FIGHTING THE FUTURE: With the new NLRB ruling, progressives have taken up William F. Buckley’s stance—”athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” It won’t work.

President Obama and the progressives in his Administration believe that by fighting this trend—and the NLRB ruling is intended to do exactly that—that by forcing corporations back into the old patriarchal model of a politically-defined and regulated patron-client/employer-employee relationship, they are fighting for the economic interests of poor people and the lower middle class most directly, but also indirectly and to a lesser extent for the rights of all workers. Union activists believe the same thing, passionately and sincerely.

What they don’t see is that the genie can’t be stuffed back in the bottle. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put blue Humpty Dumpty together again. Take the fast food industry, for example, an industry that virtually every economic and social policy of the contemporary progressive movement is trying to maim. From the $15-an-hour minimum wage in the industry demanded by New York to the fight against fast food on nutritional grounds by the Broccoli Police and the Nutrition Nannies, to this new NLRB ruling mandating that the employees of franchises be considered for certain regulatory purposes employees of the parent companies, the progressive movement is trying to do to McDonalds and related companies what Bill deBlasio and the taxi lobby want to do to Uber.

industryThe net effect of these changes will be to narrow the choices of food that poor people have, to raise the price of the food they have to buy, and to accelerate the automation of the restaurant industry, further reducing the already limited number of jobs open to people with few skills. Progressives will look on the consequences of this disaster and conclude that with urban unemployment higher and the cost of living for the poor rising, we obviously need more food stamps and rent subsidies—and so we must impose heavier taxes on the companies and industries that are still profitable in order to pay for these necessary benefits.

They’re not actually stupid. They’re pursuing a policy that produces more power for progressives, regardless of its effect on their alleged clients.

YET ANOTHER REASON FOR TRUMP’S POPULARITY: “Europeans are obsessed with Donald Trump — The loud-mouthed billionaire businessman embodies what Europeans love to hate about the U.S.,” sniffs a haughty Politico-Europe author as he dives for the fainting couch:

PARIS — The media here has got a Continental strain of Trump fever.

Since the real estate mogul made a shocking surge to the top of the Republican presidential polls in the U.S., Europe has fixated on the unapologetic showman, churning out a steady stream of news coverage and commentary.

On Thursday, France’s Libération newspaper devoted its entire front page to a photo of a snarling Donald, with an inch-high headline that read: “Donald Trump — The American Nightmare.”

The Continent has its share of outrageous personalities on the political right of center: Britain’s Nigel Farage, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, France’s family Le Pen. But Trump fits many perceived European stereotypes of America: excess, vulgarity, ignorance, superficiality, love of wealth, to name a few.

“Trump represents the America that we love to hate,” said Marie-Cécile Naves, a sociologist and author of “Le nouveau visage des droites américaines” (“The New Face of the American Right”). “He is our negative mirror image, a man we see as brutal, who worships money and lacks culture — someone who lets us feel a bit superior about being European.”

They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing — not the least of which how swell it worked on both sides of the Atlantic when America elected a Europe-approved candidate in 2008:

BLACK LIVES MATTER MARCH DRAWS 325. GLENN BECK’S ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ MARCH DRAWS 20,000:

Saturday, in Minneapolis, Reuters reported:

Several hundred protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement marched to the Minnesota State Fair on Saturday to bring attention to race issues ranging from policing to underrepresentation of minorities at one of the nation’s biggest state fairs.

The mixed-race crowd, including senior citizens and children, chanted slogans along the 1-1/2 mile route and briefly lay down on a bridge south of the fairgrounds

Minnesota media reported the number of marchers at 325.

A few hundred miles to the south, a throng of 20,000, led by Glenn Beck, marched in Birmingham, Alabama, along the same route marched by Martin Luther King. They were there to declare that “All Lives Matter.”

Guess which march received national media attention and which one didn’t.

Because controlling the narrative is what the DNC-MSM is all about.

ANOTHER PLACE WHERE THE MEDIA AND THE POLITICIANS FAILED: Mike Grunwald On The Army Corps Of Engineers And Katrina. “When Katrina hit, the Army Corps originally claimed it had overtopped and overwhelmed its levees. That’s why FEMA became the villain. But my engineer pals in New Orleans showed me the Corps was lying. You could see the debris line on the levees! 1800 people died because the Corps flood protection failed. They were victims of bad engineering & bad priorities.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Economic Progress is More Effective Than Protests: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the new wave of black nationalists are selling a line that is inimical to real racial progress in America.

The election of Barack Obama promised to inaugurate the dawn of a post-racial America. Instead we seem to be stepping ever deeper into a racial quagmire. The past two month saw the violent commemoration of the Ferguson protests, “the celebration” of the 50th anniversary of the Watts riots, new police shootings in places as distant as Cincinnati and Fort Worth, and renewed disorder, tied to a police-related shooting, in St. Louis last week.

When President Obama was elected, two-thirds of Americans thought race relations were good. Now six in ten think they are bad, according to a New York Times poll, including some 68 percent of African Americans.

This extreme alienation creates a rich soil for resurgence of a cramped form of black nationalism, as revealed in such widely read books as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Coates, like the black nationalists of the ’60s, is fawned over by today’s progressive gentry. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott gushed that Coates’s writing is “essential, like water or air.” Yet the new nationalists do not, like many previous iterations, look to Africa for salvation, and as a potential place of re-settlement. Instead they may look to Africa for inspiration, but seem content to stew in the American racial cauldron, always apart but also here.

Yet to this reader, it’s hard to regard Coates’s book as anything more than a narrow selfie that holds little hope for any future racial progress.

Demagogues gonna demagogue. They gain wealth and power from division. If most people suffer, that’s immaterial.

Related:

Worst president ever.

A RESOURCE FOR SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS: Or just for fun.

WE BUILD: In this case I’d like to build some following for James Young whose book, Acts of War, I enjoyed immensely.

IT’S LIKE TIGER BEAT FOR MASS MURDERERS: The Corner The one and only. Lovable Rogues All.  I feel like saying “Wow, now I’m glad teh Grauniad has maligned me and my friends, seeing whom they praise!”

THE LABEL DOESN’T MATCH THE CONTENTS: The ‘lone wolf’ theory is a myth.

AND HOW WOULD WE BE ABLE TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE: A rejection of the nuclear deal could lead to radicalism in Iran.