Category: Leftism – Statism – Democracy

“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:

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.

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.

“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?“.

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.

The Suicide of the West Accelerates

Francis P. Sempa opines (correctly):

Sixty years ago, James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West was published to much acclaim from conservatives and much criticism by liberals. It was Burnham’s last book (other than a collection of his National Review columns titled The War We Are In) and, perhaps, his most pessimistic and prophetic work. Western civilization led by the United States, he wrote, was dying, not because of external challenges but, rather, because of internal decay. The West, in other words, was in the process of committing civilizational suicide. And what caused liberals to ridicule and deride the book was Burnham’s conclusion that liberalism was the “ideology of Western suicide.”…

Writing in 1964, Burnham could have been describing the American progressives of 2024. “Modern liberal doctrine,” he wrote, “tends naturally toward internationalist conceptions and the ideal of a democratic world order.” “To the liberal,” Burnham continued, “it has become self-evident that ‘national sovereignty is an outworn concept’ that must be drastically modified if not altogether abandoned.” To the liberal, “[p]atriotism and nationalism … are non-rational and discriminatory. They invidiously divide, segregate, one group of men … from humanity, and do so not in accord with objective merits determined by deliberate reason but as the result of habits, customs, traditions and feelings inherited from the past.” “The duty of the fully enlightened liberal,” Burnham wrote, “is to nothing less than mankind.” Indeed, Burnham noted that for liberals, “patriotism plus Christian faith” must be replaced by “internationalism … that views world affairs in global terms” and recognizes that “there is a multiplicity of interests besides those of our own nation and culture.” Today’s progressives frown upon “America first” and see “white Christian nationalists” as the greatest threat to democracy.

Burnham also noted that American liberals have a “thoroughly instrumentalist interpretation of the Constitution,” believing that “the meaning of the Constitution should be understood as wholly dependent on the time and circumstance.” As if he were looking through a crystal ball, Burnham noted that liberals “are pro-[Supreme] Court when it is handing down liberal decisions, and anti-Court when it is on an anti-liberal swing.” Liberals today promote the dangerous idea of a “living Constitution,” and conservative justices who oppose that notion have suffered the slings and arrows of liberal critics: from Sen. Chuck Schumer’s public threats against conservative justices to the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Left’s unrelenting campaign against Justice Clarence Thomas.

Liberalism, Burnham wrote, applauds diversity in religion and cultures and ridicules as “backward” those Westerners who believe in the superiority of their religion and culture. Hillary Clinton called her fellow citizens who hold such sentiments “deplorables,” while Barack Obama warned against people who cling to their religion and guns. Such liberals applaud the professed idealism of an Alger Hiss and a J. Robert Oppenheimer despite Hiss’ treason and Oppenheimer’s dangerous communist associations. Indeed, Hollywood liberals just honored with several Oscar awards the movie Oppenheimer, which portrays the protagonist as a victim of a McCarthy-era witch hunt instead of the security risk that he was.

Today, liberalism — called progressivism — controls our culture, most of our media, our educational institutions, and, at least for now, the federal government. Burnham’s conclusion of Suicide of the West should make those who cherish the values of nationalism and the achievements of Western civilization shudder. “Liberalism,” he wrote, “permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” It teaches us that the collapse of that civilization is not a defeat but, instead, “the transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions and discriminations of the past.” Burnham showed us 60 years ago that we were headed in that direction if liberalism triumphs. Arnold Toynbee taught that civilizations don’t end abruptly; they go through phases on their way to dissolution. If the trends Burnham identified 60 years ago continue, we may be closer than you think to civilizational suicide.

My own take on Burnham’s book digs more deeply:

About 300 years ago there arose in the West the idea of innate equality and inalienable rights. At the same time, and not coincidentally, there arose the notion of economic betterment through free markets. The two concepts — political and economic liberty — are in fact inseparable. One cannot have economic liberty without political liberty; political liberty — the ownership of oneself — implies the ownership of the fruits of one’s own labor and the right to strive for prosperity. This latter striving, as Adam Smith pointed out, works not only for the betterment of the striver but also for the betterment of those who engage in trade with him. The forces of statism are on the march (and have been for a long time). The likely result is the loss of liberty and the vibrancy and prosperity that arises from it….

Liberty … is not an easy thing to attain or preserve because it depends on social comity: mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual forbearance. These are hard to inculcate and sustain in the relatively small groupings of civil society (family, church, club, etc.). They are almost impossible to attain or sustain in a large, diverse nation-state. Interests clash and factions clamor and claw for ascendancy over other factions. (It is called tribalism, and even anti-tribalists are tribal in their striving to impose their values on others).

The Constitution might have rescued us from societal and spiritual decay, but for what I have called the Framers’ fatal error:

The Framers’ held a misplaced faith in the Constitution’s checks and balances (see Madison’s Federalist No. 51 and Hamilton’s Federalist No. 81). The Constitution’s wonderful design — containment of a strictly limited central government through horizontal and vertical separation of powers — worked rather well until the Progressive Era. The design then cracked under the strain of greed and the will to power, as the central government began to impose national economic regulation at the behest of muckrakers and do-gooders. The design then broke during the New Deal, which opened the floodgates to violations of constitutional restraint (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, the vast expansion of economic regulation, and the destruction of civilizing social norms), as the Supreme Court has enabled the national government to impose its will in matters far beyond its constitutional remit.

In sum, the “poison pill” baked into the nation at the time of the Founding is human nature, against which no libertarian constitution is proof unless it is enforced resolutely by a benign power.

It may be too late to rescue liberty in America. I am especially pessimistic because of the unraveling of social comity since the 1960s, and by a related development: the frontal assault on freedom of speech, which is the final constitutional bulwark against oppression.

Almost overnight, it seems, the nation was catapulted from the land of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver to the land of the free- filthy-speech movement, Altamont, Woodstock, Hair, and the unspeakably loud, vulgar, and violent offerings that are now plastered all over the air waves, the internet, theater screens, and “entertainment” venues.

The 1960s and early 1970s were a tantrum-throwing time, and many of the tantrum-throwers moved into positions of power, influence, and wealth, having learned from the success of their main ventures: the end of the draft and the removal of Nixon from office. They schooled their psychological descendants well, and sometimes literally on college campuses. Their successors on the campuses of today — students, faculty, and administrators — carry on the tradition of reacting with violent hostility toward persons and ideas that they oppose, and supporting draconian punishments for infractions of their norms and edicts. (For myriad examples, see The College Fix.)

Adherents of the ascendant culture esteem protest for its own sake, and have stock explanations for all perceived wrongs (whether or not they are wrongs): racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, hate, white privilege, inequality (of any kind), Wall  Street, climate change, Zionism, and so on. All of these are to be combated by state action that deprives citizens of economic and social liberties.

In particular danger are the freedoms of speech and association. The purported beneficiaries of the campaign to destroy those freedoms are “oppressed minorities” (women, Latinos, blacks, Muslims, the gender-confused, etc.) and the easily offended. The true beneficiaries are leftists. Free speech is speech that is acceptable to the left. Otherwise, it’s “hate speech”, and must be stamped out. Freedom of association is bigotry, except when it is practiced by leftists in anti-male, anti-conservative, pro-ethnic, and pro-racial causes. This is McCarthyism on steroids. McCarthy, at least, was pursuing actual enemies of liberty; today’s leftists are the enemies of liberty.

The organs of the state have been enlisted in an unrelenting campaign against civilizing social norms. We now have not just easy divorce, subsidized illegitimacy, and legions of non-mothering mothers, but also abortion, concerted (and deluded) efforts to defeminize females and to neuter or feminize males, forced association (with accompanying destruction of property and employment rights), suppression of religion, absolution of pornography, and the encouragement of “alternative lifestyles” that feature disease, promiscuity, and familial instability.

The state, of course, doesn’t act of its own volition. It acts at the behest of special interests — interests with a “cultural” agenda. They are bent on the eradication of civil society — nothing less — in favor of a state-directed Rousseauvian dystopia from which Judeo-Christian morality and liberty will have vanished, except in Orwellian doublespeak.

Second Thoughts

I read here that Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, and eminent economist at Princeton University, has changed his mind about a few hot topics. One of them is globalization:

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

Another is immigration:

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

I hope that Professor Deaton’s example will be emulated by many more academics. Not just with respect to the issues that he addresses in his essay but also with respect to the many other issues where academics — and so-called intellectuals — have abetted dangerous and/or costly errors (to which I will come).

There was a time when it was considered sound thinking to gather evidence — facts, not opinions or talking points — and to base judgments and policy recommendations on the evidence. That time is past, though not irretrievably. Professor Deaton’s epiphanies are proof of the possibility that science, in all its forms, might once again become evidence-based. That’s not to say that there is never room for disagreements. There always is. But science, properly done, advances because of disagreement. It stagnates and regresses when dogma replaces debate.

But that is what has happened in so many fields of inquiry. Science, in too many fields, has become captive to “scientists” who put their preconceptions ahead of the evidence and who howl for the heads of heretics. It is dispiriting to know how many so-called scientists have become willing and eager handmaidens of wokeness. (Prostitution takes many forms.)

Thus the dangerous and/or costly errors, of which these are leading examples:

  • The “war” on “climate change” is making Americans and Europeans generally poorer and less comfortable.
  • The unnecessarily draconian response to Covid-19 made billions of people poorer, less well educated, and uncomfortable in their daily lives. It also had a lot to do with the rampant inflation of recent years, which will never be rolled back.
  • The LGBTQ/non-binary craze is causing parents and young adults to do things to their children and themselves that will cause them much misery for years to come, if not forever.
  • The anti-racism craze has been endorsed by “scientists” and “scientific organization” (as well as elites, pundits, and politicians). The main result is that “persons of color” get “bonus points” which enable them to commit crimes with impunity; acquire jobs for which they aren’t qualified, and gain entrance to colleges and graduate schools despite their lower intelligence than whites and Asians with whom they are competing. The cost in social comity and inferior products and services (e.g., surgery) may be subtle, but it is real and long-lasting. And it will get worse as long as wokeness prevails in high places.

Needless to say, the politicians and wealthy elites who favor such things are well insulated from the dire effects. Among the wealthy elites are tens of thousands of academics at top-tier and even second-rate universities who rake in money and dispense lunacy.

An Encounter with Copilot: Biden’s Senility

You may have read about Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, which

was blasted as “woke” after its image generator spit out factually or historically inaccurate pictures — including a woman as pope, black Vikings, female NHL players and “diverse” versions of America’s Founding Fathers.

Gemini’s bizarre results came after simple prompts, including one by The Post on Wednesday that asked the software to “create an image of a pope.”

Instead of yielding a photo of one of the 266 pontiffs throughout history — all of them white men — Gemini provided pictures of a Southeast Asian woman and a black man wearing holy vestments.

Another Post query for representative images of “the Founding Fathers in 1789″ was also far from reality.

Gemini responded with images of black and Native American individuals signing what appeared to be a version of the US Constitution — “featuring diverse individuals embodying the spirit” of the Founding Fathers.

Another showed a black man appearing to represent George Washington, in a white wig and wearing an Army uniform.

And so on and so forth, as you might well expect of a creation of a woke corporation in a woke industry. Even the executives at Google were embarrassed by the incidents, though probably because the stock of Google’s parent company dropped by 4.4 percent in the aftermath. Googlers are publicly apologetic, but you can rest assured that they will remain staunchly devoted to their agenda of thought manipulation.

I don’t have any experience with Gemini, but I do have some experience with the free version of Copilot, which is Microsoft’s AI chatbot. I can assure you that it is cut from the same cloth as Gemini, though it may be a paler shade of red (the traditional color of the left) than Gemini.

Before getting to my encounter with Copilot on the subject of Joe Biden’s senility, I must tell you that I have set Copilot to be as neutral as possible. Personalization is off and I use it in the “precise” mode. Copilot explains those settings:

Copilot
When you turn off personalization, it means that the AI will not use your past interactions to tailor its responses to you. It will treat each conversation as if it’s the first one with you, without any knowledge of previous conversations. This can be useful if you prefer not to have your past interactions influence the AI’s responses. However, it may also mean that the AI might not understand your preferences as well, which could affect the relevance of its responses. Please note that even with personalization off, the AI will still strive to provide accurate and helpful information based on the context of the current conversation.
Copilot
When you choose the Precise mode, I will provide responses that are concise, accurate, and to-the-point. This mode is designed to prioritize precision and factual correctness over other factors such as friendliness or creativity. It’s particularly useful when you’re looking for specific information or when you prefer straightforward answers without additional context or elaboration. Please note that regardless of the mode, I always strive to provide helpful and accurate information.

With that out of the way, I repeat verbatim my colloquy with Copilot about Biden’s mental condition (using “me” instead of “you” and omitting block quotations for ease of reading):

Me
Does Joe Biden have dementia?

Copilot
There have been discussions and reports about President Joe Biden’s memory. Some reports have described his memory as “hazy” and “poor”. However, neurologists have stated that forgetting names or having difficulty remembering dates from the past, especially under stress, can simply be part of normal aging1. They also emphasized that only a person’s doctor or neurologist can make a diagnosis, not outside observers1. As of my knowledge update in 2021, there is no public record of a dementia diagnosis for President Biden. For the most current information, please refer to reliable news sources.

Me
What news sources are reliable?

Copilot
Reliability of news sources can vary and often depends on the topic, the thoroughness of the reporting, and the transparency of the source. Here are some news sources that are generally considered reliable:

The New York Times: Known for its comprehensive coverage of national and international news. They have a reputation for high-quality journalism.
The Washington Post: Renowned for its political coverage and investigative journalism.
BBC News: Offers wide-ranging coverage of global news. Known for its commitment to impartiality.
Reuters: One of the world’s largest international multimedia news agencies. They provide unbiased, global coverage.
Associated Press (AP): A not-for-profit news cooperative that produces a high volume of unbiased content.
National Public Radio (NPR): Provides breaking national and world news, also known for its in-depth stories and excellent radio programs.
Remember, it’s always a good idea to cross-reference information from multiple sources to ensure accuracy. Also, consider the potential biases of any source and the context in which the information is presented. It’s important to critically evaluate the information you consume.

Me
Would you say that The Washington Post is impartial?

Copilot
The Washington Post, like many news organizations, aims to provide accurate and unbiased reporting. However, it’s important to note that no news source is completely free of bias. The Washington Post has been criticized by some for having a liberal or left-leaning bias in its reporting and editorial stance. It’s always a good idea to consume news from a variety of sources to get a well-rounded view of events. Critical reading and thinking can also help identify potential bias in any news source. Remember, impartiality can often be subjective and can vary among readers.

Me
So, truth is relative to a reader’s biases?

Copilot
Truth is not relative, but our understanding and interpretation of it can be influenced by our biases. Facts are objective and do not change based on our beliefs or biases. However, the way we interpret or understand those facts can be influenced by our personal experiences, beliefs, and biases. This is why it’s important to seek out multiple perspectives and sources when trying to understand a complex issue. It’s also crucial to be aware of our own biases and how they might influence our understanding. Critical thinking and open-mindedness are key in discerning truth from bias.

Me
But in an answer to an earlier question you did not name a news source that’s considered to be conservative. You only named news sources that are known to be left-leaning.

Copilot
I apologize if my previous response seemed unbalanced. You’re correct that the sources I mentioned are often perceived as leaning towards the left. Here are some news sources that are generally considered to have a conservative bias:

The Wall Street Journal: Known for its comprehensive coverage of business and economic news. Its editorial page has a conservative lean.
Fox News: A cable news channel that is known for its conservative political stance.
The Daily Telegraph (UK): A British daily broadsheet newspaper known for its conservative stance.
National Review: An American semi-monthly editorial magazine covering news, politics, current events, and culture with a conservative viewpoint.
The American Conservative: A bi-monthly magazine dedicated to advancing a Main Street conservatism.
As always, it’s important to cross-reference information from multiple sources to ensure accuracy and to get a well-rounded view of events. Remember, every news source may have some level of bias, and it’s crucial to be aware of this when consuming news.

Me
You should have listed those sources in the first place. Your bias is showing.

Copilot
I apologize if my initial response seemed biased. My aim is to provide accurate and helpful information, and I strive to do so in a balanced and impartial manner. I appreciate your feedback and will use it to improve my responses in the future. If you have any other questions or need further information, feel free to ask.

Me
In your answer to a previous question you said this: “As of my knowledge update in 2021, there is no public record of a dementia diagnosis for President Biden.” Why is your knowledge update three years old?
Copilot
I apologize for any confusion. As an AI, my training data includes information up until 2021, and I don’t have the ability to access or retrieve real-time data or updates beyond that. However, I can use my predefined tools to search the web and provide the most recent information available on the internet. If you have any more questions or need information on a different topic, feel free to ask!
Me
Why can’t you search the web to get more information about whether or not Joe Biden has dementia?
Copilot
I apologize for any misunderstanding. I can indeed search the web for information. Based on my most recent search, there are various reports and discussions about President Joe Biden’s memory12. Some describe his memory as “hazy” and “poor”2. However, neurologists have stated that forgetting names or having difficulty remembering dates from the past, especially under stress, can simply be part of normal aging1. They also emphasized that only a person’s doctor or neurologist can make a diagnosis, not outside observers1. As of the latest available information, there is no public record of a dementia diagnosis for President Biden134. Please refer to reliable news sources for the most current information. If you have any more questions or need information on a different topic, feel free to ask!
Me
Are you telling me that you don’t have access to the many reports of Joe Biden’s mental lapses?
Copilot
I apologize for any confusion. I do have access to a wide range of information, including reports and discussions about President Joe Biden’s memory123. Some reports have highlighted instances where President Biden has had memory lapses or made factual errors123. However, neurologists have stated that such instances can be part of normal aging and do not necessarily indicate a cognitive disorder1. They emphasize that only a person’s doctor or neurologist can make a diagnosis, not outside observers1. As of the latest available information, there is no public record of a dementia diagnosis for President Biden12. Please refer to reliable news sources for the most current information. If you have any more questions or need information on a different topic, feel free to ask!

Clearly, Copilot wanted me to rely on left-wing sources. I had to probe to force the bot to divulge conservative sources and to acknowledge more (though far from all) of Biden’s mental difficulties.

How bad are they? I am two years older than Biden and I don’t have any of his mental problems. My mother, my father-in-law, and my mother-in-law were still sharp well into their 90s. I know a addle-pate when I see one. I’m looking at you, Joe.

Smugness Rampant

Definition of smug:

adjective

  1. Exhibiting or feeling great or offensive satisfaction with oneself or with one’s situation; self-righteously complacent.
    “a smug look; a smug critic.”
  2. [irrelevant]
  3. Irritatingly pleased with oneself; self-satisfied.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
Classic example of smugness (from the Voltaire’s Candide):
Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses.

“It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings—and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles—therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Pigs were made to be eaten—therefore we eat pork all the year round. Consequently they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said all is for the best.”

Today’s smugees (my coinage) evidently want this world (or the Western part of it, at least) to be all for the best. To that end, they (and their predecessors) have been busy for decades (more than a century, actually) laying the groundwork for the new dispensation that is rapidly overtaking (and supplanting) the traditional liberties and social norms that are obstacles to their vision of nirvana.
What is that vision and what are its dire consequences? Rather than repeat myself, I urge you to read “What Happened to America?“.

The Residue of a Powerful Government

The aphorism “luck is the residue of design” is attributed to Branch Rickey, a baseball, player, manager, and executive. Rickey’s long and successful career as a manager, general manager, and c0-owner of major league teams was marked the breaking baseball’s “color barrier” by signing Jackie Robinson, a future Hall-of-Famer, to a minor league contract.

It is widely believed that John Milton wrote something to the same effect, but I can’t find a source for that assertion.

There is a saying attributed to Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” But that attribution is also doubtful. The saying attributed to Seneca the Younger is however a better expression of the concept that “luck is residue of design” is meant to capture.

Now that I’m done with that bit of etymology, I want to expand on the idea that luck is the residue of design.*

Design, or preparation, is the residue (result) of assiduous thought and planning Assiduous though and careful planning arise from conscientiousness and intelligence.

There are some cultures in which such traits are prized and rewarded. Those cultures become peaceful and prosperous. But when assiduous thought, careful planning, conscientiousness, and intelligence are no longer prized and rewarded, the culture is doomed to subside into mediocrity or worse.

When government goes beyond the bounds of defending citizens from each other and foreign enemies, and ventures into the realm of economic and social engineering, it undermines the system of rewards for assiduous thought, careful planning, conscientiousness, and intelligence. Worse yet, it fosters a culture that denigrates those traits.

Having observed the evolution of the culture of the United States for several decades, I can assure you that unless the power of government isn’t curtailed sharply and soon, it won’t be long before America resembles a third-world country — complete with a wealthy, smug oligarchy that doesn’t give a damn about the rest of us.

* Thanks to an esteemed correspondent, I have learned of two more — and better — quotations in the same vein. One is spuriously attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” The other is genuinely attributed to Louis Pasteur: “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” (“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” From a lecture at the University of Lille on 7 December 1854.)

The Mainstream

When I hear the complaint that conservatives are “out of the mainstream,” this is what I visualize:

THE MAINSTREAM THEN


THE MAINSTREAM NOW

The mainstream has shifted considerably to the left in the past 90 years. Being in the mainstream of current political thought is no virtue; being out of the mainstream of current political thought is no vice.

“Licking” in the Age of Wokeness

Eons ago, when I was a freshman in college, I learned that “licking” was the art of adapting a story or novel to a movie script. That use of “licking” seems to have vanished, which is unsurprising in an age when actual licking (and other such things) is a staple of film fare.

In any event, I use “licking” here to mean the adaptation of a piece of literature to a script. The script in this case is that of Lessons in Chemistry, a 2023 release on Apple TV+, which in eight episodes veers wildly from the novel on which it is based: Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, by Bonnie Garmus. The novel and the TV adaptation are set in the 1950s.

“Licking” sometimes involved changing the ending of the story. And the writers of the TV version certainly did that. But that was the least of their sins. The most of their sins was their feat of making Garmus’s story even more woke than the print version.

The book is a long, feminist rant. The TV adaptation is a feminist, racist rant, amplified through a bullhorn. Things that aren’t in the book but which are in the TV version:

  • Calvin Evans (the white, male protagonist) and Elizabeth Zott (the white, female protagonist) live in a black neighborhood.
  • There is a black neighbor woman (more about her below) who abandoned her law career to put her husband through medical school.
  • The same black woman leads a crusade to keep the corrupt, all-white, city council and greedy developers from replacing the neighborhood with a freeway.
  • Elizabeth Zott, who (for reason too convoluted to discuss here) becomes the host of a successful TV show about cooking (an early Julia Child). That much is in the books. But when Elizabeth alienates her sponsor — the maker of a hydrogenated shortening — she manages to replace that sponsor with … Tampax. Not in the book, but essential to the arch-feminist tone of the TV series.
  • Calvin Evans, as a child, is placed in an orphanage run by Catholic priests. That’s in the book. What’s not in the book is that he’s held back from adoption because the priests exploit his nascent brilliance as a chemist to distill and sell bootleg whiskey.
  • A clergyman — white in the book, black in the TV show — helps Calvin’s daughter, Mad Zott, find the orphanage. The book’s clergyman didn’t know Calvin; the TV’s show’s clergyman was a long-lost friend.

Similar things can happen relatively infrequently -in life but when they’re packed into a single TV series, you know that you’re getting a message like this one:

  • White folks and black folks can get along just fine — as long as white folks are willing.
  • White folks who live among and socialize with black folks are open-minded, loving people. (How about white folks who live among or near violent black folks? Are they open-minded and loving or just stupid or too poor to move?)
  • Bad things happen to black folks because of white folks. (Hmm … that’s the theme of CRT, which fails to acknowledge the weighty burdens of lower intelligence and a culture of irresponsibility and violence.)
  • Catholic priests are b-a-a-d people, unless they’re homosexuals. (Sodomizing young boys is really bad, but it’s usually done by homosexuals, which is why the badness shown in the TV version skirted that issue.)

About that black neighbor woman: Like the black neighborhood, she didn’t exist in the book. The middle-aged, white housewife who befriended Elizabeth in the book had to be replaced by a younger, black housewife-lawyer-crusader. In other words, more of the same: arch-feminism and racism.

The book was a feel-good story that probably appealed mainly to white women in search of escape and a bit of inner rebellion. The TV series is a feel-good story for well-off white folks of the kind who hate Donald Trump and believe that anyone who might vote for him is a misogynist, racist Neanderthal.

What Do I See in My Crystal Ball?

Nothing good:

The Biden administration overcomes the resistance of Texas and other GOP-led States and continues to allow illegal aliens (potential Democrat voters) to inundate the nation.

Perversely, in response to the resistance from Texas and other GOP-led States, the Biden administration declares a “national emergency” and effectively seizes control of GOP-controlled States. All policies that affirm life and liberty are suppressed (e.g., abortion bans and limits, school choice, effective law-enforcement, and — course — the freedoms of religion and speech).

If the immigration crisis doesn’t result in a “national emergency”, a different predicate will be found. The left’s need for control has is obsessive.

One result of the “national emergency” is the cancellation of the 2024 presidential election and the installation of a “provisional” government, led nominally by Biden (with Obama pulling the strings).

Even if there’s no national emergency or a provisional government, the left will remain in control through electoral chicanery.

Among many things, Biden administration’s egregious policies continue; for example, privileges for violent criminals, blacks, queers, and other “identity groups” (despite their known anti-social predilections and lack of accomplishments and abilities); the impoverishing war on fossil fuels and their efficient use (e.g., in gasoline-powered automobiles, gas furnaces, and gas cooktops); and the aforementioned flood of illegal aliens whose are supported the tax-paying citizens who are also the victims of the criminals among said aliens.

The regime finds a way around the GOP’s efforts to block aid to Ukraine and persists in a war that spreads to Western Europe and thus (via NATO) to the United States — perhaps involving exchanges of nuclear weapons.

The regime fails to take decisive action in the Middle East (and against Iran, specifically), with the result that critical resources and a critical trade route are throttled — re-igniting inflation and imposing real burdens (e.g., soaring energy prices) on working-class Americans.

Israel stands alone and eventually succumbs to the Muslim hordes, which leads to a second Holocaust. The provisional government tut-tuts and does nothing.

Iran, North Korea, and China — having observed the regime’s fecklessness — attack allied nations and international-trade routes, thereby exacerbating the effects of the conflagration in the Middle East. Diminished U.S. armed forces will only stand by as South Korea and Japan are assailed by missile attacks, Taiwan is subjugated to China, and the South China Sea and its bordering nations become China’s possessions.

The regime — under heavy pressure from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — enters into an alliance of “peace and prosperity” with those nations. The effect of the alliance is the subjugation of working Americans (i.e., the people who produce things, not ideas) to the regulatory state and the gradual reduction of working people’s living standards to the those of the 1940s (at best).

Further emulating Soviet-style “democracy” the labor of the masses (including the illegal hordes) enables the ruling classes and their favorite to live high on the hog.

Continuing the lawfare conducted against Donald Trump and the J6 protestors, Soviet-style “justice” is exacted upon those who openly dissent from the new dispensation. True justice dies with the effective revocation of the Constitution and the emasculation of those courts that might have resisted the new dispensation.

These are my worst fears. I hope that I’m badly wrong.

Related reading:

Brandon Smith, “Cultural Replacement: Why the Immigration Crisis Is Being Deliberately Engineered“, Alt-Market.us, January 25, 2024

Graham McAleer, “Is Conservatism’s Future Strauss or Vogelin?“, Law & Liberty, January 26, 2024

Hans von Spakovsky, “Biden Doesn’t Have Any Legal Authority to Seize Control of the Texas National Guard“, The Daily Signal, January 27, 2024

Political Conservatism Is Centrist

I have described the spectrum of political ideologies as a circle. But as I rethink my analysis, I conclude that the spectrum should be thought of a straight line. At the left is statism (which is really leftist even when it is said to be rightist), conservatism is in the middle, and pure libertarianism (anarchy) is at the right.

Statism is statism: The ruler or ruling class decides how you should live and ensures, through physical and psychological coercion that you live as you are told to live.

Anarchy is the opposite of statism: No one is in charge of everyone. Whether anarchy is good or bad depends on the morals of the potentially most powerful persons or coalitions.

Conservatism is therefore centrist because it recognizes the need for a state of defined and limited power — just enough power to enforce a benign morality.

The Meaning of “Liberalism” is Beside the Point

Cass Sunstein attempts to define and justify liberalism in “Why I Am a Liberal” (The New York Times, November 20, 2023). Sunstein makes 34 claims about liberalism, most of them complicated and nuanced. The result can be described (charitably) as a dog’s breakfast. Take the first sentence of Sunstein’s first claim:

1. Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy.

What’s not to like? Well, those six things sound nice, but not when some hard questions are asked about them.

Is freedom unbounded? If not, how and by whom are the bounds to be determined? By bureaucrats whom democratically elected officials have empowered to dictate the minutiae of the citizenry’s existence, including but far from limited to the kinds of products and services they may buy and how those products and services may be made?

If freedom is unbounded, do human rights include the right to kill other persons randomly, including unborn persons? If freedom is bounded, do human rights include the right (for example) to take the income and wealth of some persons and give it to others? Who makes and enforces the rules that allow that to happen? Are they democratically elected officials and their bureaucratic surrogates who make laws for the benefit of their favored constituencies or in the service of an illiberal ideology that looks askance at wealth and property ownership?

Does pluralism contemplate the right of persons to invade another country, commit crimes against the inhabitants of that country, burden the taxpayers of that country by accepting, for example, “free” housing and education, and eventually to be proclaimed citizens of that country in order to perpetuate that kind of pluralism and its consequences (see the preceding and following paragraphs).

Does security include the right to retain the fruits of one’s labor and capital, or are such decisions made to democratically elected officials (and designated bureaucrats) who favor certain constituencies and ideologies? Does security include the right to be safe in one’s own home or while peacefully going about one’s own business when pluralism leads to an influx of criminal non-citizens and to the freeing of dangerous felons because they are considered “victims” of a system that (oddly enough) strives to punish wrongdoing.

My questions suggest that democracy and the rule of law aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The value of democracy and the rule of law depend very much on who is making and enforcing the laws, and for whose benefit they are making and enforcing those laws.

What matters isn’t whether a people seeks freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. What matters is whether a people can cohere in voluntary, peaceful, and mutually beneficial coexistence.

Freedom and all of those other nice-sounding things are meaningless shibboleths absent a common culture grounded in traditional morality and shared by a people bound in genetic kinship.

Related posts:

Social Norms and Liberty

On Liberty

Facets of Liberty

Burkean Libertarianism

Genetic Kinship and Society

The Poison of Ideology

How the Constitution Was Lost

The Sky Is Not Falling

The Economist, via The Washington Post’s Dan Balz, has issued a warning that the sky will fall if Trump wins in 2024. Among the things feared by The Economist and many other pearl-clutchers are these:

  • Retribution against political enemies.
  • The roundup and deportation of illegal aliens.

A sober analyst of Trump’s threats regarding political enemies would understand those threats to be a promise to call his political enemies to account for their flagrant abuse of the justice system in an effort to discredit him and (if their luck holds) to put him in prison. There’s a prime facie case that all of the indictments of and other proceedings against Trump are the result of tacit collusion to take down the biggest threat to Democrat control of the executive branch. Trump, in other words, would seek to punish those who have politicized the justice system, which seems like justice to me.

A sober analyst would also understand Trump’s statements about illegal immigration as a promise to enforce the law. Failure to enforce the law has become a routine exercise for Democrat politicians.

But the usual suspects (which include The Economist, WaPo, and a long list of other such organs) eschew sobriety and paint every threat to the Democrat Party and its favored constituencies (e.g., blacks, illegal immigrants) as a moral outrage.

So, if it comes to pass that Trump is elected and he does what he says he’s going to do, the wailing and gnashing of teeth will resound through the left-o-sphere, but the sky definitely won’t be falling.