlement, an attitude entirely befitting the subjects in Tocqueville’s absolute state. In fact, measured in material goods as it is, the contemporary “American dream” is a vision driven by the Marxist belief in the primacy of the economic….

No wonder Norman Thomas was tickled by the direction of the country in the Eisenhower years. By 1958, he was beside himself. “The United States is making greater strides toward socialism under Eisenhower than even under Roosevelt,” he enthused. By 1962, the man who had run for president on the Socialist ticket six times had concluded that “the difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted the ideas of socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly.”41 Just not by name. As Upton Sinclair put it in a 1951 letter to Thomas, “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.”

We take the Big Lie instead. Euphemism. Official vocabulary. Language of ideology. The “PC” pact with the devil. The Big Lie as big con. The narrative of authority. How to stand athwart false history and yell “Stop!”? The answer finally seems clear. If once it was vitally important to shore up America’s bastions, something else is called for now. What’s needed is a full-scale assault on those bastions of unreality, those safe houses of secrets, all in a painful but restorative effort to upend the narratives of authority, to break open the conspiracies of silence, which have endured through too many lifetimes. Put another way, it’s time to avenge the victims and the truth tellers, the voiceless and the voices of one. It’s time to avenge the American betrayal of Liberty herself.

I have elsewhere drawn heavily on West’s book. My post and her book are well worth your time.

Two Kinds of Leftism?

Are there two kinds of leftism? I was prompted to ask that question by a colloquy between Megyn Kelly and Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. (The betrayal is common knowledge and the fodder of many a web post; for example, “Democrats See Ordinary Americans as the Great Unwashed” and “You and America’s Unaccountable Class“.)

Leftism in the United States was for many decades a movement aimed mainly at the redistribution of income from the have-lots to the have-littles. That kind of leftism was central to New Deal legislation in the 1930s, especially the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, the latter of which guaranteed the right of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as striking.

Later legislation, most notably the Taft-Hartley Act, diluted the Wagner Act somewhat. But the Social Security Act has been augmented by increasingly generous old-age benefits, the addition of Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and the addition of prescription-drug coverage to Medicare. There is also funding of and subsidization of housing — at all levels of government — which has expanded to encompass homeless persons and, most recently, illegal immigrants.

Today’s leftism — which synchronizes with the Democrat Party — certainly contains elements of what is now called “redistributive justice”, but it is far more than that. It encompasses actions that leftists of old (or most of them) wouldn’t have contemplated:

Flood the country with illegal immigrants with the aim of converting them to voters who will ensure a permanent Democrat majority.

In the name of “critical race theory” (CRT) and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), raise up “persons of color”, sexual deviants, violent criminals, and (generally) those who are less intelligent, capable, or diligent by rewarding them for being what they are, and by doing it at the expense of persons who are white, East Asian, heterosexual, law-abiding intelligent, capable, and diligent. (The negative aspect of raising up favored groups isn’t openly admitted, of course, because to do so would expose its corruptness. Members of non-favored groups who support raising up are either ignorant of the consequences, tormented by misplaced guilt for being what they are, or wealthy and secure enough to avoid the consequences.)

Increase the power of government for the sake of enforcing policies that the purveyors believe to be for the general good, whether or not they are scientifically sound or economically beneficial.

Use government power — in collusion with corporate and media power — to decree that certain policies are beyond debate, and to harass, suppress, and even criminalize those who dare to “deny” (i.e., question) the official “truth”. (This is straight out of the Hitler-Stalin-Mao playbook.) To date, the subjects that government and its cronies have or are striving to enforce include (but are far from limited to):

    • massive redistribution of income, directly and in kind, with the consequence of significantly lower economic growth;
    • discouragement of the more intelligent, more capable, and more diligent members of the populace, with the same consequence;
    • promulgation and enforcement of policies that reduce the well-being of most Americans — most notably the anti-scientific doctrine of human-induced climate change, and the futile and vastly counterproductive response to Covid-19;
    • deliberate (and sometimes incidental) undermining of beneficial social norms, including but not limited to marriage, religion, sanctity of life, and dignity of work; and
    • anti-Americanism and pusillanimous behavior toward enemy regimes, beginning with the Korean War and continuing through today’s behavior toward China, Iran, and Iran’s proxies — coupled with heedless, needless, and costly provocation of Russia (the Eurasia of the saga) — and accompanied by the willful (relative and absolute) weakening of America’s military might.

If this all reads like something out of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Theory and Practice of Oligarchichal Collectivism — the fictional book that plays a central role in the novel — you can chalk it up to Orwell’s keen but fallible understanding of human nature.

I say fallible because, even though Orwell was a leftist of the old-fashioned kind, he seemed to believe that some kind of economic leveling could be managed without harm to liberty or prosperity. He, like other old-fashioned leftists, could not (or chose not to) see that economic leveling means greater and greater government control of greater and greater swaths of the economy.

Further — and this is the crucial part — liberty cannot survive economic interventions by government. Friedrich A. Hayek put it this way in part 16 of Liberalism :

There is, however, yet another reason why freedom of action, especially in the economic field that is so often represented as being of minor importance, is in fact as important as the freedom of the mind. If it is the mind which chooses the ends of human action, their realization depends on the availability of the required means, and any economic control which gives power over the means also gives power over the ends. There can be no freedom of the press if the instruments of printing are under the control of government, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly, etc. This is the reason why governmental direction of all economic activity, often undertaken in the vain hope of providing more ample means for all purposes, has invariably brought severe restrictions of the ends which the individuals can pursue. It is probably the most significant lesson of the political developments of the twentieth century that control of the material part of life has given government, in what we have learnt to call totalitarian systems, far‑reaching powers over the intellectual life. It is the multiplicity of different and independent agencies prepared to supply the means which enables us to choose the ends which we will pursue.

The accretion of power by government in order to attain economic ends necessarily involves the use of that power to ensure that the populace is aligned with those ends, and with the resulting restrictions on liberty. Power-lust breeds power and more power-lust. The only way to put a stop to it is to overthrow the existing order and strive to prevent its resurrection.

In Madison’s words:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. [The Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788]

But men are not angels — not even those who profess goodness. Look at history. Look around you. Look into your soul.

The existing order in America has to be overthrown again and again to keep it from becoming what America has become and is becoming. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” got it right.

Americans have been insufficiently vigilant and far too ready to go along with schemes that aggrandize government power. They have ignored, to their own detriment, the inescapable fact that there is only one kind of leftism: the leftism of government control. That is a thing entirely different from the night-watchman government which protects Americans from each other and from foreign enemies — though even that government must be carefully and constantly circumscribed.

See also “Election 2024: The Bottom Line” and “What Happened to America?“.

Management Consultants Deliver … What Their Clients Want

I am reminded of the scam that is management consulting by an article at Econ Journal Watch, “McKinsey’s Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited“. (McKinsey is McKinsey & Company, a prestigious consulting firm founded in 1926.) I have read the article, and it firmly support the claims made in its abstract:

In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives [emphasis added].

McKinsey’s studies about the supposed benefits of diversity were produced for corporate clients. Specifically, they would have been produced for senior executives of corporations, most likely at the direction of or with the close involvement of vice presidents for human resources (i.e., personnel). I would be willing to place a wager that McKinsey’s results were just what the clients wanted, corporate culture being what it had become by the time McKinsey was called in to ratify diversity.

In that respect, McKinsey is far from alone. I worked at a not-for-profit consulting firm in the Washington DC area for 30 years. We looked down on the for-profit firms of which McKinsey is one of dozens (if not hundreds). They were known crudely but with some justice as Beltway Bandits, and more accurately as Highway Helpers. Their job (unacknowledged but obvious to anyone who read their output) was to deliver findings that served their clients’ interests. Those interests, in most cases were the justification of systems and processes being considered for procurement by government agencies. When the clients were government agencies, the findings justified whatever systems and processes were favored by those agencies.

But, to be candid, the same kind of relationship often existed between non-for-profits (like the one I worked for) and their government clients. We knew what the clients wanted to hear, and we often found ways to deliver results that made them happy. The first major project to which I was assigned went that way, and I observed (and sometimes participated in) projects that were similarly biased. One time, when I delivered to an admiral a candid — and negative — appraisal of his pet project, I was declared persona non grata in his branch of the Navy’s DC establishment.

The main exception to this kind of behavior occurred in the field, where my former employer’s analysts worked with Navy and Marine Corps operators to evaluate the effectiveness of systems and tactics — sometimes in actual combat situations. There, where lives were at stake (or could be at stake), operators usually wanted the unvarnished facts. And that’s what they got from the analysts in the field. But those analysts comprised (and still comprise) a tiny fraction of the thousands of analysts who worked for Beltway Bandits/Highway Helpers and their not-for-profit brethren.

Consulting to U.S.-government agencies on a grand scale grew out of the perceived successes in World War II of civilian analysts who were embedded in military organizations. To the extent that the civilian analysts were actually helpful,* it was because they focused on specific operations, such as methods of searching for enemy submarines. In such cases, the government client can benefit from an outside look at the effectiveness of the operations, the identification of failure points, and suggestions for changes in weapons and tactics that are informed by first-hand observation of military operations.

Beyond that, however, outsiders are of little help, and may be a hindrance, as in the case cited in a Politico article that I address here. (Which is far from unique.) Outsiders can’t really grasp the dynamics and unwritten rules of organizational cultures that embed decades of learning and adaptation.

The consulting game is now (and has been for decades) an invasive species. It is a perverse outgrowth of operations research as it was developed in World War II. Too much of a “good thing” is a bad thing — as I saw for myself many years ago.
__________
* The success of the U.S. Navy’s antisubmarine warfare (ASW) operations had been for decades ascribed to the pioneering civilian organization known as the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG), the predecessor of the organization for which I worked. However, with the publication of The Ultra Secret in 1974 (and subsequent revelations), it became known that codebreaking may have contributed greatly to the success of various operations against enemy forces, including ASW.

See also “Modeling Is Not Science“, “Analytical and Scientific Arrogance“, and “Management Science” in “The Balderdash Chronicles“.

Election 2024: The Bottom Line

As promised.

Joel Kotkin’s “The Coming Revolt against Woke Capitalism” gets at much of what’s at stake in of the coming election:

In virtually every field, the midwives of [the West’s] demise are not working-class radicals or far-right agitators, but, as the late Fred Siegel called it, the ‘new aristocratic class’, made up of the well-credentialed and the technologically and scientifically adept.

Virtually every ideology that’s undermining the West has its patrons in these ruling cognitive elites. This includes everything from the purveyors of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter to transgender activists and, perhaps most egregiously, campaigners for the climate jihad. In each case, these elite activists reject the market traditions of liberal capitalism and instead promote a form of social control, often with themselves in charge. The fact that these ideologies are destructive, and could ultimately undermine the status of these very elites, seems to matter little to them….

The current cadre of elites seem uniquely hostile to meritocracy and individual rights – values that once stood at the heart of liberal, capitalist societies. Rather than promote upward mobility for the plebs, they want to divide them into ‘identity’ groups based on race, sexuality and gender. Black Lives Matter, the enforcers of critical race theory, for years enjoyed lavish support from top tech companies, including Microsoft, Cisco and TikTok. It also became a poster child for a host of nonprofits, like the Tides Foundation, which in turn gets much of its money from oligarchs and their descendants, including George Soros and the MacArthur, Hewlett, Ford, Packard and Rockefeller foundations.

Nowhere is the gap between the elites’ political activism and the interests of the public more evident today than when it comes to the overhyped climate crisis. To a remarkable extent, the current ruling oligarchy in tech and on Wall Street have embraced the ideology of Net Zero, even though this threatens to undermine Western industrial power and raise the cost of living for the masses. Elite opinion, in general, is far more engaged on climate issues than the general population. In one recent poll, those living with graduate degrees in big dense cities and making over $150,000 a year are far more likely to favour such things as rationing meat and gas than the vast majority of Americans….

The clear hypocrisy of the greens does not go unnoticed by the masses. Those same elites who demand climate austerity for the many are widely known to enjoy the use of private jets, build $500 million yachts and own numerous, often enormous mansions. The fact that the most recent climate confab, COP28, had a session on ‘responsible yachting’ tells people all they need to know about the hypocrisy of the super-rich.

The damage being done by the oligarchs’ green agenda is now fuelling a rebellion from the beleaguered European, British and American middle and working classes. Many are becoming increasingly sceptical of elite environmentalism, just as they have been consistently hostile to woke ideas on law enforcement, transgender issues and racial quotas.

Public hostility towards what Adrian Wooldridge has labelled ‘the progressive aristocracy’ is now all too clear. In the US, there are declining levels of confidence in large corporations, tech oligarchs, big banks as well as the media. Similar patterns can be seen in the EU and the UK. This disquiet has led to such things as the 2016 election of Trump, the Brexit vote and the rise of populist parties and farmers’ protests across Europe.

So far, the elites seem barely aware of this discontent. This may stem from the fact that the oligarchs and their minions live in a very different reality from most people. They are shielded from the consequences of the policies they promote, whether from the job losses brought about by eco-austerity, or the rising crime and disorder resulting from efforts to ‘defund the police’ and the refusal to penalise street crime. They live in closeted, gentrified urban neighbourhoods, elite leafy suburbs or country retreats.

The elites’ arrogance could turn out to be their greatest liability. Those outside the charmed circle may often seem ill-mannered, but they are not stupid. They know they are being assaulted by people with greater resources, who favour ever more controls on everyday behaviour, on small businesses and on speech….

Like French aristocrats before the revolution, the oligarchs talk largely among themselves. They seem unaware that they may be financing fashionable causes that may threaten ‘their own rights and even their existence’, as Alexis de Tocqueville said of the Ancien Régime….

Already among Democrats, the party with most oligarchic support, more of its registered supporters favour socialism over capitalism. At the same time, the echo of 1789 was evident in the so-called gilets-jaunes (yellow-vest) protests against higher fuel taxes in the winter of 2018-2019. Recent protests by farmers in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy all reflect concerns about the impact of elite policies on ordinary people’s livelihoods….

For all their faults, the elites of industrial-era Britain and America at least provided opportunities for the middle and especially the working class. They helped create powerful economies that, ultimately, and with some political cajoling, produced unprecedented mass affluence. In contrast, today’s oligarchs and their ‘expert class’ allies offer nothing more than subsidies and handouts – or what Karl Marx referred to as ‘the proletarian alms-bag’.

In the coming decade, we need a politics that rejects the assumption of superiority and right to rule from our oligarchic rulers. There is still time, despite the power of the elites, to champion democracy, liberal values and the dream of upward mobility. ‘A man may be led by fate’, wrote the great Soviet-era Russian novelist Vasily Grossman, ‘but he can refuse to follow’. The future course of history is never inevitable, if we retain the will to shape it.

Ironically, the coming presidential election is almost certain to pit a billionaire who detests the elites against a professional politician-kleptocrat who is in thrall to them.

Kotkin’s piece is excellent insofar as it lays bare the hypocrisy of the elites and the damage that they are doing and will do to the lives and livelihoods of hard-working citizens. Among those things, to which Kotkin gives fleeting mention are:

  • massive, almost unhampered immigration from the south, which flouts the law and burdens the working classes while providing cheap labor for the upper classes;
  • governance by the administrative state, which is becoming an arm of woke capitalism (especially when Democrats are in charge);
  • the effects of the administrative state and “woke capitalism” on three main engines of liberty and prosperity: open and candid discussion of ideas, discrimination on the basis of ability and performance (not skin color or political views);
  • and markets that reward those who meet the demands of consumers as against the demands of woke capitalists and the administrative state.

Also at stake is the defense of law-abiding Americans from mobs within and enemies without. Woke capitalists and their political cronies seem bent on loosing the mobs and collaborating with the enemies.

For much more about the choice ahead and about what will happen if Trump loses, see “What Happened to America?“, “James Burnham’s Misplaced Optimism“, and “The Suicide of the West Accelerates“.

See also (just for starters): “Economics: The Bad News about Growth“, “1963: The Year Zero“, “The Hardening of Ideological Affiliations in America“, “The Pardoxes and Consequences of Liberty and Prosperity“, “How the Constitution Was Lost“, “Leftism: The Nirvana Fallacy on Stilts“, “Why Trade Doesn’t Deter Aggression“, “The Black-White Achievement Gap and Its Parallel in the Middle East“, and “Grand Strategy for the United States“. For much more, go to “Index of Posts” and browse to your heart’s content.

Trump vs. Biden: 10 (The Race Is Tightening)

Contrary to cherry-picked results presented on some right-wing sites (and I don’t use “right-wing” as a smear phrase), Trump is sliding relative to Biden.

Let’s start with the small picture, Trump’s standing in the so-called battleground States: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Here’s are the trends in each of those States, going back to October 2023:







I used 3-poll averages because of the paucity of polls in some States. Only in Pennsylvania is Trump clearly improving his edge over Biden.

The results in most of the battleground States mirror the national results, which I have parsed in three ways:

  • all polls, unadjusted for bias (with polynomial fits for smoothing)
  • the latest version of each pollster’s result, unadjusted for bias
  • the latest version of each pollster’s result, adjusted for bias (using the pollsters’ bias in 2020)

The results, in that order, are below. Because of the greater number of nationwide polls, I have used 5-poll averages.

 

These aren’t pretty pictures if you don’t want Biden to win.

Finally, there are the betting odds. Trump had a 16 percentage-point lead over Biden in the immediate aftermath of the Hur report, which depicted Biden (accurately) as a befuddled old man with a poor memory. That edge has shrunk to 5 percentage points — the smallest it has been since mid-November.

All of this is bad news if you are (as I am) fearful of the outright repression that would follow Biden’s re-election. What do I mean by that? Stay tuned.