It’s why I’m relatively unconcerned about who is President of the United States.

Why Historians Worry More About Trump Than Economists Do

More fundamentally, however, historians stress the importance of contingency, that things really could have gone another way. The decisions of a solitary assassin or the outcome of a single battle can shift the course of history. Particular leadership decisions might have avoided or limited World War I. Or what if the Germans had not, in 1917, put Lenin on a train back into Russia? The Bolshevik Revolution might have been avoided and probably the entire course of history would have been different. A shrewder President Paul von Hindenburg might have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler.

If you think about these questions enough, you can end up very nervous indeed. Historians have seen too many modest mistakes spiral out of control and turn into disasters.

Economists, in contrast, work more with general models than with concrete historical situations, and those models emphasize underlying structural forces. Economies have fairly set populations, birth rates, natural resources, capital stocks, savings rates, trading partners, and so on. So to an economist, the final outcomes are closer to necessary than contingent.

Economists also study “catch-up growth,” which holds that systems tend to be self-repairing. So if some resources are destroyed, GDP will fall but the system will produce new replacement resources more rapidly, just as a lobster might regrow a lopped-off arm. Catch-up growth tends to make economists less nervous about natural disasters or wartime losses, although of course we think it is better to avoid the resource destruction in the first place.

Of course the small group of people can change the law which reduces individual freedom–which makes economic recovery impossible, or worse–cause economic conditions to spiral out of control. Just witness what is going on in Venezuela.

On the other hand I have been a very strong believer that a single person can change the world–only if he is the last grain of sand in an avalanche. In other words, had George Washington been born a few years earlier he would have been a farmer no-one ever heard of. If Adolf Hitler became a successful painter, someone else would have taken his place. The assassin who started World War I wouldn’t have been more than an interesting footnote if the countries weren’t posed to go to war and were just looking for an excuse. The stability of the United States is determined in part by our culture and our attachment to the ideas of equality framed in the Declaration of Independence, not because any one man sits in the White House.

So if you want to know where our country is headed, don’t look at the rhetoric coming from the President. Don’t look at the comments of a radio host. Don’t look at the opinions espoused by the media.

Instead, look at Gallup polling and Pew polling of American attitudes.

And in those attitudes, we see greater support for gay marriage, steady support for abortion, and rising confidence in our economy.

And while we do see rising support for socialism by Democrats, on the whole the majority of Americans have been pretty steady in their support of capitalism, and when you ask what is intended by “socialism” you find considerable disagreement. Meaning a large number of Democrats may support the “socialism” brand–but they can’t agree as to what is in the box: a large number believe it is essentially what is going on in the Scandinavian countries, forgetting that on the whole (when adding up public and private welfare support, such as food banks) that the United States is more generous with welfare than are the Scandinavian countries, and forgetting that our economy is in fact more heavily regulated than the Scandinavian countries.

(So for Bernie Sanders to truly implement his “Democratic Socialism” model in the United States would require Donald Trump levels of economic deregulation.)

But even that shift in attitude doesn’t worry me, because it’s a function of branding–not a true shift in attitude. Our country has always fretted over the welfare of the poor, and providing welfare to the poor has always been considered in this country a private and public concern. And it is doubtful that even, with the best efforts by people trying to push our culture, we will ever return to the levels of government control over the economy we saw under Nixon with his wage and price controls.

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So no, I’m not worried about President Trump. No more than I was worried about President Obama.

Because our country is going to go where it’s going to go–set in motion by a Declaration of Independence (and its assertion of the freedom of man) which itself has a multi-century history tied up in European philosophy and governmental history.

For certain definitions of “regrettable,” of course.

From an excellent interview with Thomas Sowell: Thomas Sowell Returns

[Intellectuals] want to stop emphasizing growth and prosperity and start focusing on closing gaps [via] income redistribution. Take the 1920s, which was a great period of great progress in the world—but not in the intellectual sphere. You would never gather from reading most histories that the 1920s was a pivotal decade in the economic rise of most Americans, when families got electric lights, radios, automobiles—all of that and much more. Most histories of the United States, however, feature the 1920s as a regrettable decade.

I have come to the conclusion–one honed by years of observations such as this–that while most Left-wing intellectuals (and they’re legion throughout academic circles) claim to want equality and social justice and helping the common man, the claim is hogwash: the distractions of the left hand of a magician to hide what is going on in the right.

Because from concrete evidence it seems what intellectuals want more than anything is to trample down the hoi polloi and establish themselves in their “rightful place” as the rulers of the Earth.

It’s why the 1920’s are so regrettable: not despite the fact that people got the electric light, radios, automobiles–but precisely because people got the electric light, radios, automobiles and, in the process, improved their lives–causing the “unwashed masses” to encroach upon provinces once the exclusive domain of the well connected.

And when you look at socialist countries around the world–they have, almost to the last, been raging successes. Raging successes at trampling down the common man while elevating the “intellectuals” to untold wealth.

Or rather, they are raging successes right up until society collapses. But then, the “filthy unwashed masses” aren’t all that bright (according to the intellectual class)–and as Heinlein once quipped, it’s all just bad luck.

… but you know, he’s right …

It seems President Trump’s preferred mode of communications is to take a fundamental truth, wrap it in an inflammatory statement, toss it out, and watch the Left go ape shit. That way you can tell the ones who are basically anti-whatever-the-fuck-Trump-says, and those who are actually paying attention.

There aren’t a lot of people paying attention.

Take one of Trump’s statements about the wildfires in California:

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.”

And how quickly the Left latched on–screaming everything from climate change denial to the fact that Finland does not rake its forests.

Yet when you get to the core of Trump’s message–well, if there wasn’t a lot of dried brush waiting to burn out there, there wouldn’t have been anything to burn, right?

And slowly, ever so slowly, generally from the right–the essence of the underlying truth: that California has done a terrible job clearing out dead and drying brush which serves as fuel for wildfires–starts trickling out.

[Trump is] exactly right.

Just ask California officials. Two months ago, the state legislature enacted a measure that would expedite the removal of dead trees and use “prescribed burns” to thin forests. In other words: the very same reforms that Trump is now being mocked for proposing. The September law followed a Gov. Jerry Brown executive order earlier this year that also called for “controlled fires” to improve forest health.

This scientific approach isn’t easily conveyed in Trump’s preferred mode of communication, the 280-character tweet. But University of California forest expert Yana Valachovic conceded in a Washington Post interview that Trump’s “general sentiment is correct — that we need to manage fuels.” That is, to get rid of dangerous buildups of dead and dying trees.

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The reality is, the population of California rivals that of larger European nations: with nearly 40 million people, California’s population is larger than Poland’s, only slightly smaller than Spain’s. California’s population density is roughly that of Spain as well, with a population density of 93 people per square kilometer. This makes California more densely populated than all but a handful of North-Eastern states–many of which have basically grown into massive city-states.

California, in other words, has a lot of people–and the state’s population is growing, which means California’s population is encroaching onto more dry desert regions and dry shrub regions.

The Eastern United States has spent centuries living with hurricanes. If you drive anywhere on the East Coast you will notice planned hurricane evacuation routes and safe spots; the states in the East have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort figuring out how to set up evacuation routes and will quickly call for evacuations even when, as it turns out, the hurricane misses the predicted landing spot. It’s better to evacuate and have nothing happen, we’re told, than to not evacuate and not be able to evacuate when the storm finally arrives.

California needs to do the same thing, but with wild fires.

California, in other words, needs to have known evacuation routes, phased evacuations and to evacuate days before a fire spreads to an area. Better to leave and have nothing happen than to find yourself driving through a fire storm–and sometimes not surviving.

“But California is now in a drought!”

Is this an excuse to allow nearly 90 people to die? Saying “California is now in a drought, because of global warming” is a fucking excuse, not a call to action.

That’s because even if it turns out 100% of the environmental changes we see in California was man-made, and we waved a magic wand which caused all of the global warming activists dreams to come true–a magic wand which imposed the statist reforms and the massive reductions in power consumption which is said to cause global warming, and even if we assume those statist reforms actually did what activists claim they would do–we’re still talking decades before we see the impact of those changes.

Climate does not change on a dime.

And in the meantime, California needs to better manage the dry brush on the ground–and if this is caused by global warming, that means California needs to do more, not less.

So please, don’t talk to me about droughts or global warming.

Instead, California needs better planning, and it needs better emergency management–so another 90 people don’t die a few years from now when the next wildfire takes place.

How? By building a wall?

Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

So, is this an example of burning the village in order to save it?

In all seriousness, this is what happens when your expressed politics is more “the flavor of the month” rather than having deep, fundamental philosophical roots. Otherwise you start risking sounding like your opponents–such as this perfect example of “let’s give the right-wing nationalists in Europe exactly what they want, so they’ll shut up.”

And under the bus goes the immigrants…

Your moment of zen.

Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Painting Soviet Monuments To Look Like American Superheroes

The picture that accompanies the article is fantastic:

I don’t know why anyone is surprised.

The surprising (?) formula for becoming an art star

New artists who show their work early in a relatively small network of 400 venues—like Gagosian Gallery or the Guggenheim Museum—are all but guaranteed a successful art career, the study said. By contrast, artists who exhibit mainly in lower-level galleries and midtier institutions are likely to remain stuck in that orbit.

“There’s this invisible network of trust that exists in the art world, but the group that decides who matters in art was considerably smaller and more powerful than we expected,” said Albert-László Barabási, a data scientist who studies networks at Northeastern and led the study along with several colleagues including a data scientist now at the World Bank, Samuel Fraiberger. Their findings also show up in Dr. Barabási’s book published earlier this week, “The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success.”

His findings undermine a popular art-world notion that a prodigy could create in obscurity and get discovered years later. Instead, the research suggests that artists who start out seeking connections with powerful curators, dealers and collectors within the nerve center of the art world are far more likely to hit the big time…

“If one of your first five shows as an artist is held at a gallery in the heart of this network, the chances of your ending your career on the fringes is 0.2%,” Dr. Barabási said. “The network itself will protect you because people talk to each other and trade each other’s shows.”

…“The art world prides itself on being so open and inclusive, but the truth is the opposite,” Mr. Resch said.

This is how the world works.

We like to think the world is a meritocracy, but the reality is, while your success in the lower tiers of any profession is driven by merit, and while you do need some ability to succeed in the highest tiers–your ability to get into the highest tiers of any profession (including art) is primarily a function of who you know.

It’s why some rather stupid people show up in the top tiers: because in some ways, progress at the top is almost entirely predicated by who you know, not by how smart you are or how talented you are.

I’m not sure this is turning out the way the activists who organized this wanted it to turn out.

So remember that huge caravan of Central American migrants who were organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras as an anti-Trump publicity stunt? (And don’t tell me they’re just nice folks making sure migrants are safe as they move through Mexico; their own press page is full of calls to “Fight Back!”, protests of immigrants detailed at the border, and anti-ICE protests.)

Well, the first large caravan has arrived in Tijuana.

And the fine folks in Tijuana are pissed:

Hundreds of Tijuana residents congregated around a monument in an affluent section of the city south of California on Sunday to protest the thousands of Central American migrants who have arrived via caravan in hopes of a new life in the U.S.

Tensions have built as nearly 3,000 migrants from the caravan poured into Tijuana in recent days after more than a month on the road, and with many more months ahead of them while they seek asylum. The federal government estimates the number of migrants could soon swell to 10,000.

…

Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum has called the migrants’ arrival an “avalanche” that the city is ill-prepared to handle, calculating that they will be in Tijuana for at least six months as they wait to file asylum claims.

Note that most of these asylum requests will be rejected out of hand–because their claims to asylum is based on:

Honduras has a murder rate of 43 per 100,000 residents, similar to U.S. cities like New Orleans and Detroit. In addition to violence, migrants in the caravan have mentioned poor economic prospects as a motivator for their departures. Per capita income hovers around $120 a month in Honduras, where the World Bank says two out of three people live in poverty.

Poverty is not a valid reason for requesting asylum.

Nor is the relative violence rates–which the article notes is similar to the violence rates in some U.S. cities. Let’s be serious: if you were afraid for your life because you lived in “violent” Detroit–would you request political asylum in the Honduras? The murder rates are similar…

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This is backfiring on the “Families without Borders” organizers and the other assisting organizations, who are all funded by George Soros, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and Carnegie.

And it’s backfiring in a big way: already the citizens of Tijuana (and politicians in Mexico) are now looking with admiration at the Trump Administration because, unlike the President of Mexico, Trump is seen as being willing to protect the borders and preserve law and order.

Look who’s sporting a MAGA-like hat in Tijuana:

Mexican citizens are protesting the caravan of illegal Central American migrants, calling them criminals and the Mayor of Tijuana has a "Make Tijuana Great Again" hat. Will elected Democrats call them racist liars for opposing the illegal caravan?
Link: https://t.co/7wWgOCgJvT pic.twitter.com/KUpOTkImCq

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) November 19, 2018

Do you want a Brexit-like event in Mexico?

Because this is how you get a Brexit-like event in Mexico.

However, unlike the United States (which has a long history of calm and reasoned rule by elected leaders who never stray too far from a moderate position that favors individualism over State rule), most other countries–including Mexico–has a history of strong-men.

And all it would take is a strong-man to use this to effect change in Mexico–and to institute a less classical-liberal governmental regime.

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I don’t blame George Soros, by the way. He is advancing what he believes is the right answer based on his experience in Eastern Europe.

However, when you only have a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail–and sometimes when swinging that hammer you break things in unexpected ways. And George Soros only has a hammer.

When the informal structures are abused, we get formal structures which repress everyone.

Or rather, hard cases make bad law.

In particular: How Trump won the Acosta lawsuit.

[The judge] ordered Acosta’s pass returned for now in part because he said CNN was likely to prevail on its Fifth Amendment claim — that Acosta hadn’t received sufficient notice or explanation before his credentials were revoked or been given sufficient opportunity to respond before they were….

“In response to the court, we will temporarily reinstate the reporter’s hard pass,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “We will also further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future.”

So now what happens?

The judge framed it as a matter of process, which justifies Trump issuing a set of rules of decorum. I assume the rules will include a requirement that a reporter who has received a response (whether it’s to his liking or not) must relinquish the microphone, that there can be no physical interference with a staff member who reaches out to take the microphone, and that one must stop talking once the President (or press secretary) has moved on to the next questioner.

Any complaints about these rules and the prescribed consequences of violating them can be met with pieties about adhering to the judge’s ruling. Things must be done in an orderly way — in the press room and in a system of due process. Any complaints premised on freedom of the press will be met with statements like “We want total freedom of the press” and we want perfect due process. So here you are, here’s notice of our rules of decorum. And that should be the end of the kind of questioning Acosta has become famous for. Trump wins.

The funny part: the judges ruling in this case pretty much requires Trump to issue rules of decorum–meaning the freewheeling days where the press shouts questions at the President, and the President has to answer or deflect as needed are gone.

One of the rules the President may impose–one which future Presidents of both parties would undobutedly keep–are rules against asking off-topic questions. In other words, it has become common–especially with Trump who has made himself far more available to the press than Obama ever did–for press members to ask questions unrelated to the press conference at hand. (For example, it’s common for the President to hold a presser on the signing of a military spending authorization but be asked questions about domestic issues.)

Future rules of decorum could make those types of questions out of bounds–and cause the revocation of a press member’s hard pass.

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I’m sure the press will love the new rules… </sarcasm>

I have always been more concerned over global cooling than global warming.

A mini ice age could be on the way and it’s going to get very, very cold

The most stark thing from this article is the following picture of the sun:

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One of the advantages of a slightly warmer world with higher concentrations of CO2 is that these “green house” effects cause the planet to turn into a larger green house–which creates favorable conditions for growing crops. This helps increase crop yields by extending the growing season and by increasing the amount of CO2 crops need in order to survive.

(Remember that the bulk of the carbon that makes up the organic molecules in plant matter–including the sugars that provide calories in corn and fruits–comes from atmospheric CO2. After all, they make Carbon Dioxide concentrators for a reason, right?)

The problem with a colder planet is that we get shorter growing seasons. A shorter growing season means lower crop yields and the return of starvation as a global problem.

And remember: we are exactly one growing season away from mass starvation.

The last time we saw a mini ice age, we saw frost fairs in London, fairs held on top of the frozen Thames river. The Thames in London is a major transportation corridor: imagine the Mississippi freezing solid for six months.

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Worse, we’re creating a world highly dependent on sensitive microelectronics–electronics not hardened against a solar maximum.

So when this minimum ends–we may very well see another event like the Carrington Event which caused sparking along telegraph wires. An event like that today would destroy countless trillions in sensitive equipment that would seriously harm our modern information infrastructure.

No, the FBI Hate Crime Statistics does not show a 57% increase in hate crimes against Jewish persons.

A few weeks ago I observed that hate crimes against Jewish persons has been on the decline in the long term, with the FBI’s Hate Crimes database showing a drop from 1182 offenses in 1996 to 635 offenses in 2014, with a short uptick in hate crimes starting in 2015 and 2016–with 2016 ending with 834 offenses: substantially higher than in 2014, but much lower than in 1996.

(And this does not factor in a growing Jewish population. Toss that in and we’ve seen a decline from 21.5 offenses per 100,000 in 1996 to 10 offenses per 100,000 in 2014.)

And I observed when the ADL “Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents” came out, that it’s claims that in 2017 there was a further 57% rise seemed both incorrect and politically motivated. That’s because this was linked hand-in-hand with the Trump Administration: the story is that Trump’s nationalism is similar to the form of nationalism we see in Europe (with cultural subgroups asserting superiority and demanding representation free of outside influence by migrants and other nations), and that nationalism has given rise to hate against Jewish groups who often are the canary in the coal mine.

I contend such an interpretation of the Trump Administration and his popularity in the United States is incorrect.

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Well, the Hate Crimes statistics are now out for 2017. And what does the FBI show?

For 2017, there were a total of 976 offenses against Jewish persons–a rise from 2016 of 17%. (Note that this follows a rise of 20% from 2015 to 2016, and a rise of 9.5% from 2014 to 2015–meaning this is the continuation of an upward trend starting in 2015.)

Terrible, certainly.

But not the 57% asserted by the ADL.

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My concern with the ADL fundamentally was that it involves self-reported incidents:

The Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents is composed of criminal and non-criminal incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault against individuals and groups as reported to ADL by victims, law enforcement, and the media.

That is, if you’re Jewish and someone uses a slur against you, well, it goes into the database. And look at what’s in the database:

Professor made anti-Semitic comments to Jewish student.

Ongoing anti-Semitic harassment from neighbor.

Perpetrator threw a coin at the victim and said “Are you going to pick it up, Jew?”

Now my point here is not to defend the anti-Semitic statements here. Piss poor behavior is piss poor behavior, and the individuals involved here richly deserve the social shunning that used to accompany assholish behavior.

But my point here is to observe that these events (and others like them) are marginal events–meaning one can either dismiss them or not, depending on how one perceives the overall culture.

That is, if someone makes a statement towards me about my own Native American heritage–I can either let the statement go (if I think it’s an isolated event by some asshole), or I can hang onto the statement and eventually if asked, report the statement (if I think it’s a trend).

And according to the media–a media which even in the words of Larry King, has become obsessed with Trump–every ill in the world can be linked to Trump, who has become to the minds of many officially The Worst Person In The World.™

It’s all Trump. There are no news.

In such an environment, there can be no isolated events. Everything is a trend.

A professor making an anti-Semitic comment? Trump. Angry neighbor? Trump. Holocaust jokes? Trump. Verbal abuse? Trump.

And when it’s a trend, you remember it. You report it. You confirm the trend rather than allow things to go–since that asshole of a neighbor is no longer an isolated incident. He’s part of a bigger movement.

And a lot of things you may have let go under a Democratic President–one whose own side tends to agree with statements like “Jews kill Palestinian Christians” (one of the incidents of harassment now reported in the ADL database)–you won’t let go under a President who you see as advocating a particularly racist form of European-style nationalism.

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What makes the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics interesting is that it reports incidents of crime (including vandalism and assault) from a third party: police agencies who are charged with submitting reports to the FBI regardless of the current administration or the current political atmosphere.

There are two shortcomings of the data. First, it tends to under-report–as it requires people to contact the police and file a report. And as we all know, crimes tend to be under-reported–though in a similar atmosphere where you see trends rather than isolated incidents, you are more likely to call the police.

Second, it does not cover the entire United States–but only the 4,000-odd police agencies who feed the FBI UCR database.

However, it has the advantage over ADL self-reporting that reports funnel through a nominally impartial third-party reporter. Meaning that while the data may under-report and fail to report in certain regions–the under-reporting and reporting failures are consistent. While absolute numbers may not be right, year-over-year trends are undoubtedly more accurate.

Bottom line: the 17% Y/Y change–one which follows a 10% and 20% uptick from the prior two years–is probably closer to the truth than the ADL’s sensationalized 57%.

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Of course the ADL has picked up on this–though they seem to get other numbers wrong. (For example, they suggest the increase from 695 incidents in 2015 to 834 incidents in 2016 as a “5% jump.” Sorry, but my calculator disagrees–and it appears the ADL conflated two statistics in order to color their summary.)

And I think this is, in part, an attempt to vilify President Trump as the instigator of a form of nationalism similar to the brand of nationalism you find in Europe.

To summarize, Europe has, since the days of feudal rule under Monarchs and Manor Lords (where local society was organized around peasants working on an estate owned by an aristocrat), been caught between two opposing viewpoints: one of local control centering around a “people” who share a common culture and common heritage, and one of international control where the aristocrats cooperated under an international umbrella (first provided by the Catholic Church, later provided by international agreement).

Nationalism (centered around a common people and a common culture) verses Internationalism.

This, by the way, was the argument between Hitler and the NAZI party and the Anti-Fascist fighters funded in part by the Communist International party during World War II. Hitler was not a Fascist; Mussolini was the Fascist–a term originally derived from the Latin fasces, a symbol of Roman power. The idea of Fascism is that corporate leaders and government leaders would work hand-in-fist to create a regulated economy integrated into an overall authoritarian state–a top-down organization which treated the population as a resource to be mined or reaped, rather than as individuals whose own lives are important.

Hitler was not a fascist. Hitler was a Socialist who rejected the Communist International. In other words, Hitler believed in the direct government control of corporations (rather than the integration of public and private ownership under central authoritarian rule), and believed in that direct control “in the name of the German people.” But Hitler rejected the cosmopolitan internationalism advocated by the Communist International.

European politics has been caught in this debate for a very long time: top-down (authoritarian) nationalism (which is now driving anti-legal immigrant sentiment in Europe) verses top-down (authoritarian) internationalism–either by cooperating Monarchs, by the rule of a Roman Catholic Church, or by a Communist Party whose membership includes indoctrination of its leadership to support certain common goals, including the goal of wiping out more “offensive” cultural elements which lead to competition and conflict. (Of course those “offensive” cultural elements shift with the winds–such as homosexuality, which in later eras in the Soviet Union was seen as an aberration and a mental disease.)

The problem with using this dichotomy to describe American politics is that both sides in the European debate are authoritarian. That is, both sides ignore the individual, seeing individuals as a natural resource–like corn or coal or cattle–to be reaped, mined, and put to work to advocate national goals that have little (if anything) to do with individual desire.

(There is a reason why both Communism and National-Socialism have such high death tolls associated with them–some 11 million lost in the concentration camps of NAZI Germany, some 100+ million dead under Communist rule: because if individuals are little more than a resource to be used, “breakage” is just a fact of life. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?)

Americans are, fundamentally, anti-authoritarian.

But critics of the Republicans (and of Trump in particular) still try to cram American politics into this authoritarian nationalist framework–an observation that often makes little sense to Conservatives and Libertarians (in particular) who see themselves as fighting authoritarianism by reducing governmental regulatory burdens which represent the “fasces” of the State.

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And that’s why groups similar to the ADL seem to be raising the alarm of nationalism. Not because the “nationalist” term fits well in American politics: after all, as an anti-authoritarian bunch we tend to shoot revenuers (and celebrate this fact), we lie on our taxes, we jay-walk when no-one is looking, and our idea of freedom includes the ability to say fuck you, President Trump without being arrested for insulting the President.

Because in the framework of European authoritarian politics, the opposite of a cosmopolitan internationalism which puts power in the hands of a few for the good of “the people” is the racist nationalism of places like France, which sees any form of expression counter to French culture as an existential threat, one deserving the full power of the State to prevent.

The thing is, there is a third way–one where power originates from the individual, one where the rights of the individual is paramount, one where we believe in statements like:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,…

One where nation-states are created by the people in order to secure those freedoms:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

One where the government exist solely to protect the individual and to protect individual rights, rather than to control the people like cattle on a farm.

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All of this is just a long winded analysis of why organizations like the ADL are now raising the “nationalism” alarm, and why Trump’s calls for patriotism (by using the “nationlism” word) fails to understand the actual debate in play.

It explains why people are self-reporting more incidents than they were before, and why there is a concerted effort on the part of the Left to conflate concerns with illegal immigration with all immigration, by trying to reframe the debate in the United States in terms of European nationalism verses internationalism.

They are ignoring the existence of a third way–that of a free people who shoots revenuers, an “ungovernable” nation who refuses to be ridden by authoritarian nationalists and internationalists alike.

This “ungovernability” is a feature, not a bug. Because the goal of the government of the United States is not self-sustainability, nor the promotion of a single cultural expression or protecting a language or promoting a homogeneous people–but the protection of individual liberty by securing things like property rights.

And the cries of “nationalism” or the ADL’s inflated statistics are both not helpful, and they completely miss the point–which is why they’ve become increasingly shrill, not realizing that their ultimate goal of promoting a European style cosmopolitan internationalism is a Sisyphean task.