Political Outsiders — The Coming Explosion

Political outsiders are the new thing in national politics. Outsiders dominate early polling in the Republican presidential primary. This phenomenon reflects also in the Democrat Party where Bernie Sanders, not a Democrat, is showing unexpected strength.

Why this phenomenon is happening and whether it can continue is perplexing the pundit class. As part of the Washington establishment they are too close to the problem to understand. Thus far they and establishment politicians have underestimated the political support of the outsiders. The elites believe that some strange anger is coming from “fly-over” country. The rubes, racists and other Neanderthals living outside of Washington are considered too dumb to understand the complexities and nuances understood and only manageable by the elite.

This hissy-fit interpretation is likely invalid. The punditocracy considers the infatuation temporary. Before the parties choose their proper candidates, it is expected to be a footnote to the election. However the strength of the outsiders seems to be growing, not receding. Are we witnessing a real movement or just a fad? Is this the incipient version of a peasants-with-pitchforks movement in American politics? Time will provide an answer to these questions.

As the movement has gained strength, some doubts have begun among the intelligentsia. For now, some have shifted their focus to why this movement is happening. If it were only Donald Trump it would be easy to dismiss it as the cult of personality. Those most likely to believe such a theory would be the first to not see that it was just such madness that gave us our current messiah-in-chief. A Trump win is more plausible than an Obama win. Trump brings history, experience and accomplishments. Obama brought nothing but history and that he hid from the voters.

Ben Carson is closer to the Obama model except he has a goodness about him that Obama never conveyed. Yet Dr. Carson has limited managerial experience. Operating on the undersized brains of the political class is experience not needed unless Dr. Carson has discovered a way to do brain transplants on a large scale. Ostrich brains might be an improvement.

Political Outsiders Are Popular Because They Are Political Outsiders

Regardless of what the punditry accepts at this moment, they are likely to eventually believe that the demand for outsiders (i.e., non-politicians) is real. If this recognition fails to take this election, it likely will in future elections. The American public is fed up with the political class. The disgust is evident in supporters of both political parties. Only the loyalist of political zombies are without doubts regarding their political leaders.

It is difficult to identify reasons why voters vote for a particular person or party. Pundits usually attach a cause-and-effect explanation. This quid-pro-quo relationship lends itself to interest group politics. Votes, whether expressed as such or not, are seen as chattel to be purchased by actual or promised political largess. The Democrat Party today exists only because they play this game better than the Republicans. In recent years Republican strategy has been to emulate the Democrats, abandoning what few principles they had in an attempt to wrest the title of Pander Party away from their opponents.

At this stage in history, government has become a prostitute of enormous size. It will provide its favors to whomever will reciprocate with votes. David Friedman in his book The Machinery of Freedom described this behavior as a game similar to musical chairs. 100 people each put a dollar into the government pot. When the music stops, the government gives $50 to the nearest person. Then the process is repeated over and over again.

This simplistic metaphor for government is easy to understand. Two things differ from Mr. Friedman’s metaphor. First, government is much more sophisticated in its game of musical chairs. Second, it was intended to be played infrequently. The sophistication of the game has been exposed by its continuous play. People understand that it is a negative sum game. When it was played occasionally like some play the lottery, it was acceptable. When it must be played continuously, it adversely affects how well you can feed your family.

Government has always played this game, but few realized it. Lawrence Sellin, using Ambrose Bierce to make his point, explained the game and its longevity:

Over one hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce, a 19th century political satirist, deploring the political corruption and lack of representative government, described Washington D.C. as a: “Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles and the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

How little things have changed.

People are now forced to buy lottery tickets in this negative sum, terrible odds game. Too many now realize what is happening to allow it to continue without a reaction.

The anti-government sentiment is everywhere.  Jonah Bennett reports one aspect of the antipathy with this startling finding:

For many Americans, a coup in which the military seizes control of the federal government is starting to seem like a refreshing alternative to the existing administration, according to a new poll.

Victor Davis Hanson relates the dissatisfaction to political lawlessness:

America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.

His excellent article is reproduced at the end of this piece.

Mr. Hanson has identified a major concern of the public. However, the reason is bigger than just political lawlessness. I think that David Friedman got it right with his simple metaphor. What has changed is that as government has grown larger and larger, more of us now see the game for what it truly is. We may not be as bright as Ambrose Bierce was over a century ago, but one need not be a clever detective when the clues and evidence are everywhere. Government corruption exists and always has. There is more of it today than there ever was. Likewise the imbalance between the makers and takers has soared to obvious and unsustainable levels. To support the voting takers, government must increasingly take from the makers.

Even the dullards among us  see what is happening. The sheer volume and prevalence of the wealth transfers and political aggrandizement are too much to hide. Those of us who saw this earlier placed trust in insiders who promised to fix these problems. Putting them into positions of power changed nothing. The reformers did not reform, they worsened the problems.

The notion that electing me is not as bad as electing the other guy has grown stale. So has the idea that my guy will drive the car more slowly toward the cliff than the other guy. The fact is that it is going off the cliff that destroys, not the speed at which you leave terra firma.

A growing and large segment of the public is fed up. They are having their Howard Beale moment. They don’t want someone to go in and fix things. They want someone to go in and break things. They have been lied to too many times. For them the time for applying patches and band aids has passed. They want someone to come in and perform a frontal lobotomy on Washington and its membership. Perhaps that is the attraction of Dr. Carson, but I suspect they really want a bull to enter this china shop and do so hopping mad. That appears to be  Donald Trump’s attraction.

The public does not want things “fixed.” They want a wrecking ball not a healer. They don’t want to be led, they want to be left alone. For many, the old neutron bomb should be revitalized and used on the Sodom and Gomorrah known as Washington, DC. Get rid of the people but save the nice buildings.

Regardless of what euphoria you may feel regarding the political outsider movement, it is not without extreme risk. While it may offer the only hope of reversing matters, it is rife for demagogues and bad people. Remember, Hitler was democratically elected.

Below is Victor Davis Hanson‘s fine discussion of political lawlessness:

Descent Into Lawlessness

Do you remember Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.

In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.

Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald convinced a Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements to federal investigators — not the supposed crimes for which he was originally targeted by the media.

Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry — by supposedly independent and autonomous prosecutors.

In the eight-plus since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

Barack Obama once warned Latino activists that he had no legal authority to suspend enforcement of federal immigration law, stop deportations and offer de facto amnesties.

But that caution was only a campaigning talking point. After his re-election in 2012 and the midterm elections in 2014, Obama made a mockery of immigration law.

Hundreds of liberal sanctuary cities have announced that federal immigration law does not apply to them. That scary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification was sanctioned by the Obama administration — in a way it never would have been if a city had suspended the Endangered Species Act, emissions standards or gun-control legislation.

As a result, once-detained and later-released immigrants with criminal records have murdered innocent American citizens.

Consider the proposed nuclear deal with Iran. By past custom and practice, the nonproliferation agreement would be treated as what it is — a treaty.

But ratifying treaties constitutionally requires 67 yes votes from the Senate. Obama could never obtain that margin. So he managed to downgrade the treaty into a mere legal agreement. Then he claimed that the Senate required 67 no votes to override his veto.

Obama also was worried about the political impact of his new Obamacare legislation on the 2014 midterm elections. So he simply suspended by executive fiat the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Had another president done that to the laws of Obamacare, the left would have demanded impeachment.

In Ferguson, Missouri, law enforcement eased off and allowed a city to burn. But the cause of the rioting — the supposed improper police killing of criminal suspect Michael Brown — was based on the lie that Brown was shot in the back while fleeing. No matter. The ensuing public outrage seemingly exempted arsonists and looters from arrest.

Just as scary is the application of the law on the basis of the perceived politics of a suspect.

IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner was exposed as a rank partisan whose office gave particular scrutiny to would-be tax-exempt groups deemed opponents of Obama’s re-election efforts. She invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify before a congressional committee about her actions at the IRS. Lerner has never been indicted.

Almost everything former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stated about her improper use of a private email account and server has been proven false. A State Department staffer who worked on Clinton’s private server plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a congressional committee about his role in privatizing Clinton’s email.

But like Lerner, Clinton has escaped an indictment or jailing.

Not so Kim Davis. She is a conservative Christian court clerk in Kentucky who apparently thought, given the lawless times, that she could ignore without consequence a Supreme Court decision making gay marriage legal.

Davis was jailed for not enforcing the law. That is a justifiable punishment — if it were applied equally to the progressive mayors of sanctuary cities and all officials who likewise ignore federal law.

In the same manner, rank amateur video maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was jailed for violating his probation. Why?

Nakoula made a video insensitive to Muslims and thus was falsely blamed for the riotous 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The most likely culprit of the preplanned Benghazi attack was not scapegoat Nakoula, but the inconvenient pre-election truth that al-Qaida was quite alive in Libya and U.S. security quite lax.

America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.

So we are now seeing the logical descent into the abyss of chaos.