Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all who come by here

May this Holy time bring you all its blessings

I will be posting over the Christmas New Year period but not as much as usual

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What the USMCA does

After nearly a year of delay, this gift for the American people represents an opportunity for freer trade and a chance to grow our economy, reduce prices on many goods, and increase our exports to the world, creating more and higher-paying jobs in the process.

As we all know, just like with other Christmas gifts, you can also get the occasional ugly sweater that you really didn’t want. The same is true here. Some compromises were made to get the USMCA through Congress, like labor and environmental provisions that actually will create some barriers to trade and cause cost increases with certain goods.

However, just like you wouldn’t cancel Christmas gift-giving because you might get one of Aunt Janice’s homemade reindeer sweaters, the effect of these extra provisions doesn’t outweigh the fact that the overall agreement is truly in the best interest of America’s families, workers, businesses and farmers.

The USMCA would update the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). When NAFTA was passed in 1994, it created one of the largest free-trade zones in the world, allowing America to export more products and services, create more jobs and grow the economy.

Additionally, NAFTA allowed American businesses to develop better supply chains where they could draw from the best and most competitively priced products and raw materials from throughout North America. Businesses could trade them across borders without tariffs, lowering the overall costs of the end products. That process has helped many American products become even more competitively priced around the world.

The USMCA continues NAFTA’s benefits while also opening up new markets for American farmers to sell their goods. Specifically, U.S. agricultural producers will have better access to the Canadian market to sell products such as milk, cheese, wheat, chicken, eggs and turkey.

Moreover, one of the most significant gains with the new USMCA agreement is the assurance that an ever-growing way of doing business — digital trade — will remain free. When NAFTA was created, e-commerce didn’t really exist and buying and selling freely over the Internet wasn’t an issue. USMCA prohibits our member governments from imposing protectionist regulations that could inhibit companies and individuals from trading online across borders.

The USMCA also includes new protections for patents, copyrights and trademarks. This will benefit consumers by bringing more innovative products and services to market, as inventors and investors are able to create them without fear of them being stolen by others within the free-trade zone.

Finally, moving forward with the USMCA should allow many businesses to get back on track with expansions of their facilities and the hiring of new workers — plans that had been put on hold because of the uncertainty involved in waiting for the details of a new trade agreement. Knowing the rules helps to alleviate the uncertainty that businesses have felt.

As to the ugly-sweater part of this agreement, compromises were made to get it through Congress. The USMCA contains some provisions that actually create barriers to trade rather than free it up — making goods and services more expensive or stifling trade altogether. While certain environmental standards and labor standards, like imposing minimum wages and standards for working conditions in Mexico, may seem well-intentioned, they create an anathema to free trade — more government interference — and also weaken Mexico’s sovereign ability to determine its own laws.

Another provision increases the “rules of origin” requirements for automakers that could actually increase prices on automobiles. USMCA would require that 75 percent of auto content be made in North America. If automakers couldn’t get or didn’t use parts that met that threshold, they would be required to pay a tariff on them.

While this provision is meant to drive more automotive production into North America, it could actually have the unintended consequence of increasing costs and making auto manufacturing less competitive in the global marketplace, leading to lower sales.

Because of these provisions, USMCA should not be considered a model for future agreements. Free-trade agreements should focus narrowly on facilitating free trade. However, these compromises reflect the realities of our divided government and they don’t outweigh the fact that the overall agreement remains a solid win for the American people.

The bottom line: USMCA means freer trade, and freer trade means billions of dollars in new economic activity, new jobs, higher wages, and lower prices for the American people and for our North American neighbors. That’s a win-win-win everyone can get behind.

SOURCE 

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Warren ducked the toughest questions in the Democratic debate

Jeff Jacoby

[Note: This comment was written immediately following the sixth televised Democratic presidential debate in Los Angeles on Thursday night.]

Seven of the Democratic candidates for president took the stage in a debate sponsored by PBS and Politico. They were former Vice President Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as well as three lower-tier candidates: Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and billionaire activist Tom Steyer.

There was a moment, just before the end of last night's Democratic debate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, when Elizabeth Warren seemed to be on the point of directly answering an awkward question.

One of the PBS moderators had asked the debaters if, in the spirit of the season, there was another candidate on the stage to whom they would like to give a gift or from whom they wished to ask forgiveness. Andrew Yang cheerfully offered to give each candidate a copy of his book. Pete Buttigieg lamely announced that his "gift" would be for "literally anybody up here to become president." Then Warren, looking earnest, said she was going to ask for forgiveness.

"I know that sometimes I get really worked up," the Massachusetts senator began. "Sometimes I get a little hot." But that, she said, is because when you take 100,000 selfies with fans on the campaign trail, you hear a lot of sad stories, like the one about the people in Nevada who have to split their insulin three ways. "And that's why I'm running."

So whom would she ask for forgiveness? Warren never actually got around to answering that question.

It wasn't the only question she never actually got around to answering.

Early on, Warren was asked about critiques of her much-touted plan to soak the rich with steep new wealth taxes. Many analysts — including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and experts at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School — have been pointing out significant shortcomings in her plan, which would raise far less revenue than she claims and inflict considerable damage to the economy. How, Warren was asked, would she answer "top economists" who say her tax plan would stifle growth and investment?

"Oh, they're just wrong," she asserted. But she didn't respond to any of their arguments. She merely pivoted to her standard talking points about all the pie in the sky her "two-cent" tax will pay for.

At another point, the candidates were asked to answer Barack Obama's recent jab that the world's problems are usually caused by "old people . . . not getting out of the way." How would Warren — who, if elected, would be the oldest president in history — answer legitimate concerns about age? The senator tossed off a quip ("I'd also be the youngest woman ever inaugurated"), but then ducked the question and talked about her 100,000 selfies.

Why is Warren proposing free college tuition even for the wealthy? No answer. If Warren donated to Buttigieg's campaign, would the fact that she's a millionaire "pollute" his campaign? No answer.

For a long time, Warren has been laboring to sell herself as the candidate with all the answers. Instead, she's acquired a reputation as the politician likeliest to duck tough questions. In last night's debate, Warren had plenty of sass and attitude and stage presence. What she didn't have, even after all these months, was the courage to give clear answers to direct questions.

SOURCE 

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The Right to Destroy Cities

This week, the Supreme Court effectively mandated continued legal tolerance for homelessness across major cities on the West Coast of the United States.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that Americans have a right to sleep on the streets, and that it amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Constitution to levy fines based on such behavior.

That court—a repository of stupidity and radicalism, the Mos Eisley of our nation’s federal bench—decided that writing a $25 ticket to people “camping” on the sidewalk is precisely the sort of brutality the Founding Fathers sought to prohibit in stopping torture under the Eighth Amendment.

That ruling was so patently insane that even liberal politicians such as Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas joined the appeal attempt. “Letting the current law stand handicaps cities and counties from acting nimbly to aid those perishing on the streets, exacerbating unsafe and unhealthy conditions that negatively affect our most vulnerable residents,” he explained.

But the 9th Circuit ruling will stand. That ruling followed a separate 2006 ruling from the same court, which found that cities could not ban people from sleeping in public places. In this case, Judge Marsha Berzon, in language so twisted it would make yoga pioneer Bikram Choudhury jealous, wrote that “the state may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places'” and thus could not criminalize the “consequence” of being homeless.

It is worth noting that being homeless is not a “state” of being. It is not an immutable characteristic. It is an activity and can certainly be regulated.

That doesn’t mean the best solution is prosecution of those living on the street—a huge swath of homeless people are mentally ill or addicted to drugs and would benefit from better laws concerning involuntary commitment or mandatory drug rehabilitation. But to suggest that cities cannot do anything to effectively police those sleeping on the streets is to damn those cities to the spread of disease, the degradation of public spaces, and an increase in street crime.

Hilariously, Berzon contended that this 9th Circuit ruling would not mandate cities to provide full housing to the homeless; it would just prohibit them from moving or arresting the homeless for living on the streets. Which is somewhat like Tom Hagen telling Jack Woltz that while he doesn’t have to cast Johnny Fontane in his new war film, he can’t stop the Corleones from rearranging the family stable.

But here’s the problem: Cities that have attempted to provide increased housing for the homeless, despite some early successes, have seen their problems return.

Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles have attempted to build new housing. It’s been an expensive failure. It turns out that the carrot of housing must be accompanied by the stick of law enforcement. If you cannot compel drug addicts to enter treatment, or paranoid schizophrenics to take their medication, or those who refuse to live indoors to do so, homelessness will not abate.

As it is, the Supreme Court has damned America’s major cities to the continuation of the festering problem of homelessness. And that problem won’t be solved by judges who attempt to force social policy through deliberately misreading the Constitution, or who believe they are championing “freedom” for tens of thousands of Americans who are seriously mentally ill or addicted to drugs.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

POLITICAL THEATER: It's official: House Democrats close up shop without sending articles of impeachment to the Senate (PJ Media)

WANDERING MINDS WANTS TO KNOW: If impeachment articles are not delivered, did impeachment happen? Sure, it's a stupid question ... but we're living in stupid times. (National Review)

"THIS LEGISLATION TOUCHES ALL 50 STATES": Senate sends 2020 budget to Trump's desk (National Review)

FOR THE RECORD: Twenty-one things 18-year-olds can do under spending bill before they can legally buy cigarettes (The Federalist)

IN CASE OF BOREDOM... Here is everything you intentionally missed during Thursday night's Democrat debate (The Daily Caller)

WHAT DID HE KNOW, AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? U.S. Attorney John Durham is scrutinizing ex-CIA Director John Brennan's role in Russian-interference findings (The New York Times)

SENATE SHOULD PASS IT EARLY NEXT YEAR: United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal passes House with broad bipartisan support (National Review)

MORE EVIDENCE OF RACISM: Trump signs "groundbreaking" legislation supporting historically black colleges and universities (The Daily Caller)

POLICY: Big teacher-pay proposals are missing the mark (The Hill)

POLICY: Russia's Eastern Mediterranean strategy — implications for the U.S. and Israel (Hudson Institute)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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America's Immigration Dilemma

What makes an immigrant culturally qualified to enter the United States?

Most people who are presenting themselves at our Southern borders from Mexico, and South and Central America, and others who are seeking asylum mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, are from countries outside the historical process. Many of these countries are not just political rogue states, but also economic rogue states as well. They have failed to put into practice a set of sound economic policies that satisfy the basic needs of a majority of their citizens. Failed states are sinkholes in the world. They actively detract value from the region in much the same way that condemned buildings used by criminals spread mayhem and drag down home values throughout a neighborhood. Since regions are interconnected via a vast causal network of interlocking social, political and fiscal systems, they contaminate the entire liberal order.

It has, therefore, been part of America’s liberal, egalitarian and benevolent policy to admit such persons who stand little chance of making anything substantial of their lives in their own countries entrance into the United States.

This is and remains the greatness of America. People came here and they wanted to love America and become Americans. They came with no sense of entitlements, no sense of aggrievement—only with a burning desire to make something of their lives and, in doing so, to make superlative or small contributions to the moral meaning of America. As they stepped into the future America promised them, they, by their efforts and suffusion of the landscape with an original assemblage of who they were, simultaneously co-created a future template for others to inhabit.

But the immigrant demographics of this great country are changing. We are witnessing individuals who are bringing their illiberal values into the United States and wishing to implement them and re-make the country entirely into their own illiberal image. In the case of many Islamic transplants, they claim to be moderates in their religious faith. Yet they are complicit in the radical factions of a political ideology many take to be a religion of peace. By default, they do not condemn the growing fealty to the idea that Sharia law can and should run parallel to American jurisprudential law. They do not condemn the growing anti-Semitism and Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) campaigns sweeping college campuses which, incidentally, are not generated by even radical Muslims, but by mainstream moderates who view Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state, and America as an evil imperial nation.

The Hispanic populations which include several asylum seekers are from statist countries who have been reared on the idea that their fate is not their responsibility, and that the state must take care of all their needs. These individuals are being courted and entreated by a vast left-wing socialist faction within the liberal party that is no longer considered a fringe element of the party, but rather, a major and crucial identifying marker of it. Politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declare that as Democratic Socialists they are not just going to change the economic policies of our free market system, but also that they intend to fundamentally change the values that underlie it.

We should not, therefore, be surprised that hordes of undocumented residents upon entering the United States are demanding and are receiving free health care, free education and are demanding the right to vote. They often treat America as if she were the dumping ground for all their needs and unmet desires. They are more likely to vote this country into socialism and, therefore, economic ruin—to say nothing of violating the moral foundations on which capitalism rests. This includes the idea that each person is an end in himself who deserves the just rewards of his labor, that his brain and its material applications—his property cannot be nationalized or redistributed by government fiat. Major studies reveal that only 45% of young Americans view capitalism positively, while 51% have a fondness for socialism.

If Americans have reason to believe that a loss to their cultural identities and economic ways of life are going to be challenged by a “new immigrant ethos” that differed from the old ethos, then they have a right to ask a fundamental new question: What makes an immigrant culturally qualified to enter the United States? What sort of sensibilities ought he or she to have? If such immigrants are predisposed to simply transplanting their illiberal values with no desire to assimilate into becoming Americans, should they be let in? If their voting proclivities can be predicted and such proclivities translates into voting into existence a real existential threat facing us today: socialism—then ought we to let in such persons?

This sort of moral vigilance over the republic was perhaps never so needed as it is today as we face a multiplicity of cultural wars. The professoriate has grown more radical in cultivating universities that have become indoctrination centers and, therefore, national security threats. It has waged a war against reason, morality, the values of Americanism, produced a climate of Americaphobia, anti-free speech, massive entitlement programs, and a desire to abolish the second amendment. In the name of a postmodern philosophy it advocates nihilism and cultural relativism.

It is under such open hatred for Western values, the shameless promotion of the Islamification of our country, indiscriminate toleration of all values except conservative ones, and the willful intention to destroy the moral and economic base of capitalism that they seek to re-socialize the sensibilities of immigrants into inhabiting a new Anti-American ethos. It is one whose holders are welfare-dependent, whose agency can be expropriated by a managerial class that can promise them the guarantee of absolute outcomes resulting from their exercised efforts.

Not all persons have ever been allowed into the future. Some, for various reasons, have been left behind. But against the backdrop of all that is written here, we may say that a deliberate policy of moral-rational exclusion from entrance into the future can be the goal of a civilized republic if and when it can rationally and objectively identify those whose admittance could annihilate its moral, cultural and  economic development. This may sound like a hard formula to implement. Nevertheless, a social order of the unfit, by the unfit, and for the unfit is no recipe for civilizational continuity—to say nothing of the grandeur, exaltation, majesty and, as always, the unbridled expression of the luminous potential of man.

Today, we are witnessing a systematic attempt by the Left to alter the cultural character of our republic. Many companies, swayed by a logic of cultural relativism, have become sharia compliant in order to attract and manage Muslim wealth. Universities and private institutions of learning and think tanks are the recipients of millions of dollars from state sponsors of terrorism from countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. There is a growing proliferation of Middle Eastern Studies Programs and Palestinian Studies Programs on our university campuses. These political maneuverings, no doubt, are part of a large indoctrination agenda by the left to Islamify our American civilization by re-socializing the sensibilities of our young people into becoming future Jihadists and haters of America. The key players in this campus reform movement, the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas surrogate institution of which 200 chapters exist on USA campuses, are free not only to promote BDS campaigns against Israel. Most importantly, the goals of the Islamicist movements is consistent with the larger goals of their international schemes: to establish an Islamic Caliphate right here in our great republic of the United State of America.

The re-alteration of civic character is also being encouraged by an outright disregard for law when it is broken in the name of creating sanctuary cities. A form of emotionalism that pits undocumented residents against laws that determine legal residency accounts for the demonization of the concept of law itself, and the elevation of illegal actions to the form of cult heroism.

Hence our future will be blocked. The future blockers are unable to deal with the very notion of a future because the future itself is only a promise. It holds no predictable results correlative to efforts. But leftists want a predictable utopia. If we want to keep the future alive, it is freedom and liberty, and the timeless values of America that must be preserved. Those values need inoculation. Not everyone should be allowed into the future because too many are devoted to the destruction of its possibility.

And so, in our conclusion we face the challenge of how to answer the question: how do we keep our future open? We spoke about a policy of moral-rational exclusion to prevent the social ballasts and the destroyers of our Republic from foreclosing the future by suggesting they cannot be allowed into the future of which the United States is both a symbol and a reality. We must now think about a policy of strategic inclusion of those immigrants who are culturally qualified to preserve the civic DNA of our republic. Wherever they come from in the world, those who are admitted into the moral republic of the United States of America, must pass stricter cultural and civic qualifying tests. Their fealty to the republic must be demonstrable in ways determined by our appropriate government agencies. Those exclusive elites admitted must have a pre-disposition to love America. They ought to have a set of meritocratic skills that can enhance the spiritual, economic, moral and political reputation and character of the republic. They ought not be parasitic drainages and suckers with little to offer that can enhance the grandeur and nobility of the republic.

My sense is that Western Europe is culturally over. The Islamicists have won. The crime waves traceable to migrant populations, and the increasing anti-Semitism sweeping European capitals, the Islamic colonization of France, the Netherlands, England, and the Scandinavian countries will have serious consequences. With President Trump’s recent executive order recognizing Judaism not just as a religion, but as a nationality, I submit that there will be a wave of ambitious Europeans eager to flee the cultural hell-holes their countries have become. They are going to be the smartest, and the most talented of individuals. They will speak exemplary English, and they will be multi-lingual. Furthermore, they will contribute most to making the American Republic a superlative world power. We should accept them into our benevolent nation.

A vast number of European populist governments will rise up to control the Islamification of their countries after experiencing such brain drains. Rather than wait for the exodus of such talented immigrants, the United States should actively recruit them. They are the future. Like the Jewish people, they have been the creators of the historical process itself; innovators of the idea that man has a proper end to which he aspires: the fullest development of his capabilities, and the maximization of his highest modes of potentialities. These individuals are not just the promise of a future. They will create the very existential conditions that have, in the past, opened up the future. Moral pioneers and heirs and benefactors of Western civilization, they will play a pivotal role, along with the exceptional people of the United States of America, in opening up an endless new horizon of an indefinite future in which all our lives can be lived out.

SOURCE 

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To truly understand American politics, you need a translator

Recently we were given a rare inside glance at the true meaning of politics in America, not the sugar-coated day-dreams of the establishment old-guard or the spitting rage and indignation of the professional Left.  Instead we got to see exactly how the whole thing works.  It is not pretty but none of it should be a surprise.

The facts are simple.  After years of propaganda, threats and outright attempts at legal bribery from the federal government, the then Republican controlled General Assembly in Virginia enacted a massive expansion of the government socialist healthcare program known as Medicaid.  More than 400,000 more people were to be included in a program that is literally breaking the backs of taxpayers at the national and state levels.

The Medicaid expansion had been a key element of Obamacare, that reckless exercise in Soviet-style central planning that has been an underlying factor in politics for a decade.  The Republicans caved when offered a “deal” from Democrat Governor Ralph Northam.  If the Republicans would just expand Medicaid by 400,000 people – eventually costing Virginia taxpayers billions of dollars – the Governor would ask the federal government for a waiver to require some portion of the new people to find or seek work.

Known as the work requirement, the Left and their lackeys in the media and the Democrat Party howl with pain anytime the issue of asking someone who the taxpayers support to contribute anything.  And they did again.  But many more seasoned political observers warned it was a ruse, the second they had the opportunity to break the deal and simply ignore the work requirement they would.

And predictably, these observers were labeled every name under the sun.  Don’t you know that “compromise” is the essence of our government?  Why do you refuse to trust the Democrat regime, accept their word that a deal is a deal?  “Obstructionists” screamed the corporate media propagandists.

In the end, a handful of so-called “Republicans” voted with the Democrats to accept the “deal.”  Fast forward to this week.  Governor Northam announced that Virginia would “take a pause” in efforts to require the work rule.  And, on cue, the few Republicans who accept this nonsense expressed their “disappointment.”    The pathetic little play had moved into the final act.  Government expands, taxpayers get reamed, Republicans shake their heads and pledge to “get them next time,” and the Democrats reap the benefits of the growing dependent class.

Were this the only time we had seen this obscene theater we should shrug our shoulders and look to return to the fight to restore liberty in America.  But it isn’t.  This is but the most recent of a continual string of such defeats the stretch back many decades for the Virginia GOP. The quislings there still sit like vultures in a tree waiting for the next chance to swoop down and grab defeat from the jaws of victory.

But recriminations aside, there is one big lesson here, a lesson that anyone concerned about the direction of our country must take to heart and practice every day.

The lesson is simple translation: There is no dealing with the Left.  Their word is no good.  You cannot make a deal with someone who thinks lying and stealing are mere tactics, which the Marxists actually brag about.

Ayn Rand captured the essence of this situation when she wrote, “Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”  Hopefully Governor Northam’s recent exercise in back-stabbing will drive this message home.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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They're called "The Infantile Left" For a Reason!

By Rich Kozlovich

In 2012 my friend Alan Caruba, now passed, wrote an article entitled, Why Liberals are Like Zombies, saying:

"I hope Barack Obama lives to a very old age. I want him to look back at the wreckage of the Democratic Party and the senility of Liberalism that has wreaked such havoc on the world stage. To me, Liberalism is a zombie philosophy, devoid of any connection with reality, but still able to cause great harm."

He goes on to quote R.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., founder and editor of The American Spectator saying:

"Obama is the ultimate culmination of what Tyrrell calls “the Infantile Leftists”, citing the various candidates for the presidency who reflect the immaturity of the 1960’s generation of whom the Occupy Wall Street children are the latest pathetic gasp of what Tyrell regards as a failed political movement."

It turns out liberals in both parties find themselves in a quandary. Their policies, at all levels of government, are bankrupting the nation. There's just not enough money to throw at everyone, even now when the national government is bringing in more money than ever in the history of the nation, we're still running deficits.

Their traditional allies, like public unions and teacher unions, have eaten up so much of the public’s finances they're going to bankrupt a lot of local and state governments with their insane deals, especially in California, with financial obligations the public can't possibly meet, just to get re-elected.

In 1935 American humorist Will Rogers said:

"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."

Little did everyone know how prescient that was. Let's explore this.

Unions have traditionally been the backbone of Democrat politics and policy for untold decades. If unions have been the Democrat party's backbone, then black and Jewish supporters have been the ribs of Democrat politics and policy for a large part of the 20th century.

Yet, it was the Republicans who passed all the civil rights laws that benefited blacks. Laws Democrats fought against. Laws they now claim credit for as their own.

But what's happening now? The Democrat party is now finally and openly declaring themselves as the socialists they've always been. And as everyone who reads history books knows, leftists have no stable moral foundation other than to do whatever it takes to get and hold onto power. Even if it means abandoning the values they previously embraced.

The Democrat party is embracing unrestricted illegal immigration, which neither blacks or unions like, as it will impact jobs and wages. Worse yet, they now worship at the Alter of Gaia, embracing the worst environmental concepts and policies ever. All of which hurts unions, the poor, the nation, and the world as a whole.

Two groups that have absolutely been foundational to liberalism, are Big Labor and Big Green, and yet their goals are diametrically opposing. Big Green wants to destroy the economy with their policies, not to mention their desire to reduce the world's population by about five billion people, and bring about worldwide communism. Big Labor wants to grow labor, which can only be done if there's a robust economy, and no communist state.

Will Democrats have to turn on Big Labor to appease Big Green? They have! The XL pipeline is just one example.

Will they have to turn on Big Green to appease Big Labor? But do the public labor unions really belong in the traditional Big Labor category? No! So, their goals fall in line with Big Green and any other left wing scheme that creates Big Government.

Both of these groups are coming under attack from the public, who will the party abandon? They lost coal mining regions to Republicans due to their efforts to shut down coal fired power plants, and Biden says he intends to make that an important part of his administration if elected President. These are the same people Obama said irrationally cling to their Bibles and guns. These are the people Hillary called "The Despicables"! And now they know where they stand.

Illegal immigration is a jobs issue. Unions and blacks are against open borders, as they will have to compete with these illegals for jobs and wages, and they don’t like it. Unions and blacks have been foundational to the Democrat party for decades, and yet the Democrat party embraces policies that are detrimental to those bases, and those two groups are finally getting it. It's even been reported a number of polls show 30% of blacks support Trump.

Will that impact the 2020 election. You bet! No Democrat in the nation can be elected if 30% of black voters choose to vote Republican, or simply refuse to vote because of their dismay of what Democrats are doing.

As for the illegals, especially Hispanics, they want ever more latitude regarding what is legal, and of course, everyone on the left just ignores the decent, patient and honest immigrants trying to get in this nation through legal channels.

Jews have traditionally been liberal Democrat voters for almost a hundred years. Liberal Jews has been a rock hard foundation for liberal policies and candidates. However, that is changing.

The leaders of the Democrat party and leftist movement, have turned anti-Semitic and anti-Israel to the point Jews worldwide, even in Europe, are being openly persecuted and they're scared. And rightly so!

Jewish students in prominent American universities are subject to abuse and harassment from Muslims, and these abusers are being supported by the administrations of these institutions. Yet, New York Jews still vote for the very leftists who support such activity. However, I see that changing in 2020. I've even had a liberal Jewish customer in her 80's who says she will vote for Trump. I believe there are a lot more who will also vote for Trump in 2020, but they're afraid to say so.

The greatest act of infantility by the Democrat party has been their effort to impeach Donald Trump as the President of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanors. An effort Conrad Black called:

"This sordid, contemptible impeachment ruse ......another fraud...........The vitriolic antagonism of about 90% of the press, though, and the fear and loathing of the political class, which he assaulted in its entirety, have sustained an artificial levitation of morbid expectation that he will be overthrown and removed......kept alive by a Star Chamber.............It cannot produce a serious offense that the president could actually be accused of committing.........presided over by a pathological public liar...........Adam Schiff........Trump-haters so rabid they should be in straitjackets and padded cells".

Compare this to the Clinton impeachment.  While the Democrat party, the media and leftists everywhere declared it was about sex, in reality the charge was perjury.  Perjury Clinton actually committed. Perjury that was provable.  Perjury he perpetrated over and over again.  Perjury, that used to be considered a serious crime.  If it was a crime, then it was a crime of high office, making it a high crime.

His defense was a logical fallacy, a fallacy that was immaterial to whether or not Clinton committed a crime.  If he did, then it was a crime of high office.

In the article, High Crimes Against Impeachment the I and I Editorial Board stated:

"No one can deny that Clinton lied to the grand jury, and indeed his legal defense in the Senate trial was not to deny it, but that it all boiled down to the question of “Would it put at risk the liberties of the people to retain the president in office?” – in other words, having a perjurer as commander in chief wasn’t going to imperil national security, or our domestic freedoms as Americans."

As we review this situation one has to ask is this. What reason do these leftist loons have to exist at all? Answer: They exist to have power. That is all the more reason to reject their views, their actions, their philosophy,and reject them personally.

I keep hearing that the left isn't evil,  it's just wrong. Now that’s wrong! The left is wrong because it really is evil, if you correlate evil with evil ends and outcomes.  Evil is as evil does, and their policies are blatantly misanthropic.

The fascist/communist monsters of the 20th century, along with the environmentalists, have killed over 200 million innocent people in the last 75 years, and the greenies are still at it. All representing the left.

Leftist thinking may be infantile, and they may act like spoiled children, having tantrums when they can’t have their way. Tantrums better known as violent demonstrations. But what they represent is evil, and anyone who supports them shares in the blame for the evil they have wrought.

SOURCE 

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Voters are rejecting Leftist  authoritarianism

Disaffection with politics as usual has once again upended the old order, and the Conservative Party victory in the British election shows that such sentiment is here to stay. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a majority in the House of Commons, and it now appears that Brexit will finally happen. This win is sure to have implications for the American election next year.

Voters in liberal democracies across the world have rejected rule by the political elite, who had until a few years ago held sway over the levers of power. It all started with the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016 and has since swept across Europe in a rejection of the Brussels fiat exercised by the European Union. The recent Canadian election saw the out of touch Liberal Party of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hemorrhage seats. The election of President Donald Trump was not an isolated event of disaffection with the elite, but the most powerful and consequential.

British voters turned out largely for the Conservative Party because of its promise to proceed with Brexit, the ultimate affront to the status quo in Brussels. American voters also turned out for Trump and his campaign against the establishment three years to drain the swamp in Washington. Voters on both sides of the Atlantic want elected officials who focus on popular issues rather than maintaining the power of the political elite.

The British political elite and its establishment officials, for the most part, refused to take up the issues voters care most about. In the case of Brexit, they simply refused to follow through with the mandate of the people. The political elite in fact were so horrified at the very prospect of leaving the European Union that delaying Brexit became more of a punitive exercise than anything. The political elite began to lose control as a result of the Brexit referendum and have done everything in their power to subvert the will of the voters, who are intent on draining their own swamp in London.

The victory for Johnson and the Conservative Party is an affirmation that the United Kingdom will actually leave the European Union, which in itself is a sound rejection of the status quo. Its exit from the European Union, a monolithic deep state bureaucracy, is now almost guaranteed. The British election this month shows the world that the “leave” camp meant what it voted for in the 2016 referendum. We are witnessing the same scenario play out in the United States with regard to the impeachment of Trump.

In the same way the British media and political elite sought to overturn Brexit, the liberal media and Democrats wish to cancel the results of the 2016 American election by removing Trump from office. Democrats told the nation they would impeach Trump from the first day of his presidency. The talking heads and pundits oversold every leak or agency report in the hopes that it might derail the administration. Finally, after three years of muddling through, Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment.

Trump will most certainly be acquitted in the Senate, regardless of what impeachment cheerleaders have to say. Impeachment is now shaping up to parallel the affirmation of British voters to proceed with Brexit. Trump arrived in Washington with a clear mandate from American voters, many of whom were not even Republican or conservative. These were people who may have voted for Barack Obama twice before, but their aversion to and disgust with the status quo sent them over the edge. Impeachment is bound to energize voters sick of the way things are done in Washington.

No one should be surprised when the polls reflect increased support for Trump in 2020, just as they did for Johnson and the Conservative Party ahead of the British election this month. If the results from across the pond are any indication of how American voters might view the status quo, we are looking at another four years of Trump in the White House.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

MAGA ACHIEVEMENTS: While the media and his critics focused on the bitterly divided House impeachment hearings, President Trump last week collected the most agenda wins yet (Washington Examiner)

OR MAYBE THE FEARS WERE UNFOUNDED TO BEGIN WITH? U.S. economy shakes free of recession fears in striking turnaround since August (The Washington Post)

LEFT-WING VIOLENCE: Antifa's deadly year shows the extremism on the far Left (Newsweek)

BLUE LIVES MATTER: Arkansas police officer "executed" in car was shot 10 times in the head, investigators say as video emerges (Fox News)

POLICY: The Chinese economic miracle: How much is real, and how much is a mirage? (American Enterprise Institute)

MIKE LEE WAS RIGHT: FISA court issues rare public order condemning FBI for Russia-probe abuses and demanding reforms (National Review)

MOUNTING EVIDENCE: New attestation shows Hunter Biden-Ukraine payments flagged as "suspicious" in early 2016 (The Daily Wire)

THEN: Much of "Trump country" was in recession during 2016 campaign (Reuters)

NOW: Dow Jones officially exceeds 28,333, up 10,000 points since Trump's election despite doomsday predictions (The Federalist)

D'OH! Vox Media fires hundreds of freelancers due to law trumpeted by Vox (The Washington Free Beacon)

CLASS-ACTION SUIT: New York clergy sex abuse victims are suing the pope — claiming in a landmark lawsuit filed Tuesday that he and the Vatican were aware that a significant number of priests were molesting children and kept it secret (New York Post)

STOMPING ON THE "SOLE" OF AMERICA: New Nike Kaepernick shoe honors date he first sat for national anthem (The Daily Wire)

POLICY: USMCA will have a surprising effect on commercial real estate (Washington Examiner)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Donald Trump certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth.  But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?

The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?

Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the emoluments clause of the Constitution?

The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?

Special counsel Robert Mueller's 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?

The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump's tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?

Now, frustrated Democrats are trying to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find reasons why and how.

Most presidents might seem angry after three years of that. Yet in paradoxical fashion, Trump suddenly appears more composed than at any other time in his volatile presidency.

Ironically, Trump's opponents and enemies are the ones who have become publicly unhinged.

Leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden recently had a complete meltdown while campaigning in Iowa. Biden called a questioner who asked about his son Hunter's lucrative job with a Ukrainian energy company "a damn liar." An animated Biden also challenged the 83-year-old ex-Marine and retired farmer to a push-up contest or footrace.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, fared little better. On the first day of his committee's impeachment inquiry, Nadler stacked the witness list by bringing in three left-wing law professors, as opposed to one Republican centrist witness -- as if partisan academics might sway the nation.

None of the three presented any new information or evidence. All three seemed angry, petulant and condescending. At least one came into the proceedings with paper and video trails of anti-Trump animus.

The nadir came when one of the witnesses, Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, was reduced to making fun of the president's 13-year-old son.

At one point, Nadler appeared to fall asleep while chairing the hearing.

Nadler's Judiciary Committee was supposed to be empowered by the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment report. But the contents of that report were overshadowed by the revelation that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the Intelligence Committee, had obtained data on the private phone calls of ranking Republican House Intelligence Committee Member Devin Nunes, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, journalist John Solomon, former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas and others. Schiff had obtained the data via congressional subpoena.

If the chairman of a committee overseeing an impeachment inquiry is secretly digging into the phone records of his own colleague, a reporter and the personal attorney of the president of the United States, how can anything he reports be trusted?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference to announce plans to proceed with articles of impeachment. But she would not say which particular charges would be brought against the president.

Then, Pelosi lost her cool and shook her finger at a reporter who simply asked her, "Do you hate the president?"

At that point, a furious Pelosi shouted back, "Don't mess with me!"

She then retreated behind the shield of her religion by lecturing the questioner that as a good Catholic, she was simply too moral to be capable of hatred. Pelosi finished her sermon by boasting that she "prayed" for the unfortunate Trump.

At a NATO summit in London, Trump was playing the unaccustomed role of NATO defender by challenging French President Emmanuel Macron's curt dismissal of the alliance. Macron said NATO is experiencing "brain death."

Meanwhile, in an unguarded moment, a few heads of NATO nations crowded around Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he chattered and ridiculed Trump in the fashion of a gossipy teen -- unknowingly being recorded on video, much to the delight of Trump's critics back home.

The common denominator of all this petulance is exasperation over the inability to derail Trump.

Trump's many enemies fear he will be re-elected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become.

Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.

SOURCE 

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Actually, class warriors, skyrocketing inequality may be a myth

Jeff Jacoby

DEMONIZING THE RICH and condemning disparities of wealth have been pillars of Democratic Party politics for decades. Franklin Delano Roosevelt lambasted wealthy Americans who "did not want to pay a fair share" in 1936. Barack Obama pronounced income inequality "the defining issue of our time" in 2012. Few left-wing tropes are more familiar than the avarice of the well-to-do.

Bernie Sanders denounces current levels of wealth inequality as "outrageous," "grotesque," and "immoral." Elizabeth Warren accuses the rich of having "rigged the system" to "hollow out" the middle class.

These days, the most fervent bash-the-rich rhetoric comes from Democratic senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom are proposing steep new taxes on the accumulated wealth of America's most affluent families. Sanders denounces current levels of wealth inequality as "outrageous," "grotesque," and "immoral," and declares flatly that "billionaires should not exist." Warren accuses the rich of having "rigged the system" to "hollow out" the middle class, and insists that "runaway wealth concentration" is poisoning American society.

The idea that wealth and income inequality is off the charts — that the "1 percent" has cleaned up at the expense of everyone else — has gotten considerable support from the work of three influential economists, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. It's their research that Warren and Sanders rely on when they decry the super-rich for amassing ever more wealth while the vast majority of Americans is losing ground.

But what if Piketty, et al., got it wrong?

"Just as ideas about inequality have completed their march from the academy to the frontlines of politics, researchers have begun to look again," The Economist reported last month. "And some are wondering whether inequality has in fact risen as much as claimed — or, by some measures, at all."

Two of those researchers are economists Gerald Auten of the US Treasury and David Splinter of Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. In a recent paper that has drawn respectful attention in the profession, they make the case that Piketty, Saez, and Zucman fumbled their data, and that their most explosive conclusions about rising inequality aren't supported by the facts. They conclude that, once taxes and government transfer payments are properly accounted for, the share of income going to the top 1 percent in the United States has barely changed since the early 1960s.

One point critics have been making for years is that data on wealth and income ought to reflect the nearly $2 trillion paid out by the government each year via Medicare, Medicaid, and other social welfare programs. Since most taxes are paid by upper-income Americans, while most transfer payments go to lower-income Americans, a good deal of inequality is constantly being neutralized by government antipoverty spending.

To that familiar correction, Auten and Splinter add more subtle ones.

They note, for example, that Piketty and his colleagues focused on tax returns filed by households, which show the income reported by the 1 percent outstripping everyone else. But the focus on household income, as opposed to individual income, skews the bottom line. Marriage rates have fallen disproportionately among poorer Americans, which means that income is divided among more lower-income households, though not among more people. When incomes are ranked by individuals, there is a lot less inequality.

Something else those beating the class-warfare drum tend to ignore is the sharp increase in corporate profits flowing to middle-class taxpayers through pension and retirement funds. Thanks to the advent of IRAs and 401(k)s, corporate ownership has been radically democratized. In 1960, Auten and Splinter point out, retirement funds owned just 4 percent of the US stock market. Today that figure is above 50 percent.

Yet another correction has to do with the way US incomes have been reported to the IRS since 1986. A major change in tax law that year encouraged small businesses to operate as "pass-through" entities, meaning that their income — previously included in corporate returns — could henceforth be included in individual tax returns. As a result, high incomes that used to be sheltered within corporate tax filings began getting reported as individual income: a surge in personal wealth on paper, but not in reality.

Academic analyses of taxpayers' earnings can be "fiendishly complicated," the Economist acknowledges. Politicians and ideologues generally aren't interested in nuance; they prefer to treat issues of income, wealth, and inequality as black-and-white morality tales. But the incessant claim by Sanders and Warren that working-class Americans are being impoverished as plutocrats in the "tippy top" grow ever richer is just not plausible.

There is more to wealth, after all, than hourly wages. "If you argue that income has shrunk you also have to claim that four decades' worth of innovation in goods and services, from mobile phones and video streaming to cholesterol-lowering statins, have not improved middle-earners' lives," the Economist comments. "That is simply not credible." As Don Boudreaux of George Mason University points out, the humblest working-class American today enjoys a standard of living and an array of amenities and comforts — from air travel to contact lenses to overnight package delivery — far superior to most of what even a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller could have commanded a century ago.

Perhaps this is why progressive passion for soaking the rich and closing the wealth gap rarely seem to be shared by most voters. When Gallup earlier this year asked Americans to name the "most important problem facing this country today," just 1 percent cited the gap between rich and poor. When respondents were given a list of a dozen "priorities" for Congress and the president to tackle, "the distribution of income and wealth" tied for last place.

Contrary to progressive belief, America is not divided into rigid economic strata. The incomes of the wealthy often decline, while many taxpayers go from being poor at one point to not-poor at another. Research shows that more than one-tenth of Americans will make it all the way to the top 1 percent for at least one year during their working lives.

The very rich, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "are different from you and me." Are they, though? You'd never know it to hear Warren and Sanders fulminate, but the gaping inequality they rail against might just be an illusion.

SOURCE 

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Trump Now Leads All of His Likely Rivals in National Polls, Even Biden

The fallout from the Democrats' impeachment of Trump keeps getting worse for Democrats. Not only do a plurality now oppose impeachment and removal, but Trump is now leading all of his likely Democrat rivals for the White House in head-to-head match-ups, according to a new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll.

According to the recent national survey, President Trump is "defeating former Vice President Joe Biden by 3 percentage points, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by 5 points, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren by 8 points." He also bests Pete Buttigieg by 10 points, and Michael Bloomberg by 9 points.

While obviously polls this far out from the election are hardly reliable indicators, several factors make it clear that Trump is in a very strong position. At this time in the 2012 election cycle, Obama was consistently beating Romney in national polls. Given Trump's already overwhelmingly negative media coverage, the partisan impeachment hearings of the Democrats were the best chance to knock Trump's numbers down, but instead of all his likely rivals crushing him in national polls, he's now beating them.  What does that tell you?

Trump spent most of the 2016 election underwater in terms of national polling—so much so that pundits were almost universally predicting Hillary's coronation.

With the exception of an economic collapse, the height of an impeachment inquiry should be the worst possible thing for Trump. He's had Democrats being given hours and hours of air time claiming him to be a criminal. Yet, here we are — support for impeachment is underwater, and he's outpolling his likely rivals. Many underestimated him in 2016—including me—who should be looking at the numbers today and realizing that save for an economic downturn, Donald Trump will be extremely difficult to beat in 2020,

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Finland versus the USA

The NYT has a large article up under the heading: "Finland Is Our Capitalist Paradise". Finns pay huge taxes but business activity also thrives there they claim

The argument runs that Finns get most big-ticket items "free" for their taxes. The authors are particularly impressed with the free education and free hospitals.  They claim that both are high quality.

And they write as if there is no free education and no free hospitals in the USA. Yet most Americans go to "free" local schools for their primary and secondary education and can go to government hospitals where they will be treated regardless of ability to pay.  So where's the difference?

We have only the word of the authors that there is a difference in quality but I am prepared to concede that many American public schools are ratshit and that American public hospitals can often afford to provide little more than emergency care. So why is that? Can socialized services be better than private ones?

A big part of the American difficulty is that the population of the USA is so diverse.  Many in that population would not even call themselves Americans.  That contrasts with the small and homogeneous population of Finland.  So the American population is orders of magnitude harder to manage than is Finland. So what works well in Finland might work much less well in the USA.

I cannot with any brevity take on all the claims in the NYT article so I just want to focus on one of the claims -- about the high quality of Finnish public hospitals.  Like most Leftist writing, however, they will only tell you the good bits and ignore the bad bits.

I have no new information about Finnish healthcare but I live amid a similar system in Australia.  We too have universal government health coverage. And the limitations of that are well known. Despite the free government healthcare available, 40% of Australians take out private health insurance.  Now why would they do that?

They do it for two reasons: Access and quality. If you have any serious problems, the difficulty is getting yourself in front of the doctor.  There are waiting lists for almost everything and even waiting lists to get on the waiting list!  You could die while waiting and some do. 

And the quality of treatment is public hospitals is poorer, if only because it is the private hospitals that have the latest machines.  Even when the public sector has the machines they may not have the staff to operate them.  There is for instance in Brisbane a public hospital hyperbaric chamber to treat divers with the bends but that hospital will simply refer distressed divers to a private hospital that has one. 

Similarly, there are apparently PET scan machines for detecting cancer in the public sector but they are very expensive to use so most patients will be referred to one of the private PET clinics, where patients will pay out of their own pockets for the scan. My last PET scan (in a private hospital) was arranged with only a couple of days notice

So I doubt that Finnish hospitals are much better than that. I would be most surprised if Finns get the "no waiting" experience that is common in Australian private hospitals.  And it is for access to such hospitals that Australians buy private health insurance

So that is a relevant comparison. Australians and Americans both are mainly of British and Northern European heritage and both have trouble coping with large "indigestible" minorities.  If you want to know what free universal healthcare would look like in practice in America, look to Australia, not Finland. 

The Australian system is not wholly bad.  The immediate and mostly free access to your family doctor ("bulk billing") is certainly hard to beat.  It is the hospitals that are the problem area.

This whole topic is a huge one so I am not going to go on to talk about American versus Finnish university education.  But it is clear that American university education has gone off the rails in recent years and is getting worse rather than better. Finland might well be better. It might need Mr Trump to take an interest in American university education for it to have any hope of improvement.

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Neither Boris Johnson nor Margaret Thatcher got a majority of the votes -- any more than Trump or Bill Clinton did

What the NYT says below is right but far from new.  Australians are particularly aware of it because we have the British electoral system in the lower house and the European system in the upper house.  But I reproduce it as something to sober up any complacency about Boris's recent victory

LONDON — The answer to Brexit, the Conservative Party’s election victory and everything in British politics is (with apologies to Douglas Adams) 336,038.

That number is what you get when you divide the 3,696,423 total votes cast nationally for the Liberal Democrats party in last week’s election by the 11 seats the party actually won. By contrast, Prime Minister Boris Johnson led his Conservative Party to victory via a far more economical average of 38,265 votes for each of its 365 seats — a roughly tenfold difference in the parties’ ability to translate votes cast into seats.

The Conservatives’ triumph and the Liberal Democrats’ disaster were both the result, in large part, of a factor that is rarely discussed but crucial for understanding the country’s political chaos: Britain, like the United States, operates a “first past the post” electoral system, in which parliamentary seats are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes in each individual race, rather than by proportion of the total national vote.

Brexit, which has polarized Britain around a new political divide since the 2016 referendum in which the country narrowly voted to leave the European Union, has thrown into sharp relief the ways that first-pastthe- post systems can skew political outcomes.

And so 336,038 also serves as an epitaph for the political career of Jo Swinson, the dynamic 39- year-old who was the leader of the Liberal Democrats until she lost her seat on Thursday. Just months ago she seemed triumphant, her party surging in the polls. But Thursday’s election put an end to those hopes.

The first-past-the-post system works well within a two-party system, but not where there are multiple parties. For Britain, that generally wasn’t a problem until Brexit fractured the long-stable coalitions of its two major political parties, creating an opening for challengers like the Liberal Democrats and Brexit Party.

“When you don’t have two parties, the first-past-the-post system is really bad at translating voter beliefs into seats,” said Sara Hobolt, a political scientist at the London School of Economics.

That weakness was on display in the most recent election, in which the roughly half of the electorate who oppose leaving the European Union found that their votes had only a fraction of the power that votes for the pro-Brexit Conservatives did.

2nd Place Is First Loser

Things looked very different in September, when Ms. Swinson took the stage at her party’s conference in Bournemouth, an old-fashioned resort town on the south coast of England. To rapturous applause, she promised a future that much of the country had hoped for since the 2016 referendum: If her party won power, she would stop Brexit.

In a different political system, that might have been her moment.

“There is a pattern to how small parties break through,” said Dr. Hobolt, a co-author of a coming book about challenger parties in Europe. “They find an issue that cuts across a mainstream party coalition and exploit it as a wedge.” Across much of Europe, the same issues at the heart of the Brexit debate, such as immigration and membership in the European Union, have been just such a wedge for small parties.

In countries with proportional representation, the result has been a major party realignment: instead of two major parties, on the center left and center right, many countries now have four parties divided along both social and economic lines.

In Germany, for instance, the Green Party on the far left and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany on the far right have drawn support away from the center-left and center-right parties that have traditionally dominated politics. Though that means no party wins an outright majority, coalitions and compromise offer a way to reflect voter beliefs with relative accuracy.

If Britain had a proportional system, the pro-Remain parties could have formed a coalition with a majority in Parliament.

The Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, the Greens and Labour, which all promised to stop Brexit directly or hold a new referendum offering that as an option, won over 50 percent of the votes between them.

But under first past the post, things played out very differently.

Instead of giving Remain voters the option of a powerful coalition government, the increased popularity of the Liberal Democrats and other small parties split the pro-Remain electorate, ultimately helping to hand victory to Mr. Johnson’s Brexiteers.

For example, in Kensington and Wimbledon, wealthy districts of London that voted to remain in the 2016 referendum, Conservative candidates scraped to victory with less than 40 percent of the vote after Remain voters divided between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

The European Parliament elections in May, by contrast, used a proportional system.

Although the results are not directly comparable — voters tend to treat European elections as more of an expressive choice than a practical one — they did offer a hint of what a different system might bring. The British electorate was much more atomized, with the Brexit Party in first place with 30 percent of the vote, the Liberal Democrats second with just under 20 percent and then the Greens, Labour and the Conservatives clustered around 10 percent each.

But in first past the post, casting a vote outside of the two largest parties is a risky move.

“Two-party systems are particularly problematic when you have the kind of crosscutting dimensions you have now,” Dr. Hobolt said. Reflecting the will of the people can be political suicide.

‘A Geography Story’

Why weren’t Ms. Swinson and her party able to exert more influence over Labour’s Brexit platform, as the far-right Brexit party did over Mr. Johnson’s Conservatives? To stave off the Brexit Party threat, Mr. Johnson made support for Brexit by any means necessary a litmus test for Conservative politicians, going so far as to expel 21 legislators for voting to block a no-deal Brexit.

But pressure from the Liberal Democrats did not have a similar effect on the Labour party.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, grudgingly agreed to hold a new referendum, but avoided focusing on the Brexit issue, instead emphasizing his party’s economic platform and commitment to expanding the welfare state.

“That’s a geography story,” said Simon Hix, a political scientist at the London School of Economics who studies European politics. Brexit had divided the country along geographic as well as political lines: Large, cosmopolitan cities like London voted heavily to remain, while rural areas and postindustrial towns that have seen little benefit from globalization, including many traditional Labour strongholds, voted to leave.

The result was that Conservative Remainers were concentrated in a smaller number of wealthy areas, mostly in London, leaving the Conservatives with relatively few seats to lose from alienating them. Labour Leave voters, on the other hand, were more spread out — putting many more Labour seats at risk.

Mr. Corbyn tried to “have his cake and eat it,” Dr. Hix said, by prioritizing economic messages instead. But in an election where Brexit was the most salient issue, that strategy proved disastrously ineffective. Mr. Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done” attracted leave voters in traditional Labour strongholds, winning those districts by oftennarrow margins. But Mr. Corbyn failed to pick up areas like Wimbledon and Kensington where many wealthy Leave voters could not stomach his far-left economic policies and cast ballots for the Liberal Democrats.

That may offer some lessons for the United States, which shares first past the post. “When you have all these liberal cosmopolitan voters piled up in urban areas, the left are winning those seats by massive margins,” Dr. Hix said. “But the right can win many more seats with smaller margins.” That helps to explain why immigration, transgender rights and other social issues, which are effective wedge issues in rural and postindustrial areas, have become so prominent in American politics.

The United States does not have small party challengers akin to the Brexit Party or the Liberal Democrats. But its primary system offers an opportunity for populist challengers within the major parties to exploit wedge issues. That strategy propelled Donald Trump to victory in the 2016 Republican primary.

“People say that the good thing about first-past-the-post systems is you don’t get radicalright parties,” Dr. Hobolt said.

“But there’s a danger that the radical right wing of a party takes over.”

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

UGLIER THAN A CHRISTMAS SWEATER: Congress finalizes 2020 budget bill ahead of impending shutdown; bill includes federal research into "gun violence" and raising the tobacco buying age to 21 (National Review)

TONE DEAF: Chuck Schumer issues list of Democrat demands for Senate impeachment trial, gets wrecked for hypocrisy related to Bill Clinton's impeachment trial (The Daily Wire)

BOMBSHELL OR BLUSTER? Giuliani says he has new proof of massive corruption in Ukraine involving Bidens (The Washington Times)

SKIPPING THE 2020 DEBATES? Trump slams debate commission, raising questions about his participation (The Hill)

A TINY FRACTION OF THE 47,000 INDIVIDUALS: Just 11 migrants have qualified for asylum under Remain in Mexico program (The Daily Caller)

THERE ALMOST SEEMS TO BE A PATTERN HERE: Starbucks again apologizes after employees allegedly treat law enforcement with disrespect (The Daily Wire)

POLICY: Eleven more examples of how firearms save gun owners' lives and property (The Daily Signal)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Is Boris Johnson a conservative?

Peter Hitchens below puts the "No" case rather succinctly. I think an even more succinct  reponse to Peter is to say that Boris is a BRITISH conservative. The British Tory party has always been a bit wishy washy by strict conservative standards but that is inevitable in a  system where the winning party almost always has to be pretty centrist.  It was precisely that Jeremy Corbin made to effort to win the centre that he lost so soundly to Boris.  His nauseous antisemitism, love of terrorists and promises of an economic upheaval were just not British.

But the global warming craze is a dominant theme in the media with few prominent people opposing it so that is part of the political centre.  Few conservatives believe in it but at election time it would be too big a burden to gainsay it.  What conservatives do is pay lip service to it while doing as little as possible about it.  Politicians generally do the same -- something Ms Thunberg has yet to fully grasp. So Boris will do the same -- quietly scale back climate-related  initiatives and waffling as he does so.  Australia's Prime minister, Scott Morrison, is a past-master at that. It may be noted that the latest "Conference of the Parties" has just wrapped up in Madrid with zero agreement from anyone to do anything more about global warming. The British representatives were part of that.

And Tories as a centre-right party is in fact historically common in Britain. One could mention socialist policies favoured by Winston Churchill and his general acceptance of Attlee's innovations but it is clearly to Disraeli that Boris harks back.

Disraeli is generally acknowledged as an outstandingly successful Prime minister at the height of the British Empire in the late 19th century.  Yet it was Disraeli, not any Leftist, who introduced a whole raft of social welfare legislation to Britain.  He introduced some of Britain's first worker protection laws and extended the vote to many working class people who had never had it before. As a result of these social reforms Leftist MP Alexander Macdonald told his constituents in 1879, "The Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty."

So Disraeli married conservative caution, respect for tradition and respect for the individual to policies that are more typically advocated by Leftists.  It was a brilliant piece of centrism that kept him in power and enabled him to preside over a  peaceful and immensely influential Britain.  He kept the revolutionaries and other wreckers out of power and saved the best of British traditions. He called his policies "One Nation Conservatism" and Boris to has adopted both the term and a modern version of the policies concerned.  He will keep the wreckers out of power if that is all he does -- but just that is immensely beneficial. He will be very good for Britain.  American conservatives know how poisonous their present Left is. It was, if anything, worse in Britain

Just look at Al ‘Boris’ Johnson’s victory speech on Friday morning. Anthony Blair or Gordon Brown could have made it. There’s a red-green pledge of ‘carbon-neutrality’ by 2050. This means pointlessly strangling the economy by destroying efficient power generation, while making you pay for windmills through higher gas and electricity bills. Meanwhile, China sensibly continues to depend on cheap, reliable coal.

There’s a promise of ‘colossal new investments in infrastructure’. This means huge, inefficient projects such as HS2, which do no good, cost billions and hugely overrun their budgets and timetables – again at your expense.

There’s a promise of a ‘long-term NHS budget enshrined in law, 650 million pounds extra every week’. This is a crude submission to the lobby that imagines that the only thing wrong with the NHS is its budget. In truth, we could spend every penny the country has on it and it still would not work as it is supposed to.

And there’s the usual thoughtless, ignorant rubbish about police numbers. Please. The problem with the police is not how many of them there are. It is the fact that they spend their time doing the wrong things, and refuse to return to the simple, solitary foot patrol, which is the reason for their existence.

What did you think it meant when Mr Johnson appeared standing in front of a backdrop inscribed with the words ‘The People’s Government’, a phrase that could have been concocted by Blair’s mental valet, Alastair Campbell?

What did it mean when he then said: ‘In winning this Election we have won the votes and the trust of people who have never voted Conservative before and people who have always voted for other parties. Those people want change. We cannot, must not, must not, let them down. And in delivering change we must change too. We must recognise the incredible reality that we now speak as a one-nation Conservative Party literally for everyone from Woking to Workington.’

SOURCE 

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The Left can never admit that they got it wrong

UK: Jeremy Corbyn has doubled down on his support for Labour's wildly left-wing policies despite the party's spectacular election defeat.

The outgoing opposition leader grudgingly shouldered some personal responsibility for the catastrophic collapse in votes, but used two newspaper columns to pin the blame on Brexit and the media.   

Labour suffered its worst performance at the polls since 1935 after Boris Johnson reduced the party's Red Wall of traditionally northern strongholds to rubble.

While accepting the result was 'desperately disappointing', Mr Corbyn said he was 'proud' of the radical anti-rich and spending spree platform he stood on during the campaign.

Insisting his tax-hiking government blueprint was popular, he wrote in the Observer: 'I am proud that on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and on the climate emergency we have won the arguments and rewritten the terms of political debate.

'But I regret that we did not succeed in converting that into a parliamentary majority for change.

SOURCE 

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Very Quietly, Democrats Cave on Funding Border Wall in New Spending Bill

Congress reached a "deal in principle" to fund the government through next year, a deal that includes at least some funding for the president's proposed border wall. This after Democrats solemnly swore they would not vote for "one dime" of wall funding.

The Hill:

There were some indications that Democrats gave ground on the wall, moving from the zero-funding position they took in their original version of the bill.

Following a Wednesday meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Lowey acknowledged that they may lose some votes on the left.

“Not everyone can vote for the bills, and we just need enough votes to pass, and I’d like to get the majority of Democrats, at least. And I hope we get some Republicans to support the bills, because it’s always good to have bipartisan support,” she said.

It's not likely that too many Democrats will advertise the fact that their leaders completely caved to Trump and that they betrayed their far-left supporters. Otherwise, the government will shut down and no one wants to see who gets blamed by the voters for it.

Trump still had to do a little horse-trading to get his wall funding.

CNN:

The White House signaled in negotiations it would accept significantly less money -- the current level of $1.375 billion -- than requested on the border wall in exchange for maintaining the authority to transfer funds from Pentagon accounts to finance new wall construction, according to people involved in the talks. That agreement made it into the final deal, a source familiar with the talks said. The deal does not include any money backfilling the $3.6 billion in military construction funds the administration transferred earlier this year to fund the wall -- a key priority for Democrats.
The spending bill, as usual, makes a mockery of good government and sound government fiscal policy.

The bipartisan foursome of the top appropriators reached the agreement after meeting in the Capitol on Thursday, capping a day of harried negotiations, proposals and counter proposals that will significantly curtail the threat of a government shutdown. Staff will work through the weekend to produce the final legislation

SOURCE 

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Wisconsin Judge Rules More than 200,000 Voter Registrations Should Be Tossed

A Wisconsin judge has ruled that more than 200,000 voters who failed to respond to an October mailing, flagging them for having potentially moved, must have their names stricken from the registration rolls.

A lawsuit, filed on behalf of three Wisconsin voters by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), alleged that the Wisconsin Election Commission was not following the law when they allowed a two-year grace period to go by for residents who had moved to change their address. The commission sent a mailer asking people to update their addresses. About 234,000 failed to respond in the 30-day window.

The judge, Paul Malloy, denied a request by Election Commission attorneys to put his decision on hold. He ordered the Commission to follow the law requiring voters who didn’t respond to be deactivated.

Instead of obeying the law, the WEC sued.

Epoch Times:

“Instead of reversing course, the Wisconsin Election Commission has stubbornly doubled down. This lawsuit is about accountability, the rule of law, and clean and fair elections.”
The case is important for both sides ahead of the 2020 presidential race in narrowly divided Wisconsin, which President Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016. Liberals fear the voters who could be purged are more likely to be Democrats. Republicans argue allowing them to remain on the rolls increases the risk of voter fraud.

The WEC, which has an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, is fighting the lawsuit. It argues that the law gives it the power to decide how to manage the voter registration list.

This seems a pretty straightforward house cleaning task that in normal times wouldn't get a second look from anyone. But, of course, it's seen by the left as "voter suppression" because dead people and people who have moved -- perhaps to another state -- didn't respond to the mailer.

I guess most of the dead people are Democrats.

Malloy gave a sensible reason for his ruling.

“I don’t want to see anybody deactivated, but I don’t write the legislation,” Malloy said. “If you don’t like it, then I guess you have to go back to the Legislature. They didn’t do that.”
If you think the law suppresses votes, then change the law. Malloy isn't a liberal judge who believes you can just make the law up as you go along.

As of Dec. 5, only about 16,500 of those who received the mailing had registered at their new address. More than 170,000 hadn’t responded, and the postal service was unable to deliver notifications to nearly 60,000 voters.
If the post office can't deliver the mail to an address where you're registered to vote, that's a pretty good sign that you've moved or are dead. But we should keep them on the rolls because...Democrats say so.

The Democrats on the commission claim that the last batch of people who were dropped from the rolls under similar circumstances was confused and angry and that there were complaints. No word if they have any proof at all of any of that.

With registering to vote so ridiculously easy -- same-day registration is allowed in Wisconsin -- you have to wonder why there's any controversy here at all. The reason is simple: it allows Democrats to scare voters into thinking that Republicans don't want them to vote. Maintaining accurate and up-to-date voter registration rolls is critical to holding a clean election.

So why are Democrats so hysterically opposed?

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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Conservatism and The Problem of Nationalism

Kim R. Holmes --  the Executive Vice President at The Heritage Foundation -- makes a long and impassioned argument below against nationalism among conservatives.  It is of course Trump who is really in his sights.

And he has something to explain:  Is "American exceptionalism" a form of nationalism?  He offers a fairly good reply to that

As ever, however, the Devil is in the details.  What do we mean by nationalism?  Nationalism undoubtedly has a very bad track record in Europe.  Holmes sets that out well. But is American nationalism different?  Because of its historical associations I agree with Holmes by rarely making use of the word.  But when I do, I am always mindful of Orwell's clarifying comment on the matter from the 1940s:

By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

Whatever he calls it from time to time, I think Trump clearly speaks in favour of what Orwell called patriotism rather than nationalism.  Far from wanting power outside America, Trump is a traditional American conservative who wants OUT of the rest of the world and he is doing that withdrawal as well as he can, attracting considerable criticism while doing so.

So Trump is actually validating the distinction Orwell made.  His patriotism is so different from nationalism that it could almost be called anti-nationalism.  So any idea that American conservatives -- who are now almost all Trump supporters - are in the grip of anything like European nationalism is precisely wrong.  Holmes need not worry.  Patriotic Americans are ever-ready to help people of other nations but they don't want to control them

And Orwell's comment about the individual submerging himself in nationalism should be noted. Could people as individualistic as Americans ever do that?  Not many, I fancy.

There WAS an era when America WAS nationalist but that was around a century ago under the leadership of that great "Progressive", Theodore Roosevelt.  Roosevelt did at least ride his own horse into battle against the Spanish in America's conquest of Cuba but that is about all you can say by way of praising him


At first glance, the new nationalism of conservatives will seem benign and even uncontroversial. In his book, “The Case for Nationalism,” Rich Lowry defines nationalism as flowing from a people’s "natural devotion to their home and to their country." Yoram Hazony, in his book “The Virtue of Nationalism,” also has a rather anodyne definition of nationalism. It means "that the world is governed best when nations agree to cultivate their own traditions, free from interference by other nations."

There is nothing particularly controversial at all about these statements. Defined in these terms, it sounds like little more than simply defending nationality or national sovereignty, which is why Lowry, Hazony, and others insist their definition of nationalism has nothing to do with the most virulent forms involving ethnicity, race, militarism, or fascism.

Here's the problem. I suppose any of us can take any tradition that has a definite history and simply redefine it to our liking. We could then give ourselves permission to castigate anyone who doesn't agree with us as "misunderstanding" or even libeling us.

But who actually is responsible for the misunderstanding here? The people who are trying to redefine the term, or the people who remind us of nationalism's real history and what nationalism actually has been in history? Which raises an even bigger question: Why go down this road at all?

If you have to spend half of your time explaining, "Oh, I don't mean that kind of nationalism," why would you want to associate a venerable tradition of American civic patriotism, national pride, and American exceptionalism at all with the various nationalisms that have occurred in the world? After all, American conservatives have argued that one of the great things about America was that it was different from all other countries. Different from all other nationalisms.

Here's my point. Nationalism is not the same thing as national identity. It's not the same thing as respect for national sovereignty. It's not even the same thing as national pride. It's something historically and philosophically different, and those differences are not merely semantic, technical or the preoccupations of academic historians. In fact, they go to the very essence of what it means to be an American.

I think I understand why some people will be attracted to the concept of nationalism. President Trump used the term nationalism. National conservatives think that President Trump has tapped into a new populism for conservatism, and they want to take advantage of it. They think that traditional fusionist conservatism and the American exceptionalism idea are not strong enough. These ideas are not muscular enough. They want something stronger to stand up to the universal claims of globalism and progressivism that they believe are anti-American. They also want something stronger to push back on open borders and limitless immigration.

I understand that. I understand very well the desire to have a muscular reaction to the overreach of international governance and globalism, and I have no trouble at all arguing that an international system based on nation-states and national sovereignty is vastly superior, especially for the United States, to one that is run by a global governing body that is democratically remote from the people.

So what's the problem then? Why can't we just all agree that nationalism defined in this way is what we American conservatives have been and believed all along—that it's just a new, more fashionable bottle for a very old wine? Well, because the new bottle changes the way that the wine will be viewed. Why do we need a new bottle at all? It would be like putting a perfectly good California cabernet in a bottle labeled from Germany or France or Russia or China.

The problem lies in that little suffix, “ism.” It indicates that the word nationalism means a general practice, system, philosophy or ideology that is true for all. There is a tradition of nationalism out there that we Americans are part of. All countries have “nationalisms.” All nations and all peoples are all distinguished by what makes them different. Their common heritage as nationalists is actually their difference. Their different languages, their different ethnicities, their different cultures.

At the same time, all nations supposedly share the same sovereignty and rights of the nation-state, regardless of their form of government. A sovereign democratic nation-state is, in this respect, no different than a sovereign authoritarian nation-state. Regardless of the different kinds of government, it's the commonality of the nation-state that matters. Therefore, the sovereignty of Iran or North Korea is, by this way of thinking, morally and legally no different than the sovereignty of the United States or any other democratic nation.

I firmly believe that not all nation-states are the same. There have been times in history when nations have been associated with racism, ethnic supremacy, militarism, communism, and fascism. Does that mean that all nation-states are that way? Of course not, but there is a huge difference between the historical phenomena of nationalism and respect for the sovereignty of a democratic nation-state. Nationalism celebrates cultural and even ethnic differences of a people, regardless of the form of government. The democratic nation-state, on the other hand, grounds its legitimacy and its sovereignty in democratic governance.

The biggest problem causing this misunderstanding is not recognizing the actual history of nationalism. It is, as I mentioned before, to confuse national identity, national consciousness, and national sovereignty with Nationalism with a capital N.

Nationalism as we historically know it arose not in America but in Europe. Our independence movement was a revolt of the people over the type of government that we had under the British. The founders at first thought of themselves as Englishmen, who were being denied their rights by Parliament and by the crown. Yes, Americans certainly had an identity, but it was not based on ethnicity, language, or even religion alone. It had already developed a very distinct understanding of self-government, and that was the key to the Revolution.

By this time, Americans already had a fairly strong sense of identity, but that identity was not nationalism. Why is that? Because nationalism had not been invented yet. It didn't exist at the time of the American Revolution.

Modern nationalism began in France, in the French Revolution. The revolution was a call to arms of the French people. The French nation was born in the French Revolution. The terror and Napoleonic imperialism were the highest expression of this new-born French nationalism.


Revolutionary French nationalism

Napoleon's nationalist imperialism, in turn, sparked the rise of counter-reactionary nationalism in Germany, and all over Europe. Germans, Russians, Austrians, and other nations discovered their own national consciousness and the importance of their own cultures in their hatred of the French invaders.

After that, nationalism raged across the 19th and 20th centuries as a celebration of nations based on the common national culture and a common language and a common historical experience. Nationalism was, in this sense, particularistic. It was populistic. It was exclusive. It was zero- sum. It celebrated differences, not the common humanity of Christianity as it had been known in the Holy Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or even in the Enlightenment.

The key to nationalism was the nation-state. Technically, it wasn't the people themselves who were free or sovereign as the people, but the people represented by and in the name of the nation-state. In other words, their governments. Sovereignty ultimately resided in the state, not the people. The state was above the people, not of, by, and for the people as in the American experience. To this day, this idea lives in the British monarchy, for example, where the Queen is the ultimate sovereign, not the people or the Parliament.

It is unfortunately a common historical error to equate nationalism with the historical rise of the nation-state in Europe and the international state system that arose after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian Peace did recognize the sovereignty of princes, over and against the universal claims of the Holy Roman Empire and the Church, and it's true that the Protestant Reformation did solidify the sovereignty of the princes and the principalities as forerunners to the nation-state.

But these were princes. They were monarchies. They were dynasties. It wasn't until much later that the modern nation-state and especially the popular sentiments of nationalism arose in history. Whatever this state system was, it is not nationalism. Nationalism is an historic phenomena that did not emerge for another 150 years after 1648. Claiming otherwise is just bad history, pure and simple.

That brings me to the idea of American exceptionalism, which is, I believe, the answer to the question of America's national identity and what it should be.

It's a beautiful concept that captures both the reality and the ambiguity of the American experience. It's based on a universal creed. It is grounded in America's founding principles: natural law, liberty, limited government, individual rights, the checks and balances of government, popular sovereignty not the sovereignty of the folkish nation-state, the civilizing role of religion in civil society and not an established religion associated with one class or one creed, and the crucial role of civil society and civil institutions in grounding and mediating our democracy and our freedom..

We as Americans believe these principles are right and true for all peoples and not just for us. That was the way that Washington and Jefferson understood them, and it was certainly the way that Lincoln understood them. That's what makes them universal. In other words, the American creed grounds us in universal principles.

But what, you may ask, makes us so exceptional then? If it's universal, what makes us exceptional? It is, in fact, the creed.

We believe that Americans are different because our creed is both universal and exceptional at the same time. We are exceptional in the unique way we apply our universal principles. It doesn't necessarily mean that we are better than other peoples, though I think probably most Americans do believe that they are. It's not really about bragging rights. Rather, it's a statement of historical fact that there is something truly different and unique about the United States, which becomes lost when talking in terms of nationalism.

A nationalist cannot say this, because there is nothing universal about nationalism except that all nationalisms are, well, different and particularistic. Nationalism is devoid of a common idea or principle of government except that a people or a nation-state can be almost anything. It can be fascist, it can be authoritarian, it can be totalitarian, or it can be democratic.

Some of the new nationalists doubt explicitly the importance of the American creed. They argue that the creed is not as important as we thought it was to our national identity.  Let's just think about that for a minute.

What does it mean to say that the creed really isn't all that important? If the creed doesn't matter, what is so special about America?

Is it our language? Well, no. We share that with Britain, and now much of the world.

Is it our ethnicity? Well, that doesn't work either because there's no such thing as a common American ethnicity.

Is it a specific religion? We are indeed a religious country, but no, we have freedom of religion, not one specific religion.

Is it our beautiful rivers and mountains?  No. We've got some beautiful rivers and mountains, but so do other countries.

Is it our culture? Yes, I suppose so, but how do you understand American culture without the American creed and the founding principles?

Lincoln called America the world's “last best hope,” because it was a place where all people can and should be free. Before Lincoln, Jefferson called it an empire of liberty.

Immigrants came here and became true Americans by living the American creed and the American dream. You can become a French citizen, but for most Frenchmen, if you are foreign, that is not the same thing as being French. It's different here. You can be a real American by adopting our creed and our way of life.

After World War II, the American way and our devotion to democracy became a beacon of freedom for the whole world. That was the foundation of our claim to world leadership in the Cold War, and it is no different today. If we become a nation just like any other nation, then frankly I would not expect any other nation to grant us any special trust or support.

Another benefit of American exceptionalism is that it is self-correcting. When we fail to live up to our ideals as we did with slavery before the Civil War, we can appeal as Lincoln did to our “better nature” to correct our flaws. That is where the central importance of the creed comes in. Applying the principles of the Declaration of Independence correctly has allowed us to redeem ourselves and our history when we have gone astray.

There is no American identity without the American creed. However, the nationalists are correct about one thing, in suggesting that the American identity is more than just about a set of ideas. These ideas are lived in our culture—that is true. It is also true, as Lincoln said about his famous “mystic chords of memory,” that our common experience and our common history form a unique story. It is a story that embodies the very real lives and relationships of people and a shared cultural experience in a shared space and time in history that we call the United States.

The sharing of experience in space and time - in and of itself - is not unlike what any other nation experiences. At the most basic level, yes, I would say that all nations are in that respect alike. But what made it different for Lincoln was that he believed and he hoped that the “better angels of our nature,” that was grounded in the American creed, would touch the mystic chords of memory that make up that story—and it was that “touch” that set us apart from other nations.

Let me end by making two points.

One, the degree to which national conservatism sounds plausible rests on a profound historical misunderstanding. Statements in and of themselves that sound true and even attractive have to be suspended in a state of historical amnesia to make sense.

When Hazony says, "National cohesion is the secret ingredient that allows free institutions to exist," it makes an almost obvious banal point, as least for the countries that are already free. The problem begins when he associates this with the general tradition of the virtues of nationalism as a concept. Then it gets really messy.

Is national cohesion the secret ingredient to free institutions to nationalists in Russia? In China? Or in Iran? Hardly. In fact, nationalism in these countries is the bitter enemy of free institutions. If the answer is, "Well, I don't mean that kind of nationalism," then the question gets really begged: Why make broad general statements about nationalism at all if the exceptions loom so large? If in fact the exceptions end up being the rule?

My second point is this. If this were just an academic debate over the idea of nationalism, then I suppose it really wouldn't be all that important. You could let the intellectuals split their hairs and historians make their points about the history of nationalism, and you could go and see whether or not the concept of nationalism really helps us politically—whether it's true or not.

I fear the problem is bigger than that for conservatives. The conservative movement today faces huge threats to our most basic principles. From the left, we face progressives who have always said that our creed and our claims to American exceptionalism were a fraud. They have always argued that we were a nation like any other. In fact, the more radical of them argue that we are actually worse than other nations precisely because our founding principles were supposedly based on lies.

Now, we face a new challenge on the sanctity of the American creed from a different direction. This time, from the right. It comes first from blurring the distinctions between nationalism as actually practiced and the uniqueness of American exceptionalism. Then it goes on to raise the specter of the nation-state as being an idea—if not the central idea—to American conservatism. That’s no different than what a continental European conservative probably would say about their traditions.

Frankly, I don't get this at all. American conservatives are skeptical of the government. They're skeptical of the nation-state. That's what makes us conservatives. So why elevate the concept of the nation-state that is so foreign to the American conservative tradition?

I fear the answer may have to do with the deeper philosophical transformation that is going on inside some conservative political circles. It is now becoming fashionable for some conservatives to criticize capitalism and the free market. Some are even arguing that there are now no limiting principles to what the state and the government can or should do in the name of their political agenda.

This used to be called “big government” conservatism. It was seen then as a liberal proposition, and it still is, in my view. It shares a troubling principle with modern progressivism. Deep down, having the government rather than the people make important decisions about their lives is, in principle, no different than a progressive arguing for the need for government to end poverty and eliminate inequality.

Apparently the idea is that, with conservatives in charge of government, this time it will be different. This time we will make sure that the government that we control will drive investments in the right direction, and we will make the right decisions on what the trade-offs are.

Does this sound familiar? Don't defenders of big government always argue that this time it will be different?

Put aside for a moment whether we conservatives would ever control such a government to sufficiently do the things that we want it to do. Do we want to empower a government even more in industrial and other kinds of economic and social policy that will surely use that very increased power to destroy the things that we love and believe about this country?

The best way, in my opinion, to protect America's greatness, its special claims, its identity if you will, is to believe in what made us great in the first place. It wasn't our language. It wasn't our race. It wasn't our ethnicity. It wasn't our industrial policy. It wasn't the power of government to decide what the trade-offs are. It wasn't in a government that decides what kind of work is dignified or what kind of work is not. And it certainly wasn't a belief in the nation-state or the greatness of nationalism.

It was our creed and the belief system that was personified and lived in a culture, our institutions of civil societies and our democratic way of government that made America the greatest nation in the history of all nations. In a word, it was our belief in ourselves as a good and free people. That's what made American exceptional. That's what made us a free country. And it continues to do so today.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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