You may be surprised to learn that the liberal Jewish ladies at Thanksgiving dinner were outraged at President Trump's comment about "Obama judges."
Hey, I told 'em. I told them that the reason Donald Trump is president today is precisely because he talks back to the liberal Zeitgeist. They were not impressed.
And of course my riposte was nothing compared to the brilliant social-media comments, like the one countering Chief Justice Roberts. If there are no Obama judges, no Trump judges, no Bush judges, let all the judges appointed by President Obama resign to be replaced by judges appointed by President Trump.
Exactly.
But it illustrated for me my universal Law of the Incoming Rounds. Liberals are outraged, outraged, by President Trump's dirty mouth, but the liberal non-white lady writers at The New York Times prattle away endlessly about racism and white privilege, with not a care in the world about how this "feels" when you are on the receiving end.
What it "feels" like, liberals, is that someone just lobbed a mortar round into your fire base and half your buddies are now dead or dying.
After all, liberals go about their lives every day, without a care in the world, accusing other people of being racist, sexist homophobes, perfectly oblivious to the fact that a mere accusation can result in loss of job or career. Hello Brendan Eich. Of course they don't have a care in the world about accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia. Because you are not allowed to do that to liberals.
That is why liberal ladies get to be shocked, shocked, when President Trump lobs a mortar round into the liberal fire base. Why, you have no idea how hard Judge Woke von Liberal worked to become an accomplished ACLU lawyer and eventually get nominated to a federal district court judgeship. They can't believe Trump would say that about a guy with a #WeBelieve sign in front of his house.
Anyway, this all got me to thinking.
Everybody is talking about the day when whites become a minority in the good old USA. And how that will change the domination of the white race forever.
But what people are assuming is that the fake tribalism of 2018 will be the same in 2048. And you know what? I doubt it.
My reason is this. All tribalism is fake tribalism, ginned up by ambitious political activists. It has always been fake, always ginned up by the powerful. Because humans are groupish. They clump together into groups, and the groups can be founded on any notion of membership or affinity. Anything.
In the hunter-gatherer era, tribalism was between individual bands of hunter-gatherers. In the pre-state agricultural era, between villages. OK. Maybe that is true tribalism, but I no longer think so. I think that all tribalism is made up to fit the groupishness of the time.
I am now beginning to think that real pedal-to-the-metal tribalism didn't get in the saddle until the dawn of the agricultural state, when tribalism was amplified and massaged by the kings and the priests. You can see why. In the pre-state era, people attached themselves to small groupings of humans that were mostly related by blood, and they naturally fought for their tribe in the border raids and massacres of the era. But the leaders of agricultural states needed to build identity on the larger and less closely related states that they built by conquest and domination. So they invented fake tribalism, with fake state-based tribes and fake state enemies. Because that is how you do politics, then and now. And it worked. Rulers have never lacked soldiers to go and fight their fake tribal wars.
In the pre-nation-state era in Europe identity was managed by the feudal monarch, and his enemies were your enemies. Sorta. On the ground the "feudal retainers" -- to use Marx's words -- actually owed loyalty to their immediate feudal lords, not to the king. Hello Wars of the Roses. So really, if you were a feudal retainer, a serf or whatnot, your "tribe" was you and the other feudal retainers of the duke or earl that ruled the countryside in which you lived. You were the duke's men, not the king's men.
When the nation state arose, in part due to the suppression of the nobility by the absolute monarchs, the basic tribe was the nation state: the Brits against the French, the French against the Germans. And the bribed apologists of the monarchs would write about the British "race." I propose that our modern notion of "race" didn't really start to develop until European navigators started exploring the world, and a new tribalism of us and them was needed to support the power narrative of global empires like Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, and the Brits. That's when the bribed apologists of the European states really started writing and talking about the "white" race, the Negro race, the "red" Indians of North America, and the "yellow" races of East Asia.
And so here we are, and every good little girl is writing articles for The New York Times that takes for granted the race tribalism that developed in the last half-millennium and maybe peaked with the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights revolution. And they have taken like ducks to water as they broadcast the identity-politics tribalism launched by the Frankfurt School a century ago.
Let me emphasize. I think that all talk about racism, of nationalism, communism vs. free world: all political division is fake tribalism ginned up by ruling classes and would-be ruling classes in their pursuit of political power.
Now when you are a political entrepreneur bidding for power through the electoral process the obvious thing to do is to alter the configuration of tribal loyalties, to redivide the population in new ways, to get people to think of themselves in new ways that will get them to think again about their natural tribal home.
Used to be, for instance, that blacks voted Republican, because it was Republicans that freed the slaves. But starting with FDR, blacks became Democrats, because Democrats offered them loot -- even though the Democrats were also the party of Jim Crow!
Used to be that working people voted for Democrats, starting with the Irish in the mid-19th century that voted for Democrats because most British-born Americans voted Republican. So it was with the white working class until Ronald Reagan picked up the Reagan Democrats in 1980. Why was that? Because Democrats no longer cared about the white working class and no longer offered white workers any loot, preferring to bid for the votes of single women and blacks.
Today, we are all taught to believe that the Democrats will inherit the earth because whites will become a minority, and non-whites plus educated whites will be a majority. But that assumes that current loyalties are maintained.
What the conventional wisdom does not grasp is that political tribal membership changes, and usually because some political entrepreneur manages to assemble a political coalition based on some novel tribal grouping. Sure as eggs is eggs, this new tribal grouping will be based on some new sense of grievance and injustice experienced by some strategic sub-set of voters.
How about this? At some point a movement arises that is seething with resentment against the educated class for its ruthless and corrupt spoils system, that shovels billions and billions to the educated class for universities, for research, for grants, for climate change, for electric cars, for light rail, for bike lanes, etc. While "we," the new oppressed, get nothing.
If I were an average middle-class man or woman in a not-very-upscale suburb in America, I would be asking "when do I get my share of this loot?" But your average liberal lady doesn't have a clue about this. Because she is perfectly satisfied with things as they are, and feeling comfortably virtuous about all the wonderful things that liberal activists are doing for the traditionally marginalized.
I don't know how the political future will work out; I only know that it will go on being the same until it changes. And about half an hour after it changes, and the political world is organized by a new fake tribalism, everyone will realize that it was inevitable, and how could the liberal educated class possibly have been so blind -- and bigoted -- as not to see it.
Hey, I told 'em. I told them that the reason Donald Trump is president today is precisely because he talks back to the liberal Zeitgeist. They were not impressed.
And of course my riposte was nothing compared to the brilliant social-media comments, like the one countering Chief Justice Roberts. If there are no Obama judges, no Trump judges, no Bush judges, let all the judges appointed by President Obama resign to be replaced by judges appointed by President Trump.
Exactly.
But it illustrated for me my universal Law of the Incoming Rounds. Liberals are outraged, outraged, by President Trump's dirty mouth, but the liberal non-white lady writers at The New York Times prattle away endlessly about racism and white privilege, with not a care in the world about how this "feels" when you are on the receiving end.
What it "feels" like, liberals, is that someone just lobbed a mortar round into your fire base and half your buddies are now dead or dying.
After all, liberals go about their lives every day, without a care in the world, accusing other people of being racist, sexist homophobes, perfectly oblivious to the fact that a mere accusation can result in loss of job or career. Hello Brendan Eich. Of course they don't have a care in the world about accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia. Because you are not allowed to do that to liberals.
That is why liberal ladies get to be shocked, shocked, when President Trump lobs a mortar round into the liberal fire base. Why, you have no idea how hard Judge Woke von Liberal worked to become an accomplished ACLU lawyer and eventually get nominated to a federal district court judgeship. They can't believe Trump would say that about a guy with a #WeBelieve sign in front of his house.
Anyway, this all got me to thinking.
Everybody is talking about the day when whites become a minority in the good old USA. And how that will change the domination of the white race forever.
But what people are assuming is that the fake tribalism of 2018 will be the same in 2048. And you know what? I doubt it.
My reason is this. All tribalism is fake tribalism, ginned up by ambitious political activists. It has always been fake, always ginned up by the powerful. Because humans are groupish. They clump together into groups, and the groups can be founded on any notion of membership or affinity. Anything.
In the hunter-gatherer era, tribalism was between individual bands of hunter-gatherers. In the pre-state agricultural era, between villages. OK. Maybe that is true tribalism, but I no longer think so. I think that all tribalism is made up to fit the groupishness of the time.
I am now beginning to think that real pedal-to-the-metal tribalism didn't get in the saddle until the dawn of the agricultural state, when tribalism was amplified and massaged by the kings and the priests. You can see why. In the pre-state era, people attached themselves to small groupings of humans that were mostly related by blood, and they naturally fought for their tribe in the border raids and massacres of the era. But the leaders of agricultural states needed to build identity on the larger and less closely related states that they built by conquest and domination. So they invented fake tribalism, with fake state-based tribes and fake state enemies. Because that is how you do politics, then and now. And it worked. Rulers have never lacked soldiers to go and fight their fake tribal wars.
In the pre-nation-state era in Europe identity was managed by the feudal monarch, and his enemies were your enemies. Sorta. On the ground the "feudal retainers" -- to use Marx's words -- actually owed loyalty to their immediate feudal lords, not to the king. Hello Wars of the Roses. So really, if you were a feudal retainer, a serf or whatnot, your "tribe" was you and the other feudal retainers of the duke or earl that ruled the countryside in which you lived. You were the duke's men, not the king's men.
When the nation state arose, in part due to the suppression of the nobility by the absolute monarchs, the basic tribe was the nation state: the Brits against the French, the French against the Germans. And the bribed apologists of the monarchs would write about the British "race." I propose that our modern notion of "race" didn't really start to develop until European navigators started exploring the world, and a new tribalism of us and them was needed to support the power narrative of global empires like Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, and the Brits. That's when the bribed apologists of the European states really started writing and talking about the "white" race, the Negro race, the "red" Indians of North America, and the "yellow" races of East Asia.
And so here we are, and every good little girl is writing articles for The New York Times that takes for granted the race tribalism that developed in the last half-millennium and maybe peaked with the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights revolution. And they have taken like ducks to water as they broadcast the identity-politics tribalism launched by the Frankfurt School a century ago.
Let me emphasize. I think that all talk about racism, of nationalism, communism vs. free world: all political division is fake tribalism ginned up by ruling classes and would-be ruling classes in their pursuit of political power.
Now when you are a political entrepreneur bidding for power through the electoral process the obvious thing to do is to alter the configuration of tribal loyalties, to redivide the population in new ways, to get people to think of themselves in new ways that will get them to think again about their natural tribal home.
Used to be, for instance, that blacks voted Republican, because it was Republicans that freed the slaves. But starting with FDR, blacks became Democrats, because Democrats offered them loot -- even though the Democrats were also the party of Jim Crow!
Used to be that working people voted for Democrats, starting with the Irish in the mid-19th century that voted for Democrats because most British-born Americans voted Republican. So it was with the white working class until Ronald Reagan picked up the Reagan Democrats in 1980. Why was that? Because Democrats no longer cared about the white working class and no longer offered white workers any loot, preferring to bid for the votes of single women and blacks.
Today, we are all taught to believe that the Democrats will inherit the earth because whites will become a minority, and non-whites plus educated whites will be a majority. But that assumes that current loyalties are maintained.
What the conventional wisdom does not grasp is that political tribal membership changes, and usually because some political entrepreneur manages to assemble a political coalition based on some novel tribal grouping. Sure as eggs is eggs, this new tribal grouping will be based on some new sense of grievance and injustice experienced by some strategic sub-set of voters.
How about this? At some point a movement arises that is seething with resentment against the educated class for its ruthless and corrupt spoils system, that shovels billions and billions to the educated class for universities, for research, for grants, for climate change, for electric cars, for light rail, for bike lanes, etc. While "we," the new oppressed, get nothing.
If I were an average middle-class man or woman in a not-very-upscale suburb in America, I would be asking "when do I get my share of this loot?" But your average liberal lady doesn't have a clue about this. Because she is perfectly satisfied with things as they are, and feeling comfortably virtuous about all the wonderful things that liberal activists are doing for the traditionally marginalized.
I don't know how the political future will work out; I only know that it will go on being the same until it changes. And about half an hour after it changes, and the political world is organized by a new fake tribalism, everyone will realize that it was inevitable, and how could the liberal educated class possibly have been so blind -- and bigoted -- as not to see it.
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