If the answer is Trump, what is the question?

So Donald J Trump is now the nominated candidate of the Republican Party for this year's US presidential election. I seem to be a lot less surprised by this outcome than many other New Zealanders, probably because I have spent more time in the United States in recent years and have regular contact with a lot more people living in America than the average New Zealander. I don't think you need to be very politically astute to understand why Trump has secured the Republican Party's nomination.

Firstly, there is the fact that America continues to languish in the economic doldrums it has been in since 2008. Despite endless pump-priming by the Federal Reserve, and talking up of the anaemic recovery by President Obama and his bureaucrats, many Americans cannot find work (the unemployment rate for men between the ages of 25 and 54 is 16%) and many are still 'underwater' in terms of wealth, having not regained the equity they lost in property and pension funds during the global financial crisis.

Secondly, there is disillusionment with the existing political institutions to deal with America's problems. Many Americans bought Obama's message of 'hope and change' but after eight years there has been no real change except for a much more expensive compulsory health insurance system, and no hope left. The Republicans are seen as equally hopeless, having been in control of both houses of Congress for the last two years with seemingly nothing to show for it.

Thirdly, there was the uninspiring line-up of alternative candidates in the presidential primaries. As National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg puts it, "the prospect of watching a Bush-Clinton race was so disgusting" that many people decided they would rather have a billionaire buffoon or a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist than either of the candidates from the two dynasties that account for three of the last four presidents.

Trump is a consummate populist, even more so than that other populist, Barack Obama. He doesn't have any discernible political philosophy - his position on any issue, whether it is immigration, trade or terrorism, is whatever will make him popular. Perhaps the only political label you could justifiably put on him is that he is a nationalist. He certainly does not have any credible solutions to America's problems. The Republican Party has decided he is the answer, but no one seems to know what is the question.

How will Trump perform as president? No one knows that either, but I expect that we are going to find out because (as I have written before) I believe he will beat Hillary Clinton to become the next President of the United States.

Left's Anti-Semitism is Unsurprising but Abhorrent

The current anti-Semitism scandal that has engulfed the British Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn has finally brought out into the open a particularly nasty trait of the political left-wing - its willingness to compromise any principles it may once have held to advance its cause of cultural relativism and identity politics.

Conservative US writer Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism wrote about how modern so-called liberal politics has common roots with Fascism and Nazism due to its origins in the late-19th/early-20th Century progressivism. The early progressives believed in 'scientific racism' and eugenics, which found their way not only into the writings of Adolf Hitler and but also into the policies of progressive US presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The liberal left today likes to make out that it is antithetical to racism but you only have to go back a few decades to find prominent left-of-centre politicians who were openly racist (e.g. 1972 US Democratic Party presidential candidate George Wallace was a supporter of race segregation policies).

The reason for the current anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party has more recent and prosaic origins - the rise of Islam in modern day Britain. In northern cities like Bradford and London suburbs like Tower Hamlets, the population is increasingly Muslim - and often it is a fundamentalist version of Islam that is practised by the adherents of that faith in their enclaves. You cannot be elected in these areas without being at least anti-Israel and preferably anti-Semitic to boot. The left-wing is fond of explaining that there is a difference between being anti-Israeli and being anti-Semitic and while I agree that is true in theory, in practice it is a distinction that is increasingly hard to make.

The left-wing portrays anyone who warns against the advance of Islam as racist, but of course Muslims are not a race at all but rather adherents of a religion or, more precisely, a theocratic political philosophy. It is a philosophy that is antithetical to Western values such as individual rights, freedom of speech and equality of opportunity, but it is not confined to one particular racial or ethnic group and there is nothing racist about opposing such a philosophy. Jews, on the other hand, are a race in the sense that they almost all share a relatively recent genetic origin (e.g. see this Wikipedia article for information about scientific studies of Jewish genetic ancestry).

I am not a Zionist. I do not believe that Jewish people have any a priori claim on the land that is now the State of Israel or any of its neighbouring territories. However, I do think that Israel has a right to peaceful existence by virtue of the fact that it is (for the most part) a non-aggressive, rights-respecting, democratic state (and, in fact, it is pretty much the only country in the Middle East that has these characteristics).

Left-wingers are the first to promote the cause of indigenous people as part of their identity group grievance-mongering. The fact is that the Jewish people are as close to indigenous to the area of modern Israel as any endemic people anywhere in the world. Other than a few decades in the 1st Century A.D. when the Romans expelled most Jews from what was then called Palestine, there have been ancestors of today's Jewish people in that area since antiquity (and you don't need to buy the whole Moses and twelve tribes mythology to accept this historical fact). So left-wingers who oppose Israel are hypocritical at best.

I believe everyone is entitled to their beliefs and to express those beliefs but I also detest those who for political reasons judge people, favourably or negatively, on the basis of some inherent group trait. The identity politics of the left-wing does precisely that. It is 'groupism' (which incidentally is a literal translation of 'Fascism') and when it comes from the hypocritical left-wing, it is particularly abhorrent.

If God is a Republican, then it is time for Him to intervene

There has been a lot of speculation about what happens if Donald Trump wins a plurality, but not a majority, of the nominating delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio in July. If that happens there will be a contested convention that is likely to go to multiple voting rounds. Delegates from many states are only bound to vote according to the primary outcome in the first ballot and after that all bets are off.

Some claim that the party could nominate someone who hasn't even contested the primaries, like House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, while others think John Kasich, who has won only one state in the primary race, could be the compromise candidate. Current rules prevent anyone who has not won at least eight states from contesting the nomination at the convention (rules that were brought in to prevent libertarian candidate Ron Paul from contesting the nomination in 2012) but the rules could be changed by a party committee immediately prior to the convention. The most likely outcome, as Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review, is that delegates will switch from Trump to second-placed Ted Cruz. It might take several ballots but in this way Cruz could end up with the nomination.

Ted Cruz wouldn't be a bad candidate in my opinion. He is liberal on economic and civil liberties issues, non-interventionist on foreign policy and a sceptic on climate change. He believes in trade liberalisation, a low flat tax, and balanced budgets. On the other hand, he is conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. So he's about half-right, but that makes him better than most Republican candidates by half.

The thing most against Cruz in winning the nomination is that the Republican Party establishment hates him even more than Trump. This is because Cruz has been willing to defy the Republican leadership to vote against his party in the Senate, even going so far as to call Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar in a debate last year. But while it may stick in the craw of the Republican establishment to support Cruz, they may fall into line if he is the only alternative to Trump.

The outcome of a Cruz switcheroo is anyone's guess. Trump himself has talked about possible riots if he is unfairly denied the nomination. At the very least it is likely to cause infighting in the Republican Party that would damage its candidate's chances in the November election.

There is still a small chance that Cruz could get enough votes in the remaining primaries to overtake Trump as he is less than 200 delegates behind and there are more than 850 delegates still to be decided, but Trump is ahead in the polls in the remaining big states of New York and California, so that outcome seems pretty unlikely.

However, miracles do happen and if God is a Republican (as so many of the GOP's supporters seem to believe), then it is time for Him to intervene.

Who paid for the Starship Enterprise?

My last post discussed how the left wing has won the culture war and that this is not surprising when 'every university lecturer, musician, film star, writer and other public figure is parroting the socialist-environmentalist mantra'. This theme was, at least tangentially, the subject of Jonah Goldberg's recent post about the new Star Trek television series to be made by CBS and that got me thinking about the true nature of the society portrayed on Star Trek.

Star Trek's United Federation of Planets is actually a militaristic feudal order. The Federation is governed by an elite supported by an all-powerful military establishment. Their society seems to be based, at best, on chivalry (after all, what is the Enterprise's crew other than a group of futuristic knights?) but, at worst, on militaristic expansion and colonisation of independent planets. They regard any form of commerce as a much lower order of human activity than military service, just like any Earth-bound feudal society. Money appears to have been abolished, at least in polite society, and witness the contempt held for the Ferengi, who are a trading race much more interested in making a profit than in conquering the universe. Of course, the United Federation of Planets is a somewhat milder form of collectivist society than the Borg, whose culture seems to most closely resemble Maoist Communism.

The question I ponder is, who paid for the Starship Enterprise? Consider the enormous economic resources that has to go into its construction - the engineers and scientists than need to be employed to design it, the rare minerals (e.g. dilithium crystals) that need to be mined to build it and to power its engines, and the undoubtedly huge operating costs of its endless missions. All of these need to be paid for somehow. I've always had this uneasy thought that somewhere, hidden away on dozens of colonised planets, there are millions of slaves working to support the Enterprise. Alternatively, a lot of people must be paying a lot of tax to fund it all. In short, the Enterprise must rely on real enterprise, but enterprise doesn't appear to exist in Star Trek society other than as some contemptible activity engaged in by the Ferengi.

I love to study history and one of the characteristics of history that encourages me as a libertarian is that human society tends towards greater freedom. It is not a straight progression and from time to time we regress into barbarism like the Nazi and Communist eras in the 20th Century, but these reversions tend to be increasingly the exceptions rather than rule. So when I imagine the 23rd Century I think it will be incredibly libertarian.

Individual freedom will be large, government will be small. Capitalism will be universal and each individual will be as powerful a player in the market as the biggest corporation is today. True poverty will be a thing of the past because everyone will be able to trade their ideas, skills and products freely with anyone else anywhere on (or beyond) Earth, and body and brain augmentation technologies will mean that everyone will have skills that are valuable in the marketplace. Cronyism, corruption and fraud will be largely absent from human interactions as such behaviour will be instantaneously exposed by the power of communications technology and social media. Money will be virtual and multiplicitous - meaning that there will be dozens, perhaps thousands of competing currencies and the devices we use to do business will instantly exchange between them, selecting the safest and best for our particular needs.

In short, the future will be Utopian, but not in the sense imagined by most who have written about such futures - it will be as far removed from Brave New World as you could imagine, but rather more like the hidden valley in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

There may be a United Federation of Planets, but its real heroes will be the Ferengi. After all, it is undoubtedly the Ferengi who will pay for the Starship Enterprise.

Anti-Semitism Lies Beneath Anti-Israel Bias

Anti-Semitism “is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people… but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilization” 
~ Christopher Hitchens

Several years ago I had a friend to dinner, a highly educated and cultured man with whom I enjoyed discussing all manner of social and political issues. We agreed on much that was wrong with the world and on what the solutions were but I was shocked when he announced that Israel should be wiped from the face of the earth. He admitted that his views were based mainly on his experiences during a visit to Israel a few years before. I thought it a bit extreme to advocate the destruction of a country based on a few negative experiences as a tourist but when he went on to say, "They are an arrogant people, they think they are superior to everyone else," I realised that, of course, he was not talking about getting rid of Israel but rather the Jews. And I think it is that sentiment that is at the heart of everyone who opposes the state of Israel.

Israel is not a bad country by any measure. It is a democracy with universal suffrage and is a relatively prosperous, uncorrupt and tolerant society. The Basic Laws of Israel define the country as a 'Jewish state' but they protect freedom of religion and establish equal legal rights for the more than 20% of the Israeli population that are Arabs - to an extent that is exceptional in the Middle East. The effectiveness of the Basic Laws has been demonstrated by the willingness of the Israeli Supreme Court to rule against the government in matters such as settlement in the occupied territories, the conduct of the Israeli armed forces in conflict zones, and protecting the rights of its Arab citizens. Successive Israeli governments have repeatedly demonstrated the country wishes to live in peace with its neighbours, having handed back territory it occupied in defensive wars to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.

The reason for the current actions of the Israeli armed forces in Gaza is the legitimate protection of Israeli citizens against the unprovoked aggression of the Hamas government in Gaza. After months of enduring escalating rocket attacks by Hamas against population centres in Israel, the Government of Israel did what any other government would be applauded for doing - sending its armed forces into the aggressor's territory to stop the attacks. The fact that there are inevitable civilian casualties does not make the actions of the Israeli government any less legitimate or any different to any other combat situation. A few media outlets have reported the incredible efforts of the Israeli armed forces to avoid civilian casualties such as telephoning occupants of buildings in advance of bombing and detonating small charges in advance of the main strike. Israel is taking these extraordinary measures to ensure civilian casualties are minimised despite the illegal actions of Hamas in using civilian facilities such as hospitals as launch sites for missile attacks on Israel and despite the likelihood that Hamas combatants are able to escape from the targets before they are hit.

It has been interesting to note that hardly any of Israel's neighbours have condemned its current actions in Gaza. This is because almost all other Arab nations regard Gaza under Hamas as more dangerous than their traditional enemy in the Jewish State. They rightly see Hamas as a puppet of the Iranian regime and it is Iran, not Israel, that they truly fear. Extraordinarily, it has been left to the 'liberal' Western media to condemn Israel in some of the most ill-informed and one-sided reporting of any conflict in modern history. Why has the Western media condemned Israel to an extent that is not evident in the coverage of say, France's intervention in Mali, or Barack Obama's use of drone strikes against targets in Northern Pakistan?

I have recently read some interesting theories that explain this highly selective and biased coverage. Douglas Murray, the British conservative commentator, in this interview with podcaster James Delingpole put forward what I'd term the 'guilt complex' explanation. In short, Murray believes the European commentariat are still trying to live down the Holocaust and by projecting some of the characteristics of the Nazis onto the Israelis they can say that, yes, even Jews can be indiscriminate killers so we're not that bad after all. This explanation has some resonance when you hear the references to 'genocide' that are used in regard to the relatively few civilian casualties of the Israeli military action.

Jonah Goldberg, in his book Liberal Fascism, is more blunt. Western liberalism has its roots in the progressivism of the early 20th Century, which was also the root of...well, that political movement started by Benito Mussolini. Incredible as this may seem after decades of the political left-wing labelling its opponents Fascists, Goldberg makes a pretty good case for the common roots of Fascism and modern liberalism. If you accept his argument it explains a lot, such as why Western liberals find common ground with murderous thugs like Hamas and the ISIS army in Syria rather than with a genuinely liberal country like Israel.

I don't know whether Murray's or Goldberg's theories have any basis in reality but I do know the current vilification of Israel is completely inconsistent with any regard for freedom, democracy and the legitimate rights of a nation state to defend itself. The hypocrisy of Western media and commentators means we must ask ourselves what is so different about Israel. The answer is obvious - it is the Jewish state. Anti-Israeli views cannot be separated from anti-Semitism, despite efforts of some Western liberal commentators to finesse the issue.

I should declare that while I am not Jewish, I have Jewish blood on my mother's side (which - and I cannot escape the sobering thought - would have made me eligible for the gas chambers had I lived under Nazi rule). I like to think I would feel the same way even if I did not have Jewish blood, but I admit I find myself getting angry about the treatment of Israel to an extent that I do with few other issues. My response to my friend's comments over dinner were a little less considered than what I've said above so I won't repeat those words here, but instead I will bookend this post with another quotation - the words of the great David Ben Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel:

"Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive."

The Liberal Fascist

I am currently reading Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, and I recently read Victor Klemperer's I Shall Bear Witness, his personal testimony to life as a Jew in Nazi Germany. These books have in common the subject of fascism, its origins and its language.

Goldberg's book is a revelation. I had not read anything else by this American writer and I was not expecting much of his book, despite it being a New York Times bestseller (I am sure much to the New York Times literary editor's chagrin), but I discovered his book is very well researched and his theories backed by much evidence. The gist of the book, as you might guess from the title, is that modern liberalism (i.e. left-wing) politics has its origins in fascist ideology. 

This is not entirely surprising to me and I have blogged on the topic of socialists being kin with National Socialists before, but Goldberg shows the provenance of modern liberalism following a direct line from philosophers like Rousseau, through the Jacobins of the French Revolution to Mussolini (both in his initial allegiance to the Italian Socialist Party and subsequently his establishment of his Fasci di Combattimento), and thence to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's Party. Along the way he traces the origins of American Progressivism as adopted by Woodrow Wilson (undoubtedly the most dictatorial US President ever), Franklin Roosevelt (the second most dictatorial), and on to modern liberalism through Lyndon Johnson and ultimately Barack Obama.  

The interesting thing about the provenance that Goldberg outlines is how successful modern liberals have been in covering the trail. These days it is accepted wisdom that Hitler and Mussolini were right-wing reactionaries just like modern conservatives such as US Republicans. But anyone the least bit familiar with Hitler and Mussolini's political beliefs and writings knows that they were first and foremost socialists (and certainly both proclaimed their socialist credentials right to the end) with a large dollop of popular pragmatism, just like modern liberals. Hitler, in particular, held to many of the same beliefs as the modern Green parties - that the patrician state should regulate every aspect of our social and economic life for our own good health and that of the environment. 

Hitler (but not Mussolini) was also a racist and eugenicist. Surprisingly, so was Woodrow Wilson and, to some extent, FDR. As recently as 1972, the Democratic Party was fielding as a candidate for president a prominent racial segregationist, George Wallace (and he probably would have won the nomination if it hadn't been for the assassination attempt that left him paralysed). Today, people forget it was a Republican president who abolished slavery and Southern Democrats who led the rebellion to retain it.

The parallels between Goldberg's book and Klemperer's first hand account of fascism in practice is interesting. Like Goldberg, Klemperer focuses to a large extent on the language of fascism (and in fact he later wrote the authoritative treatise on the subject, The Language of the Third Reich). He concludes that the Nazis, like Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984, were able to achieve so much of their hideous agenda because they controlled the language. Many Germans came to believe the Jews were greedy, dirty, degenerate, sub-human beings because Hitler was so successful in inculcating these beliefs into the language. If you repeat something often enough, people come to accept it as truth, just as today it is accepted wisdom that US Republicans are racists.

It is tiring, as well as ironic, to be branded a racist when you believe all races should be treated equally before the law, to be branded a fascist when you believe in a small, non-authoritarian state, or to be branded a 'denier' when you point out that the scientific method has been abandoned in the extreme predictions of some climate scientists. It is interesting that it is the so-called liberal side of the debate that is always most ready to engage in such propagandist name-calling when anyone challenges their policies on these matters. Goldberg may be engaging in the some of the same techniques that he abhors in modern liberal discourse, but if he is giving liberals some of their own medicine, then that is apposite. And he certainly weaves a credible story about the origins of their techniques.

Finally, I am saddened to see the very brilliant British blogger James Delingpole (whose blog is listed on the sidebar) is giving up his pen. I have corresponded with James on one occasion and found he was as engaging individually as he is in his blogs. James has been one of the greatest fighters for classical liberal views in the world over the few years and we can ill afford to lose him. I hope that he is not giving up the fight for good, although if he is, I can certainly understand why (for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph).  I hope he will pop up in a new role in which he will be just as great a thorn in the side of cowardly, liberal fascists as he has been in his blogging career. Thank you, James. It's been a laugh.