DebateGate

Japan is an example of what happens when a consumer economy does not have a growing population.

What's wrong with Japan?

If we do not educate these children, then we will have an underclass of ignorant and useless people. Apparently, that is what breitbart wants. No one will deport 11 million people, no matter what Trump says.

Doubt that you'd have to. I suspect simply having a president with policies like Trump would encourage a large number to leave on their own initiative.

*****

Should We Be Turning Japanese?

The Big Idea

With economic instability and terror plaguing the open West, a case emerges for the insular approach.

Walking among the open air caf?s in Tokyo during an unseasonably warm November last year?just after the Paris terror attacks?I realized that something was different. Japanese almost never think twice about going into public places. Their streets are not filled with combat troops on wary patrol. Parents don?t fear when their children congregate at a concert or in the park. Japanese are the first to highlight their country?s problems, but when I talk with a group of young men and women at a tiny, crowded bar, their greatest fear for the future is growing old alone, not that they might not grow old at all.

Japan does face a demographic crisis?its population is actually shrinking?but there is another big positive dimension to life in modern Japan. The Japanese are not arguing (all that much, anyway) about social and economic inequality. Nor are the shops dark and the restaurants empty, at least not in Tokyo and other major cities. There is no Japanese Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders drawing on and stoking the anger of a disenfranchised middle class.

Japan has found a separate reality?a separate peace if you will?from the globalization paradigm that has dominated the West since World War II. The country?s experience over the past quarter-century raises the question: How open does a modern nation need to be in order to be ?successful?? That should prompt us to ask, in turn, whether we in the West have been overstating the benefits of openness and globalization, and underestimating the virtues of social cohesion and stability.

All this warrants a fresh look at the long-tainted ?Japan model.? At least as viewed by the West, Japan has spent the past quarter-century under a cloud. After the Japanese asset price bubble popped in 1989, the once-and-future ?Pacific Superpower? (recall all those headlines from the 1980s, declaring things like ?Your Next Boss May be Japanese?) no longer interested investors, pundits and the media. ?Japanese? traits such as lifetime employment, so recently lauded, were quickly reinterpreted as rigidity, risk averseness, and a general inability to deal with a new era of innovation that valued the individual over the group. In particular, it became an article of faith in the West to decry Japan?s insularity, whether economic or socio-cultural. Japanese society, ethnically monolithic and anti-immigration, was derided as fatally parochial in the new, modern borderless world.

Yet the era of Western superiority proved fleeting. The West?s vacation from history in the 1990s ended with 9/11. The crash of 2008 had the West scrambling to avoid economic collapse, and neither the American nor European economies have recovered anything like their buoyant growth of the 1990s. Fifteen years after 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the intrusive steps taken to counter it are a depressing overlay to daily life, yet the scourge of the Islamic State continues to grow and has now reached into Western societies. Meanwhile, despite the advantages of globalization, its costs and the socioeconomic damage done by the massive displacement of old jobs?especially middle-class industrial jobs?have been badly understated. Government approval rates in America remain at historic lows, and a majority of Americans believe race relations have worsened in recent years. The West?s complacency of the early 1990s has been displaced by a host of troubles.

Japan?s contrasting history during approximately the same time period?since the collapse of its bubble circa 1990?forces us to consider how open borders need to be, and to judge the trade-offs societies are willing to accept between growth and opportunity. Can a country be ?globalized? and ?modern? yet not ?open?? Japan offers the example of a society that is willing to be less engaged with the world and to maintain certain socioeconomic barriers, thereby trading some growth for physical security and economic and social stability at home.

None of this should be interpreted as a call for the West actually to turn Japanese?at least not excessively so. Nor is it a rehashed version of the Japan triumphalism that was so prevalent in the 1970s and ?80s. To decry the failures of capitalism is not to desire greater state intervention or a less competitive economy. It is to want to rid Western capitalism of its distortions and injustices?or at least do a better job of ameliorating them?and to level the playing field for those who value hard work and want the chance to become part of the ownership society. Crony capitalism and the close political-financial alliance protected by Democrats and Republicans alike need to be uprooted in favor of policies that help Main Street and provide meaningful cushions for workers and families trying to be part of the economy.

Similarly, to identify the sources of Japan?s physical security is not to embrace an anti-immigrant polemic. The history of the United States and even Europe is inseparable from immigration, but to welcome legal immigration is not the same thing as to call for open borders or to deny the importance of ensuring that a common culture and civil society is maintained and passed down to future generations. To acknowledge such cultural, social and economic questions is instead to demand a politics that is responsive to reality and not to the utopias of either the left or the right. It is to question how freedom and equality must be balanced against security and opportunity in an imperfect world.

***

What has been lost in the West is the understanding that openness and globalization are only a means, not an end. Japan?s different approach to both ideas goes back to its profoundly different view of modernity. In the West, ever since the American and French revolutions, modernity has been identified with the beginning of a new world, and the discarding of tradition. Since then, Western modernity increasingly became identified with the concept of openness to the world, moving from the realm of ideas and political philosophy to the field of economic competition, and more slowly to the opening up of the country to large-scale immigration. As the belief in openness sank deep roots, it defined both national identity and government policy, particularly in America, evolving into the idea that greater diversity, achieved through ever-increasing openness, result in greater national strength.

The concept of openness soon transcended national boundaries and evolved from a concern solely with the internal workings of a society to the idea of an integrated and united globe.

In Japan, by contrast, modernity has always been restrained by a tradition of social stability that goes back to the centuries of a feudal system headed by shoguns and emperors. Thus the Japanese have always viewed modernity more warily. Japan really is different from the rest of the modern world, and while it is an almost heretical thought, perhaps it is time to consider whether Japan has made better national choices since the 1990s than we have given it credit for. It has succeeded in providing a stable and secure life for its people, despite significant economic challenges and statistical stagnation. It has done so in part by maintaining cohesion at home and certain barriers against the world. By comparison, America and Europe appear increasingly confounded by their failures to ensure sociocultural integration, keep their economies growing equally for all, and provide security in the heart of their great cities. When historians look back on global history from the 1990s into the first decades of the 21st century, how will they judge which nations were successful, and which failed to provide a good life for their people?

The metric employed by Americans in particular?how much personal freedom and economic growth one can calculate and accumulate?is not necessarily the measure favored by the Japanese. It is fair to say that in Japan, it is not the lack of individual restraint that counts, but the overall level of stability in society. Similarly, the West?s adherence to neoclassical economics has been adapted in Japan to something that may be less efficient, but also less disruptive to society.

Not that the Japanese aren?t constantly questioning the level of their involvement in the world. ?Do you think we should take in more Syrian refugees?? the head of one of Japan?s leading cultural exchange organizations asked me last November in Tokyo. ?It looks like we?re not doing our part.? I demurred, noting that Europe has yet to deal with problems the refugee flood may cause. Twenty-four hours later, the Paris massacre burst onto Japan?s television screens.

Since my trip to Japan, we?ve also had the Brussels attacks and mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. ISIS-connected terrorists struck in Jakarta, and jihadist-inspired lone wolves carried out knife attacks on the London Underground and shot an American police officer in Philadelphia. Unlike the West, consumed by the threat of terrorism for half a generation, Japan is a modernized and liberal society not directly at risk from the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and homegrown Islamist radicals. Like any nation, it offers a plethora of soft targets, but the reality is that Japan is in comparatively little danger. Its people live in a reality entirely different from that of the West, spared from a seemingly endless fight against an implacable enemy who now lives among them.

In important ways, Japan privileges order over openness, and stability over opportunity. America has had no such value system?and what Donald Trump offers is but little-disguised jingoism and an apparent preference for trade wars as a tool of statecraft. Trump is rightly derided by Democrats and establishment Republicans. But the example of Japan shows that what we might call radical openness might not be the only path for a modern society to take.

***

Since World War II, the predominance of the concepts of openness and diversity has never been seriously challenged in the West. The almost universally accepted identification of modernity with openness has prevented needed discussions of the costs associated with such an approach. More recently, arguments such as Francis Fukuyama?s ?The End of History? presented a triumphalist liberal interpretation of societal success, tied in part to Western notions of openness and diversity. Borders both physical and ideational are universally condemned as immoral, misguided and harmful to a nation and its citizenry.

The assumption that openness is a prerequisite for modernity and economic success has led observers to dismiss, or has prevented them from understanding, the logic of an approach designed to maintain social cohesion and insulate a country from foreign economic and security disturbances. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall was one of the few Western scholars to consider the benefits of a different approach in his 1976 book, Beyond Culture, when he compared "low context,? or diverse, cultures like the United States, with "high context," or more uniform cultures like Japan. Low-context cultures, which merge many disparate traditions, encourage creativity but become increasingly unwieldy the larger they grow. High-context cultures, by comparison, often impose rigidity in thinking and certainly in social interaction, but offer far greater cohesion, due largely to their monolithic ethnicity.

Forty years later, the trade-offs that Hall discussed are at the center of political conflicts throughout the West. Even America, whose national identity was built on immigration, finds itself at odds over the benefits of open borders and amnesty, forming odd alliances across socioeconomic lines. For many in the United States, openness has become an end in itself, with no reference to larger social questions. The fear of unassimilated immigrants is greatest in Europe, which is now forced to contemplate the effects of decades of largely unrestrained, largely Muslim, immigration that is rapidly changing the continent?s demographics while burdening its security and social services.

Reassessing Japan?s recent history in the light of Western failures does not mean whitewashing its current weaknesses and challenges. A third of a century of anemic economic growth, averaging 2 percent from 1981 to 2015, is a signal that the mature Japanese economy will likely never again see double-digit growth. Unbalanced investment has left Japan?s rural regions in parlous economic shape, and temporary workers now account for nearly 40 percent of the workforce. The country?s regulatory environment is too stifling, corruption nests inside corporate and political cultures, the service sector is startlingly inefficient, and the nuclear industry is a mess. The government was widely criticized for its inept handling of the March 2011 nuclear crisis after the devastating Tohoku earthquake.

Socially, Japanese youth are widely reported to be dissatisfied with their future prospects, and the scope for individualism in the workplace remains tightly constricted. Foreigners are tolerated, but not particularly welcomed, and Japanese of Korean descent still face discrimination. Immigration is all but absent. Moreover, Japan has faced its own homegrown terrorists, in the millennial Aum Shinrikyo cult, back in the 1990s. Above all, the country faces a debilitating demographic collapse, one no modern democracy has ever encountered and that poses the single greatest threat to Japan?s future.

Yet compared with the problems that both the West and many of its neighbors face, Japan?s relative strength and stability should at the least cause us to rethink our assumptions about social and economic policy. The Wall Street Journal?s Jacob Schlesinger argues that, for two decades after the popping of the bubble, Japan?s leadership consciously chose a deflationary course for the economy, seeking stability and the minimization of social risk that would accompany radical economic restructuring. Only the return of Shinzo Abe to the premiership in 2012 reversed this long trend, as he actively sought to inflate the economy, privileging economic expansion over stability. The difference might be thought of as ?value? policy versus ?growth? policy, similar to stocks or mutual funds. The careful, moderate reforms of what is called ?Abenomics? indicate that even the current government is seeking a mix of value and growth, again prioritizing social stability.

Despite decades of officially slow or stagnant macro growth, the real economic picture of Japan is better than many Westerners think. Writing in the Financial Times, Matthew C. Klein showed that, in the decade from 2005 to 2014, real GDP per person grew more in Japan than in the United States, Great Britain and the Eurozone. In the nearly quarter-century from 1990 to 2013, in other words, nearly the entire post-bubble era, real household consumption in Japan also grew more than the Eurozone, and behind only Great Britain, the United States and Sweden.

As China?s economy began openly to unravel during 2015, and the U.S. equity markets precipitously declined in early 2016, my visits to Tokyo have revealed a country neither sprinting ahead nor rocked by economic instability. The uncertainty that clouds so many of the world?s economies exacts psychic and material costs, but Japan, where GDP growth has been sluggish for decades, seems less threatened by the roller coaster that is prevalent in the West, in part because its system remains more resistant to radical restructuring and the diktats of unrestrained market forces. In fact, things simply aren?t all that bad.

Japan remains a high-income country by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) standards. Its GDP per capita at purchasing power parity rates increased from $34,300 in 2011 to $36,400 in 2014, while the cost of living in Tokyo and its other major cities declined, due in part to moderate deflationary trends. Japan?s Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, stood at .32 in 2008 (the latest year available), according to the World Bank, higher than many European nations, but lower than America?s .41 (2013 measure).

Economic data tell only part of the national story. Other measures show a picture of social strength. To give just a few examples, Americans are 16 times more likely to be murdered than their Japanese counterparts, according to the United Nations. Japan, with approximately 40 percent the population of the United States, recorded just 443 cases of intentional homicide in 2011, a rate of 0.3 per 100,000 inhabitants; while in America, 14,661 persons were murdered intentionally, a rate of 4.7 per 100,000. While gun control advocates point out that Japan has far more stringent gun laws than the United States, crimes of all kinds, especially violent crimes, occur far less frequently in Japan than in America. Japan is a more peaceful society because of factors other than regulation of guns. There are few debates over what it means to be ?Japanese,? and different segments of society rarely seem to be at one another?s throats.

Japan remains a male-dominated society, yet Japanese women are among the most highly educated in the world, and they traditionally have controlled household budgets and family decisions. Moreover, as the Financial Times? Klein notes, more than half the growth in Japanese workers since 2003 has come from women entering the labor force, even as the overall population has shrunk. Prime Minister Abe?s ?womenomics? policy seeks to increase this number even more, as well as to break the glass ceiling in executive suites.

In education, Japanese students once again scored at the top of the global math, reading, and science rankings by the OECD in 2012. Americans, by contrast, scored significantly lower, 27th in math and 17th in reading, despite spending close to 30 percent more per student than Japan. Meanwhile, Japan?s unemployment rate is below 3.5 percent, which partly represents demographic decline, but also the strong work ethic and expectation that able-bodied citizens will be in the labor force. Sixty-six percent of Japanese aged 15-74 were employed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, while 63 percent of Americans aged 16 or older held a job, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, a number that has been dropping steadily since 2007. Japan is also far healthier than America and most European countries, ranking as the least obese developed country according to the OECD, while America is No. 1. Moreover, the number of suicides in Japan has fallen for six straight years, since 2009, and is down by a third from its peak in 2003.

Again, such statistics of social strength tell only part of a far more complex story. Yet they can be adduced to support an argument that Japan has more successfully dealt with its myriad problems over the past quarter-century than most observers have recognized. Whether Japan can continue to maintain its stability, social cohesion and basic economic strength without opening up its borders, overturning some traditional social structures and introducing an element of disruptiveness into its culture will be the great question of Japanese history over the next two generations. Yet even to ask such questions is to again presume a Western frame of reference.

Paris and Brussels have driven home a stark understanding that the West?s long war with Islamic terrorism is not only far from over, but that it is entering another, deadlier phase. We have been fighting terrorism at home and abroad since the 1970s, but in particular since 1993 and the first World Trade Center attack. Close to 25 years on, Western societies appear increasingly threatened by a radicalized minority. Meanwhile, and just as worryingly, Western leaders have failed to solve the economic problems that have dogged their nations since 2008 and all have used the crisis as an excuse to increase the role of government, adding yet another layer of unease, inefficiency and uncertainty onto society.

America and the West will debate the causes of radicalization and the steps needed to counter it for years, perhaps decades to come, just as they will the future of the capitalist system. Meanwhile, the crisis will grow. Skilled workers in the knowledge economy will continue to outpace those lacking such ability and society will become more divided between haves and have-nots, giving openings to socialists like Fran?ois Hollande and Bernie Sanders, while fueling Trumpism, Le Penism, and other extreme movements on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

After Brussels, however, one thing seems clear: Ordinary Westerners will live another decade or longer fearing for their physical safety, waiting for the next attack, swinging between panic and numbness, and expending massive amounts of energy and treasure on war, all while they watch their economies gyrate, further dividing their societies. And the Japanese won?t. The story of whose history was better during these decades is far from written.

Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The End of the Asian Century (forthcoming, Yale).

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/globalization-japan-terror-insularity-213807

Hillary the fainting goat?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=78&v=we9_CdNPuJg

Video of Hillary leaving with "over heating" episode at Sept 11 Memorial today

https://twitter.com/zgazda66/status/774993814025011200

Additional coverage
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/09/11/hillary-clinton-has-medical-episode-at-911-ceremony-source-says.html

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/5-most-un-libertarian-positions-of-gary-johnson/3/

Johnson is not a purely pure Libertarian, ......


 Oh well , who is?

I gave up on the libertarians when I realized that as much as they claim to hate the state, they don't hate it nearly as much as they hate the nation.

Open borders, indeed!

The Flight 93 Election
By: Publius Decius Mus
September 5, 2016

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You?or the leader of your party?may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don?t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can?t be that high because they are never that high?except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no ?end of history? and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even?as Charles Kesler does?admit that America is in ?crisis.? But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!

Not to pick (too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer??even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary?s??is unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues?immigration, trade, and war?right from the beginning.

But let us back up. One of the paradoxes?there are so many?of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don?t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can?t (or won?t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I?ll stipulate it.

Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted?tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed ?family values?; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere?if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe?mustn?t they??that we are headed off a cliff.

But it?s quite obvious that conservatives don?t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative?indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the ?condition of America? and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of ?conservative? ?solutions,? with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, ?civic renewal,? and?of course!?Burke. Which is to say, conservatism?s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? ?Civic renewal? would do a lot of course, but that?s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve ?civic renewal?? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of ?stress[ing] the ?national interest abroad and national solidarity at home? through foreign-policy retrenchment, ?support to workers buffeted by globalization,? and setting ?tax rates and immigration levels? to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously?one might even say fanatically?anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today?s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won?t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It?s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler?s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.

Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad?But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don?t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.

Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs?to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society?and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let?s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

If your answer?Continetti?s, Douthat?s, Salam?s, and so many others??is for conservatism to keep doing what it?s been doing?another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal?even though we?ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you?ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn?t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.

They will say, in words reminiscent of dorm-room Marxism?but our proposals have not been tried! Here our ideas sit, waiting to be implemented! To which I reply: eh, not really. Many conservative solutions?above all welfare reform and crime control?have been tried, and proved effective, but have nonetheless failed to stem the tide. Crime, for instance, is down from its mid-?70s and early ?90s peak?but way, way up from the historic American norm that ended when liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-?60s. And it?s rising fast today, in the teeth of ineffectual conservative complaints. And what has this temporary crime (or welfare, for that matter) decline done to stem the greater tide? The tsunami of leftism that still engulfs our every?literal and figurative?shore has receded not a bit but indeed has grown. All your (our) victories are short-lived.

More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The answer?which appears to be ?nothing??might seem to lend credence to the plea that ?our ideas haven?t been tried.? Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas ?haven?t been tried,? who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising ?entrepreneurs? and ?creative destruction.? Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?

Only three questions matter. First, how bad are things really? Second, what do we do right now? Third, what should we do for the long term?

Conservatism, Inc.?s, ?answer? to the first may, at this point, simply be dismissed. If the conservatives wish to have a serious debate, I for one am game?more than game; eager. The problem of ?subjective certainty? can only be overcome by going into the agora. But my attempt to do so?the blog that Kesler mentions?was met largely with incredulity. How can they say that?! How can anyone apparently of our caste (conservative intellectuals) not merely support Trump (however lukewarmly) but offer reasons for doing do?

One of the Journal of American Greatness?s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying. That possibility, apparently, seems to them so preposterous that no refutation is necessary.

As does, presumably, the argument that the stakes in 2016 are?everything. I should here note that I am a good deal gloomier than my (former) JAG colleagues, and that while we frequently used the royal ?we? when discussing things on which we all agreed, I here speak only for myself.

How have the last two decades worked out for you, personally? If you?re a member or fellow-traveler of the Davos class, chances are: pretty well. If you?re among the subspecies conservative intellectual or politician, you?ve accepted?perhaps not consciously, but unmistakably?your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of American politics. Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To the extent that you are ever on the winning side of anything, it?s as sophists who help the Davoisie oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.

All of Trump?s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same?as will the election of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their ?opposition? may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don?t dream up inanities like 32 ?genders,? elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, ?Islamophobia,? and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.

A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most ?advanced? Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie?s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns?operated through the former and aided by the latter?of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama?s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.

It?s absurd to assume that any of this would stop or slow?would do anything other than massively intensify?in a Hillary administration. It?s even more ridiculous to expect that hitherto useless conservative opposition would suddenly become effective. For two generations at least, the Left has been calling everyone to their right Nazis. This trend has accelerated exponentially in the last few years, helped along by some on the Right who really do seem to merit?and even relish?the label. There is nothing the modern conservative fears more than being called ?racist,? so alt-right pocket Nazis are manna from heaven for the Left. But also wholly unnecessary: sauce for the goose. The Left was calling us Nazis long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial memes. And how does one deal with a Nazi?that is, with an enemy one is convinced intends your destruction? You don?t compromise with him or leave him alone. You crush him.

So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys?and paychecks. But those are going away anyway. Among the many things the ?Right? still doesn?t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don?t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

If you haven?t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but we do nothing with them. Call ours Hannibalic victories. After the Carthaginian?s famous slaughter of a Roman army at Cannae, he failed to march on an undefended Rome, prompting his cavalry commander to complain: ?you know how to win a victory, but not how to use one.? And, aside from 2004?s lackluster 50.7%, we can?t win the big ones at all.

Because the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us. I will mention but three ways. First, the opinion-making elements?the universities and the media above all?are wholly corrupt and wholly opposed to everything we want, and increasingly even to our existence. (What else are the wars on ?cis-genderism??formerly known as ?nature??and on the supposed ?white privilege? of broke hillbillies really about?) If it hadn?t been abundantly clear for the last 50 years, the campaign of 2015-2016 must surely have made it evident to even the meanest capacities that the intelligentsia?including all the organs through which it broadcasts its propaganda?is overwhelmingly partisan and biased. Against this onslaught, ?conservative? media is a nullity, barely a whisper. It cannot be heard above the blaring of what has been aptly called ?The Megaphone.?

Second, our Washington Generals self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Lenin is supposed to have said that ?the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.? But with an opposition like ours, why bother? Our ?leaders? and ?dissenters? bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them. Fearful, beaten dogs have more thymos.

Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.

It?s also why they treat open borders as the ?absolute value,? the one ?principle? that?when their ?principles? collide?they prioritize above all the others. If that fact is insufficiently clear, consider this. Trump is the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from conservative orthodoxy in so many ways that National Review still hasn?t stopped counting. But let?s stick to just the core issues animating his campaign. On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his Democratic opponent. And yet the Left and the junta are at one with the house-broken conservatives in their determination?desperation?not merely to defeat Trump but to destroy him. What gives?

Oh, right?there?s that other issue. The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America?s ruling and intellectual classes. Their reasons vary somewhat. The Left and the Democrats seek ringers to form a permanent electoral majority. They, or many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie that America?s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only through ever greater ?diversity.? The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige. The Republicans and the ?conservatives?? Both of course desperately want absolution from the charge of ?racism.? For the latter, this at least makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court?much less cash his check?with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct expense of their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their ?natural conservatism? at the ballot box? It hasn?t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn?t stop the Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose, how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!

This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect. So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time?or, more importantly, to connect them. Since Pat Buchanan?s three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who saw one piece: Dick Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on immigration. Yet, among recent political figures?great statesmen, dangerous demagogues, and mewling gnats alike?only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent?more practically wise?than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.

Which they self-laud as ?consistency??adherence to ?conservative principle,? defined by the 1980 campaign and the household gods of reigning conservative think-tanks. A higher consistency in the service of the national interest apparently eludes them. When America possessed a vast, empty continent and explosively growing industry, high immigration was arguably good policy. (Arguably: Ben Franklin would disagree.) It hasn?t made sense since World War I. Free trade was unquestionably a great boon to the American worker in the decades after World War II. We long ago passed the point of diminishing returns. The Gulf War of 1991 was a strategic victory for American interests. No conflict since then has been. Conservatives either can?t see this?or, worse, those who can nonetheless treat the only political leader to mount a serious challenge to the status quo (more immigration, more trade, more war) as a unique evil.

Trump?s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults. That the Left would make the campaign all about the latter is to be expected. Why would the Right? Some?a few?are no doubt sincere in their belief that the man is simply unfit for high office. David Frum, who has always been an immigration skeptic and is a convert to the less-war position, is sincere when he says that, even though he agrees with much of Trump?s agenda, he cannot stomach Trump. But for most of the other #NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?

Another question JAG raised without provoking any serious attempt at refutation was whether, in corrupt times, it took a ? let?s say ... ?loudmouth? to rise above the din of The Megaphone. We, or I, speculated: ?yes.? Suppose there had arisen some statesman of high character?dignified, articulate, experienced, knowledgeable?the exact opposite of everything the conservatives claim to hate about Trump. Could this hypothetical paragon have won on Trump?s same issues? Would the conservatives have supported him? I would have?even had he been a Democrat.

Back on planet earth, that flight of fancy at least addresses what to do now. The answer to the subsidiary question?will it work??is much less clear. By ?it? I mean Trumpism, broadly defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy. We Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country through stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be restored.

But we can probably do better than we are doing now. First, stop digging. No more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures. We have made institutions, by leftist design, not merely abysmal at assimilation but abhorrent of the concept. We should try to fix that, but given the Left?s iron grip on every school and cultural center, that?s like trying to bring democracy to Russia. A worthy goal, perhaps, but temper your hopes?and don?t invest time and resources unrealistically.

By contrast, simply building a wall and enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting off the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by incentivizing the English language and American norms in the workplace. These policies will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and (we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and middle classes of all races and ethnicities. The same can be said for Trumpian trade policies and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice?only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families.

Will this work? Ask a pessimist, get a pessimistic answer. So don?t ask. Ask instead: is it worth trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can?t say, forthrightly, ?yes,? you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a conservative intellectual.

And if it doesn?t work, what then? We?ve established that most ?conservative? anti-Trumpites are in the Orwellian sense objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can?t stomach him, have you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see ? which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big, a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited government, and a 28% top marginal rate.

But for those of you who are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four following a Trump defeat? I can?t either.

The election of 2016 is a test?in my view, the final test?of whether there is any virt? left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.

http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/

SORE LOSERS

HANNIBAL BATEMAN ? JANUARY 22, 2016

Sam Francis called the American conservative movement a collection of ?beautiful losers.? To look at them now, a more apt descriptor would be ?sore losers.? The meltdown of the mandarins of Conservatism, Inc. over at National Review about Donald Trump can only be seen as the last gasp of an increasingly irrelevant ?movement.?

The heirs of Buckley would love nothing more than to exercise his inquisitorial powers over Donald Trump and the growing ?alt-right? movement. Over twenty ?movement Conservatives? penned diatribes against the Donald in the latest issue of National Review. For the most part, these barely rise above the level of ?democrats r real racists guyz!? to denunciations of ?nativism? and faux patrician concerns about ?vulgarity? as defined by Leo Strauss (I?m looking at you, Kristol). What we are seeing is no more than the death throes of Conservatism, Inc. in a wild temper tantrum.

Events have accelerated quickly. First there was GOP ?cucksultant? Rick Wilson?s pathetic whining on MSNBC about Donald Trump and the alt-right, to Rush Limbaugh?s acknowledgement that nationalism and populism had overtaken conservatism. The lame conservative movement is on life support.

The dispossession of the Beltway Right is a moment that should be celebrated and seized. Sam Francis once denounced ?the managerial verbalist class? which includes the oh so precious contributors to National Review. The controlled grammatical tyranny they have exercised over the thought of the Right is nearing its end. Instead of writing their obituaries with a period, let?s do it with an exclamation mark!

The truth is, publications like National Review and the entire ?conservative? movement are nothing more than sinecures for a b-squad managerial elite on the Potomac. Like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Conservatism, Inc. has been swift and unexpected (at least, to them). They?ve even lost the RNC (Ha!) But with the destruction of this false opposition to our reigning liberal hegemony, a new opposition can take hold.

That?s where we come in. Donald Trump has been a great beginning towards restructuring politics in the United States. In the last year we have seen moves towards nationalism, and even a nascent whiff of a white ?identity politics.? Seizing the mantle of opposition brings new possibilities and new dangers. Of course, this is the only way forward.

Francis said the choice:

Between the present elite and its challengers is not merely between one power and another. It is a choice between degeneration and rebirth, between death and survival, for survival is not a right or a gift freely granted by the powers that be. Survival, in the jungle or in political society, is a hard-won prize that depends ultimately on power itself. In this world, wrote Goethe, one must be the hammer or the anvil.The essence of the message from MARs [Middle American Revolutionaries] is that the messengers want to work the forge.
We have to be the hammer! The death of Conservatism, Inc. is going to leave an ideological void on the right. One that we should be eager to fill. Where they offered platitudes, we will offer identity.

One of the main currents that run through all of those pathetic squawkers in National Review?s ?symposium? (we get it! You?ve read Plato) is a loyalty to abstractions. They rant and rave about ?liberty,? ?the Constitution,? ?muh rights,? etc. But the truth is, none of those things matter much outside of the particular people that gave birth to them. Our people. Who are being hammered by the pincers of mass immigration and cultural marxism being pushed by our managerial elite.

National Review likes to claim that they have been ?standing athwart history yelling, ?Stop!?? In reality, they have done nothing more than stand behind history yelling ?me too! me too!? while chasing off its best minds and adopting yesterday?s liberalism. With this latest stunt, they fall further into irrelevancy.

The ?beautiful losers? of yesterday?s conservatism have morphed into today?s sore losers. We're going to wipe the floor with them.

http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2016/1/22/sore-losers

Minus all the standard leftist insults, I have to agree with xo.....to a point, C.  Now, granted, I'm up front in saying, he's not my 1st choice.....or my 3rd....or my 5th.  Point being, that it doesn't appear presidential or one of leadership, especially before a state's caucus/primary, to skip out on a debate, because he feels like he's getting picked on.  Everyone is asked tough questions, and it comes across as a little thin skinned, when he has a mini tantrum because one particular moderator is on, who asked a very pointed question.  He's on record as showering Megyn Kelly with praise for her journalistic and moderator ability, not more than a few years ago.

He could have managed this much better, and not used our wounded veterens like a chess piece in his tiff with Megyn Kelly & Fox

But let me also add....it was pretty bone headed for Fox News to put out that less than humerous memo regarding Trump & Putin.  A little classless, IMHO.  Although that never would have come out had Trump not publically declared his intentions to skip the debate

I disagree. He's letting the media know they aren't going to tell him which debates he's going to show up for, he's going to tell *them* which debates he'll show up for, and where they can put their hat if they don't like it.

Since when do politicians take orders from the media, anyway? Fox News needs Trump. Trump doesn't need them!