PAUL RAHE: Stalinism At The American Political Science Association. “In short, provision has now been made for a purge; the purge is to be carried out by the clique who now control the Council and who nominate their successors (who are generally elected without a contest); and, in carrying out such a purge, they can act at will. For no grounds for removal or revocation are specified.” Typical Social-Justice-Warrior tactics. Plus: “All of this is part of a larger pattern within the academy. Everything is now politicized, and it looks as if in the future the space for free and open scholarly disputation traditionally provided by colleges, universities, and scholarly associations will no longer be available.” Long term, this simply means marginalization and a loss of outside support, but they’re not bright enough to see that.

NOT YET, BUT OBAMA IS TRYING: Victor Davis Hanson, “Is the West Dead Yet?”

Immigration is a one-way Western street. Those who, in the abstract, damn the West — as much as elite Westerners themselves do — want very much to live inside it. The loudest anti-Western voices in the Middle East are usually housed in Western universities, not in Gaza. Jorge Ramos is a fierce critic of supposed American cruelty to illegal immigrants — so much so that he fled Mexico for America, became a citizen (how is that possible, given American bias against immigrants?), landed a multimillion-dollar salary working for the non-Latino-owned Spanish-language network Univision, and then put his kids in private school to shield them from hoi polloi of the sort he champions each evening. Now that’s the power of the West. . . .

But as in mid-fifth-century Athens and late-republican Rome, there are signs that the West is eroding — and fast. The common Western malady is age-old and cyclical. . . . In the case of modern America, Britain, and Europe, the sheer material bounty spawned by free-market capitalism and legally protected private property, combined with the freedom of the individual, creates a sort of ennui. Boredom is the logical result of that lethal mix of affluence and leisure. .  . .

Take the ongoing mass exoduses from the Third World into Europe and the United States. . . .But note that no elite Westerner wants to face the cause of the malady: namely, that the failure in the Third World to adopt Western ideas of consensual government, equality between the sexes, free-market capitalism, individual liberty, and transparent meritocracy logically leads to mayhem and poverty. . . .

But it is worse than that: Western elites deny their own exceptionalism, and deny any reason for their own privilege other than the easy private guilt of citing the Holy Trinity of “race/class/gender.” . . .

The first casualty in a bored and would-be-revolutionary society is legality. And certainly in the West the law — whose sanctity built Western civilization — has become a joke. New Confederate-style nullificationists in San Francisco demand that federal immigration statutes not apply to their sanctuary city, even as they insist that a minor clerk in Kentucky be jailed for nullifying a Supreme Court edict allowing gay marriage. Kim Davis should indeed be jailed for obstructing a federal mandate, but only after the neo-Confederate nullificationist mayor, Board of Supervisors, and sheriff of San Francisco. . . .

What the West worries about is not poverty, but disparity: No one argues that the rioters at Ferguson did not have smartphones, expensive sneakers, hot water in their homes, air conditioning, and plenty to eat — it’s just that they did not have as many or as sophisticated appurtenances as someone else. Michael Brown was not undernourished or in need of the cigars he lifted. . . .

Virtually every American must palpably sense the country’s rapid decline since President Obama assumed office. It’s not just economic stagnation; it’s a moral, religious, cultural and legal free fall that turns the stomach. That’s why the 2016 presidential election isn’t so much about needing an “experienced” politician (i.e., someone who cares more about being a member of the D.C. club than listening to Americans living outside D.C.), or even the candidates’ positions on particular issues.

It’s about a desperate, visceral longing for someone who believes that America is the greatest force for good on earth, that it occupies a special position of power that in large part determines the stability and prosperity of the globe, and that its own goodness and quest for fairness should not be used against it by those who plot to destroy it from within.

As we free fall from the Obama era of weakness and indecision, Americans’ top priority seems to be avoiding career politicians whose well-rehearsed, mellifluous, politically correct words instinctively smack of arrogance, weakness, guilt, insincerity or paternalism. D.C. has turned into the Capitol city portrayed in the Hunger Games–corrupt, privileged, arrogant, condescending, manipulative, shallow, materialistic, weak, and utterly ignorant of the needs of those who live beyond its borders.

The political class has forgotten who is actually “boss” in our constitutional republic– We the People outside of D.C.  The boss is now interviewing presidential candidates to ascertain who understands this basic principle, and accepts that the job description entails being the leader of ordinary (not merely elite) Americans, and a staunch defender of American interests.

The political elites in this country are apoplectic that their “insider” candidates are doing so poorly. The rest of the country is enjoying the fact that they have choices other than candidates who espouse the same old interchangeable, predictable, politically correct B.S.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Make The Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 852.

FORGET IT, JAKE. IT’S BUZZFEEDTOWN: “It was easily the most unintentionally hilarious, if shockingly bigoted, BuzzFeed video ever produced.”

JAMES SHERK: TIME TO REIN IN PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS:

In the 1950s, one out of every three workers belonged to a union. Today less than 7 percent of private-sector workers do.

Government unions have been the only exception to this downward trend. The labor movement originally thought organizing government employees made no sense. Civil service laws protect them from mistreatment, and the government has no profits to bargain over. In 1955 AFL-CIO President George Meany opined that “bargaining collectively is impossible in government.”

In the late 1950s, however, the unions came to see government employees as an untapped source of new members and dues. Starting with Wisconsin in 1959, many states began allowing—or requiring—collective bargaining in government. In the next two decades, unions organized millions of government employees.

Union membership has flourished in government since then. Unionized government agencies have no non-union competitors. No matter how inefficiently they operate, they stay in businesses. Moreover, government unions don’t run for re-election, so they don’t have to persuade new employees to support them.

Unions now represent two out of every five government employees, and those employees make up half the union movement. Twice as many union members work in the Post Office as in the entire domestic auto industry.

This shift to government has transformed the nature and interests of the union movement. Private-sector unions often lobby for special treatment, such as trade barriers to limit foreign competition, but they fundamentally desire a strong and growing private sector. That’s why the AFL-CIO endorsed the 1963 Kennedy tax cuts. Today’s construction trades unions support the Keystone XL pipeline for the same reason.

Government unions primarily want a bigger government. More government employees mean more government union members. Higher taxes mean more money they can bargain over. So government unions have campaigned for almost every major tax increase in recent history. . . . This transformation of the labor movement has had disastrous consequences for taxpayers and the recipients of public services. In most states, the average government employee makes considerably more than comparable private-sector workers, with most of that difference coming in back-loaded retirement benefits. This pushes taxes higher and squeezes out funding for other programs.

I’m with FDR. Government workers shouldn’t be allowed to unionize.

PUSHBACK: Hungarian bishop says pope is wrong about refugees. “They’re not refugees. This is an invasion.”

PAUL MIRENGOFF: The Syrian crisis and Obama’s post-American presidency. “Obama has proudly proclaimed himself a citizen of the world. These aren’t idle words. As Elliott Abrams has demonstrated, Obama’s presidency reflects a desire to transcend merely American interests. Unfortunately, the Syrian crisis shows that Obama doesn’t measure up as a citizen of the world, either.”

CHANGE: Hundreds of Muslim Refugees convert to Christianity in German church.

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“MARKED OR NOT IS IRRELEVANT. RED HERRING:” As Charlie Martin writes, when Hillary’s lost Ron Fournier, you know her email scam is in trouble.

BEHOLD THE TRUMPEN PROLETARIAT: “No Movement That Embraces Trump Can Call Itself Conservative,” Jonah Goldberg exclaims. Is he right?

RELATED: “Today’s column by arch-leftist Paul Krugman is titled, ‘Trump Is Right on Economics.’ Krugman’s theme is that of all the Republican presidential candidates, Trumps’s views on the economy are closest to Krugman’s.” What could go wrong?

BRUCE BARTLETT: Donald Trump Doesn’t Need Latino Voters To Win: He Can Win With Blacks!

If the eventual Republican nominee needs 47 percent of the Latino vote to win the general election — the threshold set by two political scientists in a study for Latino Decisions — what chance does Trump have?

But if Trump could replace Latino votes with those of another large minority group that traditionally votes Democratic, he might have a fighting chance at victory. And even without changing his message, black voters could be that group.

African Americans have long been receptive to the anti-immigrant concepts behind Trump’s campaign. Simply put, the jobs, housing and other opportunities that immigrants take come largely at the expense of blacks who were born in the United States.

As long ago as 1881, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained that immigrants from Ireland, the Latinos of the day, were stealing jobs from African Americans. “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly-arrived emigrant from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and color entitle him to special favor,” Douglass wrote in his autobiography. A few years later, in his famous Atlanta Exposition address, Booker T. Washington begged white employers to reject “those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits” in favor of native-born blacks, who had toiled “without strikes and labor wars.” By 1916, mass immigration had made black workers “superfluous,” the New Republic charged. The immigrant “is the Negro’s most dangerous competitor,” it said.

Black newspapers opined in favor of the Immigration Act of 1924, which enacted the first major restrictions on immigration. In an editorial, the Chicago Defender said: “With the average American white man’s turn of mind the white foreign laborer is given preference over the black home product. When the former is not available the latter gets an inning.” The labor leader A. Philip Randolph went even further, saying the Immigration Act wasn’t enough. “Instead of reducing immigration to 2 percent of the 1890 quota, we favor reducing it to nothing,” he said. By 1993, poet Toni Morrison put the issue succinctly in an essay for Time, saying, “Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American.”

Economically, the division is beyond doubt, and Trump could exploit it if he chose to. . . . Tellingly, the only Republican to take an anti-immigrant message directly to the black community in recent years received a positive reception.

This has to be the Democrats’ worst nightmare. And with Trump polling at 25% with blacks, who knows?

Hey, maybe he can even get support from The New Republic:

I became convinced that high levels of low-skill immigration are good for wealthy Americans and bad for poor Americans. Far more important, high levels of illegal immigration—when you start to get into the millions, as we have—undermines unions and labor standards, lowers wages, heightens social tensions, strains state budgets, widens income inequality, subverts the rule of law, and exacerbates class divides. The effects go far beyond wages, because few undocumented workers earn enough to cover anything close to the cost of government services (such as education for their children) they require, and those services are most important to low-income Americans. In short, it’s an immense blow to America’s working class and poor.

Well, no, that’s probably a bridge too far:

That is not a fashionable concern, of course. Worrying about illegal immigration today is a lot like worrying about communists in government in 1950. It’s not that the problem isn’t legitimate or serious (there actually were, we now know, a lot of Moscow loyalists working for the U.S. government). It’s that expressing your concurrence links you to a lot of demagogues and bad actors.

And at TNR, of course, who you’re “linked to” is the most important thing.

Michael Barone, on the other hand, looks at the Survey USA poll and says “Whoa!”

Against Trump Clinton carries non-whites — but by less than impressive margins. Trump’s name is supposed to be mud among Hispanics, but he gets 31 percent of their votes — more than Mitt Romney in 2012, the same as John McCain in 2008 — and Clinton gets only a bare 50 percent. Among Asians, Trump actually has a (statistically insignificant) lead of 41 to 39 percent, echoing the 50 to 49 percent Asian margin for Republicans in the 2014 vote for House of Representatives. And among blacks Clinton leads Trump by 59 to 25 percent. That’s a huge contrast with Barack Obama’s margins of 95 to 4 percent in 2008 and 93 to 6 percent in 2012.

But is the poll accurate, or an outlier? Stay tuned for further polling and we’ll see.

SHA-NA-NA FOUNDER (AND LAWPROF) Dennis Greene has died. That’s sad. I went to law school with him (it was his second career), and he was a good guy.

DEMOCRATS SEE NO IRONY IN RUNNING AGAINST THEMSELVES: Well, that’s often the case when a Democrat running for president has to run against while the current Democrat is still in office making a mess of the country with his socialist policies — Bobby Kennedy ran in ’68 in opposition to not just only the escalation of the Vietnam War by LBJ, but also against the sunny “can do” optimism of his brother’s New Frontier. In 2000, Al Gore rejected Bill Clinton’s centrist policies and their success; as Michael Kinsley noted immediately before the election, the punitive leftism of Gore boiled down to an attitude of “You’ve never had it so good, and I’m mad as hell about it.”

And yesterday, as John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “Joe Biden delivered a populist oration on the occasion of Labor Day:”

Biden ripped the stagnant American economy of recent years:

“I’m mad, I’m angry,” Biden thundered, attacking the U.S. economy as “devastating for workers.”

That’s what we’ve been saying for the last 6 1/2 years. Where has Biden been all this time? Oh yeah, that’s right–he’s been the vice president. The economy is lousy for most workers because of a lack of economic growth. In my view, slow growth is largely the consequence of the administration’s economically ignorant policies, in particular, over-regulation. But for the unsought (by the administration) fracking revolution, conditions would be even worse.

So how can the vice president run against his own administration?

Just how devastating have the last six and half years have been? Feel the Bern!

And of course, as Glenn noted earlier, despite having a Dickensian story line being handed to them with easy to photograph Margaret Bourke-White-style Depression-era visuals to accompany it, there’s no chance the media will touch this story, for fear of its impact on both Hillary’s chances, and The Won’s final days:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR FRED HIATT IS UNSPARING: “This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.”

Plus:

When Obama pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, critics worried there would be instability; none envisioned the emergence of a full-blown terrorist state. When he announced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” critics worried the words might prove empty — but few imagined the extent of the catastrophe: not just the savagery of chemical weapons and “barrel bombs,” but also the Islamic State’s recruitment of thousands of foreign fighters, its spread from Libya to Afghanistan, the danger to the U.S. homeland that has alarmed U.S. intelligence officials, the refugees destabilizing Europe.

And even this is too kind. The “red line” fiasco was a signal that nobody needed to pay attention to U.S. views. The Iraq withdrawal was, in fact, predicted to be a disaster, and took place against the advice of the generals. And the Libya disaster was a war-of-choice, in violation of a disarmament deal we’d already made with Khaddafy.

Worst President ever. And yet the Dems still bleat about Bush. But of course, who would want to confront the magnitude of the disaster they have foisted on the nation, and the world.

THE WORST EUROPEAN REFUGEE CRISIS SINCE THE END OF WORLD WAR II IS TAKING PLACE BEFORE OUR EYES — Barack Obama’s Refugee Crisis.

NARRATIVE: Chris Wallace Presses Cheney on Iran: Didn’t You ‘Leave President Obama with a Mess’?

Why no, no he didn’t. In fact, things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.

In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:

BOB WOODWARD: Bush Didn’t Lie About WMD, And Obama Sure Screwed Up Iraq In 2011.

[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Plus:

Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:

Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.

We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.

Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:

As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.

Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?

Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.

Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.

And who can forget this?

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012

Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.

Related: Obama’s Betrayal Of The Iraqis.

THEY BUILT THAT: WaPo editorial page editor upset about the Syria crisis the WaPo helped spark.

IF YOU DON’T WANT THEM TO COME, JUST LIMIT WELFARE BENEFITS TO CITIZENS: Denmark Places Anti-Refugee Ads in Lebanese Newspapers. But that’s not too far off:

The plain text flyer continued by informing readers that the Danish Parliament has just passed a regulation to reduce social benefits for newly arrived refugees by up to 50 percent. It then listed six other obstacles refugees would face, including a language requirement to obtain permanent residence and a waiting period of at least five years.

In addition, the ad informs readers that “foreign nationals granted temporary protection in Denmark will not have the right to bring family members to Denmark during the first year.”

Maybe we should do something similar.

SALENA ZITO: Hillary Misses Mark With Millennials.

What looked like a block-long line turned out to be a crowd that could barely fill one-fourth of a football field. And the students in attendance? Well, they weren’t exactly there to support the former secretary of State.

“I am sort of a Bernie (Sanders) fan. I also had nothing else to do at 10 in the morning,” said Brian Miller, a chemical engineering student from Pittsburgh, waiting with more than a dozen friends for the event to start.

David Lituchy of Morgantown, W.Va., was there on the off-chance he’d see a different Clinton: “I am here for Bill. He would definitely liven things up here.”

He said he’s leaning toward Sanders, too.

Such sentiment wasn’t anecdotal; scores of students expressed it, and you didn’t need to interview anyone to know that Clinton has political problems beyond her email controversy.

The event here wasn’t just a failure to connect with millennials, but a fundamental inability to read her audience and adjust her speech — or perhaps laziness, or a sense of entitlement that she shouldn’t have to work this hard for support. Perhaps it was all of that. . . .

A good politician would have noticed when he took the stage that the audience was filled with kids who likely did not grow up in Ohio (19 percent of Case Western Reserve University students are foreign-born) and were barely 12 years old when Clinton battled to win the state in 2008.

Instead, Clinton launched into a memorial for Ohio congressmen who were significant long before these kids were politically aware, then thanked the kids for their votes in 2008. (Again, they would have been 12 back then.)

“You lifted me up when I was down and out,” she said, referring to Ohio voters who got her flailing 2008 campaign back on its feet temporarily.

There wasn’t the sound of crickets chirping, but no one picked up what she put down.

Clinton spoke for 30 minutes on voter suppression, gun control, women’s reproductive rights; she called Republicans “terrorists” and championed foster care. The only time she caught the audience’s attention was with a brief mention of college affordability.

It was as if time had passed her by.

It has. She’s so stale that a 74-year-old Montgomery Burns lookalike is fresher.

NOT ALL NEWS IS BAD NEWS: “News outlets only care about a small part, but you call it the world…The facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong.”

Watch the whole thing.

THE ELECTION in one tweet:

THE LEFT’S DILEMMA: THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS TO BE OFFENDED BY, AND SO LITTLE TIME TO AGONIZE ABOUT EACH, George Will writes:

Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, also is the time for sensitivity auditors to get back on — if they will pardon the expression — the warpath against the name of the Washington Redskins. The niceness police at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have won court approval of their decision that the team’s name “may disparage” Native Americans. We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub away remembrances of unpleasant things, such as the name Oklahoma, which is a compound of two Choctaw words meaning “red” and “people.”

Connecticut’s state Democratic Party has leapt into the vanguard of this movement, vowing to sin no more: Never again will it have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. Connecticut Democrats shall still dine to celebrate their party’s pedigree but shall not sully the occasions by mentioning the names of two slave owners. Because Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners have long been liturgical events for Democrats nationwide, now begins an entertaining scramble by states’ parties — Georgia’s, Missouri’s, Iowa’s, New Hampshire’s, and Maine’s already have taken penitential actions — to escape guilt by association with the third and seventh presidents.

The Washington Post should join this campaign for sanitized names, thus purging the present of disquieting references to the past. The newspaper bears the name of the nation’s capital, which is named for a slave owner who also was — trigger warning — a tobacco farmer. Washington, D.C., needs a new name. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, D.C. She had nothing to do with her husband’s World War II internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.

Hey, our students’ history books, like Oceania’s Newspeak Dictionary, aren’t going to shrink themselves.