Moving to Substack

My latest posts are now at: https://commonermanifesto.substack.com/

See you there!

After Guns and Abortion Then What?

It seems like forever that conservatives have obsessed about guns and unlimited abortion. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment really means what it says about guns and that abortion is not a federal human right hidden in a penumbra and an emanation, but an issue that state legislatures should address, there almost seems like an issue vacuum.

OK. Nature abhors a vacuum so let’s go to work.

I’d say first up is education. I’d say that the gubmint-bureaucrat-run education of the last nearly two centuries since Horace Mann and his “common school” is the best candidate for reform. And here is my Three Point Plan:

1. Make government employee unions illegal, as a form of insurrection.

2. Universal vouchers, so parents can send their children to the school of their choice.

3. An end to teacher credentialization.

That’s not so hard.

Next up is American Empire. It’s time to bring our troops home and buff up the Navy so it can descend upon pirates threatening container ships and tankers. In my view American Empire has been a disaster ever since President Wilson sent the doughboys from On Moonlight Bay to fight the Germans. Why not let the Euros fight it out on their own? And then to punish the Germans with a Mongol-era reparations peace plan with the Treaty of Versailles? Hello Hitler? My Three Point Plan is:

1. End NATO and make the Europeans grow up and run their own defense.

2. Stop meddling in the Middle East, except to defend Israel.

3. Cut the “intelligence community” from 17 to 2.5 intelligence agencies.

Finally, deregulate the regulatory state. I don’t know how to do this, but we really need to cut the educated class out of its current power to direct traffic from 1,001 regulatory agencies. We need to free America from the imperialism and the colonization of, by, and for the snobs of the educated class.

I would also really like to replace Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Student Loans with a Great America Savings Plan. It would like a mega IRA that you can use for all the big things in life, from retirement to end-of-life health care to unemployment to kids’ education, and if you choose it then you opt out of Social Security, Medicare, etc., and do it yourself from your Great American Savings Account at Fidelity, Vanguard, whatever. The only problem is that if you cut federal spending in half then our liberal friends will find a way to spend the money on other free stuff. Milton Friedman once wrote that the government, every government, collects as much as the traffic will bear in taxes and spends as much as the traffic will bear on loot and plunder. I take that to mean that if we relieve the Feds of the cost of Social Security our liberal friends will find another way to buy votes with that money.

Of course, I propose to save the planet from climate change with Build Nukes Now. But that is obvious.

Abortion and the Three Peoples Theory

Do you notice anything about the clips of pro-choice demonstrators peacefully protesting about Roe v. Wade? To me the protesters all look like white girls from selective colleges. You don’t see any ordinary American commoner women. And you don’t see any welfare moms from the ’hood.

The point about abortion politics in the USA is that the pro-choice side is driven by educated women in the educated elite. And the pro-life side is driven by ordinary middle-class commoner moms.

I have actually experienced this face to face as I ate breakfast at a hotel just down the street from the US Supreme Court where the Dobbs appeal was being considered. It was December 2021, and the hotel was full of abortion protesters, for and against.

At one point I heard two pro-life women mixing it up with a pro-choice woman. The pro-life women were quoting Bible verses and the pro-choice woman was talking about “my spirits.”

Which is exactly what I would expect. And you know what? They agreed to disagree; nobody called in their mostly peaceful protesters to get in the faces of the other women at breakfast.

Now, I believe that we have abortion politics today because of the situation of educated class women, that I call People of the Creative Self in my reductive Three Peoples Theory.

Modern feminism proposes that women should not be merely wives and mothers, but should have careers, as men do. That’s all very well, but that means that women can’t get married and have children until they have completed their education and begun their career. It means that, for 10-15 years after puberty, an educated woman really can’t have children.

And yet, in today’s society she is expected to have sexual relationships during college and early career.

If I were an educated woman, and I had internalized the feminist culture that I had been carefully taught, and I knew that I wanted a college education and a career before starting a family and that I should aim to become an “independent woman” as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and that I was expected to “put out” — in the classic phrase of Blanche in A Streetcare Named Desire — I would want abortion as a backstop.

Without that, life would be too “stressful.”

But hey, ladies, what is so wrong with the common law tradition that criminalizes abortion at “quickening?”

Women who are People of the Responsible Self do not see the world the way that women in the educated class see it. For them, as ordinary commoners, maybe immersed in their Bible verses, life, the universe, everything, revolves around marriage, family, home, children. Paid work? Sure, but work is work. And it’s nice to earn money after the children are grown, and be around other women, and give back to the community.

For Responsible women marriage and children are at the center of life. So having sex with a man who isn’t committed to fathering your children is an abomination. Aborting a child you have conceived with the man you love? Unthinkable.

In other words, there is a great religious and cultural gulf between the project of life for a woman in the educated class and the project of life for a woman in the commoner class. What makes life meaningful for an educated class woman is her education and career. What makes life meaningful for a commoner woman is the family she created.

It is the beginning of wisdom in our ruling class to understand this, to accept it, and to allow America to be a place where both kinds of women can live their lives.

But whatabout the women who are People of the Subordinate Self? What is their relation to abortion?

Obviously, down the ages, poor women that had unwanted children usually abandoned them, either by exposure or by killing them. Many were left at churches: foundlings. Up to 40 percent of live births ended up as foundlings raised by the church at the local orphanage. And up to 90 percent of those died in the first year. See this piece at Quillette. It’s pretty obvious: if a mother can’t afford to keep the baby and a relative won’t take the baby, then mothers tended to abandon the baby and hope that someone would take the baby and raise it.

Today, of course, poor women get an abortion. Is that a good thing? Probably not. In any case, because of the “present orientation” of lower class life, poor mothers are going to make decisions at the last possible moment. So, if they don’t have abortions and they can’t afford or don’t want to raise the child, then society has to “do something” if we don’t want such children abandoned or withering away in orphanages.

So what do we do? How about going back to the common law, where abortion after 16-20 weeks was criminal, and abortion before then was shameful?

Roe v. Wade as Bookends

 On the day that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s venture into discovering a constitutional right to abortion because penumbras and emanations, was reversed, let me begin by stating my postion on abortion.

I think that abortion sould be safe, legal, and shameful.

I think that, in general, if you got a baby started, father-to-be, then you got yourself a job for the next twenty years. Men should not be in the position of telling a woman to “get rid of it.”

I think that, in general, the criminal law is needed to keep rowdy men under control. Men sometimes need a punch in the solar-plexus to get straightened out. Or imprisoned for ten years or so until they get cured of their violent ways by anno domini.

But I think that, in general, the criminal law should not be ordering women around. If the word got around in female circles that abortion was shameful, if women were in the habit of agreeing with their friends: “I can’t believe she got an abortion,” then there would be a lot less abortions in this world.

It’s in the genes. Women believe what they have been carefully taught, what the other women believe, and that is just they way they are. Men, not so much.

So my objection to Roe v. Wade issues from my belief that very few things of a religious, moral, or cultural nature should be issuing from on high from an all-wise Supreme Court. And I believe that the law should not be an educated-class diktat. I believe that lawmaking should be a process very like what Jürgen Habarmas proposes. It should not be promulgated from on high, but worked out in the Lebenswelt, the “lifeworld” of people in a community working out agreement of community standards in the to-and-fro of conversation and communication.

And I believe in the notion of the states as “laboratories of democracy.” Guess what, it was a liberal justice of the Supreme Court that coined the phrase.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis was the first to popularize the phrase that states “are the laboratories of democracy.” Justice Brandeis in his dissent in the 1932 case of New State Ice Co v. Liebmann stated that: “a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned by the US Supreme Court, individual states can set their own laws with respect to abortion. Some liberal states will maintain the current effective law of abortion until live birth. Most, I expect, will develop laws that severely limit abortion after 12 or 15 weeks — just like they do in Europe. Some states may ban elective abortion completely. Maybe that is not such a good idea, because “back-alley abortions.” Still, I am sure that rich abortion enthusiasts are even now planning how to get the word out to any pregnant women on how to get an abortion.

But, I still think that abortion sould be safe, legal and shameful. I leave the Karens of the world to deal with the women without shame.

But now, let us deal with the Larger Question, the culture among our educated classes that they are called upon to decide all moral and cultural questions, and to enforce their decisions with politics and government. And you shut up, peasant.

The extreme case of this is, of course, Communism and its half-sister Socialism, and its bastard brother, the administrative state, in which the educated ruling class decides everything from on high, and there is no recourse, no appeal, no evaluation of the benefit of any diktat from on high. Not until the society collapses in ruin, as China at the end of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. And notice that China did not abandon economic communism until after the death of Mao ZeDong.

Thomas Sowell roundly demolishes top-down culture and politics in The Vision of the Anointed.

But the Science!

Did you know that the Science these days is coming to the idea that there is a mysterious “something” — well, let’s call it a Dark Force, to go with the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy — that scientists think may be driving the universe to create new things, whether new species, adaptations, cultural changes, whatever. In other words, when Charles Darwin talked about “evolution” he didn’t know the half of it. I am reading a book right now, The Self-creating Universe: the making of a World View by J.J. Clarke that calls this mysterious Dark Force “emergence.” And then honestly says that this “emergentism” describes the way the universe works, but does not explain it.

Let’s rehearse how this should work with abortion.

Up until, say 1900, aborting a fetus was extremely dangerous, because infection, and not surprisingly, human society took a very dim view of abortion. But, in the United States “medicinal abortion” did not become illegal until 1821 in Connecticut. (Which means what? That the women in the village decided?) So first, the rulers decided that abortion should be illegal. And then in 1973 they decided it should be legal. I wonder why.

I think that with the development of safe “medicinal abortion” we all need to sit down together and come to agreement on what we think is right and proper. And I thijnk that, in general, it should be women running the show.

And then the larger question of the educated rulers deciding everything “from on high” needs to be addressed, on everything from climate change to systemic racism.

Because if you believe that “equality never hurt anyone” dear rulers, it means that everyone should have a voice when moral, cultural, or economic decisions are made — even racist-sexist homophobe armed insurrectionist deplorables.

The Fatal Conceit of Every Ruler

Politics, according to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, is about the enemy. Any human community that experiences an enemy must rally together under a war leader to defeat the enemy. And a community at war must subordinate itself to its leader and fight as one to defeat the foe.

But when the enemy is defeated, what then? Then the leader comes up with all kinds of reasons why a top-down hierarchical system is still needed to save the community from chaos. And that is why just about every society we know about features a hierachical system with the war leader at the top, his lieutenants as his faithful followers, and the ordinary peasants at the bottom.

In fact, that is not the way that the world, or human society, works. We have realized, especially over the last 200 years, that human society is much more complicated than mere hierarchy, and that the horizontal interactions between humans are more important, both economically in trade and gift-giving, and socially, in the “lifeworld” where, according to Jürgen Habermas, it is not the single consciousness of the ruler that defines the world but all of us together, and we test and share our experience of the world in conversation with each other using the language we share.

And, from our market and social transactions and conversations, we leave behind a precipitate of agreement that becomes our culture and our understanding of the way things are.

Rulers are different. In his Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell writes about how our modern rulers believe and act as if they have a special relationship to the truth. They know, whereas ordinary commoners don’t. In Chapter 2: The Pattern, he relates how our current rulers have advanced policy in “The War on Poverty,” “Sex Education,” and “Criminal Justice.” In each case, the rulers declared a “Crisis,” declared a proposed “Solution,” ignored or explained away the negative “Results,” and came up with a “Response” that interpreted the failed “Results” as a need to redouble our efforts.

I experience “The Pattern” as the fundamental limitation of the political that I learned from Carl Schmitt. In politics, everything is about the enemy and defeating him. Obviously therefore, any setback, as in war, is interpreted as a need to redouble our efforts; otherwise we will be defeated and be driven before the enemy and hear the lamentation of our women. As I say, if a political leader admits he is wrong then it is time to resign. But no political leader is willing to do that!

We see this in the current situation of the Biden administration in June 2022. Basically, the Bidenoids made a grand strategic error in 2021 by going full bore on a trillion dollar handout and closing down oil exploration. But can President Biden address the nation and say “sorry, my bad?” Absolutely not. So he resorts to absurd complaints about Putin and oil companies not using their full refinery capacity, and ridiculous ideas about suspending the federal gasoline tax for 90 days.

But what if we are not in a war, or a “crisis?” Then, I would argue, we don’t need politics, but the normal human interaction and conversation that leads to agreement. Of course, down the ages, aside from court politics, people lower down the totem pole did exactly that. But in our modern era our rulers have developed the conceit that they can direct traffic from the court all the way down to the ordinary Joe and Jill at work and at home. I say that the results are in: top-down politics doesn’t work.

Another view is that of J.J. Clarke in The Self-creating Universe. His idea is that new things emerge out of the interaction between entities, from sub-atomic to living things to humans.

If this is true then all the conceit of our betters, from the welfare state to economic regulation to The Great Reset to ESG to the Green New Deal are bound to fail. That’s because they are not emergent, a coming together of different proposals and adaptations, but a top-down imposition of a single notion on everyone by some special person on top.

I suspect that this top-down culture is not just a folly our our present educated class but a failing of all political regimes, that issues out of the necessity of any war leader to coordinate his forces upon a single purpose, to defeat the enemy.

However, even in war, the Germans discovered in World War I, you need to push responsibility downwards as far as it can go, because the general in charge cannot comprehend everything that has to be done to attack and destroy the enemy. He can only propose the general outline of what has to be done, and that general outline is worked out and interpreted into more detailed orders as the instructions get retailed from army to division to regiment to company to platoon.

In life there is interaction, and give and take, and buying and selling, and giving and receiving, and conversation and disagreement and agreement. In politics there is only conflict, the war against the enemy.

I say that the next Big Thing in history is the emergence of rulers that know, as Susan Sowerby taught in The Secret Garden, that they don’t own the whole orange, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did.

The Age of the Commoner

Back in the day, King Henry VII of England had a problem. The Wars of the Roses had killed off most of the male feudal aristocracy. So how to repopulate the ruling class?

Perfectly simple, according to Liah Greenfeld, author of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Henry promoted a bunch of commoners into the aristocracy. And thus was born the notion of the “nation,” a combination of people and nation. Because previously, “nation” meant the elite.

Redefined as the English nation, the English people was elevated to the dignity of the elite… A nation was a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members and inclusive identity, which cut across class and status.

And thus began an age in which, again and again, people of ordinary origin soared into the social stratosphere, not because of who they were, but what they achieved. What about Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII? Word is that he was the son of a butcher. Henry’s other Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell was the son of “a yeoman, fuller and cloth merchant.” His descendant was Oliver Cromwell.

What about Sir Francis Drake, scourge of the Spanish Main? La Wik suggests he was the illegitimate son of a well-connected farmer that got farmed out to a neighbor who ran a ship in the coasting trade.

Then we have the United States of America. The commanding general of the Revolutionary War was George Washington, a landowner by marriage and a slave owner. But his eminense-grise was “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” from the island of St. Croix: Alexander Hamilton. It was the twenty-something Hamilton that kept Washington’s army going as his chief of staff. And then, as the first Secretary of the Treasury under Washington this brilliant commoner set up the National Debt of the new nation and organized its accounts so that today we have a continous recording of US spending and revenue going back to 1792.

And who can forget Benjamin Franklin, escaped apprentice, who built a fortune from printing and publishing in Philadelphia. He created the American culture of thrift, hard work, and community spirit in his Poor Richard’s Almanack. In his seventies he was the agent of the rebels at the court of King Louis in Paris and talked the French into supporting the American Revolution.

Andrew Jackson was the son of Scotch-Irish pioneers; his father died in a logging accident just before Andrew’s birth. He was captured by the British in the Revolutionary War and orphaned at age 14. He studied for the law and was admitted to the bar at age 20. At 35 he was appointed head of the Tennessee militia, and ten years later achieved immortality at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1828 this commoner became President of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln was the son of an unsuccessful farmer in Kentucky. With intermittent schooling, Lincoln worked on his father’s farm until age 22 when he moved to New Salem, Illinois. After serving in the Blackhawk War he opened a store with a friend. Then he became a postmaster and finally determined to study to become a lawyer and entered into politics, serving in the Illinois legislature and then the US House of Representatives. In the 1850s Lincoln was active in anti-slavery politics and the new Republican Party. He was elected president in 1860.

Warren Harding was the son of a farmer and schoolteacher who later became a doctor. His mother was a midwife. In 1870 his father bought a local newspaper, and Harding learned the business. He went to college at age 14, and purchased the Marion Star after graduation at age 18 and managed eventually to make the Star into a success. Starting in 1900 he was successively elected state senator, lieutenant governor, and in 1914 US Senator. He was elected president in 1920.

Richard Nixon’s father ran a lemon ranch, and then a grocery store and a gas station. He worked his way through Whittier College at the family store. He studied law at Duke, and was called to the bar in California. After WWII service in the US Navy, Nixon ran for Congress in 1946 and the US Senate in 1950, winning against liberal Democrats. In 1952 he was elected Vice President, and in 1968 President.

Ronald Reagan was the son of a salesman. After high school and college he worked as a radio and sports announcer. In 1937 he took a screen test and became a B-movie actor. In 1947 he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild and testified before Congress about Communists in Hollywood. In the 1950s he became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS and famously toured GE plants making speeches. In 1966 he was elected Governor of California and in 1980 President of the United States.

Then there is Andrew Carnegie, son of a handloom weaver who got steel production going; John D. Rockefeller, store clerk who created Standard Oil to provide safe kerosene for oil lamps. The Wright brothers were sons of a bishop in the evangelical United Brethren and neither went to college. Henry Ford was born on a farm and never attended high school, but did learn how to operate the Westinghouse portable steam engine. Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a coastguard mechanic. He developed a “blue box” with Steve Wozniak to make illegal free long-distance phone calls. He dropped out of college after one semester and then got a job at Atari.

Our modern world has been created and enriched by Nobodies and Anybodies: people without much breeding and without much education and without much polish. I wonder why.

Understanding Our Ruling Class

Ever since the French Revolution “we” have believed in a politics of Left and Right. Because the supporters of the French king in the National Assembly in 1789 sat to the right of the president and the opponents to his left.

Thus the Right came to be identified with the old order, with privilege, with feudal hierarchy, and the Left with reform, with ideas, and with the common man.

It is the saving faith of the Left that it stands for the worker, the oppressed, the victim, against the powers of privilege, of oppression, and stasis.

I I have been reading today a couple of pieces by the Zman proposing that the Old Order is ending, that the West is out of time.

The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born.

On the other hand, he writes at Taki’s, the West’s utter folly in Ukraine marks the end of Russia trying to be a part of Europe from the East and the end of the Global American Empire trying to be a part of Europe from the West.

A question that I have is: what on Earth does our ruling class think it is doing? Here’s a piece by Leighton Akira Woodhouse about the homeless scene in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in which the homeless demand for drugs leads to shoplifting and the whole thing run by an industry feeding money for drugs to the Mexican drug cartels.

Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly.

Then there are the “victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans.” Their pharmacies and grocery stores get shut down, etc.

And yet our rulers do nothing about the whole operation, from homeless to drugs to petty crime to criminal gangs. Their philosophy is that criminals are victims, that police are thugs, that accused criminals should be released with no bail and society doesn’t care about oppressed peoples.

I am in the middle of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed in which he notes that the rulers’ approach to problems doesn’t change and doesn’t respond to results on the ground.

War on Poverty. The idea back in the early Sixties was “to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves” and to effect a “decline in dependecy.” The record is that the War on Poverty has increased dependency, but our rulers have not changed their approach to poverty.

Sex Education. The idea back in the early Sixties was that sex education in the schools would help reduced venereal disease and pregnancies before marriage. In the event, STDs increased, pregancy outside marriage increased and marriage decreased. But our rulers have amped up the sex education to include celebration of LGBT.

Criminal Justice. In the Sixties the idea was promulgated from on high that the criminal justice system was primitive, vindictive, and a “deeply childish fear” without punishment crime “would run amok.” Why not turn jails into rehabilitation centers? In the event, crime, including murder, has increased, but fifty years later our rulers still think we are being too punitive, as in Soros prosecutors.

The point is that, despite the results of these policies being failures, our ruling class has not changed its approach to these issues over the past 50 years. If anything it has increased its commitment.

Now Sowell has a Five Point analysis of the ruling class’s approach to the world.

1. Social problems exist because people other than the rulers “lack the virtue or wisdom of the anointed.”

2. Social beliefs are “socially constructed” rather than an adaption to reality, so that problems should be solved by ruler rationality rather than “evolved traditions” or social adaptation.

3. When things go wrong it is intentional rather than “systemic.” Someone is to blame.

4. Great social dangers can only be averted by “imposition” of ruling class vision.

5. Opposition to the rulers issues not from a valid difference of opinion but from intellectual or moral faults in the lower orders.

What, you may ask, is wrong with these people? I think the answer is that, in politics, you can never be wrong. The whole point of politics is to lead the people to war against an enemy that threatens to annihilate us. If our gloroius leader fails to lead us to victory, he is outta here. So, he can never say: gee, fellas, I guess I screwed up that one.

The lesson, then, is that anything short of a war to the death against annihilation should not be a political issue, but assigned to other social institutions, from economic to social to religious.

But for our ruling class it’s too late for that.

So what do we do? I say that we work on a new narrative to replace the old narrative of our present ruling class, that the Zman says is “something not yet born.”

Only I think that its outline is pretty clear. The new narrative will say that the wisdom of the ages is in the semi-conscious evolution of the culture of the middling sort of person, that lives engaged in the sinews and the day-to-day social and economic relationships of society. As opposed to the vision from on high of our present educated evolved ruling class.

And I say that the day will come when the whole superstructure of our present ruling class, represented by the analysis of Thomas Sowell above, will come crashing down. Rather like the whole structure of late-feudal/absolute monarchy came crashing down in France in 1789.

Why did it come crashing down in 1789, and lost the Mandate of Heaven in that year of all years? Good question. But come crashing down it did.