Posted on

The Surprise About the Surprise on “Hacked” Elections

Come on, let’s face it: “Russia attacked our democracy” is a hackneyed Dem chant to delegitimize the 2016 election. Yes, other culprits like the alleged red neck hatred for the “marginalized” have pride of place in lefty boilerplate. But the Russia mantra offers the unique opportunity to enlist the fabled objectivity of our intelligence agencies in the excuse-mongering. It only works, though, if the history of US meddling (aka “attack”) goes down the memory hole.

To be clear, much past US meddling was a response to Soviet/communist meddling. It is reassuring to know that Mosaddegh and Allende didn’t succeed in turning Iran and Chile into a part of Russia’s “near-abroad”.

Time magazine cover from 1996.

Still, one cannot say that political interference was invented by Putin. We have a well-documented history of “attacking” elections, and, yes, even in Russia. Just ask the ghost of Boris Yeltsin. Boat loads of cash were funneled to Yeltsin’s political clan, some of it laundered through the IMF, to ensure his victory in 1996. (4) Or maybe we should ask Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1999, Clinton sent James Carville over to advise the Labor candidate, Ehud Barak, against Bebe. (3)

Pres. Clinton with James Carville in 1999.

Obama’s meddling in Israeli elections mirrors the recent murky Russian activities. US money goes into one organization and then into another and then into assorted anti-Likud voter drives and electioneering. Obama wasn’t content with “hacking”, Twitter, and Facebook, like the Russians. He sent over to Israel part of his political brain trust – Jeremy Bird, fresh off of Obama’s 2012 field operations. (1)

Jeremy Bird, Obama/Democratic Party field operator, in the Israeli offices of V15, one of the anti-Likud/Netanyahu groups in 2015.

Obama’s hostility to Netanyahu was glaring in 2010 when he rudely left Netanyahu simmering with his aides in the Roosevelt for over an hour. (5)

Maybe comments from experienced intelligence community hands would calm excitable lefties. (4)

* Countering the charge that the Russian effort was exceptional is 30-year CIA veteran Steven Hall: “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all”.

* Loch K. Johnson, American intelligence scholar and staffer on the Senate’s Church Committee from the 1970’s: “We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947. We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”

* Dov H. Levin, Carnegie-Mellon scholar, documents 81 US and 36 Russian instances of attempts to influence foreign elections from 1946 to 2000.

You might call this kind of thing a well-traveled approach to foreign policy. This isn’t an excuse, and when it happens to us, it is up to us to sanction the offenders and install additional safeguards. But, please, stop feigning shock and horror at something that is part of the toolkit to bend nations toward your preferred interests.

Grow up, or, better yet, read and listen a little more to sources outside the echo chamber.

RogerG

Footnotes and sources:
1. “The Obama Campaign Strategist Who Could Break the Israeli Elections Wide Open”, Roy Arad, Haaretz, 1/26/2015, https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-could-obama-s-strategist-break-elections-wide-open-1.5365391
2. “Blog claims U.S. funded anti-Netanyahu election effort in Israel”, Jon Greenberg, PunditFact, 3/25/2015, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/25/blog-posting/blog-claims-us-funded-anti-netanyahu-election-effo/
3. “The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries”, Nina Agrawal, LA Times, 12/21/2016, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-us-intervention-foreign-elections-20161213-story.html
4. “Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.”, Scott Shane, NY Times, 2/17/2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html
5. “Obama snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle and the girls, Israelis claim”, Adrian Blomfield, The Telegraph, 3/25/2010, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/7521220/Obama-snubbed-Netanyahu-for-dinner-with-Michelle-and-the-girls-Israelis-claim.html

Posted on

Smelly Environs

In testimony before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees on Thursday, FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok described his role in the investigations of Hillary Clinton’s email server and Russian interference in the 2016 election as acts of patriotism. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

It seems a whole lot of things are pungent these days. Peter Strzok, with the olfactory glands of a bloodhound, is hot on the scent of Trump voters as if thoughts metabolize into odors – “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…”. As for something that’s really beginning to take on the stink of a deer carcass in the summer sun, the FBI’s Hillary and Trump investigations are becoming quite ripe. I’ll withhold judgment till after the Mueller report but the stench is maturing beyond a whiff.

Strzok maintains that he faithfully abided the “bright line” between personal beliefs and work. Who’s he kidding? The email investigation – of which he was central – wreaked: exoneration before the target was interviewed; clear and plain evidence of the destruction of evidence; suspects in the criminal conduct are allowed to represent and collaborate with the target of the investigation; proof of violations of national security statutes messaged into the bland “extremely careless”. The fix was in, and Strzok’s fingerprints are all over it.

Fresh off that sham, Strzok jets off to London to moonlight as DNC oppo research coordinator on the FBI dime. But Trump won the election and upset the apple cart. The 2016 machinations of the DOJ/FBI lawyers at the top of the DC pile were exposed. Instead of savior, Strzok and company ended up with a diet of crow, and maybe facing a few criminal indictments to boot.

The aforementioned reference to Strzok’s uncanny ability to sniff out Trump voters shows another side of this sordid affair. The condescension for the people outside the Georgetown bistros and wine socials and upper middle-class northern Virginia suburbs was as palpable as London fog.

Borrowing Strzok’s “smell” metaphor, his texts smell like the cultural divide at the root of our politics. The Democratic Party is the party of the blue dots (dense urban cores) and the few states wholly beholden to their blue dots. The culture in the blue dots has evolved into a brew of social libertinism, dreamy multiculturalism, and fascist intolerance. Yet, they hold their snouts high in the air at the people who patronize Walmarts. Reagan said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him. A more up-to-date version would be, “America didn’t leave the blue dots; the blue dots left America”. The blue dots changed into something that the rest of America didn’t want any part of — thus the election of Trump.

It’s a cultural divide possibly as stark as the one in the 1840’s when a person crossed the Ohio River from free Ohio into slaveholding Kentucky. The places developed as differently as if they were on different continents. For instance, today, the blue dots are at war with traditional standards. One’s simple expectation about the occupants of a public restroom has to be revised as blue dot media mavens propagate the fantasy of 40 genders. You can’t even be certain of the chromosomal makeup of the participants in a girls’ track meet. The cultic philosophies of victimhood and shallow identity-mongering are rampant. And that’s only a start.

Trans wrestler Mack Beggs won the girls’ 110-pound category in a state wrestling tournament for the second time.
Transgender female Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell won the 110 and 200 meters at the 2017 Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference Class M track meet. (Jeff Jacobs, Hartford Courant)

The experience of a person fresh from a Baptist Sunday service and passing through West Hollywood must be akin to the Ohio resident stepping off the ferry into 1840’s Kentucky. Culture shock anyone?

It’s fascinating to wonder if Strzok and Page were caught up in one of America’s premier blue dot bubbles – DC – so much so that their muscular confirmation bias would not appear as a choked worldview but as the only true reality. Insular echo chambers work that way. In the meantime, the notion of a government of enlightened “experts” free of the prejudices of the average person is as shattered as Conan [the barbarian] throwing a 20-lb sledge hammer through an untempered glass window.

RogerG

Posted on

Cross-Fertilization of Two Investigations and the Bane of Progressivism

I have long sought to keep separate the FBI’s Trump/Russia probe and their “MYI” [Mid-year Investigation] into Hillary’s server. The IG report of this past week shattered that assumption. The two are linked by the same personnel, a coterminous but muddled boundary in time, and an obvious unity in partisan bias. All of this is nestled in unbridled DOJ and FBI higher-ups in DC and its satellites. We’ve got a real mess on our hands.

The legacy media oracles responded as if they are on a mission to contradict conservatives and simple common sense. A bias in its own right. They serve to mystify and cloud what is increasingly becoming apparent: powerful organs of our government engaged in crass partisan favoritism in both official queries.

If this doesn’t dispel the progressive dream of the benign, above-the-fray rule of a clerisy of “experts”, nothing will. Progressivism has its roots in upending the understanding of our nature dating back to Genesis. It used to be accepted as axiomatic that humans are corrupted by an imperious selfishness. We were counseled by our traditions to restrain it. The late 19th-century progressives jettisoned this human nature and replaced it with a person cleansed by an expertise born of formal education (the “expert”). In other words, people like themselves.

This has profound societal consequences. The design of our Constitution is predicated on the overriding inclination of people to pursue self-interest, and thus it is true to our traditions. The founders’ structure sought to fight selfish faction with selfish faction by distributing power with separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.

No need for that kind of thing under the progressives’ scheme of rule by a degreed priesthood of technicians. According to Churchill, though, “The French have a saying, ‘Drive Nature away, and she will return at the gallop'”. The episodes in 2016 and 2017 reveal those technicians to be riven by the same weaknesses as our sandaled and later-wigged ancestors. All that we’ve done is insulate the powerful from accountability in a massive bureaucratic pyramid.

The officials with the guns now have a political eco-system to facilitate great damage. Free of popular sovereignty, their base instincts are free to flower.

Recourse to official ombudsmen – like the IG – as a corrective is fruitless. They are too often infected by the same natural defensiveness as the rest of us. Thus we have the IG report’s equivocations, contradictions, and voluminous mind-numbing prose stretching beyond 500 pages. A glaring example from the report: on the one hand there exists coarse bias; on the other, we can’t attach the bias to any actions. What? How does that work?

There’s the rush to exonerate the favorite (Hillary) while they jump at the slightest unproven provocation to bedevil the targeted villain (Trump). It’s laid out in the report’s timeline and public record. But we’re expected to believe that what’s in the head of Strzok, Page, McCabe, and untold others is somehow unrelated to the clearly observable actions adjoining the thoughts. It’s simply Orwellian.

Trump/Russia and Hillary’s server are two investigations that share the same DNA. Questions about Mueller’s probe are similarly warranted. Like the others, Mueller is taking on a flavor akin to the previous machinations. The same or similar people are scouring for Trump people to ensnare.

Has it been happening for years? You know, the underhanded tactics to flip people, empire-building of imaginary cases, the incestuous relationships – some sexual – between big journalism and big law enforcement, the hounding of people into incriminations, and all of it unchecked. A look under the rug at the Carl Icahn-Phil Mickelsen-Chlorox-Tom Davis imbroglio, shepherded by FBI honcho David Chaves and the DA of SDNY, might be instructive.

Yes, we’ve got a mess. The sooner we discard the demigod status of government apparatchiks, the sooner we’ll make sense of it all. Only then will we be empowered to restrain our own government. Accountability need not be something necessitating a 500 page report.

RogerG

Posted on

2016 Hayseed Racists? NO!

I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.

The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.

No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.

The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.

Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.

Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.

RogerG

Posted on

The Season of Living Dangerously

“The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982) with Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt.

Ever since the Trump ascendancy, the left has been on a tirade. The marches, the gnashing of teeth about fictional prophecies of doom, and the willingness to tramp over broken glass to defeat anyone with an “R” (Republican) after their name are loose in the land. They are ginned up as if on amphetamines. The political season erupted after inauguration and hasn’t let up. It’s the season of living dangerously.

2,500 unhinged protesters hit Boston Common to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 2016.
Anti-Trump rally, NYC.
Man disrupted and had to be removed from Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R, La.) townhall in Feb. 2017.

Case in point: lefty bankrollers like Tom Steyer and their misnomered “League of Conservation Voters” (LCV) are airing adds hyper-ventilating about the rape of nature by the R’s. The bilge of extremist rhetoric abounds. Here in Montana, the targets are Greg Gianforte and Brian Zinke. I’m sure that the field of fire is national.

So-called “dark money” abounds at the LCV. That’s the money hidden behind a non-profit label, taking full advantage of FEC regs. Peeling back the facade, though, one finds envirotopia’s big-time cleanup hitters.

The “League” ain’t a quaint collection of middle-class hikers. It’s heart is the well-heeled lefty do-gooder, anxious to order our lives according to their semi-literate conscience. The hall of shame includes Facebook co-founder Dustin Muskowitz and wife who cut loose with $5 mill for the “League” in 2016. 2014 saw AFSCME and George Soros ladle a combined $1 mill into the coffers. Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action poured $775,000 into the collection plate. That’s just a sample of the deep pockets.

Lefty billionaire activist Tom Steyer turns to people standing behind him before taking questions during a news conference in Washington, Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster).

This campaign has nothing to do with the grassroots. The average Joe and Jane want good jobs and healthy social conditions to raise their families. All the lefties can offer up is DMV-style government, debilitating dependency, and micro-management of our lives, aka California. The whole thing adds up to a social and economic cesspool.

Billie Jo leans back at her homeless encampment near unincorporated Cameron Park in El Dorado County, Ca.
A encampment is shown along the Santa Ana River trail on the border of Fountain Valley, Ca.

If they succeed, watch out! It certainly is the season of living dangerously.

RogerG

** Thanks to “League of Conservation Voters: Environmental Group or Democratic Campaign Heavyweight?”, Hayden Ludwig and Kevin Boyd, Capital Research Center, 7/6/2017, https://capitalresearch.org/…/league-of-conservation-voter…/

Posted on

Russians Indicted, Not Trump

Tears and shock at Clinton election night party.

This whole Russia dust-up is only about one thing: the Dems were shocked on Nov. 8, 2016. Then, the deligitimization campaign kicked into high gear. Hillary oppo research was leveraged into a smear operation. They were assisted by bureaucratic sympathizers who stretched their authority and an ideologically sympathetic legacy media to keep the fantasy on the front burner.

The Russians weren’t anymore prescient about the election result than Gallup. Their efforts were really done on the cheap. As a matter of fact, we have been famous for interfering in foreign elections. Ask Brexit supporters or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or take a look at the 1980’s Soviet disinformation campaigns in support of the nuclear freeze movement and domestic efforts to block Reagan’s decision to install medium range missiles in Europe. Many lefties, including lefty Dems, benefited from the succor. The current Dem obsession is divorced of any context, except their displeasure about losing.

Really, it’s all about the election result. As for the Russians, they tried to weaken the clout of their expected winner: Hillary. Now, the Russkies are focused on delegitimizing Trump. Pardon me for noticing the commonality of purpose of our “loyal” opposition and the Kremlin. Collusion anyone?

RogerG

Posted on

Journalism as Wish-Fulfillment

Sonam Sheth, politics and national security reporter at Business Insider, from her Twitter page.

While scanning Yahoo news, I ran into an article by Sonam Sheth (pictured above) of Business Insider about Trump’s pardoning  of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff accused of challenging one judge’s definition of the amorphous abstraction of “racial profiling”.  What was presented as a straight-up news piece was essentially a stitched together product of lefty wish-fulfillment.  The article went along a boozy path from the pardon to Trump-as-mafioso.  Journalism isn’t journalism any longer.  It’s fevered imaginations run wild.

To grasp the pitiful state of journalism, let’s go on a journey through Sheth’s personal profile.  It will illuminate a lot about her unconscious – or conscious –  mingling of bits of hard news with barnstorming lefty politicization.  This will be brief.

Her’s is a compressed odyssey from a Rutgers University classroom to a couple of extensions of the classroom in internships and a “columnist” for the college newspaper.  While in the college cocoon, she had a 3-month layover with Citizen Action of New York.  Currently, Citizen Action is one of the lefty activist groups in the vanguard of The Resistance.  Check out these gems of left wing boilerplate from the website:

“Build the Movement. Add Your Name to the Restistance Rapid Response: We’re building the statewide movement we need to take on Trump and make health care for all a reality. Build it with us.”

“Gov. Cuomo: Stop Trump’s Climate Attack!  While we fight the Trump administration every step of the way in D.C., New York must lead on climate change by transitioning to 100% renewable energy. It’s up to Governor Cuomo.”

There’s more, but you get the idea.

What would attract a future Business Insider staffer to an organization of politically strident lefty activism?  Hmmmm.

Oh well, from there she dropped into a short internship with CNBC and was picked up by Business Insider.  I’m sure that the Rutgers econ degree drew attention with the HR departments, but with the degree comes a load of ideological fixations.  They make it easy to leap from assumption/premise to disjointed fact to conclusion, all in a surreal and dreamy narrative landscape.  It would make Salvador Dali cringe in envy.

Salvador Dali

Now to the article.  The title says it all: “Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”.  A person could stop with the title and be just as informed.

The article was riddled with so much bounding from point to point that my wife could only hear, as I was reading, my repeated refrain of “This is bull@#$&*!”. The bravo sierra begins with the grasping for a link  between the pardon and hoped-for proof of obstruction of justice.

First, right out of the gate, she constricts Arpaio’s sin as “criminal contempt in July for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos”.  “Racial profiling” is one of those politically loaded terms that are bandied about like a frisbee.  It’s become so expansive that a victim might shy away from using the word “black” to describe a black  assailant.

Besides, Arpaio’s tough illegal immigration stance, and his use of “racial profiling”, might have something to do with the overwhelming type of illegal that a sheriff might confront in a state that shares a border with the Latino world south to the Strait of Magellan.  In effect, the judge is either ordering the sheriff to ignore the rule of law – immigration law that is – or pretend the obvious doesn’t exist as he does so.  Either way, it’s a court-ordered charade.  Trump’s pardon put an end to the judicial lunacy.

Illegal immigrants sit in a group after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas. (Associated Press).

For our budding journalist, it may never have occurred to her that an immigration hawk of a presidential candidate has a natural affinity for a sheriff thinking, and doing, the same.  It’s not proof of criminal intent and conspiracy to clear a sheriff from the clutches of an activist judge for carrying out policies in line with the policies and constitutional authority of the president of the United States.  But no, Sheth’s surreal potboiler must take precedence.

From the pardon, she builds the edifice.  In quoting a single source, Renato Marriotti, she tries to weave a story of criminal intent from, once again citing Marriotti, Trump hypothetically “ending investigations as to his friends”.  The presence of “friends” is not evidence of “intent” of criminal conspiracy to “obstruct justice”.  Arpaio isn’t an example of the kind of cronyism typical of the Clintons.  If viewpoint sympathy can be strung into the kind of relationship most typically found in criminal conspiracies, then most assuredly Bill Clinton should be dressed in striped livery for the pardoning of Marc Rich.  There was much more evidence of illicit behavior in that whole unseemly affair.

President Bill Clinton and Denise Rich attend a funraiser for ‘The G & P Charitable Foundation for Cancer Research’ in October 1998, in New York City. (DIANA WALKER/LIAISON)

As for Sheth’s insinuation of  “obstruction of justice”, where’s the underlying crime?  You know, the criminal conduct that a person seeks to hide.  For Bill Clinton, it was perjury in Federal District Court in Arkansas and his subsequent dissembling testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC.  For Trump, as the constitutionally ordained chief executive officer of the United States government, he simply asked about the possibility of ending the investigation of Michael Flynn.  Even here, Sheth can’t present proof of an order by Trump do so.  She’s only got Comey’s “feelings” of pressure.

I’m reminded of my discussions with my teenage sons after they came home late.  Certainly they felt “pressure”.  Am I guilty of “obstruction of justice” simply because they felt “pressure” … but I’m hiding no crime for which the “pressure” is applied?  Sheth’s pseudo-logic enters the realm of the ludicrous.

Of course, lurking behind the curtain is the fantasy of all denizens of the left: the Trump/Russian criminal conspiracy, the philosopher’s stone of explanations for the 2016 election results.  There’s been no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” … up to now.  But, then again, there’s no evidence of an underlying crime in my sitdowns with my clock-challenged sons … up to now.  I can only hope and pray that they never discover Sheth-logic.

Possibly Sheth could benefit from 2 doses of reality.  First, the president is the federal government’s alpha law enforcement officer.  In essence, he’s the chief DA of the federal government.  He can inquire into any investigation under his purview.  It may prove to be embarrassing to his supporters and much fun to his detractors, but voters can deal with that at the next election.  Alan Dershowitz, no card-carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, said as much in June of this year (see 6 below).

Furthermore, the president’s pardon power is near absolute.  If Trump so wished, he could pardon the entire roster of inmates in the federal penal system.  He doesn’t even have to wait for convictions to fling the power around.  It may not enhance his electoral viability, but he could do it.

Sheth’s story is a mess.  It is more lefty wish-fulfillment than it is journalism.  It doesn’t even make for good commentary, and more resembles a bad term paper.  As per the old cliché, there’s no there there.  For the Sheths of the world, it’s as if they want to overturn an election with smear-mongering and an endless manipulation of the criminal justice system.  The more appropriate venue for their angst is the ballot box … which, by the way, they have difficulty in winning.

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  3. Sonam Sheth Twitter page, https://twitter.com/sonamsays
  4. Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
  5. Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
  6. “Alan Dershowitz: History, precedent and James Comey’s opening statement show that Trump did not obstruct justice”, Alan Dershowitz and contributor, Washington Examiner, 6/8/2017,  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alan-dershowitz-history-precedent-and-james-comeys-opening-statement-show-that-trump-did-not-obstruct-justice/article/2625318
Posted on

The Distressed Working Class and the 2016 Election

Understanding the 2016 election requires something more involved than a 140-character tweet or an abbreviated Facebook post.  Much has been written about the white working class in the lead up and aftermath to the Trump victory.  The video is an AEI panel discussion with J.D. Vance and Charles Murray on the topic from October of 2016.  First, watch the conversation and then read the essay below it.

Our politics seems increasingly disjointed as many see the electorate as disparate victims’ groups.  Some call it “identity politics”.  A semi-official status as “victim” normally follows an intense period of political activism.  The process was evident for unionized workers, all sorts of hyphenated Americans, and gays (now to be added to the “hyphenated” category).  Did the 2016 election cycle insert the “white working class” to the list?  Can it claim addition to the growing list of the “oppressed”?

Indeed, something significant has been happening to the white working class; something ignored by the culturally powerful.  It’s a story of the isolation and ignorance of the culturally influential from the everyday lives of average working Americans.  It’s a story of the negative impacts of an insular elite’s popular causes on people outside the elite redoubts, in a place I call “middle-America”.

Middle-America is an entity culturally, economically, and geographically defined.  Culturally, middle-Americans are least likely to experience haute couture and an Ivy League setting.  Dining preferences ranges from a good steakhouse to a bar/grill to fast-food.  Economically, they occupy the rungs hovering around the poverty line to blue collar, wage-earning incomes.  Geographically, they reside in areas conducive to their livelihoods.  They increasingly have been weeded out of the now expensive coastal enclaves and gentrified, trendy inner-city neighborhoods.  More and more they are identified with the vast stretch between the Appalachians and the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges.

Middle America is a swath of the country in distress.  Socially, many middle-Americans are mirroring the experience of the African-American underclass.  Marriage rates are down; illegitimacy is up.  Church attendance is down; social pathologies like drug use and crime are up.  Unstable families more and more characterize life for many children.  Educational attainment is stunted.  Workforce participation by males is in decline.  The upshot is an evisceration of human capital that will be handed down to the next generation. (1) (2)

Factors like the decline of private-sector unions aren’t the cause as some claim.  The decay of these unions is a symptom, like all the rest, of a broader blue collar malaise.

These conditions are far removed from the cultural and economic elect.  They congregate in particular aesthetically pleasing nodes on the west coast and in places like Vail, Co.  They dominate financial and media centers and the surrounding neighborhoods, and college-centered communities.  Their children predominantly experience stable, intact families.  While church attendance is increasingly rare, values of hard work associated with formal education are stressed.  The backstop of strong families gives them a leg up in a world they’ll increasingly dominate.

Today, the two slices of America rarely intersect.  In the past, as recounted in the works of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam, they did.  It was common for the wealthy to rub elbows with workers and the poor.  Residential districts weren’t far apart and frequently shared the same schools, stores, and churches.

“Deindustrialization” has shattered this unity.  Some factories, the mainstay of some communities, have closed as economic weight gravitated to centers of financial services, technology, and higher education.  An outlook, distinct and secluded, has developed within each group. (2) (4)

Beliefs, as a consequence of isolation, begin to take hold among the two slices of the population.  Of particular note are the ideological obsessions and prejudices of the emerging upper class.  J.D. Vance makes reference to the slights of “hillbillies” and “rednecks” as acceptable language in conversation among so-called sophisticates.

Environmentalism has come to replace Christianity as a focus of near worship among cultural and upper class elites. (5)  It may be speculation but the attraction of the ideology probably has much to do with aesthetic cleanliness and neatness, just taking the form of environmental purity – thus the love affair with recycling, climate change, almost anything labeled “sustainable”, biodiversity, the preservation ethic for public lands, etc.

Furthermore, a formally educated elite has a predilection for the rule of “experts”, a foundational tenet of progressivism.  Environmentalism’s prescriptions lend themselves to the rule of “experts”.  Of course, the “experts” tend to be themselves.

The consequences of these views being translated into policy for those outside the elite enclaves is profound.  Yet, these effects aren’t maturely appreciated by this class of self-anointed “betters”.  For the elites, the forests are in essence parks that are to be treated as recreational preserves for the REI-crowd.  For a blue collar worker, the woods represent jobs and the stuff that fills a Home Depot.  Different perceptions, but it’s the REI-crowd who has magnified influence beyond their numbers.

The whole gamut of environmentalism’s causes has deleterious effects on working people and their communities.  Their safety-net is threatened as tax revenues decline.  Jobs disappear, only to be replaced by unemployment checks and part-time work.  Communities watch the housing stock deteriorate and store fronts board up.

Why?  One possible answer can be directed at the policy prescriptions whose origins lie in the perceptions of a particular, insular cultural elite.

The elite’s response to anyone harmed is a galling condescension and social engineering.  Opposition is ridiculed.  People experiencing the negative fallout will be directed into the “proper” behaviors and “proper” occupations.  Their children will be directed into the “proper” thoughts.   The near totalitarian dimensions of the outlook is obvious.

The political dimensions are equally obvious.  The blue along the coasts, and in the urban and college islands, corresponds with the cultural elite (map above).  The red is everyone else.  The Trump movement was a revolt, a revolt of middle-America against the condescension and effrontery of a cultural claque residing in “blue” America.

It will be interesting as the Democrats try to reshuffle their ideological deck to make it more appealing to blue collars.  I’m reminded, though, of the adage about lipstick on a pig.

RogerG

Sources:

(1) Losing Ground, Charles Murray

(2) Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray

(3) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance

(4) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert D. Putnam

(5) “Diversity in Environmental Organizations”, Sierra Club, 9/9/14, http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/2014/09/diversity-environmental-organizations