Lifestyle strivers are less spiritual, despite / due to scorn of work, wealth, and stuff

In the comments to the previous post, the topic came up about lifestyle strivers and lack of spirituality, community, and so on. Talking about folks out West, Feryl said:

Also, the emphasis on various superficial things and materialism indicates a void that needs to be filled by more essential things. Like a sense of place, of tradition, of the future, of any kind of belonging to a greater whole.

That's the weird thing, though -- people out West are not materialistic. They aren't obsessed with money, dying with the most toys, or competing over who has the greatest things.

For them, life is just a brief journey, and they're going to have as much fun along the way as they can. What happens after that, hey man, we'll like, figure it out later, or something.

This focus on how they live their lives is just another way of saying that they're lifestyle-oriented rather than job/wealth/material-oriented.

There's a great confusion that people who leave behind material concerns are going to be more spiritual -- as though they're ascending from the material mundane realm up into the ethereal heavens.

But in reality, focusing on your lifestyle and persona construction couldn't be more navel-gazing -- the opposite of stepping out of yourself, experiencing the Sublime, merging into something greater and larger than yourself, and so on.

Sure, parts of your lifestyle may involve socializing and connecting with others, all else equal serving to sustain a community. But it doesn't do anything to sustain a family, and that is the most basic unit that has to be firmly in place before any larger units can be nested around it.

It's no secret that family bonds are depressingly weak out West -- even for those who've lived there their whole lives, but especially for those who transplanted themselves out there precisely to avoid having to be tied to their family back wherever they came from.

Job/wealth/material stuff -- focusing on that can sustain a family. It's called bringing home the bacon, putting a roof over the wife and kids' heads, and keeping the lights on and the water running.

Of course if there's a striving as opposed to accommodating mindset, then the career-orientation leads the working parents to neglect their children more than if they were only working enough to take care of the household. It would be better if they worked less, and spent more time with family.

At the same time, even with career striving parents, the family unit is still sustained -- bacon, roof, lights, water, all there.

Just compare Donald Trump's kids with those of a leading lifestyle striver from California -- one of those Real Housewives types. Their kids are a total mess, and there's zero family bonds -- maybe outright hostility.

With the family unit taken care of, then more layers of group-iness can be added around it. Neighborhoods, churches, towns.

Man was more spiritual back when he was kept busy for much of the day with earning a living, whether tending his field or herding his livestock. Jesus was a carpenter, and Paul was a tent-maker -- neither was an ascetic like Diogenes who, aside from a few epic trolls, left no legacy or influence on world history whatsoever.

Focusing mostly on lifestyle and leisure makes man less spiritually satisfied, probably because being unproductive in any tangible sense makes you feel adrift in every way possible.

When de Tocqueville visited America, he didn't say "OMG, look at how much yoga and quinoa smoothies these spiritual seekers have taken in before the morning's over!" That would have been referring to the gay decadent leisure-based aristocracy that was quickly crumbling away back in Europe.

Indeed, the scorn of working and the sole focus on lifestyle and leisure out West makes them more of a wannabe-aristocrat class, a poor man's leisure class, slackers gone wild, etc. They're just as numb to the appeals about "look what's happened to the working class in America" as the old aristocrats would have been -- not due to class privilege, since they're not all that rich out West, but due to being in a totally different mindset, where working and therefore workers are felt to be beneath them -- not vulgar scum (the aristocrat view) but uncool-ly focused on money and jobs.

What made American democracy great is still located back East. We're going to resurrect the American economy and government, even if the decadents out West are too busy getting / giving blowjobs to notice, let alone pitch in. They just need to stay out of our way if they aren't going to get on board.

Lifestyle strivers compete in domains where stuff is still "made in America"

People who compete for status in the lifestyle arena, as opposed to the career arena, have settled on two main battlegrounds -- food, and leisure activities. (See earlier posts on the career vs. lifestyle vs. persona contests here and here.)

In practice, "leisure activities" nowadays means what kind of entertainment you consume in your free time. Only a minority of lifestyle strivers are very into competing over rock-climbing, yoga, skiing, and other physical activities outside the home. All lifestyle strivers, though, are heavily invested in contests over the kinds of entertainment they consume, mostly while relaxing at home.

Food works as a status contest in the lifestyle domain because it's part of a person's regular routine, and there's enough innate interest in it already for the pleasure that it gives, rather than some boring part of a person's routine that would not energize a competition. The same goes for entertainment.

And yet for all of the exotic novelty that lifestyle strivers aim for -- to distinguish their lifestyles as beyond the familiar, pedestrian norm -- the actual objects of their competition are still made right here in America (or other culturally familiar first-world countries).

It's one thing to show your Facebook friends that you had beef cooked in a Mexican style -- carne asada -- but it's quite another to eat beef that is from Mexico. You want the raw materials to be American (or first-world), and only the style of preparing them into a final meal to be exotic. You wouldn't want to risk food poisoning at every meal and cut short your lifetime career of uploading food pictures to your social media accounts.

It's also telling how little the entertainment strivers consume of foreign media. Remember -- one of their goals is to show how their tastes are beyond the familiar norm, e.g. by eating carne asada and drinking horchata. Why don't they brag about their consumption of Mexican TV shows or movies? The language barrier is not the answer, since they can be watched with subtitles, and again they otherwise prefer the status boost from exotic and hard-to-pronounce stuff.

The simplest explanation seems to be that they recognize how crappy the production of Mexican entertainment is, especially compared to first-world standards. The quality of acting, the cameras, the lighting, the sound recording, editing, directing, etc. -- some or all of these elements are just not up to snuff.

Yes, there's a tiny niche of film dorks who compete over who has seen the most obscure hits of foreign cinema, but that's been going on for a long time, and has not grown as a phenomenon. On the other hand, 40 years ago nobody held contests over who was a bigger fan of The Bionic Woman, or who could micro-analyze the social world of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or who had boosted their status in a single day by binge-watching an entire season of The Waltons. These days, TV shows are so obsessed over and fought over, it's pathetic. But they're all made right here in America, or England.

It's not just due to the greater supply of higher-quality TV shows now vs. the '70s, because it isn't only Mad Men and the like that are obsessed over. Lifestyle strivers hold contests over utterly pedestrian crap like The Big Bang Theory, Law & Order: SVU, Orphan Black, and whatever other gay-vampire-detective junk they're running in primetime.

Perhaps the clearest comparison can be drawn between the appeal to lifestyle strivers of clothing and accessories on the one hand, and grooming items on the other. Both clothing and grooming are part of your regular routine, and there's an existing interest in seeing what other people look like. And they're part of the same lifestyle domain -- your daily presentation to other people.

However, most clothing, shoes, hats, etc. are made in third-world sweatshops, whereas most grooming items are made right here in America. Even the $2 shampoo from a big box store says "Made in USA," whereas even a higher-end clothing item like a merino wool sweater from Banana Republic says "Made in China".

So which one do the lifestyle strivers do the most battle over? Just go to any retail store, and notice how much grooming stuff there is. Aisles and endless aisles of striver-oriented grooming products.

Clothing is subject to fashion cycles, but lifestyle strivers don't seem to make use of it in their battles over who is cooler than who else. Competing over clothing is more of a niche thing, and even then it's over clothing made in the first world. Competing over grooming products couldn't be more widespread, when any given supermarket offers men dozens of hairstyling materials, deodorant scents, and vitamin-supplemented moisturizers.

On YouTube, the most popular female lifestyle strivers are part of the contests over hair products, makeup, and the like -- not so much clothing, shoes, or bags. Ditto for male strivers -- they're not as obsessed over either one or the other, but they're still more likely to obsess over hair products, beard oils, shaving cream, cologne, and so on, rather than apparel.

The one possible exception is technology products that are made in the third world, but that play a key role in lifestyle status contests -- iPhone / MacBook, Skullcandy headphones, Nintendo DS, etc. Toting these devices around and showing them off to others is part of their regular routine, and there's interest in who has what. Why don't people mind that they're all Chinese crud?

But that misses the difference between the device and the media that it's used to access. Strivers obsess over TV shows -- all of which are made in America -- but not really over the television sets themselves. Whatever will do, will do, as long as they stream the shows that the strivers have to stay on top of in order to be part of the coolness competition.

It's no different with desktop or laptop computers, smartphones, headphones, or video game consoles -- the media that they provide to the user are all designed and produced in the first world. Internet sites, smartphone apps, pop music, video games -- all made in the first world.

So, even in the world of lifestyle competition, where the point is to move away from competing over career, wealth, and materialism, there is still a vexing concern about how high-quality the materials and labor process were that went into making the stuff needed to carry out their lifestyle contests.

This gives insight into why folks back East are more in favor of Trump's campaign to "Make America Great Again" by bringing back manufacturing to the US (darker colors mean greater support for Trump):

People are more career-striving back East, and are more concerned with the quality of material possessions -- TVs, cars, clothing, furniture, and so on. What is made now is crap, and hardly worth bragging about in a status contest. Imagine trying to preen over some crappy IKEA coffee table made out of Chinese frankenlumber (albeit "assembled in America" -- by you).

Out West, the focus is more on lifestyle contests, and the raw materials and labor that go into the relevant products are already made here in America. They're not really what we think of as possessions, though, but more like the material or immaterial stuff that greases our daily lifestyle routines. They don't see what the big deal is, when it's American or first-world materials and labor that produce their pumpkin spice granola, craft beer, tea tree oil shampoo, TV shows, movies, smartphone apps, and even video games.

To the out-West mind, it's "Why so gloom and doom about the state of the economy?" Hence the focus instead on social and cultural values rather than matters of the economy and government, whether that's in the blue-state or red-state flavor of out-West values orientation.

All you beard-oiling, Walking Dead binge-watchers out West of the Mississippi should be throwing your support to Trump rather than the regional favorite Cruz, or just stay out of the way altogether. You can continue jerking yourselves off about who's the bigger craft beer aficionado, while the materialists back East are busy bringing back quality-made stuff to our country, and in the process restoring dignity, prosperity, and freedom to the working and middle classes who will be powering those formerly long-gone sectors of the economy.

Perfect time to add copper architecture, with commodity prices in free fall

Now that the prices of commodities are crashing around the world, why not take advantage? Look at how much copper prices have fallen -- down about 55% from their peak in 2011, with no bottom in sight:

You could make the best of these historic lows and upgrade your plumbing to copper, although it may be hard for the plumber to get at all the existing pipes (behind walls, etc.), and you may not want to have the water shut off for large amounts of the day.

Upgrading exterior elements to copper, however, wouldn't be difficult for the installer, and wouldn't seriously disturb the day-to-day atmosphere. You can't install copper yourself, so you'll still pay for specialist labor, but that isn't the biggest chunk of the total costs, which is the copper itself (expensive compared to other materials, yet suddenly a LOT more affordable).

Copper roofs, gutters, downspouts, and trim will last forever -- centuries at the least -- provide an interesting texture, wonderful color that changes over time, and a familiar natural material. As opposed to cruddy, bland, new-fangled stuff. Juxtaposing the blue-ish patina that develops on copper, and masonry or brick that is brown / red / orange / yellow, is one of the most pleasing and subtle color contrasts available. It also works well with whiter materials, which make it look more bright and cheerful than sober and handsome.

Formerly just a dream, now within reach.

Does racial insulation make whites get taken advantage of by other groups?

With Iowa temporarily in the spotlight, many on the uncucked right have mentioned how racially insulated the people of that state are, and in that region generally. Remember, Iowa is right below Minnesota, and most of that state lives close to its southern boundary.

Being so innocent of the realities of living around blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, and whoever else -- it's only natural that they should have such a naively welcoming attitude toward them. They don't know any better from experience. Right?

But why do they assume the best about outside groups, in the absence of any evidence one way or another? They could just as easily assume, as all human groups do, that outsiders are not to be trusted -- especially if we haven't had any experience with them that might get them off the hook with us.

So it's not simply insulation, but insulation combined with the non-human presumption that outsiders are just as wonderful as us insiders.

Compare the Scandinavians west of the Mississippi to the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia, who live here:

The map below shows racial diversity (where darker means more diverse). Appalachia from Knoxville TN on up north is one of the most homogeneous regions in the nation, even more so than the western Midwest:

Moreover, it has been this liberated from diversity since forever. It's not as though they used to have extensive contact with outside groups, but do not currently. Even the Great Migration of blacks out of the Deep South (the lowland South) after WWI did not affect Appalachia, aside from a handful of them taking up factory jobs in Pittsburgh. The migration took an eastern path up the East Coast, and a northwestern one up toward Cleveland, Detroit, and farther west into the Midwest. But they entirely skirted around the hills and mountains of Appalachia, where it must have been made clear that they were not wanted.

Having been so insulated from the realities of day-to-day living with the Tower of Babel, are Scotch-Irish hillbillies and Slavic steelworkers just itching to adopt Somali babies or welcome Mexican serfs into their workplace with open arms? Whadda yinz think we look like, a buncha jagoffs?

There's just something genetically different about the Nordic people compared to the Celtic and Slavic people. We see that back in their European homelands as well.

Ireland, Scotland, and Wales aren't over-run by foreign hordes, although the Saxon legacy of the English government has opened up England. (Saxons were from the Nordic area north of the Rhine.) Especially looking at the relatives of American hillbillies, the Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland. A little over a year ago, the NYT wrote an article titled, "In Northern Ireland, a Wave of Immigrants Is Met With Fists". Doesn't sound unlike the welcoming they'd receive in Wheeling WV.

And of course the Slavs from eastern Germany, Austria, and Hungary out toward Russia and the Balkans couldn't be more dismissive of outside races. (No, it's not due to historical experience with Mongols, etc., since none of the Slavs in America remember any of that history.)

Like the Celts and the Slavs, the Nords have had little direct experience living with Africans, Indians, Vietnamese, and whoever else. Yet they have the opposite presumption about outsiders as the Celts and Slavs do -- namely, that they must be just as wonderful as we are. It's the same mindset as the citizens of Little Scandinavia here in America. (If we thought or behaved otherwise, that would be mean. And we can't be mean, don'tcha know?)

What genetic distinction is there between the Nordic / Scandinavian groups and every other European group, including the Mediterraneans (who have had extensive experience living with Africans and Arabs, and who do not care for them)?

My hunch is that it's due to Scandinavians having the highest proportion of their genome coming from hunter-gatherers, while other European groups are more pastoralist and agriculturalist. (That's a fact; the link to their naivete is my hunch.) Hunter-gatherers are not free from violence, but compared to more advanced forms of making a living (pastoralism, agriculture, horticulture), they are incredibly more gentle, easy-going, egalitarian, and trusting.

But the Noble Savage is easily taken advantage of, especially if the other side is not hunter-gatherer and does not share the egalitarian ethos.

Like it or not, we don't live in a gentle hunter-gatherer world anymore, and to preserve our own group, we have to have heightened negative responses to the outside groups -- that's how they view and treat us, after all, since they're not innocent Noble Savages either.

When it comes to group preservation, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. The trouble is: how do we communicate that to the egalitarian primitives? Someone with deeper insight into the Nordic mind, please chime in.

To restore American industry, regulate branding of third-world crud bearing Western names and symbols

One way to start making stuff here in America again is to put tariffs on the cheap foreign crud that floods our retail shelves. If the company that off-shores its production has to pass along a decent tariff to the consumer, Walmart and Target will stop carrying their junk -- why would consumers may about the same price for junk as for quality?

A separate path is one I haven't heard discussed before, but is crucial to pull back the veil about what exactly it is they're buying. Most people don't realize how shoddy the product is because, even if they search for the country of origin (and most of them do not), a tiny label reading "Made in China" gets lost on them because of the Western branding.

After all, the company making it bears a Western name, and so does the particular item. It's the Peckham model shirt from the Applecart and Morrow company, so it doesn't matter if the label says "Made in China". The worst is branding that is specifically American -- the All-American model power drill from the Uncle Sam Tools company, whose logo is a red white and blue flag -- oh btw, MADE IN CHINA.

These companies should not be allowed to fob off cheap third world crud on us, while deceiving us with Western branding (names, symbols, etc.). Hypothetically, consumers can inspect the country of origin, but again most do not, and in the cognitive dissonance between the tiny print on the label and the cleverly designed branding, their minds favor the razzle-dazzle over the strict facts. We might wish the human mind worked differently, but it does not, and we must base policy on how things really are.

I also don't see this coming from consumer protest groups, because again the consumers go through cognitive dissonance and resolve it in favor of the branding -- perceiving it as cheap third-world junk would undo their resolution and bring back that anxious feeling all over again. So leaving it to individual consumer demand would not do the trick either.

That leaves it, unfortunately, to some federal agency to regulate the presentation of consumer products. I wish nobody needed to do that, but then I wish we didn't have to enforce laws against dumping toxic waste into our water supply.

It would be akin to the regulation of food marketing by the FDA -- for example, you can't market or brand something as "chocolate" unless it has cocoa butter, the key ingredient. If the company uses a cheaper lipid like generic vegetable oils, they can't fob it off on the public as "chocolate" but "chocolate-y" or "made with chocolate" or "tastes kinda like real chocolate". True, the ingredient list would show consumers that cocoa butter isn't in there, but it requires too much effort to do a mini research project every time you want to inspect a common consumer good. Just summarize it so we can tell at a glance.

Country of origin is no less important of a summary for the quality, reliability, and durability of a consumer good. There's a simple reason why the maker off-shored the manufacturing -- to cut costs by paying for crappier labor and inferior materials, while charging the same price back home, with the consumer none the wiser -- or at most, apathetic, cynical, and passively accepting.

I don't see how an agency within the industry could do the regulating. Usually the insiders only regulate branding to protect native stuff and emphasize its quality. Here the goal is the opposite: to reveal foreign junk as foreign junk to dissuade consumers from wasting their money. No industry insider body would want to do that. Some kind of government agency seems to be the only sort of solution, a la the FDA regulating food companies from marketing "pink slime" as minced ribeye steak.

I'm also not committed to one way or another of regulation. The idea that sprang to mind was to make the branding names be consonant with the country of origin, or at least region. This is easy to tell in practice -- a shirtmaker that has everything made in Vietnam has to brand itself with a Vietnamese or Southeast Asian name. Not necessarily in the Vietnamese language, which we wouldn't understand, but something like "Vietnamese Elite Tailoring" or "Ho Chi Minh Clothiers" rather than "Rumptree and Cork". Likewise with imagery, no Union Jack flag logos allowed for something made in Vietnam.

Mega-corporations are at this point running a shell game with consumers about what product was made where, always making sure that the shells themselves look culturally familiar. It amounts to fraud and ought to be stopped.

More importantly, though, it would wake consumers up to just how much of the stuff that retailers stock their shelves with is simply third-world crap. Even without a tariff imposed on it, this would shift a lot of their purchases toward authentic Western producers. Compounded with a tariff, it would wipe out the retail junk market overnight. Pay more for lower quality? Pass.

Such a regulatory system would resemble the protected designation of origin laws for foodstuffs produced in Europe, where only authentic Asiago cheese can be labeled as such, protecting its makers from having some lower-quality imitation stuff benefiting from the original's reputation, which it did not create or cultivate, but is merely latching onto like a parasite. Similarly, Chinese tools that look like American tools should not be allowed to benefit from their reputation and prestige by being branded with American names and symbols.

The third-world junk on retail shelves does not come right out and say it's American -- in fact, in fine print on a small label, it says it's from Malaysia, Nicaragua, or wherever -- but the level of insinuation and deception with its branding makes it amount to the same as outright fraud.

Again putting the tariff issue aside, even if American consumers wanted to buy these things, they should be doing so without being misdirected by marketing sleight-of-hand. Aside from being wrong in the abstract, this kind of fraud is incredibly widespread -- it's hard to think of any manufactured good that it does not apply to -- and keeping American producers from making and selling the real, good stuff.

That the American makers of furniture, hardware, clothing, electronics, and all the rest of it, have been put out of business and their workforce either on the dole or working crappy service jobs, just so some liar with an MBA can get rich with their marketing shell game, is one of the most appalling disgraces of the modern era.

Evangelical betrayal of Trump came from right half of the bell curve, left half was solid pro-Trump

The recent upset provides a good occasion to point out that the airheads in Iowa and out West generally are above-average in IQ and education. Gelman et al showed that the red state vs. blue state culture wars are primarily fought among the better-off, who don't have to worry so much about basic economics and politics, and can indulge in their airy-fairy values contests.

Studies of the Tea Party members also find them to be more educated and wealthier than the average American, even if they're not 1% Ivy grads.

True to form, the entrance poll results in Iowa show that Trump did the best among those with no college education, and had lower support for each additional level of education. Rubio was the other way around, and was the winner of those with college or more. Cruz was in between, peaking with those who had some college, losing to Trump among no-college voters, and edging out Trump on college-and-beyond voters (though below Rubio).

Trump won handily among the non-evangelical voters, while Cruz won just as handily with the evangelicals.

Do not fall for the "what's the matter with Kansas?" narrative, which Gelman et al have already demolished. Not that there isn't something wrong with out-West states, but that it is driven by the right half of the bell curve whose battle over values comes in red-state and blue-state flavors, each of them eclipsing the fight for basic economic and political matters like a healthy economy, low debt, good incomes, solid borders, keeping the culture American rather than foreign / cosmopolitan, not wasting our military on video game shit in the Middle East, etc.

The lower-status folks vote primarily on those economic issues, and therefore do not show so much polarization around the country. They went solidly for Trump in Iowa, and they will do so everywhere else. Ending the culture war means restoring the franchise to the blue-collars.

It is not the left half of the bell curve that is to blame, as the IQ fetishists would have you believe. They want a "cognitive elite" uber alles? -- well then what else do you expect than voting for a non-American, Ivy slimeball with deep ties to Goldman Sachs?

This realignment election season is revealing a deep rift in the "alternative right" between populists and elitists -- both may want some form of nativism, but is it for the benefit of all classes, or for helping the strivers reach the elite and stay cushy once they get there, freeing them from having to take out million-dollar mortgages to avoid the brown hordes? Something that the blue-collar majority cannot afford to do, aside from having their jobs stolen by foreign scabs.

Newsflash: Iowa picks another loser. And now back to your regularly scheduled Trump domination

As I detailed back in October when Carson had temporarily taken over Trump in Iowa polling numbers, that state's caucus results are not informative about what happens with the national nomination. The polls had been close in the month leading up to the caucus anyway, so the slight advantage to Cruz is not a mind-blowing reversal of our expectations.

There have been 7 Republican caucus seasons that were up for grabs (meaning, there was no incumbent Republican President). Of those 7, only 3 of them correctly predicted the national results. The way things look now, they are going to lower that batting average to only 3 out of 8, since Trump so dominates Cruz et al everywhere else.

As for New Hampshire, they correctly predicted the outcome in 5 of those 7 times. The South Carolina primary predicted the outcome correctly in 6 of those 7 times, with the sole exception being local favorite Newt Gingrich winning in 2012. Trump is wiping the mat with everyone else in those states, including the local favorites.

He's going to bulldoze in the next two primaries, which are far more predictive of who gets the nomination, and the next one is only a week away. So just brush off the nattering nabobs of negativism for the next week, and it'll be right back on track toward the nomination, and then the general.

I wouldn't get too bent out of shape by all the what-if's about Trump's performance in Iowa. According to polling results at the caucuses, Trump won handily among those who showed up to caucus for the first time, while it was Cruz for those who had caucused before. These new-comers were fully 45% of everyone who showed up. Trump is indeed bringing out lots of new-comers, and he is picking up many more of them than are the other candidates. In states where masturbatory values-conservatism has no appeal, the droves of new-comers will be even more strongly tilted towards Trump.

Trump supporters have also made up their minds for a long time. Cruz won among those who made up their mind between a week and a month ago, and Rubio won among those who made up their mind in the last few days or the day of the caucus itself. Disturbingly 35% of the caucus-goers were from this fickle mush-head demographic that overwhelmingly went for Rubio, and nearly as much for Cruz, and not nearly as much for Trump.

The best thing the Trump movement can do is convince people who haven't made up their mind yet to STAY HOME for their primary. "Too many choices, maybe it's better to just sit it out on the sidelines and then go vote for real when it really matters in November and there's only two candidates to choose from, and who will clearly differ from each other." Or something to that effect. Wishy-washy airheads may swerve into the path of the Trump train, and we don't need any bumps on what should be a full-steam ahead victory.

It's important not to confuse two kinds of "unforeseen" voters -- those who typically do not participate in Republican primaries, but who have made up their minds for awhile now to vote for the breath-of-fresh-air candidate; and those who have a vague feeling that it's important to perform their civic duty by voting in the primary, but who will put off thinking about who to support until a few days before. These procrastinating conformist wimps will naturally blink when push comes to shove, and will go with the choice that's most respectable to public opinion.

Maybe a line like, "Hey don't worry, voting in the primary isn't like jury duty -- if you're just not feeling that into it, no one will blame you for waiting until November to vote".

The two areas where Trump could improve are in getting more in touch with his supporters ("ground game"), rather than hoping that they'll all turn out. In Iowa, it made no difference whether someone had contacted the voter about Trump or not, whereas Cruz gained five percentage points among those who had been contacted about him. Most people (just over 60%) fell into the "had not been contacted" category, but that still leaves a sizable minority who could be swayed one way or another by a phone call or a knock on the door.

And more importantly, Trump needs to ruin Cruz's reputation as an outsider candidate. In Iowa, half of caucus-goers wanted an insider, and half wanted an outsider. So this is a big group if they're won over. Trump easily dominates Cruz and Rubio with those who prefer outsiders (46 to 20 to 7 percent), but even 20% of their vote is too high for Cruz. If he could have stolen 10 points away from Cruz among that group, he would've easily won.

Not surprisingly, Trump has only 3% support among the half who want someone experienced in politics, so there's no point in trying to win them over. What he needs to do is more fully consolidate the support from those who want an outsider and are sick of business as usual.

Concretely, that means letting the Canadian birth issue go to the back burner, and focus more on Cruz's insider background from start to finish -- policy adviser for Bush Jr., wife works for Goldman Sachs, sweetheart loans totaling $1 million from Goldman and Citi, which he did not disclose, being in the pocket of Big Oil, fighting to quintuple H-1B visas on behalf of CEOs who want to outsource their white collar professional jobs, supporting amnesty, and so on.

Like a typical weasel, Cruz cynically aped the outsider positions only when it became clear that there was a second path toward the nomination, and he wanted to circumvent the in-fighting among the overt Establishment candidates.

The polls at the Iowa caucus show that Cruz does far better among those who want an experienced politician -- 35% among them, but also enjoys having it both ways with the 20% among those who want an outsider. (Rubio is the anti-Trump who only polls well with voters who want an insider.) Trump could point to that and say, "See, Cruz does nearly twice as well with the voters who want business as usual. My people are all from those who want a real change for once." Somehow, he has to cut off that support from the anti-Establishment voters, while allowing the pro-Establishment ones to keep on supporting him.

Emphasize that most of Cruz's gay slapfights are with Rubio, i.e. they're really both duking it out for Establishment favorite position, in more of a good cop / bad cop way, instead of Cruz being a sincere populist or nationalist.

Furthermore, hammer him over having the character traits of an unctuous used car salesman, seductive traveling salesman, snake oil huckster, etc. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing, a false prophet. He's the crypto-Establishment candidate.

And remind the outsider-preferring group that although Sarah Palin supported Cruz awhile ago before his views would become revealed, the First Lady of the Tea Party has endorsed Mr. Trump over her former protege -- for a reason. Trump is the real outsider, and a self-funding one to boot, not a Wall Street-owned sell-out like Cruz.

Obviously the Trump campaign has probably thought of most of this stuff already, but it's important to get this out there more broadly. Whether it's talking to people face-to-face, over social media, or anonymously in comments / forums / Twitter, we can give the Trump train the extra oomph it needs to roll over Goldman Ted.

Culture wars are dead: Jerry Falwell Jr. stumping for Trump, the Good Samaritan

A recent post discussed how Ted Cruz's failed attack about "New York values" shows that the culture wars are losing major steam. Not only the election but the political climate in general is now entirely about the nature of the government and the economy -- there is no room for appeals to social and cultural values, as there has been back to Jimmy Carter's emphasis on being a born-again Christian during his 1976 presidential campaign, and really ramping up during the '90s (gun control, abortion, etc. -- all very stale topics way past their consume-by date).

In fact, as Jerry Falwell Jr. has been pointing out while stumping for Trump, Jimmy Carter may have been a good born-again Baptist and Sunday school teacher, but he wasn't the best choice for President of the United States. (Search YouTube for "Trump Falwell" -- he has made several appearances already.)

It would have been unimaginable just 10 to 20 years ago for the Chancellor of Liberty University (evangelical Southern Baptist) to be endorsing a candidate who wouldn't receive an A+ on the evangelical report card. Today, we have him appealing to conservative Christian voters that they ought to put aside whatever concerns they may have about Trump's faith and religious life, and choose him because he's the best shot they have at preserving their way of life, at such a crucial now-or-never point in history.

In his stump speeches, Falwell gives the analogy of bringing your sick child to whoever the best doctor is that can heal him -- regardless of the doctor's personal faith. Separation of church and medicine. He also relates stories about putting the university that his father founded on a solid financial foundation, and that this required bringing in professionals who may or may not have shared his faith, but were the best ones for the job. Separation of church and accounting.

That may sound utterly ordinary for mainstream Christians or the not-so-religious, but it is a major reversal of the evangelical stance that "the personal is political" -- that it's not just a candidate's character that matters, but specifically how closely his religious beliefs and behaviors reflect the evangelicals' own ways. Falwell also quotes Jesus' admonition to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," explaining that this means separating religious from political affairs -- again, a major reversal of the message and mindset that the evangelical audience has become used to.

I'd go one step further and argue to evangelicals that Trump is like the Good Samaritan who helped the traveler who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead on the side of the road, after the priest and the Levite (another religious official) had passed by without stopping to help.

The wounded traveler is the American way of life, and evangelicals are like the audience of the original, who were from a somewhat different tribe than the Samaritan helper. (Still, the Jews and Samaritans were highly similar cultures, sharing blood, language, history, land, and most of their religion.)

The priest and the Levite are those who are more concerned with maintaining their own personal ritual purity than administering aid to a dying crime victim, whose wounds and filth might defile them -- Republican "intellectuals" and politicians, Religious Right figureheads, and the leaders of the conservative values movement in general. Healing the sickly American way of life is going to require actions more than loud words and empty gestures, and handling a dying body will leave you with unclean hands afterward.

In Jesus' parable, it is not the traveler's spirit that is in danger -- it is his health, wealth, and security that the robbers have stolen from him, and they robbed him for material rather than religious motives. The priest and the Levite probably thought, "Hey, it's not a religious matter -- let the doctors intervene. And anyway, if we got involved, we could get physically and spiritually polluted."

Likewise, much of the American way of life has to do with secular and mundane matters like how our economy and our government operate.

Do we allow American companies to send our jobs overseas, while the executives make the profits right here? Do we allow anyone who wants to come into the country to do so, and even to gain citizenship? Do we allow technocrats in Washington to dictate education policy? And so on and so forth. If we allow the wrong choices to be made on all these matters, as we have for the better part of several decades now, then the American way of life will vanish into thin air -- religion or no religion.

Someone working as a latter-day serf at two part-time service-sector jobs, whose neighborhood is increasingly colonized by foreigners and turned into a Tower of Babel, is not going to live a truly American way of life, even if they continue to go to church on Sunday, say grace before dinner, and pray to God to forgive their sins. They will be living like a disenfranchised Medieval peasant, albeit a devout one, and with more dazzling devices to numb the pain. They will not be living as a free American citizen.

Restoring health and wealth to the American way of life is going to require getting our hands dirty with the workings of the economy and government. Evangelical candidates such as Ted Cruz would rather preserve their holier-than-thou purity than get anything constructive done to help the dying crime victim. Trump, the New Yorker, does not hail from the evangelical tribe, but he is going to do far more to bring the American way of life back to life. And he is truly acting more like a good neighbor to America than are the priests of the conservative movement.

Trump meme (Back to the Future)