Three Peoples: What Happens When It All Goes Wrong?

Suppose you are a Responsible, an ordinary Commoner, that lives by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law? What happens if the world changes and the rules don't work any more? That's what a reader proposed to me, and he is right.

Because the "life styles" of the Three Peoples are not immutable answers to the problem of "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." They work for people living in this world. Until they don't.

I've already discussed this problem as it applies to the People of the Subordinate Self, the Clients of the ruling class under the concept of "Little Darlings."

If you are the Little Darling of the ruling class then everything is copacetic until the day comes when you are no longer any use to the power program of the ruling class. To me the classic case is the French soldier abandoned on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812. Sorry Pierre. "So long, and thanks for all the fish." At least, that was "the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass", in the words of La Wik.

Yeah. I know. Dolphins? Who knew?

But whatabout the Responsibles? We responsibles follow the rules in the same way as the Subordinates follow the leader. So what happens on the day when the rules don't work, because the universe changed?

Actually, we know what happens. When the rules weren't working for the Germans after World War I they eventually chose to follow a leader. Today, of course, all right minds deplore their embrace of Nazism, but really, what are they supposed to do when the whole place is falling apart? I read of a German woman in a train during the hyperinflation, asking how this could be happening, given that Germany was the most advanced country in the world? Ay, lassie. How indeed?

Actually, there are two choices for the Responsible when things fall apart. The responsible can follow a leader; that is one choice. The other choice is to get creative and find new rules to go by. The point is, of course, that there is no One Way that always answers. That's not the way the world works, however much we yearn for it to be so.

OK. Now let's get to the fun stuff. What about our friends the Creatives? What do they do when things go wrong?

I must confess that I haven't really thought about this very much. My friend says:

I think of how Dr. Peterson always insists that for all the corruption and so on, our hierarchies are essentially competence-based. I sometimes think he underestimates the insidious levels of corruption that we live under...

All the elites deplore the loss of faith in experts yet it seems entirely justified these days. They are less paragons of competence than bubble-dwelling gentry/creative parasites - in the main. It seems something - many things - are quite contaminated with incompetence and bad faith.

So what he seems to be saying that that we are cursed to live under a ruling class, a Gentry that thinks of themselves as high-flying creatives, when in fact they are bottom-dwelleing parasites.

Yes. I think that answers the question. As Jordan B. Peterson divines from Jung, the true creative is a Sacrificial Hero, exploring the border between Order and Chaos. Such a person understands they are doomed, that they give their life that others may live. In fact, you may say, this true Creative follows the Hegelian principle that the thing is the same as its opposite. Thus the Creative surrenders to his fate on the border of Order and Chaos just as the Subordinate must surrender to the will of his Master.

But then there is the fake Creative. Who thinks he is just special, and not subject to the vicissitudes of life like ordinary deplorables. Who thinks that being Creative is the same as drinking the Kool-Aid of ruling-class bromides. Who recites what he has been carefully taught without reading the actual texts.

And another thing: my Great Reaction notion. I am saying that our glorious educated elite, that thinks of itself as so Progressive, is in fact a nostalgic movement that is lurching back to the past.

I say that socialism is a return to slavery, that the welfare state is a return to feudalism. And here we are with Bernie Sanders and his youngster Bernie Bros going for full-on socialism. Only not with any of your nasty secret police, oh no. So don't listen to the Bernie Bros interviewed by Project Veritas. What do young people find so attractive in socialism? That is takes care of them as they wobble on the border between Order and Chaos at the start of adult life? That it seems to resolve all uncertainty in return for loyalty to the Master state? That it seems to promise a cosy community instead of the cold hard life of the citizen in the cold rational world of the market and the labor force?

Does the Great Reaction start with the Romantic movement of the 19th century that said that reason and logic can't be the last word about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And indeed, everything since then has confirmed that, whatever life is all about, it is not just about reason and logic and mechanics.

As I like to say, the whole arc of the German Turn -- from Kant to Nietzsche, to psychology and relativity and quantum mechanics, and yes, to Adolf Hitler -- is saying that whatever life is all about, it is not just about reason and logic and science.

And that is also to say that life is not just about following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law.

But then, what is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?" Good question.

Perhaps we will find the answer next week.

Canceling People for Racist Tweets

Oh dear oh dear! Oh No! A couple days ago Alistair Stewart, a newsreader on ITN in Britain, issued a  Shakespeare quote that included the word "ape."  Now he has been fired for racism.

Let me say here that I am a profound racist. I believe that race is real, and I believe that everyone must live with that reality.

And, as they say, we are all descended from the apes. Bless their hearts.

But in the United States and in the United Kingdom racial discriminaton is illegal.

That means that government actors and corporate actors are not allowed to discriminate against minorities and women on the basis of race or sex.

Although in practice, governments and corporations the world over are encouraged to discriminate against white men on behalf of women and minorities, and are named and shamed if they don't. Yeah. You tell me.

But here I want to say. What does it matter what people say? On Twitter, or anywhere else? If racial discrimination is illegal, that is final. (As President Coolidge said in a different context.)

And if, 50 years after the Civil Rights Act blacks are paid less than whites then, if they are actually being paid less than they are worth there is an opportunity for what the speculators call arbitrage. An opportunity to make money. And since people that hire minorities acquire status in today's society...

Yeah. Imagine the kudos to be obtained by creating a company that exploits the arbitrage between what minorities and women are paid and what they are worth. There must be billions, trillions of dollars to be made in that market!

Here's another thing. Black men in the arts and on the streets these days are notorious for their testosterone culture of "rap" which celebrates the rough tough hombre that is fearless and projects masculine power.

So why do blacks need protection from the ruling class? Aren't they already rough and tough enough to take care of themselves?

I mean, do blacks need the cultural protection of ruling class apparatchiks to go about their daily business safely? In addittion to the protection of the Civil Rights laws? Are they sissies? I mean, if they are to be free and equal then they surely must ache to demonstrate it by dispensing with the clammy grip of ruling-class hangers-on and bravely going about in the world without that ruling-class security detail.

And anyway, getting on Twitter and complaining that "Johnny looked at me" is girl stuff. Are all lefty activists really girly boys? (Don't answer that!)

Let me say here that I am a profound sexist. I believe that sex is real. Also gender. Also the next twist that girly lefty activists come up with.

I mean. All you girls are superheroes, right? You can get on movies and TV and kick and overwhelm men twice your size with your amazing martial-arts superhero skills, Right?

So why do you girly girls and girly men not use your amazing superhero skills and instead do the Community of Women's Culture of Complaint thing that appeals to the nearest man to protect you? Which presumes that you are not in fact the superheroes you claim to be but are in fact, despite the legal protections of the Civil Rights laws and the actual political and cultural power of the ruling class, weak helpless girly girls and girly boys that really aren't ready for prime time.

When black artists strut their stuff they are saying that they are ready to defend themselves in the public square without the assistance of a security detail from the ruling class.

When women twitter on about Girl Power they are saying that they do not need the protection of a father or a husband from the patriarchy of which you've heard tell. Right, girls?

But when some poor chap gets canceled for racism because of a tweet, then we are saying that blacks are helpless forever more.

Which means that we may as well cancel the Civil Rights laws and all the cultural apparatus that protects and inflates blacks. Because they can never be equal, not without the guns and truncheons of the ruling class. They are second-class citizens forever. Because reasons.

See, the point of good old Worcester saying in Henry IV Part One, that

It was myself, my brother and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.

is to declare that the essence of male honor, which is courage, is to boldly outdare whatever might happen to be the dangers of the time.

But to be a man of color, already protected by the Civil Right laws of every clime, and whine that "Johnny looked at me" is to say that "I am a helpless subordinate slave and nothing will ever change that, not laws, not cultural support from the ruling class, not principalities, not powers: nothing."

I don't think that was the idea back in the day. I don't think that civil rights activists imagined that 50 years later, with the protection of the laws and the cultural support of the ruling class, there would be a need to cancel TV anchormen for a Shakespeare quote.

And if they did, they shoulda told us.

Actually, of course, equality is a lie and always will be. There always was a hierarchy, an order of rank, and always will be. That is the point that Jordan B. Peterson is trying to make to girly girls in the media with his reference to lobsters. Hierarchy is coded into lobsters, honey. You think that we humans can un-code something that is so deeply coded within us that it got expressed in primitive creatures like lobsters?

And the point of hierarchy is to reduce violence, so that animals need not contest every incident in their lives, but can live in peace.

The point is: how shall hierarchy be determined, who shall regulate it, and what kind of escape from hierarchy is beneficial and allowable?

Got any ideas on that, precious?

Right now, we have a pitiless hierarchy based on whether you can get Mommy at Twitter to cancel your rivals. Conservatives need not apply.

What does that mean? Does it mean that conservatives are brutes? Or does it mean that the Little Darlings of the ruling class are pathetic sissies?

And what does it mean if you are the kind to run to Mommy and are not willing to establish your position in the status hierarchy without adult assistance?

It must not escape the notice of every sentient human that it was the most extreme advocates of equality that gave us the slave states of the 20th century and the most severe political and economic hierarchies.

So it might be that an excessive concern for equality might be a problem.

This would not suprise us Hegel scholars, who understand that the thing is pretty well the reflection of its opposite. But some of you naïve others might not be so well prepared to boldly outdare the dangers of the time where opposites are concerned.

Here's the fact of the matter. If you are a Little Darling, in the special care of the ruling class, then you are advertising to the world that you are not yet ready for prime time. You need a safe space, and you are less than you should be.

But if you want to tread the world as a citizen, as an equal to any other, then you must accept the challenge of making your own space and defending it without the power and might of the ruling class.

Or, to put it another way, there is no way out of getting out there and fighting for your status in the hierarchy.

Otherwise you are just the Little Darling, the subordinate serf of the ruling class, protected so long as you discharge you duties as its loyal subject, and not a moment longer.

Appreciating Life's Blessings

For everything there is a season.

As I return from visting my daughter in Britain, I am reminded of this.

When I was a boy in Britain in the 1950s in the northwest London suburbs my parents would drop me and my sister off down the street at the house of a pair of maiden sisters and drive to Stratford-on-Avon for a Shakespeare play.

Then the day came when my sister and I got to go. We saw Much Ado About Nothing in 1958 with Christopher Plummer as Benedick. I still have a visual recollection of Plummer on the Stratford stage.

Twenty years later we were driving with two daughters to Ashland, Oregon to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a week of Shakespearing and getting together with my parents.

Then the next year we took our daughters to Seattle Opera for a performance of Don Giovanni. The orchestra was on strike so there were two grand pianos in the orchestra pit. But who cares!

Twenty years later I was driving to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival because my daughter was organizing a week of Shakespeare for her husband and two sons. For some reason her sons were really energized by the fight scenes. Unlike my daughters twenty years before.

Last summer I visited my daughter in Britain and she took me to Stratford-on-Avon to see a couple of Shakespeare plays and visit the schoolroom where William Shakespeare went to school and learned all about the classical figures he featured in his plays. And then on to Bath to check out the Jane Austen scene.

Last night my daughter took me to the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, right next to the flower girls of which you've heard tell, and we saw a fine performance of La Traviata. Earlier in the day we had a cream tea in the cafe at the British Museum where it seemed that everyone was outnumbered by the East Asians.

And so the whirligig of time brings on her revenges. Or the old'uns merely hand off the future to their posterity, in the realization of Burke's dictum that human society is a "contract… between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are to be born." A contract never originally planned, or carefully carried out, or monitored or, at the last, reviewed and judged, but just an unrolling phenomenon from a disappearing past striding forth into an unknown future. And a blessing when you discover that life is giving you much mure than you deserve.

Feeling Up the Elephant of Identity Politics

Here's John Gray mourning "identitarian liberalism" in the modern West. In the good old days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, people were glad to be Austrian, he writes. But then, according to Galician Jewish writer Joseph Roth, born in 1894:

All those people who had never been other than Austrians … now began to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the Slovenian, the Croatian ‘nation’ — and so on.

From Roth's point of view,

With all of its faults — including a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in fin-de-siècle Vienna — the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed its subjects to live with one another without having to define themselves as belonging in any particular group.

Well, according to Adolf Hitler the only problem was that everyone did define themselves by National group in the Habsburg Empire whatever intellectual Jews thought and that the minority Germans came out second best. At least from the point of view of a nationalist German like Adolf.

In other words the ruling class of the time thought of itself as above national identity, but wasn't above a bit of divide and conquer on the national identity front.

Now John Gray thinks that there's a problem today, that

Both in Europe and the US, the liberal project has shifted from aiming to enable peaceful coexistence among individuals and groups with divergent identities to one that seeks hegemony for a single kind of identity—that of the autonomous, self-fashioning individual.

Well, I don't think that our liberal friends have ever been in favor of peaceful coexistence between groups, except those that were willing to peacefully protest for the Gentry liberal agenda. That's why the socialists were against the bourgeoisie and for the workers back in the day. 

And that is why liberals today are against Trump-voting commoners and for racial and gender identity groups that vote for liberals.

And as for the autonomous self-fashioning individual, I think that our liberal friends are in favor of left-leaning Gentry individuals that toe the left-liberal line and will cancel anyone that steps out of line.

And I think it is characteristic of chaps like Gray to think that maybe we've got a slight problem, but not to worry.

No, the bigger problem is that autonomous self-fashioning liberals are not people that think that politics is something that we need to keep under a tight rein; they think that politics run by them will bend the arc of history towards justice for autonomous self-fashioning indivoduals like them.

But Gray's heart may be in the right place. Says he,

A 21st-century successor to liberalism would enable devotees of individual autonomy to inhabit the same society as people who define themselves by other values — inherited codes of conduct of settled communities, revealed religionsoor noncommittal pragmatism, for example. Basic freedoms would allow people to move from one identity to another, but there would be nattempt to convert everyone to a life of self-fashioning autonomy.

But first our liberal friends have to release their rigid grip on the controls of political power.

A group intent on impeaching a duly-elected president is not a group anywhere close to admitting politics is not the universal answer to human problems, and that other people have rights too.

The Millennial Cult Problem

Obviously, millennarian cults, prophesying the end of the world, are a recurrent human phenomenon. And I suppose it issues from a fairly obvious cause. There are times when a human community is faced by an existential peril and everyone must respond to the call of the leaders, or the group faces oblivion.

This obvious fact surely underlies every politician predicting doom unless we act now. It obviously underlies all the climate change urgency. Irrespective of the validity of climate change claims or of the time scale involved, the only way to provoke a political response is to say that we face doom unless we act now, or at least within the next ten years.

The point is that any period outside about ten years -- or 12 years in some appeals -- is not a peril that requires the community to act now. It is something that can be put off for a year or two. But the point and the internal logic of every political campaign, every activist movement, is that we have to act now.

Actually the call to action is an incredibly risky proposition, because it is really a call to arms, a call to suspend normal life and enroll in the community's army that will face and vanquish the foe. It is only warranted when there really is an existential peril requiring the mobilization of every person in the community. We, who have lived in the aftermath of the two greatest wars in human history, must surely understand how incredibly risky the suspension of normal life and the conversion of all wealth and activities to the fight against the existential peril can be.

We are talking here about human deaths in the millions, not just in the war itself but in the aftermath. I've been reading in the last couple of days a book about the end of World War II that might be ridiculous conspiracy theory or it might be true. Leaving aside the 6 million Jews, there were probably millions of German soldiers and German civilians that died after the end of the war as they were captured and/or expelled from German-settled areas in Eastern Europe. Apart from the question of "who is to blame" there is another point, that once you disrupt normal day-to-day life and normal human work and interaction, people start to die really quickly unless you take heroic action. The US Army, for instance, liked to have about 100 days of food on hand for its forces in the field during World War II. Hmm. I wonder how many days of food are on hand here in the good old USA during the piping days of peace. Somehow I suspect that there are a lot less than 100 days of supplies in the "supply chain." So what would happen if there was a natural or man-made disaster right here, right now?

My point is that in the political world we make a big deal about all the horrible things that are wrong with society, but seldom think about what has to go right -- and what is going right at this moment -- just to keep everything running day to day, so that we all go to work, buy our food, shop for things, drive around, and do 101 things without thinking that are in fact essential for the day-to-day continuance of life as we know it.

I was thinking about this as I penned yet another look at the Democrat's Failure of Prophecy situation. Here they are, prophesying the end of the world, stopping the usual corrupt progress of politics-as-usual so they can harass and harm the president and also bring all racists sexist and homophobes to book. But meanwhile, life must go on! Otherwise we all die!

And what a remarkable thing it is that normal life does go on. And people make the products, serve the consumers, cook the food, make the babies, feed the children, look after the aged, and all that continues irregardless of the pantings and the shoutings on the hustings and in the TV studios.

My point is that probably we should be listening a lot less to the predictions of disaster and merely keep on keeping on with the daily routine. For the daily routine that delivers food and light and energy and life and health and all the rest is a moment-to-moment miracle, and must be carefully weighed against any proposed frightful peril that requires us to suspend all usual activity and instead fight the foe.

You better have a real foe, Mr. We Must Act Now, or millions of people will die for nothing.

Liberalism Properly Understood

I saw a reference to Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen, and bought the book. And I am glad I did. Not that I agree with Deneen, who accuses liberalism, both in its economic-libertarian and progressive-social versions of being an “anticulture” that destroys the culture of virtue and sense of place of the great cultural tradition from the Greeks to the start of the Enlightenment. Says he:

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that makes place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning.

Actually, I don’t agree. First, humans have always been in the business of conquering nature. More and more, we learn how even our furthest ancestor mucked about with the Earth. For instance, we have just experienced a moral panic about monster bush fires in Australia, supposedly proof of runaway climate change. Only, skeptics point out, aboriginal tribes have done controlled burning since time out of mind. And all animal breeding and horticulture is a flat out conquest of nature: what are domestic animals but our conquered slaves?

And as for time: certainly it is true that we now think of time as linear, and we used to think of it as cyclical. But we also have cyclical theories of dynasties, such as the progressive dynasty that seems to be showing its age right now and doesn't seem to have the chops to see off the populist rebellion.

Deneen also makes a lot about the sense of place, about humans being rooted in a single place, anchored to land and community. Except that people anchored to place were usually not virtuous souls giving back to the place what they took out of it, but serfs, that thrived so long as weather and the political ambitions of their lord allowed it. And humans are notoriously a nomadic species that wanders the Earth in search of it knows not what.

Like many cultural conservatives Deneen’s ideal is a culture of virtue.

The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance governed the souls of the citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be realized only in a city that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom.

The only thing, of course, is that all this good thinking was a kind of pious hope. The reality of Greek life was Peloponnesian wars. Followed by the rise of Alexander who conquered most of the known world. Not much virtue there, or a wise recognition of the sense of place and the obligations of community. Just flat out pursuit of power.

In other words, the ancient world through the Middle Ages may have had an ideal of virtue and looking after the Earth and cherishing community and the sense of place. But the Spartans were throwing kids off cliffs if they didn’t look like they were going to measure up to the Spartan ideal of masculinity. The Romans legions were conquering near and far and sending the booty and slaves back to Rome for a jolly old triumph. The feudal age was big on inter-lordly conflict with this lord teaching that lord a lesson. They recruited their armies with promise of loot and plunder.

Now I don’t know if you think of that sort of behavior as nurturing nature or conquering it. And as for a sense of place, well, you’d better have your armed knights and archers ready to defend it.

Let’s interpret that world in this way, as a Two Peoples world. There were the virtuous that had studied the classics or the Bible under worthy teachers and had succeeding in the endeavor of paideia, the education in virtue. But everyday life was superordinate and subordinate, with lords ruling it over their subordinates that looked to them from protection.

What Deneen doesn’t like is the advent of the age of creativity.

If you think of economic liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can learn how nature works and put it to work for us. Conquest of nature, no question. Or as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. But you know what? We also got the Great Enrichment with an increase in income of 30 times in 200 years. In Africa people are using cellphones for money transfers. How crazy is that? And is it despoiling the Earth? Yes, probably. Only, as the London Economist wrote about 20 years ago, once a country gets to about $10,000 per capita income per year it starts to care about cleaning up the environment. And worry, as we have taught teenagers to worry, about our resource use destroying the planet’s climate. Whatabout the crash of 2008 and unsustainable debt? Well, people that take out debt are anticipating future income; debt is particularly useful in trade where the final sale may be months after production. But there's a problem when the political sector uses mortgage debt to buy votes, for if people can service their debt and/or the collateral on a debt can't be liquidated -- as was direct policy due to the Community Reinvestment Act, then you got trouble, right here in River City.

If you think of progressive liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can free people from age-old hierarchy and subordination. We can create our own hierarchy and justice out of the incrustation of centuries. Is there a downside? Certainly. We can screw up and we have screwed up big time. And as plenty of critics have pointed out, the new world seems to be really good for educated elitists but not so good for lesser folk.

See I don’t believe that things were nobler and more virtuous and wise in the old days. People may have had a dream of virtue, but there wasn’t much around. Let us say that the Enlightenment with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and all started the rot. But what about Henry VIII who disarmed the nobles in his reign of 1509 to 1547? His nobles forthwith threw out a good bunch of their peasants because they were no use as potential soldiers. I don’t think that had anything to do with virtue and lordly noblesse oblige. It was a simple power play: Henry VIII on his nobles to keep them from causing trouble. And nobles looking out for Number One and deciding that they didn't need no stinkin' peasants any more if they weren't going to be used in their private armies.

Now, I agree that the problem with getting all creative, economically and socially, is that you certainly throw out a lot of babies with the bath water. Untrammeled creativity is indeed what Nietzsche described, free spirits going all out for a bit of Wille der Macht before breakfast.

The interesting thing to me is that after Nietzsche described and celebrated pedal-to-the-metal creativity, the dialectical opposition of creation and destruction, the folks that came after him dug up the old wisdom about creativity, that it must be implemented through the agency of the Sacrifical Hero who has been on his Hero’s Journey into his personal unconsciousness and its demons and come back sadder and wiser, ready to explore on the border between chaos and order. And give his life so that others may live.

But however high we may reach into the creative empyrean we are still humans, and many of us merely want to hang on to some powerful lord for his protection -- not to mention a bit of free stuff. A good proportion of middling folks aspire to responsibility and virtue, learning how to live a good life. But what happens if the world changes, but conquest or by invention? What do the sensible Hobbits of the world do then? The truth is that life is full of challenge and tragedy and learning the virtues is not enough. You also have to suck it in in the hard times and perhaps up sticks and leave your beloved home and journey to a new land.

There is no doubt that modern liberalism in all its facets is a hot mess. And there is no doubt that the economic titans with their constant chop and change cause ordinary people much heart ache. And the progressive wokerati and their secular religions have caused untold misery, and it some cases a return to slavery. The whole thing could yet end in utter failure and disaster just as the climate change enthusiasts insist.

Or we may muddle through.

What I say is that we, the educated, the wise, the evolved, the people that have had an education in paideia and the virtues, need to understand that our own agenda is not all there is. The world is not here just for creative geniuses and creative knuckleheads. Creative people are destroyers as well as creators. Nor is it just for people what want to hold on to the culture and the accumulated virtues built up over the past. You can’t hold onto the past: it can disappear in the twinkling of an eye. And if you just want to hang on in the retinue of some powerful lord or onto your well-paying union job and its guaranteed pension and shelter from the icy blast, be warned that the day will come when you are no longer of use to the lord's power project. You do have a backup plan ready? Right?

Liberalism is a hot mess. So is every creative project. The only problem with creativity is for the creative folks to insist, as they do all the time, that creativity is the only thing, and beat up the ordinary mortals that just want to wive and thrive and get kids on the ground.

But hey, nobody needs to figure that one out. The Trumps and the Brexits and the Borises are teaching the creative geniuses a lesson and all we have to do is sit back and watch.

These creative guys, liberals of the market and liberal of the wokerati are so brilliant that they didn't see it coming.

Imagine that!

When the Ruling Class Decrees Only One True Religion

Here's a piece in Quillette about how in Canada kids hockey coaches have to take non-binary gender classes in order to coach ice hockey. One parent said no.

Or whatabout Australian Margaret Court, the greatest woman tennis player of all time? She's in trouble because she thinks that transgenders should not be allowed to compete in women's sports. Oh, by the way, Court is now a Pentecostal minister, and some of her offending comments were made in sermons. You can see the problem with this Guardian headline: "Margaret Court: astounding champion who found God and lost the respect of a nation." The Guardianistas cannot endure the notion that maybe there are other ideas in the world.

Now, it is not that hard for me to fit this onto the Procrustean bed of my reductive Three Peoples theory.

If you are a Gentry or a Creative you think that people are supposed to be creative and that anyone that prevents people being creative is a hater and a bigot and should not be permitted in the public square. One of the more obvious ways of being creative is to step out of traditional sex and "gender" roles, for instance as a feminist or as an LGBT. Since Gentry people believe, as part of their secular religious tenets, that gender creativity is morally a Good Thing then people that promote traditional gender roles are doing a Bad Thing.

But if you are a Commoner or a Responsible you believe that people are supposed to obey the law and follow the rules. That is what traditional Christianity teaches. That is what "Sin" is all about. Expert theologians and prophets, inspired by God, have decided for you what is good and what is bad. Just obey the law and follow the rules and you will go to Heaven. In particular when it comes to sex.

Now, it seems obvious to me that both the Gentry/Creative and the Commoner/Responsible positions on sex are declarations of faith, worked out by the prophets and the philosophers of their faith traditions. There can really be no compromise on this, because each doctrine is one religion's attempt to determine "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

Let me reiterate. If you are a Gentry/Creative you probably believe that the whole point of life is to be a creative artist or activist, and you believe it is ridiculous to live a life where you just abide by the rules and roles of your parents. If you are a Commoner/Responsible you probably believe that the rules of the good life are instantiated in your religion and in the tradition of your family. It is unconceivable to step out of that tradition and imagine a life that breaks with the rules and roles you have inherited.

Of course, it would not matter that Gentry people do not understand Commoner people if it weren't for governemnt. There is, you may have noticed, a tendency for religions and governments to join up. Government is force, and the government governs best that governs least. So it really helps government govern if God is on its side.

But what if there are competing religions in the lands governed by a particular government?

Well, our Founders recognized that this could be a problem. So they decreed that there should be a separation of church and state and wrote into the First Amendment that there should be no state establishment of religion. That way people could profess different religions and would not be allowed to impose their religion on the rest of the nation. In the phrase invented by our liberal friends, the government would not be allowed to "legislate morality."

But when the Canadian government requires coaches of children's sports to undergo LGBT sensitivity training the government is legislating morality. It is imposing the religion of the Gentry/Creative class on the rest of the nation.

What, the lefties say? We don't believe in religion. We are past all that. All we are trying to do is establish justice for traditionally marginalized groups.

That, of course, is the great problem of the age. Lefties do not understand that their beliefs are religious beliefs, that they have a god, even if it is not a traditional Axial Age god. And they do not understand that most of what they do is legislating their lefty morality on the rest of us. Or else.

And, on top of that, they are saying that you will believe in our Gentry/Creative class religion and only that religion. All other faiths are superstition and bigotry and hate and will be driven from the public square. In particular the Christian faith of Commoners and Responsibles is not to be endured.

Yes, but, the lefty believers insist. We believe in facts and logic and reality. And these other people are reactionaries and patriarchs and gay-baiters. Are you standing up for haters? You must be a racist, sexist homophobe.

Yes. Well. Every half-baked fool believes that she believes in truth and the other people believe in lies.

I believe that we are all searching for "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" and because we do not know we have to make it up.

Let me reiterate this. I believe that nobody knows "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." But every religion and every activist group is claiming that it does.

The beginning of wisdom is to understand that different people will have different understandings of "the meaning of life, the universe and everything."

And as a practical matter it is probably a good idea to let other people practice their faith in peace and not get in their faces. Because there is this nasty thing called religious war. Or, if you prefer, using the argot of the 20th century, ideological war.

And when humans engage in religious or ideological war, millions of humans die. the Nazis declared ideological war on the Jews, and the official word is 6 million Jews dead. The Commies declared war on wreckers and saboteurs and kulaks and rich farmers. The official word is 100 million Russians and Chinese dead.

So I say to the wokerati, stop this nonsense of forcing your creative religion down everyone's throat. Because you chaps are provoking a rebellion, and you won't like what happens if it actually gets going.

The Politics of Sticking It to the Other Guys

The basic format of US politics for the last 100 years has been the elite, the Gentry, advocating on behalf of the Subordinates: workers, women, minorities. The basic game has been to guilt-trip the ordinary middle class into funding various government programs to deliver loot and plunder to the said workers, women, and minorities.

With the middle class getting a cut of the action in accordance with Irving Kristol's rule that if you want to help the poor you have to deal in the middle class.

Notice that there was a cunning indirect approach in this. The Gentry did not tell the Commoners: you are scum, now give us more money. No, they set up their Clients -- workers, women, minorities -- as helpless victims, liable to enternal oppression and marginalization unless we act now. And then they handed out some of the loot to the middle class.

But I think in the last 10 years or so that the Gentry has changed its front. Now it is not so much doing a guilt trip as saying: You Commoners are dirt, and we will run over you.

An obvious example is the newly Democratic state legislature of Virginia passing a bunch of gun-control measures. These measures are not exactly a response to a crisis in the streets; they are not an effort to come to a compromise that lets all parties go home and feel that they got something out of the deal. It seems to me that the purpose of these measures is not to make Virginia safe but to stick it to the rubes.

It all makes sense when you call the opposition, as a matter of routine, racist, sexist homophobes: in a word, deplorables. You are good; they are evil. They deserve everything you shovel at them.

Suppose we presume that, all along, the strategy of the Gentry was to stick it to the Commoner rubes. In that case the strategy to say that, hey, we have no beef with you middle-class folks; we just want justice for the helpless victims: that is brilliant. It is, as they say, an indirect strategy that deceives the targets into believing that they are not targets.

OK, maybe after half a century of this, the people on the receiving end are going to be wondering about the shells landing all around them all the time.

But when you actually start saying that all white people are white supremacists, and all white men are toxic masculinists, and all ordinary middle-class people are a basket of deplorables, then you have switched to a direct strategy. And you shouldn't be surprised that people on the receiving end start to take notice and start to organize against you.

Only you are surprised. More than surprised, you offended and outraged! Why, we are the good guys, the educated, evolved, ethical guys! How dare, how dare the rubes, the ignorant and bigoted rubes, dare to answer back!

And in Virginia, a day after 22,000 people demonstrated against more gun control, the Democratic state legislature went ahead and passed more gun control measures.

To say that this is worse than a crime, it is a blunder misses the point. It is a deliberate attempt to humiliate and marginalize the other party. It is not an attempt to find some sort of a compromise that everyone can live with; it is a statement of "our way or the highway."

OK, OK. I get it. For a generation and more all the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls of the Gentry have gone to college-as-lefty-seminary. They have not been exposed to "the best that has been thought and said." They have instead been rehearsed in lefty apologetics. So all they know, like AOC, are the memes of the lefty Gentry culture.

And that means that they "literally know nothing" about the larger world. It means that they don't know how to deal with other world views, except to shut them down.

The point is that when your politics is reduced to sticking it to the other guys, because they are scum, then you are prodding the other guys into forming a head of rebellion against your regime of injustice. That is why people form a head of rebellion: they feel that they have been ignored, humiliated, and robbed, and they decide that they have nothing left to lose so they might as well burn it all down.

But, if my understanding is correct, our Gentry friends have no idea what they have been doing to average Commoner Americans for the last 50 years. They have no idea that people are angry, and why. They have no idea that their diversity and inclusion philosophy is a monstrous injustice. They have no idea that their identity politics is dividing the country like you wouldn't believe. They have no idea that President Trump, far from being a bumbling oaf, seems to be a man with an extraordinary ear for the voice of maligned Commoner.

The best we can hope for is for the impeachment trial to go down pronto. For Trump to win decisively in 2020, for the Republicans to win the House and for Democrats high and low to ask: What Went Wrong? And then come up with a New Bill Clinton in 2024 that declares himself a New Democrat just as the original Clinton did in 1992.

But I doubt if things will be as simple as that. They seldom are.

Liberals with Nowhere to Go

Right now I am thinking about what comes next. I take it as given that the Enlightenment mechanical world-view and its notion of a final paradise on Earth, whether of the right's market equality or the left's political equality, is a dead end.

In particular I react against the notion that we are all alike and all want the same thing, or should be forced to.

That's because the billions of humans on this Earth all want different things.

However, that is much too complicated. We need to simplify. And what humans do when thing are too complicated is we simplify things down to a Rule of Three: Past, Present, and Future. Garden of Eden, The Fall, and Heaven.

That is why I have come up with my reductive Three Peoples theory, reducing all the billions of world views down to three. I know, what presumption!

But I think it makes sense. Creative people want a chance to create a new world; Responsible people want a chance to make work the existing world, the world they are given; Subordinate people just want to be able to hang on to some powerful patron and shelter from the storm till the next check arrives.

Now, a couple days ago I commented in the American Thinker on a John Gray piece in The New Statesman in which he told the cultural wokies that in the wake of Boris Johnson's "stonking" victory their world view had "melted down into a heap of trash."

But then I stumbled over another couple John Gray pieces in UnHerd.com. In first he tells the greenies that, even given that their scientific analysis is correct about climate change -- and he thinks it is -- their strategy for dealing with it won't work. We should be adapting to the changes we have created, not curling up in the face of "unstoppable climate change."

But in 'Liberalism: the other God that failed" Gray goes further and argues that all the Enlightenment ideologies are finished. In the old days, people could import their Christian values into Enlightment equality, and ex-Communists in the late 1940s could return from the Communist ideology and its revolutionary forced march to the perfect future to ordinary liberalism, left or right, and its gradualist walk to the perfect future. Not any more.

When ex-communists became liberals, they shifted from one secular faith to another. Troubled liberals today have no such option. Fearful of the alternatives, they hang on desperately to a faith in which they no longer believe. Liberalism may be the other God that failed, but for liberals themselves their vision of the future is a deus absconditus, mocking and tormenting them as the old freedoms disappear from the world.

Actually this is not surprising, at least not to me. Because I moved on from the mechanical Enlightenment world and its logic and reason view years ago. We are not moving along an arc of history, not towards justice, and not towards universal prosperity. We are living things struggling to live in a changing world, adapting it if we can, and adapting to it if we must. We do not know the correct strategy for survival. Never did, never will. What we will do, what we have always done, is stumble along day to day, and hope that we didn't make a fatal blunder. Some people don't make it, sometimes a lot of people don't make it. But the world goes on.

Actually, the whole history of the last 200 years and its Great Enrichment on the economic front tell us what is happening. From time to time there are world-changing economic revolutions, started by some nobodies, that change everything. Machine textiles, steam power, world transportation, wood to coal to oil to electricity to nuclear, personal powered transportation, computers, internet, smart phones. Each of these has been an astonishing transformation, and yet we are all still here. Do you see how remarkable this is? We have had economic revolution after economic revolution, and yet almost everyone has kept up. More than that, the left-behinds, in China, India, and Africa, are catching up, even as the developed West keeps reinventing the economy. What is going on?

What is going on is humans analyzing the situation, coming up with 101 different plans to Do Something about it, and then letting the chips fall where they may, so that the two or three chaps with plans that actually work get to be billionaires and own the future. For a season.

And that is where my reductive Three Peoples theory comes in. The Creatives are the people that are going to be coming up with the 101 plans for the future. Good for them. Let them experiment with their own money and money that investors and speculators give them, and let the rest of us sit in the bleachers and see who wins the race. The Responsibles are the people that just live their lives as best they may and hope to adapt in a competent way to whatever the Creatives come up with. The Subordinates just sit there and shelter from the storm in the retinue of some great lord or big government.

The problem with the current situation is that the Creatives, the educated gentry, are forever coming up with plans that they want to force the rest of us to pay for and submit to. Because they are special.

They get to create the plans. We get to pay for it. They get the credit if it goes well, and robber barons take the blame if it blows up. Thanks very much.

Obviously, they "literally know nothing" because modern psychology, Jung version, has rediscovered that the way to the future is the Sacrificial Hero living and exploring on the border between order and chaos, and giving up his life so that others may live. The Sacrificial Hero is not the proud activist that gets to create a totalitarian regime that sacrifices everyone else's life so that the proud activist and his minions can live the life of Riley. Not at all.

We will know when our liberal friends come up with a good plan. Because it will be a plan to recognize that the highest and best thing to be is a Sacrifical Hero, and not a revolutionary activist or carping moralist. The plan will make it clear that it will be the Creatives that will do the sacrificing, not the average Commoner or the average Subordinate.

The MLK Legacy

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day we honor the man that led a non-violent movement for black civil rights.

What is extraordinary is that a minority of former slaves could persuade the majority to grant them full citizenship and civil rights. For the granting of such rights was not an expression of political power, but a forebearance, a majority declining to press its power to the limit.

In our day we are all taught to believe that slavery is a monstrous evil. And equality is good. Actually, there is no such thing as equality. There is always an order of rank, and the folks at the bottom have the worst of it.

The question is not that slavery is evil: it had been normal and ubitquitous down the ages. What is remarkable is that slavery became scandalous. Why? Because of evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce? Because of the equality ideology of the Enlightenment? Because slavery doe not pay, compared to free labor? Because of the actvism of the left? Because of the hatred between North and South in the 1850s?

Yet it is the left that inspired the greatest slave societies in all history. And, you may say, in the last century the common man has been re-enslaved by the taxes and the regulations of the modern administrative state.

Is civil rights the forbearance of political power, the forbidding of government by race? And is the politics of quotas and diversity a fight against racism or a resumption of racist politics under another name?

My take is that the civil rights for blacks campaign felt so good to liberals that they decided to make everything into a civil rights issue. And I'm here to say that is not a good thing.

Because there is a difference between liberating a previously marginalized minority and the politics of quotas and timetables.

In my reductive Three Peoples theory, and in Curtis Yarvin's three-layer Gentry-Commoner-Client notion, the common concept is the idea that the upper class (Creatives/Gentry) obtains its political power by recruiting the lower orders (Subrodinates/Clients) with the promise of loot and plunder. But when you have a politics you must have an "us" and "them." Thus we educated and evolved creatives/gentry combine with our supporters, the subordinates/clients, against the "them" of responsibles/commoners. "We" are evolved and progressive and marginalized; "they" are superstitious and narrow-minded.

I don't suppose our liberal friends really imagined that they were changing the politics of the US in a way that would stigmatize and marginalize the white working class for ever more. After all, they were bending the arc of history towards justice. But if you are going to do politics you are going to be doing "us" and "them;" you may not think you are going to need an enemy, but you will.  Because politics is civil war by other means; it is a fight, a brawl.

And it is no longer possible to have a frank and open discussion of the issues in America, because the "right" that used to occupy a space in the public square has been drubbed out of it, particularly in the academy, the media, and the arts.

This mean that there is no way to "rebel" except in the streets.

You see the problem everywhere. There's the new urbanism that is forcing all cities to densify and build up rather than out. This is very amenable to educated gentry, but ordinary people -- especially ordinary women -- like to live in a place with a bit of green. There's the environmental and climate change movement that is designed to put people into mass transit and fence in all kinds of economic activity with regulations and restrictions.

And it is very difficult to get another voice into the process, because the educated gentry is pretty well unified on this, and where are the alternate, commoner voices going to come from? Who listens to them?

And I blame all this on the civil rights movement, in which liberals got the idea that they were the most moral, ethical, and evolved people in the world. And what the world needed was civil-rights-style activism from sea to shining sea.

This is a terrible and collosal error, and we are nowhere seeing ourselves to the end of it. Indeed, all the best people think we need to apply the civil-rights paradigm everywhere, and especially against dull commoners that are really white nationalists and racists.

The point is that when you are the gentry you are close to political power; you have access. So it looks to you as if all the world's problems can be solved with a bit of access.

I don't know what it is going to take to disabuse our liberal gentry friends of this collosal error.

All I know is that none of them have the least idea there is a problem. Except that racism, sexism, homophobia is a bigger problem than ever. Oh, and we are killing the planet.

Our Elite's Crimes Against Humanity

What? Our noble elite and our creative Educated Gentry? Crimes against humanity? Isn't that putting it on a bit thick, old chap?

Not if you subscribe to my notion of the Great Reaction, that socialism is gussied-up slavery, the welfare state is gussied-up serfdom, and identity politics is gussied-up tribalism. Etc.

Not if you subscribe to my notion of "Little Darlings," that our modern ruling class cultivates client groups to increase its power and then dumps the Little Darlings when it is time to move on to a new, lusciously curved, younger and innocent Little Darling.

Whatabout women? Christopher deGroot has a long piece on how the feminists are making things worse for most women. And men too. Oh, things are pretty good at the top for Gentry women that can afford careers and marriage and children and cheap immigrant servants. But whatabout the rest of women, for, as he quotes G.K. Chesterton:

“Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

Wait! I thought that only approved Educated Gentry intellectuals had the right to opine on slavery!

But I think this is a very good way of approaching "issues." You should ask: "in what way is this better than slavery?" Or, alternatively, "in what way is this better than serfdom?"

Our Democratic friends on the presidential campaign trail are outdoing each other in various "Something for All" comprehensive and mandatory programs, from Medicare to College to Childcare.

So, in what way are these programs different than life in the good old agricultural estate, with the noble lord enserving his underling famers in exchange for free benefits? Or, if you prefer, the good old slave plantation and the good old slave driver with his cowskin whip.

See, I interpret the history of the last century or so in this way.

Part One: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the workers. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to balance what the Gentry thought about the helpless workers with what the workers thought about the workers and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the workers? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine what "we" wanted the workers to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that the Educated Gentry won the votes of the workers by offering them free stuff, and things were copacetic for a while as certain workers obtained above-market wages, and everyone's children got rough, tough education in the Three Rs from rough, tough schoolmarms in government schools. But in the end the workers all lost their high-paying manufacturing jobs and the schools became mere government child-custodial facilities doing useless fad-following.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that the workers were developing on their own, from unions (without special privileges) to mutual-aid societies to mechanics' institutes to the Christianity of the kind practiced by the hero and the heroine of George Eliot's Adam Bede.

Part Two: The Educated Gentry declared themselve the protectors and the liberators of women. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless women with what women -- high, middle, and low -- thought about their lives and also what the taxpayers thought about helping women? And did the feminist activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted women to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that Educated Gentry women set the agenda, and basically forcing the rest of womankind into their notion of what women needed. And what women needed, according to Gentry Women was to have fascinating careers just like the men in their lives. Er, did they ask their men about just how fascinating those careers were? No, I thought not. Then Educated Gentry women wanted all women to have access to abortion and divorce and the right to have sex without humiliation. Yep, it turned out that Gentry women in the workforce -- and the right to have their incomes counted when applying for a mortgage -- has made everything more expensive, so that, while it more or less works for Gentry women, it doesn't work very well for Commoner women. And let's not even think about lower class women where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Oh, and, girls, how great is it when the sexual revolution means that women are expected to "put out" in the immortal phrase of Tennessee Williams. And when women are expected by their lovers to "get rid" of the products of liberation? And when divorced women end up as cat ladies?

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that worshipped women and wives and mothers and put them on pedestals. Because, after all, "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. I think that we should have patted the Educated Gentry women for their conceits about career and "leaning in" and wanting to be in politics, First Woman President, etc. But whatabout Commoner women that want marriage and home and children? And whatabout lower-class women that just want a male provider, thank you very much? Gee, I wonder what they want?

Part Three: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the blacks -- and subsequently every imaginable oppressed group under the sun. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless blacks with what the blacks thought about themselves and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the blacks? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted the blacks to be in 100 years?

Well, we started out right, with a genuine civil rights movement that used non-violent protest to demand equality of rights. And we passed a Civil Rights Act and Sen Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) promised to eat the paper the bill was written on if it led to quotas. But, of course, in accordance with the divine law divined by longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, every political movement ends up as a business or a racket. And we have had quotas, timetables, diversity, inclusion, and flat out racism ever since.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been for Hubert Humphrey to spend the rest of his live advocating against quotas and timetables, and for the Supreme Court to retire all the activist groups that supported the civil rights movement. And I think that the right thing would have been not to have the welfare expansion under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and I think that blacks should have been encouraged to develop the responsible culture already flourishing in their black churches. Instead Educated Gentry activists have whipped up racism into a national crisis, decades after the passing of the laws that made government and corporate racism illegal.

And let's pass over in silence the question of Latinos and LGBTs, etc. Not to mention the nightmare of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Now Christopher DeGroot finishes up his piece worrying about single women electing more Democrats, and how stopping that

may be just as important as checking excessive immigration and trying to preserve what Peter Brimelow calls the Historic American Nation, each essential if there is to be an American right in the future.

But I don't think it is a question of "an American right." I think it is a question of forming a head of rebellion, civil or otherwise, against the monstrous and heedless Educated Gentry that, as they say, "literally knows nothing." Except the selfish status  and power games it plays within its Educated Gentry bubble and expects the rest of us to ooh and ahh over. Or regret it.

Look, as Bismarck said: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

And I would say that the emergence of Donald Trump as the champion of the Commoners is another proof of God's existence, and Bismarck's claim to wisdom.

All we need to do, as "an American right" or anything else, is march towards the sound of the guns. That is all any man, since the dawn of firearms, has needed to know.

Deep State: Follow the Rules, You Fools and Knaves

Yesterday I wrote about the folly of the current administrative state model. Being a government by, of, and for the Gentry it cannot know what the ordinary Commoner wants. And, blithely ignoring the world view of Commoners, one day it wakes up and gets Trump.

But now I want to look at the other problem. It is the reason why we have rules of procedure, "due process," and laws in the first place. And how our Gentry and the administrative state that it inhabits has been ignoring this notion.

Again, returning to yesterday's piece, I argued that the whole point of politics is to avoid civil war.

The whole apparatus of elections, of separation of powers, of throwing the rascals out is so that the overwhelming majority of people are content enough with things as they are that they do not feel that a head of rebellion is required to defend themselves from a tyrannical government.

But there is another angle: having a government that is seen to obey the laws and the rules of "due process."

Obviously, what governments have done since time out of mind is to bend the rules and even break them for reasons of state. Or raisons d'état as you you would say if you were French. And they invented the administrative state.

The reason that governments do this is to protect their power, to squelch rude underlings that are threatening its power and its continuance. And that is, rather obviously, what the Deep State has been doing ever since 2015. (Never mind what went on previously).

For instance, it is pretty obvious that in 2015-16 somebody decided they wanted to spy on the Trump campaign, for reasons of state. The means obtained to do this was to get the FISA court to approve surveillance of Carter Page as a possible spy for the Russians. Only, it turned out that Page was already a CIA asset! And some FBI operative failed to note that in the FISA court application for surveillance.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the applications to the FISA court that failed to mention that the Steele Dossier -- that accused Trump of various offences -- was mostly uncorroborated.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the leaking by FBI/DOJ officials of stuff about the Steele Dossier to the media in the fall of 2016.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was FBI Director's cutesy meeting with Donald Trump that he used as a pretext to get a Special Counsel investigation of the president.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the packing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team with Democrat partisan operatives.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the FBI entrapment of Gen. Michael Flynn, whose main crime was disagreeing with Obama administration strategy in the Middle East. And then alteration of documents.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the Special Counsel's report that reported no Russian collusion but couldn't say whether the president obstructed its investigation.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the changing of the rules for whistlblowers coincident with whistleblower Eric Ciaramella deciding to report Trumpian Ukraine skullduggery that he only heard second-hand. (Hey, Google, how come that your Search doesn't autocomplete when I get to "whistleblower eric c"? Cat got your lefty tongue?)

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

And never mind about Nancy Pelosi's derisive impeachment investigations in the depths of the basement run by the Intelligence Committee instead of the judiciary, and the whole laughable delay over transmitting the articles of impeachment.

My point is that the way we avoid civil war is not merely by following the rules, but by being seen to follow the rules. As in Caesar's Wife.

Because if you are a stickler for following the rules it makes it much more difficult for your political opponents to paint you as scoundrels, and it makes it much more difficult for revolutionaries to get up a head of rebellion.

The problem is, of course, in any political context, whether at the local non-profit or in the United States House of Representatives, there is always a temptation to use your power, whatever it is, to slide around the rules to get your way.

But the problem with breaking the rules is that it encourages people to say, with Shakespeare's Casca: "speak, hands for me."

And, I think, breaking the rules is the tactic of weaklings. The manly thing to do is to follow the rules, and accept the result like a man. But the cowardly thing to do is to sneak around the rules, to avoid embarrassment and reversal.

And the truth is that the Deep State is composed of late-dynasty weaklings, scions that have got their positions because of Daddy or Mommy or connections begun at some selective college, or having the right opinions. They are like the inheritors of a thriving corporation that don't really know how and why the corporation flourished, and how to redirect it in a changed world. And when things go wrong they start to cheat.

Yeah, that is the foundation of most financial scandal. A bet goes wrong, and the executives try to hide the losses, and make it all back on the next play. Only that one fails too. And so on.

I suppose we should all be glad, because the Deep State shenanigans show the weakness of the late-stage administrative-state dynasty. It shows that the dynasty is losing the Mandate of Heaven. But late dynasties are always full of fools and knaves.

Only, my hope is that we can go through a Time of Troubles and get to the next dynasty without an open civil war.

Hey, I guess I'm an optimist!

My Advice to the Administrative State

I started out this morning reading piece by Charles Lipson about "Impeachment and the Fight over the Deep State." On the day that Speaker Pelosi sends the Articles of Impeachment over to the Senate.

Does this mean that the party out of the presidency will be harrying presidents from here on in with impeachments? Maybe not, if Donald Trump gets a thumping reelection and the Dems lose the House.

Because if Trump thrives on the Pelosi impeachment the Deep State conventional wisdom for the next 20 years will be that impeachment is a mug's game.

Lipson's argument is that President Trump presents an existential threat to the administrative state of the 20th century that rules through the federal bureaucracy and the tradition that the courts get to fill in the details of legislation. Naturally, the Deep State doesn't like Trump.

They oppose Trump because he threatens their once-secure political world. He is abolishing long-standing regulations at an astonishing clip and appointing federal judges who, for the first time in decades, refuse to ratify far-reaching regulations and executive orders that are only loosely tethered to statutory laws. 

What a world if the norm were to be that federal judges got to put down laws that were too vague about the details! Why, the whole gentry class lives its life as wise and educated "fill in the details" experts.

This judicial challenge to “bureaucratic delegation” is being led by Neil Gorsuch at the Supreme Court and Neomi Rao at the Court of Appeals in D.C. They acknowledge that bureaucracies can fill in the “details” of laws, but only if the laws offer clear guidance. Liberals correctly say that enforcing this criterion retroactively would abolish the modern federal government. They know it is a tissue of regulations loosely based on underlying laws.

Now, I argue in my Four Laws that the administrative state cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth to do it. The complexity of our society, or any society, means that courtiers in the king's court and bureaucrats in the administrative bureaucracy cannot know enough to instruct the whole nation on how to tie its shoe-laces.

But there is a bigger issue. It relates to the fundamental philosophy under any political system. That is to avoid civil war. The whole apparatus of elections, of separation of powers, of throwing the rascals out is so that the overwhelming majority of people are content enough with things as they are that they do not feel that a head of rebellion is required to defend themselves from a tyrannical government.

The problem with an administrative state is that it sets up a regime where the Gentry gets to monopolize the sinews of government, and not just by occupying all the positions of power by monopolizing the ideas that inspire government. What do ordinary Commoners want? Good question, Senator.

And moreover, given the modern complexity of government, it becomes almost impossible to reform the government. With hundreds of programs -- let alone the big ones like Social Security and Medicare -- where do you start? And now much reform can you do in a session of Congress, let alone a two-term presidency? And that is without considering the problem that, since the administrative state is necessarily of, by, and for the Educated Gentry class that has the credentials to occupy high administrative positions, the administrative state is blind to the lives and the concerns of lesser mortals, such as Commoners and Clients (or Victims).

Let us review the obvious agenda of the three layers of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Gentry. Because we are educated and evolved we should be in charge of the country and direct its affairs in matters large and small.

Commoners. Leave us alone to live our lives, but make the trains run on time and be there when we need protection.

Clients. Life is rough and we expect our chieftain to protect us and take care of us.

You can see how the present regime is fine for Gentry and Clients, but not so good for Commoners, because the whole point of the Gentry administrative state is to be poking Commoners in the ribs for their moral edification and to cure them of their deplorability.

So that's why we got Trump.

The interesting thing, to me, about the administrative state of, by, and for the Gentry, is the way it needs to demonize the Commoners. OK, it's not interesting, it is inevitable. If government is force then all government requires an enemy to justify the use of force. QED.

But this is a lie. The whole point about the Commoners is that they are Commoners, neither rich nor educated nor eminent nor notable nor powerful. To make Commoners into vile racist sexist homophobes and white supremacists and haters is a monstrous injustice. Because Commoners aren't much engaged in politics, aren't thinking up new ways to do activism and save the planet. And they don't get up each morning with a new plan to beat up blacks, women, and gays. They aren't doing much at all except going to work and raising families. So when the Gentry makes war on the Commoners, mucking about in their modest businesses with demands they make cakes for gay weddings, or accusing them of being patriarchs, or of being vile racists, the Commoners ask "what's this all about? I was just ordering in pizza."

That's how we got Trump.

My advice to the administrative state and to the Gentry in general is: Cool It. No matter what happens we are going to be giving you chaps lots of jobs and power in the administrative state. And just because of your education and interest, you chaps have an influence on politics and culture way bigger than your numbers. And, need I add, you deserts.

But supervising the mundane details of Commoner life, from bathrooms to "hate" to recycling to tree regulation, is a bridge too far. It's going to force the Commoners to push back. Not because Commoners have better ideas than you Gentry but because there comes a point where the humiliation of being poked and prodded becomes intolerable.

See, this is what I think. I think you Gentry already have it pretty good. Because of the credentials you earn you get to live really safe working lives, often with tenure and with lavish pensions, and little impact from the business cycle. And you often get to feel that you Made a Difference. Commoners, on the other hand, are not so well protected. Their jobs are often at the mercy of the business cycle, they often work in jobs that are "employment at will," and have to start small businesses and the like if they want to live well. And, at the end of their lives the only way they Made a Difference is that they have grandchildren.

But there comes a point at which the Commoners say: I can't take it any more. And you Gentry types really don't want to provoke the Commoners to that point. Life's pretty good for Gentry. You really don't want to risk a Commoner rebellion.

See, if we had a Commoner rebellion it might, just accidentally, abolish the whole administrative state. Because I'd say that the administrative state doesn't do anything that couldn't be done at half the price by the private sector.

And what would you Gentry do then, poor things. Hey, you might have to get real jobs.

Trying to Read Our Nance

So, what's the real story on Nancy Pelosi? Is she just an old woman, past her prime, hanging on as Speaker of the House of Representatives because she can?

Is she losing her marbles, as her recent appearances on TV seem to suggest?

Or is she still the cunning political manipulator that has brought the Democrats to a House majority in two elections, 2006 and 2018?

Is she hanging on, trying to keep the crazy lefties like AOC's mentor Saikat Chakrabarti from taking over the Democratic Party?

Or is she trying to blind-side Commie Bernie and favor Joe Biden for Democatic nominee as GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy proposes?

Is her delay of sending the impeachment articles over to the Senate a brilliant tactical move, as her supporters seem to think, or dumb and stupid, and my kind of racist sexist homophobe tends to think?

Or, as I wonder, is she, as a woman, just not up to the knockabout playground bully WWF style of partisan politics? I mean, women play a different game, of naming, shaming, and shunning, rather than the male approach of a sucker punch to the solar plexus.

And is that why Donald Trump won the 2016 election, because he fought the election as a man with flat out imsults while Hillary Clinton fought it as a woman, naming and shaming ordinary Americans to a gay audience as a basket of deplorables.

I don't know.

I just think that the Democrats have come out of hiding in the past few years. Back in the Bill Clinton years they were making like they were New Democrats and moderates. Then Barack Obama campaigned as a moderate and once in office unleashed the lefties. Now the lefties are everywhere, pushing their modern politics-as-religion on the rest of us.

And we don't like it. Nobody likes having someone push their religion on me. Lefties especially hated it when they accused conservatives of "legislating morality." But when you are forcing your religion on the other guys...

See, everything that the Democrats do is really pushing their religion, whether it's abortion for all, saving the planet, ending the gig economy, regulating firearms out of existence, open borders, you name it. But they don't think that. They think they are building a just and ethical world, bending the arc of history towards justice. Bless their hearts.

I tell you, the more I live the more I realize that our Founders were the geniuses of the ages.

I mean, what a concept! Separation of church and state so that people can go off in all directions with their crazy cults, believing whatever they want and creating a moral community that does not get to impose its morality on other people. But, when it comes to the nasty stuff, like robbers and murderers and cheats and frauds. Well, for those guys, we got politics, government, hangmen and jailers.

I was reading a piece today about black conservatives and how, if you didn't know they were black they would sound to you just like regular conservatives, the kind our liberals know and love as "white supremacists."

Of course, my line is that -- especially with the Trump Prosperity -- blacks are starting to transform themselves from Curtis Yarvin's Clients (or Victims) into Commoners. And as Commoners they think and live as American patriots: American nationalists if you like. Nothing fancy or remarkable about this. It's just that modern Commoners experience their tribe, their sense of political belonging, in the Nation.

Maybe the chaps that invented the notion of the Nation knew that, and instinctively molded the nation state to be a place where Commoners felt at home. I was reading about Sir Roger Scruton, RIP, that one of the keenest human yearnings is the yearning for home. At its most trivial it is the desire you feel on a trip to get back home. And Commoners feel politically at home in a nation.

But the fact is that the Democratic Party, led by centi-millionaire Our Nance, is an anti-Commoner party. It looks down on Commoner culture of work and family, Commoner politics of nation, Commoner religion, the whole arc of Commoner life.

And that, I suspect -- OK, I hope -- is going to cost them.

Roger Scruton RIP

The most important thing to know about British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton who died January 12, 2020, aged 75, of cancer is the way that he met his Sophie, the future Lady Scruton. He was riding his gelding Sam in the Beaufort hunt and happened to be standing next to Sophie, riding her mare Petra. Says he in his autobiographical Gentle Regrets,

Usually [Sam] puts his ears back if a horse gets too close to him, anxious to preserve the distance that will preserve safety; on this occasion, however, he stood quietly beside Petra, and then followed her as the hunt moved off. The next Saturday he caught sight of her across a field of 200 horses, seized the bit and cantered across to where she stood, fulfilling simultaneously his desire and mine.

But here's the thing. Not only was Scruton's horse named Sam, but also his family dog when he was a boy and his son. His son. You tell me! Perhaps there is a connection, that Scruton loved his dog, his horse, and his son, so why shouldn't they have the same name?

And another thing. It turns out that his surname Scruton is made up. His great-grandmother, born Lowe, had a son surnamed Lowe, that she decided should be surnamed Scruton. So perhaps his grandfather was conceived on the Scruton estate while his great-grandmother was in service there.

Of course, all this has nothing to do with Trollope's Sir Roger Scatcherd, railway engineer, drunkard, and father of the illegitimate and practically-perfect-in-every-way Mary, in Doctor Thorne. Nor would Trollope, a famous hunter of foxes, ever have dared to introduce a ridiculous plot device like a horse selecting his owner's wife for him.

Roger Scruton was an immensely learned philosopher and writer, son of a left-wing teacher father and a respectable middle-class mother. Born in 1944 he became a conservative in the 1968 student riots in Paris, and throughout his adult life was on the receiving end of the tender mercies of the left. The latest incident was a 2019 New Statesman interview conducted by a young lefty -- who no doubt literally knows nothing -- that monstrously edited and misrepresented his remarks. And got him sacked from the Tory government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for a season.

Scruton seems to have been a gentle soul, according to many that knew him, and also a courageous one, who went into Eastern Europe in the 1980s to meet with the dissidents that became the government leaders in the 1990s.

Scruton visited Prague [in 1979] to give a secret lecture with the dissident Czech philosopher Julius Tomin. 

When he accompanied Tomin back to his apartment, he found waiting for them at the door a secret policeman who refused to let Scruton in, and then pushed him down the stairs. He was eventually arrested and thrown out of the country. 

“I realised that this was a situation that was completely outside anything in my experience,” he remembered. “And at the same time this was a place which was dear to my heart. The intellectual life was genuinely dangerous. They were being put in jail by a Left-wing police force.”

But actually, Scruton was "put in jail" multiple times throughout his adult life by the left-wing police force of the academy and the culture. It is just that the left-wing police in Prague were a little more direct than our left-wing police in the university and in the culture.

What is wrong with these people? Don't answer that.

Scruton has written about many things, principally in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy. So I thought I would check his notions of my current enthusiasm, Nietzsche. He notes, in A Short History of Modern Philosophy, that Nietzsche, in common with Aristotle, "found the aim of life in 'flourishing':  excellence resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim." Thus,

In each case pride, self-confidence, cheerfulness of outlook, and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man.

The drawback is, of course, the accusation that this is why Nietzsche is "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." But whatabout Marxism, with Marx "the Commies' favorite intellectual?" As Scruton writes in Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey:

If you happen to believe that you are, deep down, an Übermensch, whose powers, energies and talents are frustrated by the little people who tie you with their Lilliputian web of obligations, you will gladly endorse Nietzsche's vision[.]

Or if you believe that you are an activist, fighting for justice for all the oppressed peoples of the world, you will gladly endorse Marx's vision that appoints you as the vanguard of the proletariat.

The massive excuse prepared by Marx for the crimes of the international socialists, was prepared by Nietzsche for their nationalist opponents.

And this makes me think that Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic and Nietzsche's Master and Slave morality are missing the middle.

Both Marx and Nietzsche are trying to find a Master morality for my People of the Creative Self, today's Educated Gentry. Nietzsche is sneering at the Slave morality of weak people, who just want to combine against the strong.

But I think Nietzsche is missing the middle, what we might call Commoner Morality. In other words, when he complains about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, he is complaining about the self-reflection that the Axial Age religions promote for commoners. It is a middle way between the self-justification of the "creative" and the collective protective morality of the slave. It is the thought that, in the give and take of commoner life, well, maybe the problem is me.

So that would fit my reductive Three Peoples theory and Yarvin's Gentry, Commoner, Client layers.

Creative/Gentry morality: Creativity involves creative destruction, perhaps of me, perhaps of lesser folk. Too bad.

Responsible/Commoner morality: Life is an interaction and we need to think about how our actions impact other people so we don't have to come to blows.

Subordinate/Client morality: Life is a bitch and we the people have to combine against the powerful to protect ourselves.

Sir Roger Scruton was a remarkable man, gentle, learned, courageous. We shall not see his like for many a year. 

It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.

I'm reading Why Liberalism Works by economist Deirdre McCloskey that celebrates her three "Bourgeois Era" books. In those books she establishes the remarkable Great Enrichment of the last 200 years and attributes it to the bourgeois ethos of the seven virtues and also the "have a go" ethos of ordinary people starting in 1800.

Basic to this notion is that "capital" is not something that accumulates, but is created when something new and useful is invented and produced and sold out of a clear blue sky. I suppose the fundamental case for that is the creation of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil. Rockefeller created a company that reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents per gallon to 10 cents per gallon. Not surprisingly this astonishing achievement shot the stock of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into the stratosphere. Why? Because the present value of Standard Oil discovering and producing and selling oil was enormous. And that was before they discovered oil in Texas in 1901.

I mean: what is the value to the average housewife of the oil that she bought for those cute oil lamps later featured in western movies? That were much safer and useful than the wax candles that really only rich people could afford? (Check out various recent TV series of the candle era in which typically the producers have decided to show the indoor lighting just by candle. Rich-people parties have veritable galaxies of brutally expensive candles. Almost everyone lights themselves to their bedrooms with a single candle.)

Apply the same logic to all the other astonishing things of the past two centuries: trains, steamships, cars, electricity, safe childbirth, computers, internet. This is not accumulation but explosion.

However, I am not sure that I buy the Bourgeois Virtues argument and the celebration of bourgeois culture. I am more inclined to go with the verdict of George Eliot in Adam Bede where she celebrates ordinary rural carpenters and farm girls getting the ethos of Methodist Christianity and the sense of directing their own livesunder the inspiration of God and his divine laws.

In other words, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris were graduating out of the subordinate peasant mentality to think and act as Commoners.

And there is the peculiar marriage of elite science and commoner mechanics marrying science to technique and turning ideas into useful products.

I am more inclined to attribute the Great Enrichment to the ordinary people "having a go" and the elites and governing classes not seeing what was going on until it was too late to stop it.

Think of the Trump election in 2016. The elites thought Trump was a rube and a blowhard. They just had no idea that he could and would connect with the ordinary American Commoner and win their votes and now their trust. If they had known... they would have made sure that Trump got nobbled before he got out of the starting gate. Indeed they did nobble him with the Steele Dossier, but just didn't press home their spying operation, probably because they thought to themselves that "this clown will never get elected."

I guess my point is that it is past time for defending the market system and its recipe for baking the cake of a world without poverty. If you don't get that, lefties and gentry, after all these years, you are a fool and a knave.

When the elite and the left make that elite guidance is needed to keep capitalism just and moderate I think that they are not quite lying but certainly covering their eyes to the reality of the market economy. Certainly any fair-minded judge has a right to feel that the eye-coverers have a vested interest in their blindness.

It is past time to be understanding. I think we should be on the attack, as in this from my Maxims page:

Crimes of the Left: Driving working class off the road to the middle class; misdirecting women in the public square; making war on middle class culture and values; taxing business and ordinary people and enslaving them to ruling-class crusades to save the world.

See, I think that the argument of Marx and subsequent lefties to teach the working class that "we wos robbed" is one of the great crimes of the ages. All in the interest of political power. And then teaching women to have "careers" rather than run the culture from their traditional base in the home, the famiy, and the neighborhood. Now we have the gentry class saying that we need less prosperity! Because Saving the Planet.

Here's a piece about how the Democrat judges are using blatant devices to stall and stymie anything that Trump proposes with tricks like "nationwide injunctions." I don't think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and allow that the poor dears just don't understand. If the Obama judges don't understand the monstrous injustice of their actions -- and I dare say they don't -- then they really don't understand law and don't understand that the whole point of law is to be a brake on ruling-class power.

It is far more likely that the Obama are deliberately blind to the injustice of their actions, because they don't want to know, because they have been carefully taught, because to seriously think about their political agenda, to seriously allow that others -- their political opponents -- might have a valid point of view, is not to be endured.

In other words it makes more sense to believe that our liberal friends of all kinds are merely Educated Gentry responding to ruling class anthems that appeal to their taste for ambition, their need for honor, and their consuming vanity. And that the don't have the education, the understanding, and the judgement to think any other way.

When you look at our liberal friends, let's face it, it's all about them. That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about, the utter demolition of the decades old liberal comfort zone.

I mean, anyone with half a brain should have at least considered that 2016 was a change election, after two terms of Obama and certainly after 8 years of very slow growth out of the 2008 Recession, and given the rather limited political skills of Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The very fact of the post-election hysteria was a dead giveway that the average Educated Gentry voter had been led by their leaders and the liberal media into a political La La Land. Because what grown-ups do after a failure is suck it in and determine to do better.

No, the only thing that will teach our Educated Gentry that they have a problem is nothing less than the school of hard knocks, of a 55-45 loss in 2020, a sold Republican Congress in both houses, several high profile criminal prosecutions of Obama administraion officials involved in the spying on the Trump campaign and the half-hearted coup attempt since the 2016 election.

Our Democratic friends have to be treated to the famous line that the coach delivers to his football team after a stinging loss: "Let's get back to basics. This is a football."

And nothing would communicate that something is completely out of joint than for a significant chunk of black and Hispanic voters to start voting like Commoners rather than Victims.

It's past time for merely defending the market system. It is past time for merely defending the American way of life. It's past time for assuming that the Educated Gentry will ever give the Commoners a fair shake. It's past time for cringing before the accusation of racism, sexist, homophobia.

It's time to go on the attack. For the simple reason that all sectors of American society have a right to be heard and to have their needs factored into the political auction.

It is not true that the market system is unjust. It is not true that Commoners are bigots and white supremacists. It is not true that women and gays and blacks and Hispanics and Muslims are helpless victims and need special privileges to get justice in America. And it is not true that Educated Gentry have a right to order the rest of America around.

Until that is conceded, things are going to continue to get pretty hot around here.