Kotkin: Shared Culture Is Key

Writing at Newsweek, Joel Kotkin writes much common sense in an article entitled:

America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It

A key point he makes is that one of our national political parties seems to have forgotten the common culture which enabled us to reach this point.

If the Democratic Party wants to avoid further electoral disasters like those in Virginia, Long Island and elsewhere, it would do well to relearn the obvious truth that a common culture that binds us is not only good and necessary, but popular.

Key to understanding how out-of-step the Ds have become is this fact.

Only a very small fraction of Americans, well under 10 percent, consider themselves progressive, and most reject the view of America as uniquely fallen.

Contrary to the the view of much of our academia and media, America is not a country based on racial commonality but a set of political notions.

It is passing strange that the media and academia, along with the Democratic party are jointly trying to “sell” a view congenial to so few actual Americans of any color. 

Not Black and White

A quick note about the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial that supposedly has something to do with race. The three people that Rittenhouse shot, likely in self-defense and two of them fatally, were all white men.

The only racial connection is that the white men Rittenhouse shot were rioting in Kenosha WI about the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis MN. Rittenhouse is accused of shooting no black people.

A Setback

Probably as a result of the cumulative stresses of the last year - Covid, selling one house, having another built, moving, RV living - my dear wife of the last 50 years (aka “the other DrC”) developed a bleeding ulcer which put her in the local hospital last night. 

She’s still there tonight but may come home tomorrow. It is likely she will need a month or more to recover. Whatever it takes, we will do willingly.

Veterans’ Day

Today, on the anniversary of the ending of World War I, we celebrate America’s military veterans. We owe them our enduring appreciation for defending this great nation, often at much cost to themselves.

In addition to a father and four uncles who served, I had an aunt who was a WAC in WW II. Thank a veteran for his or her service today.

Thursday Snark

Stephen Green, posting at Instapundit, describes President Biden as:

An incontinent and gaffe-prone archetypal example of the Peter Principle.

Green packs an admirable amount of negativity in a short sentence.

The New Peasantry

It’s time for another installment in our series on the deterioration of our state-of-birth, California. Once again our chronicler is Victor Davis Hanson who lives there and continues to ‘sing’ its elegy, this time in Deseret News. His point is that, in CA and places like it, the middle class can hardly exist.

The result is the emergence of a new American peasantry, of millions of Americans who own little or no property. The new majority has scant, if any, savings. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. Most of what they buy, from cars to electronic appurtenances, they charge on credit cards. The credit card indebtedness is over $8,000 per household and over $2,000 per individual — paid through monthly installments at average annual interest rates of between 15% and 19%, at a time when most home mortgages are usually below 4%.

Such short-term debt is often roughly commensurate with the payments and share- cropping arrangements that premodern peasants once entered into with lords and made it impossible for the serf to exercise political independence or hope for upward mobility.

A fifth of America receives direct government public assistance. Well over half the country depends on some sort of state subsidy or government transfer money, explaining why about 60% of Americans collect more payments from the government than they pay out in federal income taxes.

What remains of a CA middle class is largely government employees, the latter-day equivalent of the overseer class in a plantation economy. They are teachers and prison guards, firefighters and tax collectors, game wardens and bureaucrats, welfare workers and utility technicians. Their jobs are secure, some can actually buy homes. It certainly isn’t the life our founders envisioned for us.

Selection Bias

Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff reports the results of CNN interviewing - as a group - four suburban VA moms who voted for Youngkin. Most had voted for Biden a year ago. Mirengoff makes much of their shared dislike for former president Trump.

The final takeaway from the parents’ comments is that Trump remains poison with moms in the Virginia suburbs. Although all four thought that Trump was irrelevant to the gubernatorial race, their ongoing contempt for the man was obvious. His irrelevance was due to the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot.

I don’t deny that the four moms interviewed were no fans of Trump. On the other hand, given CNN’s anti-Trump bias, I worry CNN preselected anti-Trump voters-for-Youngkin for their moms panel. Such clearly exist in VA but we have no idea whether they are a representative sample.

Pathological Social Media

Politico interviews social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about political extremism and what, if anything, we can do about lessening it. It is an interesting read, perhaps worth your time. One thing Haidt says I find particularly riveting.

We are in a fundamentally new era — since 2012 — which makes it difficult to use history as a guide. As I see it as there is a before time, which is before 2009, and there is an after time, which is after 2012. What changed in between those years is that Facebook added the like button and Twitter added the retweet button. Thereby social media became far more engaging. Millions of people flooded on. All journalists flooded on to Twitter.

Now any set of beliefs can be fostered in a community completely separate from any objective reality. This is especially happening to the extremes.

What has this led to? To empowering the extremes, Haidt believes.

A fundamental law of our times is that the average does not matter. So even if 80 percent of people are fed up, it does not matter since after 2012 the dynamics are different. In the old times 80 percent was bigger than the 20 percent — or at least as big as 20 percent. Now 80 percent is not nearly as big as the 20 percent. So, yes, most people are fed up but it does not mean things will change.

Poll: Biden Approval Below 38%

Writing for USA TODAY, Susan Page and Rick Rouan report the findings of a recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll which looked at voter approval, or lack thereof, of presidental performance and policy. 37.8% approve of Biden's performance, 59.0% disapprove.

Nearly half of those surveyed, 46%, say Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he's done worse, not better, than they expected.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64%, say they don't want Biden to run for a second term in 2024. That includes 28% of Democrats. Opposition to Trump running for another term in 2024 stands at 58%, including 24% of Republican.

Americans overwhelmingly support the infrastructure bill Biden is about to sign, but they are split on the more expensive and further-reaching "Build Back Better" act being debated in Congress. Only 1 in 4 say the bill's provisions would help them and their families.

Sleepy Joe’s giving a truly Carter-like performance as President. And even fewer (28%) approve of cackling Kamala.  

Process Note

Barring some catastrophic (inter)national occurrence which absolutely demands comment, postings here will be sparse for the next several days. The whole move-the-old-stuff-into-the-new-house thing has to happen.

A 25% downsized house has different patterns. I’ll be otherwise occupied figuring out with the other DrC what goes where. If things go as planned, I should be back to this blog later in the week.

Wish us well.

We’re In

Yesterday we got the keys to our new house, and today the first furniture arrived, 11 new pieces we ordered back in March. On Monday, our stuff from the former winter home we sold in February will be delivered out of storage. 

We ate breakfast there this morning; if like us you count a cinnamon roll and coffee as breakfast. I’m not certain when we will spend a night in the new place, probably not for a few days as things there will be hectic. We have a perfectly serviceable RV hooked up to city utilities and livable a few miles away.

The house is looking nice, the ceilings are high and the doors are tall which increases the feel of space. The garage is so completely finished inside it even has baseboard molding, a first in my experience. It will be fun learning the patterns of a new house, something we haven’t done for 17 years.

Marching Orders for the Right

I don’t often declare something a “must read” but I believe I just read one, in The Federalist. Rachel Bovard, their Tech Editor, takes a stab at creating an agenda for the political right in America and I think she’s come dang close to nailing it. 

Along the way she relegates the never-Trump group of former Republicans to the ashcan of history without ever mentioning either them or Trump. Her agenda is something I’d sign onto, see if you don’t agree.

Zero Sum?

A Politico article discusses the difficulties inherent in trying to determine who Hispanics voted for and in what numbers in Virginia. Some polls show a real shift among Hispanics to voting for Republicans, others show the reverse. Nobody much disagrees that Trump got substantially more Hispanic votes than previous Republican presidential candidates.

A reason this could be happening - one nobody wants to talk or write about - is that Hispanics don’t have a lot in common with American Blacks. Hispanics often aren’t fond of and don’t want to be lumped with them. Democrats spent much time and energy taking pro-Black stances and those are probably off-putting to many Hispanics. 

Nobody likes that some political party choices are zero-sum games, where when one group wins, the other must lose. This may be one such “game.”

Update

We visited the new house today and found all but one of our appliances had arrived and been installed. We have the new range top and our dishwasher. The range hood is still incomplete and we have a “loaner” refrigerator until the correct new one arrives. 

When we are handed the keys tomorrow at 1 p.m. the house will be a usable home. Honestly I’m a bit amazed they made their deadline. 

We will start storing things there tomorrow, and in the process uncluttering our RV which has had stuff stashed in corners and behind furniture. Actually, the back seat of our pickup is full nearly to bursting with a variety of “stuff” we’re anxious to unload.

Political Snark

Instapundit attributes the following to a friend who sent it along:

Q. Why did the Dems lose in Virginia? 

A. The fake ballots were printed in China and they’re all still stuck on a ship waiting in LA harbor!

It would be even funnier if it weren’t an actual possibility. 

Agro Terminator

Go see a Forbes article about a robotic machine that cruises through a truck garden field zapping weeds with lasers while protecting the desired plants from harm. The objective: reducing the need for expensive and health-hazardous herbicides. It sounds benign.

Imagine applying the same technology to people - picking the undesirables for zapping. The machine can tell an onion from a carrot, why not a red from a blue? Somewhere Skynet smiles, considering the possibilities; Sarah Connor, it’s time for you and young John to go off the grid.

Wednesday Whimsy

 Headline at Business Insider:

SpaceX's leaky Crew Dragon toilet means 4 astronauts returning to Earth will have to rely on 'undergarments' instead, a NASA official said

Elon, check with Howard Wolowitz. He is the widely recognized expert on space toilets. 

Learning the Lessons

Democrats took a shellacking last night, almost across the board. Now the question is what lessons they will learn from the voters’ repudiation of their candidates? 

Will they conclude they’ve drifted too far left, and got beaten in the culture wars? Or will they conclude their inability to agree on massive tax-and-spend programs was at fault because they didn’t “buy” enough votes with give-aways.

Did they lose because Joe Biden has been, in office, a slow-motion train wreck with one screw-up after another? Or because it is hard to get voter turnout in off-years? Actually, we know it wasn’t this last one, as VA had a relatively high turnout for a non-presidential election.

Jeff Greenfield reminds us of how Bill Clinton moved the D party to the center and won, and implies that would be a winning strategy today. I suspect he is correct but will have trouble selling that program to many of today’s lefty Ds.

Mini-progress Report

Work continues on our new house. We stopped by yesterday afternoon and found workmen doing some touch-up tile work. We also discovered our water softener had been installed earlier that day and our ovens had been installed. They look good, very shiny (photo at the other DrC’s blog).

We still need a range top and hood, dishwasher, and refrigerator as well as the “odd bits and bobs” mentioned on Monday. Until proven to the contrary, I choose to believe they’ll show up soon. The evidence so far suggests our builder is making the proverbial “good faith effort” in far-from-optimal circumstances. 

The Election Results

It appears that Republicans won all three statewide races in Virginia yesterday, electing a governor, a lieutenant governor, and an attorney general. All three offices were previously held by Democrats. A source I read claimed that no Republican had won a statewide VA race since 2009, until last night. This is big.

Conventional wisdom held that the large number of federal employees and hangers-on in the northern counties around DC could be counted on to vote D. It turns out many of those “federal folk” are also parents with kids in the public schools who don’t like their children being taught they are evil, if white, or victims if not. 

Public school teachers squandered most of their public goodwill during the recent pandemic. Public anger at teacher unions and their tame school boards is an under appreciated political force. Perhaps hindsight will conclude inviting union president Randi Weingarten to campaign for McAuliffe was a blunder.

While it is still too soon to call as I write this, the governor’s race in New Jersey is very close, but was expected to be an easy win for Democrat Murphy. November 2 has been a bad day for Democrats, and thus a good day for our United States. Going forward, the culture wars seem to be a winning issue for the GOP.

Another good outcome yesterday was the citizens of Minneapolis voting down a measure to disband the city’s police. That measure was a response to the death in police custody of George Floyd. I got the good political news I hoped for … for a change.