The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

Some conservatives may be starting to see Donald Trump as a Frankenstein monster. Those conservatives have a longer view of history and recognize that a nasty social order is incompatible with their long-term survival. German conservatives who saw Hitler as the defender of property, whether of industry or landed estates, recognized such too late -- and found that the potential allies in protecting markets and formal ownership had been incarcerated in concentration camps, had gone silent in fear of the Gestapo and SS, or had fled. Trump is not Hitler -- he may be similarly malign in intentions, but he is less competent in following the Dictator Play Book... or maybe American political institutions thwart him. Whatever interpretation you take, you may be right.

Mathematical and scientific laws operate with consummate rigidity and no mercy. Those who defy them can get hurt badly, if not die of their folly. People standing on a cliff and walking backward to get a better selfie or standing on unstable ground at the edge of that cliff and falling to death as one steps into thin air or onto earth of questionable stability is stupid. An embezzlement of money that one 'covers' with a pretended mathematical error eventually trips up the embezzler. One heeds mathematical and scientific laws or they hurt or kill one -- or at least make life miserable.

In the long view I recognize the need for the genuine conservative, the person who offers tradition as a fallback when radical reforms either fail or go too far. At one time liberals pooh-poohed the idea that families matter in the success of their children and thought that criminal behavior was a consequence of poverty (including poverty of opportunity). Then came the sexual revolution that led to divorces that hurt children. Add to this -- some very good people live in the nastiest slums, barrios, and reservations... and horrible people have arisen from the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The difference between aristocratic figures who became Holocaust perpetrators and a low-life brute like (executed) serial-killer Alton Coleman is the opportunity that such people had. Some starry-eyed idealist who assumed that poverty created criminality failed to ask the locals how to avoid the hopeless-but-dangerous pimps, pushers, and muggers often got hurt or killed. Someone not so starry-eyed might first ask the locals who is trustworthy and who isn't... and avoid pimps, pushers, and muggers while being social organizers. Add to this, it is patronizing to assume that people cannot turn out well as people (even if they remained damned to poverty) if poor. Morality has no obvious link to social class.

Trump got away with what he did because of mass irrationality. Many will discover that irrationality kills, cripples, and degrades. If lucky enough, those who recover from the hurt, physical and emotional, will have learned the hard way that irrationality is for losers. It may be harder to fail as a graduate of Harvard than at the informal School of Hard Knocks, but although the School of Hard Knocks is far from the ideal place in which to learn, it does have open admission even if it grants no formal degree. Maybe its lessons aren't as refined as those that one gets from a first-tier professor at Harvard or even "Kegger State", but one can learn those lessons just as effectively... and unlike learning some classical language or art history one at least finds its lessons relevant to real life if one lacks the economic advantages usually necessary for matriculation at Harvard... or even "Kegger State".

If one is too much a blockhead to learn the dear lessons of the School of Hard Locks, then one is in really-bad shape.