Read it.

T he best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).

Certain fashionable minorities have influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Homosexuals, for example, do not exceed 2% of the population, but you would think (from the news media) that there are at least as many homosexuals as blacks.

Freeberg has some interesting things to say.

I have long noticed that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who are trying to achieve work upon external things, measurably altering states in one or more definable ways, upon one or more definable objects; and those who are acting as stewards of their own emotional state. In very crude terms, you might think of this as the difference between those who want to work and those who want to play. The former seeks to accomplish something and the latter wants to feel good all the time. It’s a maturity thing, since acting as a steward of your own emotional state is exactly what newborn babies do. It is the default condition. Later on, we get concerned about getting work done — for a variety of different reasons. But if you want to be effective at that you have to let go of the “be happy all the time” thing. Some people don’t, ever.

That is a very good articulation of  a distinction I have long felt but never been able adequately to express.

From this comes a split in how to deal with time. If your objective is to get work done, time is a resource and you never have as much of it as you might want to have. So you have to learn to prioritize. If your objective is to act as a steward of your own emotional state, you have to make sure you’re never bored. Time becomes a liability instead of an asset. As a consequence, you don’t prioritize, at least you don’t prioritize the same way as people who are trying to get a certain amount of work done in a limited amount of time.

Read it.

It’s about time that the Roman hierarchy step up to the plate when it comes to human life issues.

John Podhoretz, who lives in an Other Left Coast bubble, still finds an acorn every now and then.

In 2013, 107,000 crimes in the United States were committed with a gun. There are 330 million people in the United States. If we assume every one of those crimes was the work of a different individual, then .03 percent of all those who live with a gun in the United States used that gun in the commission of a crime.

That’s not 3 percent. That’s not one-third of a percent. That’s three-hundredths of a percent.

There are approximately 120,000 schools in the United States. If we use the term “school shooting” in the most capacious way, there have been 145 incidents since 2010. That means 0.12 percent of all schools in the United States have suffered the horror of a school shooting.

If you are the sort of person who believes guns are evil objects no one should want to possess, or that semi-automatic weapons are especially monstrous devices no one should be allowed to own, these numbers won’t matter all that much to you, or at all. In your mind, the very fact that guns are used in crimes, especially in mass shootings, invalidates any arguments on their behalf.

One Burning Issue. People Who Are Like Me are the only people who matter, and People Who Aren’t Like Me are barely tolerable and might not really be People after all.

But you are almost certain to ask, “Why does anyone need these things when they can do such harm?” You scoff at the tired line that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. You have likely assigned moral meaning to the ownership of a gun. And you have judged those who own one to be suffering from a moral flaw, and those who own many to be fetishistic monsters.

Maybe not even People at all.

What you have to understand is that while you believe you have all the moral force on your side, you cannot make a gun owner believe that he is the Parkland shooter. Because he isn’t. And let’s face it — somewhere, deep in your heart, you think he is.

And that’s the problem. To the Left, the Right aren’t even people, they’re just some sort of underworld denizens who just happen to resemble people in some respects.

Scott Adams characterizes Twitter as ‘unqualified people with opinions’.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Antiplanner explains it all to you.

Business Insider is stunned by the notion that Silicon Valley residents who earn $400,000 a year consider themselves middle class. Yet they are; the only reason Business Insider doesn’t think so is that neither it nor Palo Alto Online — the source of Business Insider‘s data — understands the difference between class and income.

According to the Pew Research Center, “middle class” includes families of four that earn $48,000 and $144,000. But that’s not middle class; that’s middle income. While classes and incomes can be correlated, they are not the same. Social classes include upper, middle, and lower, but most of lower being working class.

Many people in America with top-tier incomes consider themselves ‘middle class’ and, effectively, they are — because their attitudes are ‘middle class’, since that’s the way they were raised.

This is more than just a quibble because working-class, middle-class, and upper-class people tend to have very different tastes and preferences. A working-class person who manages to earn $239,000 a year still shares more preferences with working-class people than upper-class people. An upper-class person who doesn’t earn much money one year still has tastes similar to other upper-class people.

One of the driving motivations behind rich people advocating higher income tax rates is a desire to keep middle-class people who just happen to have high incomes away from upper-class amenities such as hotels, restaurants, and resorts. Aside from the fact that these people, if they were serious, could just write a check to the IRS, the key is that they advocate raises in tax rates on ordinaryx income, such as wages, but not on the dividend and capital gains income that represents the chief source of really rich people’s wealth. The main reason Warren Buffet pays tax at a lower rate than his secretary is that she’s being taxed on wages and he’s being taxed on capital gains. But the fawning articles in The Press never tell you that.

Rush Limbaugh is reporting that Trumps approval rating is at 48%, as opposed to Obama’s 45% at this point in the first term.

ZMan point out some inconvenient truth.

In the modern vernacular, the sociopath is someone who lacks empathy, remorse and an understanding of right and wrong. The sociopath sees no difference between the truth and a lie, only their utility. Additionally, they never think about the consequences of their actions. A sociopath sees no harm in telling people that his brain juice will prevent concussions. The veracity of his statements are meaningless. What matters is how well it moves product. People ending up with brain damage as a result is never considered.

The key thing about the modern sociopath is the ambivalence toward the truth. They think saying something is the same as doing something. What matters is if the words get the listener to do what the sociopath wants them to do. Standing in front of crowd, making false claims, is fine if it causes people to buy product. If the truth sells more product, then the truth is better. From the perspective of the modern sociopath, the difference is about the results, not the accuracy of the statements. The truth or a lie, whichever works.

Now replace “sociopath” with “politician” and “product” with “votes” and you have the modern managerial democracy.It’s not that our politicians lie. It’s that for them, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth. That’s why they seem so utterly shameless. Shame requires a sense of right and wrong, a knowledge that what you said or did is intrinsically wrong. For the people who rule over us, right and wrong only exist in the context of their own ambitions. Something is “right” if it benefits the person in the moment.

Read it.

I find it difficult to take seriously a guy who wears earrings.

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It’s no coincidence that a soup kettle was the symbol for feeding the poor, rather than, say, a roasting pan or a skillet. Soup has always been one of the most economical ways to provide nourishing, filling food to a large quantity of people. Although he was hardly the first person to come up with the idea to feed the poor, an interesting fellow known as Count Rumford is often credited with establishing the first real soup kitchen.

Read it.

A number of workers in Silicon Valley are planning to leave the tech hub due to a discomfort stemming from a uniform way of thinking in the industry and region, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The workers already are or plan on indirectly following the lead of Peter Thiel, a President Donald Trump-supporting venture capitalist. The billionaire entrepreneur recently announced he is leaving Silicon Valley for the slightly less liberal Los Angeles area to escape an allegedly pervasive discrimination against conservatives and some libertarians.

Citing a number of influential investors, and a couple of tech workers and startup entrepreneurs, the WSJ reports Thiel’s geographic “defection” is emblematic of an apparently larger trend.

“I think the politics of San Francisco have gotten a little bit crazy,” Tom McInerney, an angel investor who now resides in L.A., told TheWSJ. “The Trump election was super polarizing and it definitely illustrated—and Peter [Thiel] said this—how out of touch Silicon Valley was.”

Y’all come to Texas — we got plenty of jobs here and affordable housing.

Read it.

Absolutely. Every school that declares itself to be a ‘gun-free zone’ ought to be required to have a big sign outside that reads VICTIMS! GET YOUR VICTIMS HERE! CAN’T HAVE AN ATROCITY WITHOUT VICTIMS!

Of course, that’s not what the article’s about — but it’s what the article ought to be about. So I helped.

Steve Sailer reports the news you won’t hear anywhere else.

In 2015, under the Obama administration, ICE inspected the documentation of Labor Network’s employees at Cloverhill. In May 2017, the Trump administration sent letters to about 800 employees, saying they weren’t authorized to work in the United States, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

Those Hispanic employees didn’t return to work, leaving the bakery desperate to fill their jobs. So the company turned to another placement agency, Metro Staff Inc., and it provided Cloverhill with workers screened through the government’s “E-Verification” program. Most of those new employees are African American.

Ed French, owner of Elgin-based Metro Staff Inc., says his company became the main provider of workers for the bakery and that about 80 percent of them are black

Read it.

Building tall stuff with wood seems to be all the rage.

Eventually perhaps we will be able to persuade buildings to grow themselves.

Eric S. Raymond gives us some good advice.

A useful way to sort the decision challenges we face is into situations of high uncertainty versus low uncertainty. These call for vary different adaptations. In a situation of low uncertainty there is a single optimal choice; your effort should go into determining what it is and then executing it as hard and fast as possible. Unless uncertainty rises during execution (for example because you discover you made a serious mistake in your problem analysis), deviation from plan is most likely to be a mistake. Buying options is wasteful.

In a situation of high uncertainty you don’t know what your best choice is up front; there’s a broad range of possible ones that might be optimal, and there may be choices you can’t yet see. In this situation, what you need to do is enable yourself to collect on as many of the options as you can identify and afford to buy. Your hope is to be able to narrow the range of conditions you need to cope with as you learn more.

Read it.

Except that, like ‘renewable energy’, it can’t match the price of doing things the old way.

So it’s just a pipe dream at present.

Matt Welch at tReason mag understands the dialectic.

Trump, an outsider con man who hustled his way into the most prestigious insider job in America by mastering the art of the troll, has not to date found his social media equal among the hydra-headed opposition. The president pecks out impotent bluster designed to inflame the haters, and Democrats, journalists, and establishmentarian Republicans take the bait every time.

Journalists are experts at giving the impression that they could do anything you can do better, if they only they put their minds to it.

Theodore Dalrymple peeks behind the curtain.

The son of a friend of mine applied for a place at medical school and was turned down on the grounds that his personal statement was inadequate. I don’t know what was wrong with it; perhaps he employed incorrect old clichés rather than the correct new ones. Having the means to do so, my friend sent his son to a tutor who specialized in personal statements (every bureaucratic requirement is an economic opportunity for an ex-bureaucrat wanting to strike out for himself). No doubt the tutor in personal statements advised him to put in more about his passion for social justice and equality. At any rate, it worked and he was accepted.

Read it.

California left-wingers who want to densify cities to make them affordable are getting some push-back from other left-wingers who think density will push low-income people out of neighborhoods. A proposed bill to eliminate zoning in transit-rich areas in order to allow developers to build high-density housing would, say opponents, displace low-income families from neighborhoods with high rental rates in favor of high-income whites who can afford to pay for high-rise housing.

The opponents aren’t wrong. On one hand, increasing housing supply would seem to make housing more affordable. But affordable for whom? With housing prices in some California cities averaging more than $1,000 per square foot, building high-density housing that costs $400 to $500 a square foot would allow people who can afford that to find a place to live. But hardly anyone can afford that.

Read it.

How many such tragedies will it take to bring about sensible immigrant-control laws?

ZMan is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

Why is George Soros still alive?

For most of human history, a person who caused trouble for rulers found himself either on the run or on a pike. A earl or prince that made trouble for the king was dragged before the king, humiliated and then hanged. If he fought back, then the king sacked his lands, killed his family and made an even bigger spectacle of killing the the troublemaker. After all, the point of political power is to reward your allies and punish your enemies. Yet, George Soros, an international troublemaker, is free to make trouble wherever he likes.

The obvious reply to that is civilized nations no longer rely on political assassinations to handle their business. Political leaders have a self interest in discouraging the practice of killing heads of state. If ruler X has ruler Y killed, because it advantages him, the other rulers have no choice but to band together and kill ruler X. Otherwise, it is a lawless world of all against all. President Gerald Ford issued an executive order in 1976 prohibiting US intelligence services from conducting political assassinations for this reason.

That makes sense with legitimate political leaders, but George Soros is a rootless grifter, who has no allegiance to any government. Killing him would be no different than droning a terrorist. Some argue that international law prohibits targeted assassinations, but international law is mostly meaningless. The Israelis have been using targeted assassination against whoever they like for a long time, including the murder of Canadian engineer Gerald Bull. The US has droned more Arabs than we can count.

I’ve wondered about that myself. Offing people like George Soros is kind of what the CIA is all about.

Read it,

Even minorities own guns because of the minority. What do they know that she doesn’t.

Most black people who die from guns do so at the hands of other black people. But they never tell you that on the evening news.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

But let’s look at Mike Tirico instead as an example of how rare it is in modern non-Hispanic America for somebody who appears to be kind of black not to claim to be black. I won’t call him “the exception that proves the rule” because that always triggers a lot of people, such as a certain federal judge, who want to explain that, logically, an exception can’t prove a rule. So I will call Tirico an example of somebody whose famous exceptionalness to the general tendency offers support for the tendency.

The tendency is that people who are significantly black by ancestry seldom self-identify as white in recent decades (assuming they aren’t from some culture like Latin America where that is encouraged). This in contradiction to the popular theory of White Privilege.

Deirdre McClosky fisks Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize in Economics.

Adam Smith spoke of “the man of system” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” Thaler and his benevolent friends are men, and some few women, of system. They hate the Chicago School, have never heard of the Austrian School, dismiss spontaneous order, and favor bossing people around—for their own good, understand. Employing the third most unbelievable sentence in English (the other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning”), they declare cheerily, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

We humans face a choice of treating people as children or as adults. A liberal society, Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” treats adults as adults. The principle of an illiberal society, from Thaler’s to the much worse kind, is that you are to be corrected not through respectful dialog that treats you as an equal, but by compulsion or trickery, which treats you like a toddler about to walk into traffic.

What some on the alt-right call ‘Cloud People’ versus ‘Mud People’. In case you’re in doubt, you and I are Mud People.

Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.

For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics.

And politics.

The Progressive economists believed they saw monopolies, spillovers, informational asymmetry, consumer ignorance, producer ignorance—in short, everyone’s folly and ignorance except the nudging government’s—to the number of over one hundred imperfections. They imagined a new one every year or so, and lately have been getting Nobels for discovering allegedly fresh market failures. Paul Krugman, for example, received the prize in 2008, supposedly for reinventing monopolistic competition for international trade. He deserved it eventually, though he got it embarrassingly prematurely (compare Obama’s for peace) because the social democratic Swedes wanted to buck up a left-of-center columnist. Krugman tweeted about Thaler: “Yes! Behavioral econ is the best thing to happen to the field in generations.” He would say that.

Lenin would have agreed, had he still been around.

The essence of civilization is Carriage and Storage.

Without Carriage and Storage, you got nothin’. You’re living from day to day, sometimes hour to hour, and your future is so uncertain that it might as well not exist.

If you gather more than you can eat right now, you need Storage, or you’re mostly wasting your time. Dork.

If you kill more than you can eat right now, you need Storage, or you’re mostly wasting resources. Shame on you.

If your Storage doesn’t readily convert into Carriage, then you are fixed in one place, and eventually something (or someone) will find you and kill you. And they will eat what you have stored, and you will feel like an idiot, or would if you were still around.

Think about it. What are buildings? Partly shelter, mostly storage. What are vehicles? Exclusively Carriage. What would we be without buildings and vehicles? Chimpanzees without the hair. Not a pleasant prospect.

There is a reason the women carry bags, and men have pockets.

Think about it.

Read it.

If you haven’t read any of the novels of Ian M. Banks, you probably ought to do so.

This article tells you why.

It also contains some useful discussion of culture, technology, history, and moral choice.

This is, I think, where Banks draws upon his most sociologically astute observation, again extrapolating from contemporary cultural trends. There are a variety of developments that are associated with modernity. One of them involves a move away from ascribed toward achieved sources of identity. The idea is rather simple: in traditional societies, people were defined largely by the circumstances that they were born into, or their ascribed characteristics – who your family was, what “station” in life you were born to, what gender you were, etc. There were a strict set of roles that prescribed how each person in each set of circumstances was to act, and life consisted largely of acting out the prescribed role. A modern society, by contrast, favours “choice” over “circumstances,” and indeed, considers it the height of injustice that people should be constrained or limited by their circumstances. Thus there is a move toward achieved sources of identity – what school you went to, what career you have chosen, who you decided to marry, and the lifestyle you adopt. “Getting to know someone,” in our society, involves asking them about the choices they have made in life, not the circumstances they were born into.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. The advantages of choice, for people living in an achievement-oriented society, are too obvious to be worth enumerating. But there are disadvantages. Under the old system of ascribed statuses, people did not suffer from “identity crises,” and they did not need to spend the better part of their 20’s “finding themselves.” When everything is chosen, however, then the basis upon which one can make a choice becomes eroded. There are no more fixed points, from which different options can be evaluated. This generates the crisis of meaning that Taylor associates with the decline of strong evaluation.

Read it.

A story out of the United Kingdom details a University of Manchester research project to determine the carbon footprint of the humble sandwich. The upshot: a prepackaged and refrigerated breakfast sandwich with egg, bacon or sausage, produces as much carbon dioxide as a 12-mile car trip. No word on what kind of car the scientists assumed in this calculation — likely not a Tesla charged with coal-fired electricity.

At the other end of the scale was a ham and cheese sandwich made in one’s own kitchen. Presumably the fact that such a homemade meal didn’t require an employee who had to commute to work to make the sandwich, along with the packaging, shipping and refrigeration for hours afterward, played a large role in that sandwich’s superior carbon footprint rating.

Once you know what the ‘carbon footprint’ is (assuming your calculations are anywhere correct, which I dispute), so what? The assumption seems to be that a ‘carbon footprint’ is a bad thing. Is it? Almost everything in life seems to have a ‘carbon footprint’ of some kind — but saying that doesn’t really tell you anything useful.

The Unarticulated Assumption of this whole effort seems to be that a smaller ‘carbon footprint’ is better than a larger one, but without any sort of scale by which carbon footprints can be measured, and some sort of idea as to what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ carbon footprint, it tells us Absolutely Nothing Useful. Another Unarticulated Assumption is that somehow human being are responsible for all of the ThoughtCrime ‘carbon footprints’ existing in the world today — which is proglodyte religious dogma, and (again) not useful. (What is the ‘carbon footprint’ of a whitetail deer? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?)

Presuming that the Manchester scientists are correct in their data, so what? As a former California lawmaker, I know the practical effect of such a study is to inform policymakers to “Do something!” That something most likely being a tax on prepared foods with higher carbon footprints.

My question is: How does increasing taxes solve whatever problem is caused by ‘carbon footprints’? Then theory seems to be that if we slap a tax on something, then less of that something will be produced. The flaw in that reasoning is that history teaches us that whenever we slap a tax on something, people just bend their minds to evading the tax, not toward decreasing the ‘carbon footprint’. The major disqualifying counter-argument is that, if a large ‘carbon footprint’ is a bad thing, then the proper governmental action is to ban the activity, not just tax it. (Somehow that never seems to occur to legislators.)

The guilty flee where no man pursueth.

I’ll bet you’re wondering why the Democrats are so committed to importing foreigners into the U.S.

Well, I’ll tell you.

When you say ‘American’ to a Democrat, they think ‘redneck Republican’ — hence their hostility to the use of the word ‘American’, the flag, patriotism, etc. Their immediate reaction to this is ‘Not Our Kind’ — and they’re right. The ideal Democrat country consists of Their Kind of People and an appropriate servant population, with nothing resembling a middle class to cause trouble.

There are two reasons why Democrats want tons and tons of foreigners to come freely to the U.S.

1. They hope such people will vote Democrat (illegally if they can get away with it) in return for generous government benefits. (This is why Democrats also advocate ‘removing barriers to citizenship’, because it interferes with their process.) It was customary for Democrat city political machines (and may still be, for all I know) to provide ringers who would swear falsely that the immigrant had lived in the U.S. for the requisite period of time and was an upstanding candidate . My great-grandfather benefited from this system, being sworn in as a U.S. citizen the day he got off the boat from Ireland in exchange for a commitment to vote Democrat until (and, for all I know, after) he died. (My father was born a couple of weeks after my grandfather died, and my grandmother remarried a non-Irishman, which is probably what broke the chain.)
2. Such people are already accustomed to being governed by a narrow corrupt ruling class that is more white than they are. They think it’s How The World Works and, while they’re not happy about it, they don’t see any prospect of changing it (because it never changes in the place from which they came). If you doubt it, look at the sort of countries from which Democrats prefer their immigrants: Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa – any place that could accurately be described by a non-Democrat as a ‘shithole country’. Nobody from democratic countries in Europe or East Asia need apply.

There.

That was easy. Ask me a hard one.

Read it.

I think this is an extended metaphor about politicians and journalists but I’m not sure which is which.

Read it.

Why not? It’s already turned a number of supposedly intelligent and well-education people into paranoid morons.

Read it.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is a must-read site for tech industry analysis. This review of the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/JPMorgan Chase announcement, and its implications for the future, is a well-reasoned look at what might be going on here.

Imagine Amazon doing to health care what it did to publishing. One of the chief defects in the American health care system is lack of transparency — people can’t price shop because they don’t know, and in many cases can’t get, the actual prices charged for their health care because people aren’t the customers, insurance companies and employers are the customers; people are just the patients. (Nobody bothers telling your cat how much the vet charges, because the cat is not paying the bill.)

Read it.

The open borders philosophy is wrong, because, like the failed ideologies of the past century, it doesn’t account for unpleasant facts about human nature and society. The truth Communism missed is that human beings prefer self-interest to compelled altruism. The truth open borders advocates miss is that human societies are tribal.

West Hunter continues his evaluation of Bryan Caplan’s new book.

For example, test scores convey useful information. They could help show that an applicant is smart even though he attended a mediocre school – the same role they play in college admissions. But employers seldom request test scores, and although applicants may provide them, few do. Caplan says ” The word on the street: putting high scores on your resume suggests you’re smart but socially inept. ” Who would understand that better than Bryan? So valuing conformity leads to totally arbitrary standards – they exist because they exist. Let me suggest another possibility: flaunting high scores risks irritating the drones in HR. HR tends be packed with underperformers and people that the corporation felt compelled to hire (AA). Few people in HR have high scores on standardized tests. Other employees routinely express contempt for HR/Personnel. In the immortal words of Lieutenant Callahan: ” Personnel? That’s for assholes. ”

In the long run, who you hire is truly important, so it seems odd that companies would routinely allot this task to feebs. Yet it happens. The same thing is true for college admissions – the people doing it are not that special.

(The headline is, of course, taken from the Tom Lehrer song, which was in turn taken from the title of the Yale alma mater Bright College Years, which Lehrer, a Harvard man, was intending to mock. We’re everywhere.)

Jim Goad comments on modern culture, as only he can.

After the glorious and undeniably hilarious election of my towheaded homeboy Donald J. Trump, a common lament among his eternally dyspeptic naysayers went something along the lines of, “I don’t want to live in a country where Muslims and Mexicans have to worry about being attacked by mobs of toothless racist rednecks.”

Well, good luck with that goal, hon, although I don’t think you need much luck. I don’t think that would have been a likely scenario, anyway, despite your wildest fantasies and most depraved yearnings. Those toothless racist rednecks don’t care about you, or even think about you, nearly as much as you would seem to like.

Here’s my dream: I don’t want to live in a country with a reigning moral code that extends blanket sympathy to Muslims and Mexicans but has nothing but scorn for “toothless racist rednecks.”

Joel Kotkin uses an incredibly mixed metaphor.

Ultimately all parties are coalitions of disparate groups and interests. Much attention has been on the divisions within the ruling GOP — libertarians, social conservatives and populist/nationalists. But with the Democrats poised to make a comeback this year, and perhaps gain control of all three branches by 2020, perhaps it’s time to analyze divisions that may determine the extent of their ascendancy.

Three different, and often somewhat hostile, tendencies now define the Democratic Party. These include the corporate oligarchs, causists obsessed with particular hot button issues, and (arguably the most critical to long-term ascendency) populists who bear much of the party’s social democratic message and legacy.