Mandatory or Discretionary? You Make the Call

You may know, or you may not know, that federal spending in divided, like Gaul, into three parts. There is Mandatory Spending, which does not require an annual appropriation by Congress. There is  Interest Payments, which go without saying. And there is Discretionary Spending, which is legislated every year by Congress.

At usgovernmentspending.com our crack analysts have just completed a Mandatory Spending Analysis page. Here is a look at the overall picture from 1962, the first year of the Historical Tables that are published each year by the Office of Management and Budget.

 The overall story is that year after year, the Mandatory side of the budget keeps getting bigger. And the main reason is the expansion of health care programs, which are mostly Mandatory.

And, of course, the defense budget is almost all Discretionary. Go figure.

Actually, it makes sense. All government is force, and the number one government program, after selling the debt, is paying off supporters. This has been true at least since the good old days of the Frankish Empire operating out of Trier in western Germany after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

And, I have determined, the only government program that ever gets cut is the defense budget after a major war. Everything else is sacrosanct.

So you may think that, probably, the only thing the government should spend money on is defense.

Because if you, the great leader of the nation, create a program that can never be cut, well, you are an idiot.

Oh well, I guess that's why they say that history goes in cycles. Because political leaders are members of the Lina Lamont Fan Club. Their motto, like hers, is "What d'yer think I yam? Dumb or somep'n?"

A Word of Advice to You Wokerati

Oh dear oh dear. Yesterday on CNN with Jake Tapper House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, of President Trump, that "his denial at the beginning was deadly" and that as he "fiddles, people are dying."

Oh dear, Speaker Pelosi.

Denial? You mean when he shut down travel from China on Janary 31 and "everybody" called him a racist or a xenophobe?

Fiddles? You mean to get direct flights of masks and stuff from China as The New York Times reports?

A commercial aircraft carrying 80 tons of gloves, masks, gowns and other medical supplies from Shanghai touched down in New York on Sunday, the first of 22 scheduled flights that White House officials say will funnel much-needed goods to the United States by early April as it battles the world’s largest coronavirus outbreak.

Or maybe you chaps are thinking of President Trump's reckless endorsement of the choroquinine drugs for use in fighting the CCP virus. So that two or three clueless Democratic governors issued warnings to doctors. Only now the FDA has endorsed the use of chloroquinine drugs.

Look, here's some advice to you wokeratis, activistes, revolutionistas, and progressives. Lay off the identity politics for a month or two. Because it doesn't play with the voters during a virus war when humans naturally respond to their basic instincts and rally behind the tribal leader that is charged with protecting them from danger.

Your identity politics is brilliant. It is a brilliant way of conducting politics and mobilizing marginalized, pre-civilized communities in the service of the progressive agenda. And I use the word "pre-civilized" advisedly, meaning people that have not yet learned how to wive and thrive in the city and its market economy.

Politics is division, and if you are in the political arena you need to hang your hat on some issue that divides people into "us" and "them." Humans are natural political fighters, squabbling over the least little thing.

But when there is a war on, then humans stop the squabbling and look for a leader to lead them to safety. Right now, whether you progs like it or not, that leader is President Trump.

When this whole CCP virus mess is over, then you chaps can go back to identity politics as usual. Maybe during the hiatus you chapettes will think of some cool new pejoratives with which to demoralize and cancel the opposition. After all, your racist-sexist-homophobe jag is getting a little stale, I'd say.

But I should warn you. President Trump is going to be making a big play for the minority vote in the next few weeks, and he is going to be telling them that he is their president too and that he cares about them just as much as any American.

So when this whole thing is over, and President Trump is reelected in November and the House returns to Republican control, you may find that the ground rules of political combat in these United States have undergone a sea change.

See, my line is that World War II united all the various European urban ethnic groups in the US into 100 percent Americans. Because? Because for a couple of years the politicians needed cannon fodder rather than political division. And because humans naturally unite in a war.

I suspect that something similar will happen as a result of the Great Virus War. Could be wrong, of course. You chaps managed to transmogrify President George W. Bush from a hero to an idiot in four short years, from the hero of 9/11 to the idiot of Hurricane Katrina.

Like I say. I could be wrong. But I wouldn't count on it, if I were you. It may only have taken four years to break the unity of 9/11. It took 20 years to break the unity of WWII with the Sixties and the Sixties Kidz. I'd say the unity of the Great Virus War will last longer than four years but less than 20 years.

Or, of course, President Trump may effect a fundamental transformation of American politics and make the Republican Party into the Commoner Party of all races and genders, leaving the Democratic Party as the party of the rich educated wokerati and the poor helpless victims. And then you guys would really be in trouble.

But who knows?

Good Luck With That!

With the Corona Contagion just starting to take off in the US, My Pal Kevin D. Williamson says: "Goodbye Green New Deal." Because after two weeks of partial shutdown Americans are already getting restive. Yet the Green New Deal proposes decades of shutdown and subjection to administrative diktat. Good luck with that, he writes:

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

Because, of course, life must go on. And the dead are soon forgotten, except by their Moms. Did you know, for instance, that the death toll from the 1918 Spanish Flu was way more than the butcher's bill in World War I? The truth is that the world is a mayhem of death and destruction. And life goes on.

But let us think of other things that are going to go the way of the Dodo.

Whatabout the New Urbanism, the cult that we are all going to live in yeasty "creative" urban environments full of high density housing, public transit, and woke cafés? Forget that!

See, back in the day, cities were so unhealthy that their death rate always exceeded the birth rate. Only since the discovery of the Germ Theory have cities begun to be even half healthy.

It is pretty obvious, e.g., New York City, that city life cannot exist alongside with social distancing, because you cannot get far enough away from other people to be safe. Whereas in the countryside...

Remember how liberals have been telling us for half a century that it was the eeevil oil companies that invented the suburbs? Probably not. Probably the suburbs were invented by women that wanted a nice safe, green place to raise their children.

Could the administrative state be another victim of the Wu Flu? It is pretty obvious that the health directorates, whether the World Health Organization or the Federal Drug Administration, are "not fit for purpose," as the Brits say. The reason, of course, is that the Follow the Leader administrative hierarchy is grossly inferior to the Have a Go (® Deirdre McCloskey) creativity of the market economy. You read, right now, of all kinds of people coming up with ways to make ventilators, or sew face masks, or stitch smocks for health care workers. To say nothing of the various drug cocktails doctors are mixing up. Nobody told them to do it. They just had an idea and decided to Have a Go. And it looks like President Trump is pretty good at waiving regulations aside so life can go on.

I also suspect that the four-year campaign to destroy Donald Trump is reaching its sell-by date. Here is Steve Sailer retailing the truth about Donald Trump. What, writes Scott Alexander, is it that real-estate moguls do? Answer: they are very good liars. The reason is that none of the participants, from banks to investors to renters, want to sign on the dotted line until they other guys have signed.

The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. 

This was written in 2016. Before the USMCA, the China Trade Deal, etc.

The other thing, it seems to me, is that Trump seems to be smart enough to be a couple of weeks ahead of the conventional wisdom: restricting travel from China early enough so the media could still be outraged by his xenophobia, but just in time to show he is "doing something" before the whole world demands that he "do something."

And isn't that really the secret of political leadership? To be just a little ahead of the curve but not so much that you look like a kook?

What I would really like to see is the delegitimizing of the educated Gentry and the realization among Commoner truckers keeping the supply chain going, and supermarket employees keeping the food chain working, and health care workers tending the sick, that they are the real America. And God bless them. I get the feeling that those folks are finally getting the respect they deserve, and they know it. And rightly so.

The other thing that can't come too soon is the delegitimizing of the mainstream media, the Democratic operatives with bylines. Back in the day journalists were cocky and insolent Commoners rather looked down upon by the educated as uneducated hicks. But then -- with Watergate? -- journalism became cool and all the Best People crowded in. Now we know the truth is that journalism by cool Gentry is a lot worse than journalism by barely educated Commoners. And now it looks like cool journalism is getting its comeuppance.

Really, of course, nobody knows nothing, and the future will be much different from our hopes and our fears.

And in the end, we all die.

Pelosi's Far-Left Bill: The Bigger Problem

Yesterday I proposed that Nancy Pelosi's horrible fund-all-the-lefty-wish-list never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste bill was maybe just her way of showing the lefty activist community that their agenda just wasn't going to fly. Not this week. Try again later, wokies.

Today I am reading a lot of commentary outraged at the rank partisanship of the Dems, and how horrible it is, etc. Yes. Of course it is. Partisanship is what politicians and activists do every day.

But let us understand the bigger picture.

The Dems really believe in legislating their progressive morality. They really believe that we need laws to enforce diversity in the work place, and that these laws can make America a better place.

Do you see the difference between a law that makes racial and sexual discrimination illegal and a law that penalizes failure to achieve government-set racial percentages in the workplace?

Do you see the difficulty of making judgements based on percentages of different races and sexes in a particular corporation or workplace? For instance, did you know that well-born white women have really entered the life sciences in battalion strength but not so much in computers and engineering? So, how does the government judge the situation at, say, a microbiology department at a university and a Silicon Valley startup? Who gets harassed and fined? At what point?

Well, we know. They set up a bureaucracy with quasi-legal authority to judge and harass corporations that don't meet their moral standards. As the bureaucracy feels appropriate.

My point is that once you get away from a pretty black-and-white situation -- as in not hiring a guy because he is black where there are incriminatory statements on record -- you have a problem. How do you deal with the vague and uncertain question of whether a particular racial and sexual breakdown can be reliably dealt with by government prosecutors and the courts? Or government administrators?

Government is the agent for protection from existential peril. Morality -- churches, activist groups, women´s gossip networks -- is the means of doing social control over things that are not questions of life and death. And, per our beloved Founders, it is best to separate the organs of force from the organs of morality.

And the fact is that the progressive movement instinctively understands this. That is why it represents each of its agenda items as a matter of life and death.

But most moral issues are not a matter of life and death, and they should not be encoded into law.

Many of the commentators outraged by the Dems' shenagigans are demanding that we teach them a lesson at the ballot box. And certainly they need that.

But I return to the basic Breitbart notion that politics is downstream from culture. And the John C. Wright's  expansion that culture is downstream from religion.

Then there is a further argument that religion is downstream from social animals. In other words, the whole point of religion in the broad sense is that social cooperation with moral rules is a lot less bloody and expensive than deciding everything with a fight. Jordan B. Peterson makes the point in his 12 Rules that even lobsters have a social hierarchy, so that lobster males don't fight over every little thing. But the Good Little Girls interviewing him on TV had no clue what he was talking about.

So, how soon do you think that our liberal friends will get this? Take, for instance Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch, whose job in life is to search out "far-right" offences to progressive morality and name and shame the perpetrators. What would it take for her to see the error of her ways?

Well, we know the answer. It is contained in books like When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. Every religion, every ideological movement, is a prophetic movement, predicting some kind of perfect world in the future. And when its prophecy fails it doesn't give up, not right away. Indeed failure initially encourages a deepening of prophetic enthusiasm. But after a while the adherents start to fall away.

Now I think it is reasonable to say that the basic left-wing prophecies have failed. And the intensified enthusiasm of today's wokerati is, in a way, a marker of that.

What we need to do is show our lefty friends, again and again, that their prophecies have failed. That's the basic thing, that wherever leftism has been tried it has failed. Oh, we'll never persuade the leaders. But the followers...

Two other things.

First, to establish the notion that almost all the progressive agenda is about status and honor for the educated Gentry, as proposed by Curtis Yarvin in his "Clear Pill." It is not about saving the victims; it is about power and glory for the activistes. We need to establish every day that the moral preening of progressives is just that. Moral conceit.

Second, to attract victims from the rank-and-file of Gentry Clients and invite them to come on over and join the Commoner class. Like I say with my Little Darlings concept, the fact is that the helpless victims beloved by the progressives are beloved only while they are useful to the progressive power project. When they are no longer useful they are dropped like an overage mistress. The idea is simple. We Commoners care about people like you. The educated Gentry doesn't care about people like you.

Here's a way we can start. We can classify every progressive activist group as a church. And we can critique every lefty initiative as an effort to "legislate morality."

Actually, I think our lefty friends would be much happier if they formed a church and said woke confession to each other every Sunday. But they are too dumb to realize that is what they need.

And for tomorrow and next month, it sure wouldn't hurt for President Trump to be experienced by the average American as "doing the right thing." And it will really help if he restarts the economy real soon.

Suppose Pelosi Was Crazy LIke a Fox

Everyone is agreed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was acting like a prehistoric progressive fossil when she intervened in the good old American coronavirus pork fest to interject a bill larded up with progressive rubbish like mail-in voting and $15 minimum wage and more windmills and diversity, diversity, diversity.

But maybe she was really acting like a sensible philosopher of political contagion.

Think about it: here she is in San Francsico mansion for a well-earned rest, and dealing all week with all manner of lefty activist groups each with their own bauble that they wanted to hang on the coronavirus Christmas tree.

Now think about it. The sensible, practical thing to do would have been to have an aide get on the phone to Schumer's aide and get them to sneak a few goodies into the Senate bill. On the Q.T. That is what an experienced practical politician does.

But she didn't do that. Instead she arrives in DC like Queen S*** and demands that the whole of Washington, DC comes to a screeching halt and introduces a bill that is a caricature of "far-left" fever dreams.

Immediately all hell breaks loose, and guys like me call their senators and representatives demanding that they cut the c*** and act to save the economy. I have to admit that I have never called a congressional office before. Then next morning I called 'em again and left more messages.

So Nancy caves.

But suppose that Nancy Pelosi all along has been trying to deal with her crazies by giving them what they want so that they can see for themselves that pushing the lefty agenda is a quick way to political Jail, do not pass Go. Why, it might even reelect Trump and return the House to the GOP!

Suppose she has been telling each lefty group along that this just is not the hour to push the progressive agenda. Hey, she tells them, wait until the next Democratic president is inaugurated. Then we can push your agenda. But, she says, if you insist I'll go back to DC and get your issue in the bill. But I don't think it will end well.

But what does she do? She piles all the lefty rubbish into a heap and lights a firestorm, and the whole thing goes up in flames.

I ask you. Is Nancy Pelosi really that stupid? I don't think so. I think this was an effort to clear the decks until after the election. Or better still 2024.

I was reading Jonah Goldberg this morning and he had a half-sensible thing to say.

One of my priors is the idea that our political parties are overdue for a major transformation. The coalitions that constitute them are unstable and combustible. The ideas that once bound them together are frayed.

Well, Jonah, I would say that the Republican Party is well on its way to reinvention as the Commoner party, Donald J. Trump, proprietor.

But the Democrats! They are the party of the educated Gentry pretending to be in it for the victims. Only their entire agenda is really just Gentry posturing and moralizing: it all comes down to jobs and status for the Gentry and its fads and enthusiasms. It is all about restoring Meaning to the lives of north Seattle liberals now that the moral posture of driving a Prius has become a little stale.

It's already obvious what the future Republican Party is going to look like.

But the Democrats? Good question! How do you square the moral preening of educated professionals with the needs of immigrants busily working their way up and the descendants of slaves now camping out in decaying cities?

Quite honestly I don't have a clue.

But I have a message for the immigrants and slave descendants. Jobs, jobs, jobs.  You'll find them in the Republican Party's economic agenda. Democrats really don't care about people like you.

Just Because I Made a Little Joke

A while back in American Thinker I penned a piece about "Women, the Public Square, and Cancel Culture." In it I made the point that I had spent years pondering that women don't like the public square, and if we give them too much opportunity they will abolish it. See the "cancel" culture and microaggressions and safe spaces. Oh, and I made a little joke:

In other words, women don’t confront someone that has insulted them [in the public square]. No. They complain about it to a third person, as in “I can’t believe President Trump tweeted that.” And the complaint ripples through the “hive mind” of the community of women, and sooner or later the culprit is named, shamed, and shunned. Or, as we now say, “impeached.”

A couple of days ago I was searching Google for my use of "Culture of Insult" and I found that back on December 10 that AT piece had been featured over at Right Wing Watch in a piece by Kristen Doerer: "Women in the Public Square Are to Blame for Impeachment, Right-Wing Blog Says."

As Foghorn Leghorn said, so many years ago, "That's a joke, boy." I think I am going to send Kirsten Doerer an email:

Attn: Kristen Doerer, Managing Editor

A couple of days ago I came across your report on my thoughtful article at American Thinker on women in the public square.

Do you know? I think that the headline of your piece "Women... are to blame for impeachment" was what we postmodern thinkers call "overdetermined."

As Foghorn Leghorn said, so many years ago. "That's a joke, boy."

Of course, I realize that, racist-sexist-homophobe as I am, that I would not be as sensitive to modern readers like you as I might have been.

But jokes and pejoratives aside, I was trying to think through a serious question. What if women are different than men? What if women cannot stand the free-for-all of the public square? What then? What happens to the free exchange of ideas? What happens to politics? What happens to the culture?

What do you think? What speech is acceptable, what what speech is to be named, shamed, and shunned? You tell me.

Of course, my larger point, encapsulated in one of my maxims -- at https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2019/01/assorted-opinions-and-maxims.html -- is that progressive activism and the left in general represents a Great Reaction, an attempt to re-politicize the world in an age that can probably do with a lot less politics. Here is my short version: 

"Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice, social justice is good old loot and plunder."

My point is that all the progressive instincts are a lunge back into the past. If we think in Jungian terms we would say that the left is mining the collective unconscious for ancient archetypes, and using them in a project of power.

But I want to talk to you directly about activism. As Managing Editor of Right Wing Watch I imagine your experience yourself as a progressive activist, fighting for justice against the forces of bigotry and superstition that abound on the right.

But I think that "activism" is similar to medieval knight-errantry. I was re-reading some of the medieval romances and I realized that the romances are an absurd effort by minstrels toadying to the feudal barons to make them into noble disciples of Christ saving damsels in distress in between epic feasts. But in fact they were thugs.

I'm here to say that your average revolutionary, whether Robespierre, Lenin, Trotsky, Hitler, Franco, Castro, or Pinochet is a thug. So in my view anyone with a misty idea of being an activist and fighting injustice is probably kidding themselves. Because politics is a game for thugs. Actually, I have a maxim for that:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

My point is that it is all very well to be an activist for human rights and justice and fight against injustice. But I am here to tell you that many people on the receiving end of your fight for justice are going to experience it as injustice.

In that case, would you be right or would they be right?

Hey! If you are ever in Seattle, get in touch and let's have coffee!

sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

Hey whaddya think readers? Ain't I a stinker! As Bugs Bunny would say.

Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion

Here was I, cruising along unconcernedly as a seagull with my notion of the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint when suddenly I realized I had got it all wrong. Or at least only half right.

Because the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint are only half of the story.

And I shoulda known it. What a fool! Fortunately my unconscious mind got me sorted -- as the Brits say -- about 4:00 am a couple days ago. Really, what would we do without our unconscious minds pointing out the "glitch" in the Matix?

What I realized was that, with the notion that honor in men is courage, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, that there are two sides to the coin. Let's reproduce the key quote again.

[I]n spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- courage for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surface of popular culture that has done so much to efface it.(p.5)

(But as late as the movie On the Beach in 1959, with Gregory Peck as the captain of a nuclear submarine in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon, the male characters are all constructed around the courage archetype and the female characters around the chastity archetype.)

Obviously, I now realize that male honor -- courage and the reputation for courage -- comes in two cultures. There is the positive side and the negative side. There is the Culture of Courage in the Hero and there is the Culture of Insult in the Adversary. I get that from Jordan B. Peterson in his Maps of Meaning.

So, when men are hurling insults at each other, they are not as good as they could be. Because the Man of Courage, the Hero, is above all that.

Hmm. And here I have been encouraging men to throw the insult of racism right back in the face of the pathetic liberal pejorator (perjorator is one who hurls pejoratives: I just coined it). Obviously, in the Culture of Courage, our Hero would not throw the insult right back. On the other hand he would not cringe either, and whine that he was not a racist, no, because some of his best friends are black. Still, to throw an insult at a vile liberal pejorator requires a significant degree of courage, particularly if the liberal pejorator gets in touch with HR and gets you fired.

But what would the pure Hero, sans peure et sans reproche, do? I'll have to think about that.

Now let's get to the female side of the equation, where honor is chastity and the reputation for chastity. Here, obviously, we have a Culture of ChastityPraise and a.Culture of Complaint. But whatabout the archetypes? I don't know where this will end up, but I think we have to start with Good Girl and Mean Girl. The practitioner of the Culture of Praise is the Good Girl, the Virgin, that is pure and innocent and sees nothing but good around her. The practitioner of the Culture of Complaint is the Mean Girl, of high school memory, who is always poking holes in the chaste pretentions of the other women in her community of women. That, after all, is what the iconic "I can't believe she..." remark is all about. Don't imagine that the the girl next door is a sweet innocent, 'cos I got the goods on her.

The point about the Hero and the Culture of Courage is, to return with Bowman to the savage, the defense of the border which can be psychologized into the border between Order and Chaos. The point about the Good Girl and the Culture of Praise, with Bowman, is the management of the hearth and home. If we go back to our chimpanzee friends, the males are defending the band's territory so that the females can bear and feed and rear the baby chimps. That's according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. The Good Girl is doing all the things that need to be done about the hearth -- Latin: vesta, as in Vestal Virgins -- or, as we say, keep the home fires burning.

The point is that in the Culture of Praise the Good Girl is getting on with the things that need to be done with good cheer, while in the Culture of Complaint the Mean Girl is busy critiquing all the other women because they aren't doing the things that need to be done, according to the judgement of the Mean Girl. The Mean Girl is perfect, of course.

So, in this analysis, the Culture of Insult and the Culture of Complaint are both perversions. The Insulter is faking the courage of the Hero, and the Complainer is faking the innocence of the Good Girl.

Notice that Insults and Complaints are easy peasy; anyone can do them. But what does the courageous Hero do? What does the chaste Good Girl do? Good question.

See, living the life of Courage or of Praise is hard. That's why the Hero has to go on a Hero's Journey to find out what it really means to be a hero. And the chaste Good Girl? Despite the pretensions of the Heroine's Journey and all those unbelievable superheroines around these days, the life of a woman is lived moment to moment; she doesn't get to go off into the underworld for a spell. That is why women are eternally agonizing about the right thing to do. There's a word women use for this, but I have forgotten it.

Well, obviously this is just the start. Who knows where it will lead?

Chinese Flu: Too Much or Too Little?

The central question disturbing us right now is whether the Chinese Flu -- known to the wokerati as COVID-19 -- is a global pandemic that will result in millions of deaths or an overblown nothing-burger that is panicking us into stopping the economy dead in its tracks.

A question that is burning in all hearts is whether President Trump acted too soon or too late, too little or too much.

Before we answer the question we must understand that President Trump is a politician, and politics is the art of the possible.

So, let us ask ourselves whether it was possible in mid-January for President Trump to stop flights from China. The answer is obvious: No. He would have been accused of trying to interfere with the serious and troubling issues that were being addressed in the House impeachment and Senate trial on Russia, Russia, Russia.

But at the end of January he halted flights from China, and in his State of the Union speech, just before Speaker Pelosi tore it up, he promised a vigorous response to the virus. So I would say that Trump has been on the leading edge of responsiveness, but not on the bleeding edge.

Let us now ask whether the President is doing too little or too much. Should he have locked the Nation down two weeks ago? Or should he have refused to panic and said that, hey, this looks like a normal flu-type bug, not much different that a regular winter flu?

Again, the answer lies in the fact that politics is the art of the possible. Could President Trump have shut the nation down on March 1? I doubt it. It would have been universally laughed and sneered at as a ridiculous overreaction. But suppose he had waited until today, Friday March 20? Then, I think, he would have been laughed and sneered at as waiting too long.

The truth is that leadership of any kind depends on getting in front of the herd, but not too much. YOu must be seen to be protecting the People, but not treating them like cattle. And the fact is that President Trump is quite an experienced leader, much more so than 97 percent of the poiticians in Washington DC.

Why is that? It is because the skills and qualifications of the average politician are all about running for elective office. That is what they do. But actually leading and sucking it in and making tough decisions, knowing that 33 percent of them will be the wrong decision? Not so much.

President Trump, on the other hand, has lived a life of decision-making in his various businesses. You can say that he has truly experienced life on the edge. And he has experienced his share of failure.

Trump is unlike our average crop of Harvard-Yale educated and evolved elite that live in a pretty safe-space world where the system looks after them, provided they pay their dues and don't step out of line. And that, I think, explains why the president always seems to be half a block ahead of them.

There has been a bit of criticism that Trump's White House is chaotic and he runs through chiefs of staff like toilet paper. But I think that misses the point. The White House staff system is intended to enable the President to escape from the chaos of daily events, and preside like a god over the nation. I think that setup exists partly because your average president -- I am thinking of you, Barack -- can't handle the stress and chaos of leadership. And so he needs a staff to make the world look like it is manageable.

In reality, the world is not manageable. It is chaotic, and you never know when and where the Dragon of Chaos is going to show up next. If you manage your interface with the world to make sure the Dragon is kept out of sight, well, then maybe you are not going to be ready when it is time to act.

Probably the next big decision that President Trump will have to make, after the masks are flowing freely and the Chloroquine is available all across the fruited plain, is to say OK, now it's time to start getting back to normal.

Based on his performance so far he will make the decision a little after he should have done, based on facts and reason, but still a little too soon for the Good Little Girls in the media worried about their hair and the racism of calling the COVID-19 virus the Wu Flu.

And then it will be on to the election, and who knows how that will turn out?

Only I would say this. To have set up Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee for 2020 is getting close to another proof of God's existence.

Great Reaction: The Left's Neo-Knight Errantry

I argue that the left represents a Great Reaction, a religious and cultural and political attempt to return to the past. My Maxim is:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice, social justice is good old loot and plunder.

What's not to like! But I wondered a bit about the medieval knight-errantry bit. Was that really true, or was I over-determining a bit?

Well, I spent a few days reading some medieval romances in a college textbook collection, including the story of "Perceval," the Grail Knight, from Chrétien de Troyes, "Tristan and Isolt" from Gottfried von Strassburg, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" by Anonymous.

Chrétien de Troyes, according to La Wik, flourished from 1160-1191. Gottfried con Strassburg, according to La Wik died in 1210. And, of course, for Brits there is "La Morte d'Arthur" a reworking of the tales by Sir Thomas Malory who lived 1415-1471 according to La Wik.

All of the narratives are highly colored. The court of the king is incredibly lush and rich, cloaked in costly fabrics, inlaid with gold, and banners are flying, and the queens are astonishingly beautiful and attended by beauteous maidens. And the feasts! The meat! And fine wines! They go on for days! But not to worry, all these chaps are deeply religious, observing all the Christian festivals and getting shriven and making confession before they ever go off on their palfreys into the wilds.

Well, if you were entertaining the rough tough medieval barons in the long winter evenings how would you do it? Exactly. You would concoct stories to flatter your hosts. Here is a piece that I particularly liked, as Sir Gawain arrives at the moat of the castle of the Green Knight in the middle of nowhere.

The wall ran down into the water wonderfully deep, and towered up to a huge height above it, wrought of hard hewn stone right up to the cornices, and with bantels of the best under the battlements. There were fair turrets fashioned between, with many loopholes designed to shut fast.

Yeah. I imagine that every second-tier baron of those days wanted a castle like that. In his dreams.

We know a bit about what those barons and bishops and knights were really like. They were rascals. Here is the Frankish drive to the east under Clovis, in 500 AD from The Barbarian Conversion by Richard Fletcher.

It was the obvious direction for Frankish kings to turn when the annual campaigning season came around: let us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.

Golly. It seems really similar to modern progressive government that depends upon "regular, successful, predatory" taxation to reward the regime's supporters and maintain political power.

In our day we have similar "romances" to tell the glorious story of the progressive intellectuals and reformers. One of the most durable is the idea that Fidel Castro in Cuba may have been a tyrant, but at least he did literacy and provided universal health care. And our Sixties Kidz all went around with a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. And there is the iconography we saw in the Soviet Union of Marx to Engels to Lenin to Stalin.

In progressive narrative riots and rebellions are represented as "demonstrations" a polite way of saying "show of force." But then "demonstration" was further softened into "peaceful protest." And thus a "mostly peaceful protest" is the modern term for a violent riot.

Thus rebel is transformed into "revolutionary" rather than "agitator" and now into "activist."

And street riots are turned into the street theater of Extinction Rebellion that provides opportunities for well-born maidens to dress up and do their hair.

The point is that politics and kingship in the Middle Ages was a pretty thuggish affair. You had to be rough and tough and rougher and tougher than the baron next door. And when castles came in in the 9th and 10th centuries having the biggest and bestest castle became the name of the game, because until guns appeared, a castle made you the master of all you surveyed. And of course you wanted to dress it up into something glorious and fashionable, with banners flying and queens beautiful and damsels dimpled.

Likewise, our modern progressive government is a pretty thuggish affair, spending money on its supporters that it has forcibly taken from ordinary wage-earners and businesses. Its devotees are instinctively eager to dress it up in noble robes, a knightly quest to succour the victims and protect them from oppression.

But whatever they do and say, government is still force, taking money from one person and giving it to another.

That was the point of Don Quixote, to laugh and sneer at the whole medieval romance genre, and imagine a guy that actually tried to make the medieval fantasy a reality.

We await our Miguel de Cervantes to write the novel that will satirize the whole progressive conceit into embarrassment.

Because I say that the whole point of the Great Reaction is a last desperate attempt to make politics relevant and pretty before we go forward into a post political era where politics has become a minor irritant while most people just get on with their business, and their wiving and thriving, having got past the notion that force and compulsion should be front and center in human life.

For are we not, at heart, social animals that have learned how to minimize the resort to expensive and deadly force?

Time to Kill The Racism Virus

By now everybody knows that the MSM has jumped on board the Xi train and accused President Trump and others of "racism" for calling the COVID-19 virus the China virus.

Oh yeah! You should always go with the experts at the WHO. And the propagandists in the totalitarian regimes.

Never mind that the US media -- hello New York Times -- has been carrying water for the Commies since the 1950s, what with NYT reporter Herbert Matthews hailing Cuba's murderous dictator Fidel Castro. Not to mention the 1930s when NYT reporter Walter Duranty wrote of the Ukrainian famine: What famine?

And never mind that the Chi-Coms are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket now that facts on the ground are telling us that we need to be a lot less dependent on the global supply chain. I mean, the Chic-Coms, that apparently produce 95 percent of our antibiotics, have been threatening us with a cutoff. If we don't stop the racism! See, they are looking at a real economic depression if the US and Europe decide to lower their dependence on manufacturing in totalitarian countries. So of course they are trying to intimidate us and change the subject.

You would think that any journalist worth her byline would be extremely skeptical of government memes out of China right now. Even if she was emotionally consumed with writing her next article about her hair.

But hey! If you are a mindless liberal journalist "racism"-in-the-air is like blood-in-the-water for sharks. You can't help yourself.

Now if I were the editor, or the publisher, or the owner of The New York Times I would have put the race-baiting journalists on Social Distancing without pay for 30 days or until the arc of the China Virus epidemic curve started to bend towards justice. That's what I would do. But I dare say that NYT owner Carlos Slim rather enjoys watching the gringos in a cat-fight.

I say, never mind about them. Whatabout us?

And I say that it is 30 years past the time when there was any moral warrant to name, shame, and shun "racists." Because hey, racial discrimination is illegal. And the only real racists are loser white crackers parading around with tiki-torches. If there is still racial discrimination in America then pull the FBIs off Michael Flynn and put them to work on investigating acts of racial discrimination and sending the results to the local Soros-funded prosecutor.

I mean. There is a difference, dontcha think, between some guy making a racist tweet and some innocent POC being denied a job or a place in university because of racial discrimination. One of the two is not like the other. One of them is an act of racial discrimination, and the other is just some jerk mouthing off.

So I say that this China Virus racist flap is the ideal moment to declare that we deplorables are not going to cringe in fear any time someone call us racists. Not any more. It is time to stop apologising.

Indeed it is time to hit back, using the eternal male Culture of Insult that is connected back into the male culture of honor, which is courage. We males are expendable, anyway, as the millions of men that died in the armies of the rulers of the world down the ages have proved.

Here are a few insults for you to try out when next you are accused of being a racist.

"Wait a minute! I thought you cupcakes said that race didn't exist!

"That's an insult to all the African-Americans that died under slavery down the ages!"

"So's your father, buttercup!"

"It takes one to know one!" 

"Know what racists and anti-racists have in common? A vile obession with race."

"Yeah, call me racist-sexist-homophobe, snowflake. I don't care!" 

"Know what really gets me? The hate that educated whites have poured on poor white trash down the centuries." 

"Wow! You really are a hater. I had no idea!"

Notice that you should add the patronizing "cupcake" "buttercup" or "snowflake" according to taste and opportunity.

Now, if you are lunching with a liberal woman friend the rules are different. Because with women we cannot use the male Culture of Insult. Instead we are acting out the female Culture of Complaint and are always talking about a third person who has said or done something that should be named, shamed, and shunned.

So when some third person is branded a racist, as in "I can't believe she would say something so racist," you say:

"But, like, Susie in my book club who is, like, a Gender Studies professor says that race doesn't exist." 

"So, like, I always worry about which are the worse haters, the racists or the activists." 

"I worry that making that a racism thing makes it, like, harder to deal with real racism."

I leave the "like"s and "I can't believe"s and "uptalk" to you. You know best how to emotionally manipulate your women friends.

We can't finish this without reminding ourselves of the words of the noble Democratic sage, Rahm Emanuel, who said:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste."

And two can play at that game. Cupcake.

Really? We Can't Make Art Beautiful Because Ugliness?

I only found out about Alma Deutscher a couple of days ago. Because reasons. And I don't know whether she is a musical genius or just another musical prodigy. The Wall Street Journal says of her "A Girl Makes Music Without Irony or Ugliness."

What? No irony? No ugliness? What's her problem? As she says told the audience in Carnegie Hall last December:

But some people have told me that nowadays, melodies and beautiful harmonies are no longer acceptable in serious classical music, because, in the 21st century, music must reflect the ugliness of the modern world.

Really? I admit I never thought of it that directly. But, as Rush Limbaugh says: she just nailed it.

So the modern artists think the world is an ugly place and art ought to reflect that.

Really? More ugly than Vienna at the turn of the 19th century when chaps like Beethoven were perpetually sick as dogs from the urban pathogens -- and lack of personal hygiene -- and Beethoven couldn't get it on with his aristocratic girl students because class barriers, darling.

Actually, I think the problem is that too many artists and composers get sinecures from universities and so don't have to develop a popular style to earn their Benjamins.

Anyway, Deutscher wrote a waltz about sirens:

In the piece, “Siren Sounds Waltz,” the music moves from the dissonant sounds of Vienna’s city center, with its noise and ambulance sirens, to a buoyant big-hearted waltz in which the “sirens” are made to sound like Homer’s rather than Vienna’s.

What? Deutscher knows about those pesky sirens that bothered our pal Odysseus on his way home to Penelope in Ithaca? How did she ever get to do that in this world of "woke" education? Oh, I see...

“I don’t go to school,” she says. “I’m home-schooled. I read lots and lots of books about almost everything—history, geography, fiction, science, whatever. As long as they’re interesting.” 

But, but, but! How in the world does she have the time for a classical education when she is a concert level violinist and pianist and has composed a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and two operas?

But she does echo the pyschologists who say that the unconscious mind is the ruler of all.

She has spoken elsewhere of melodies coming to her from an early age, so I ask if they get in the way of her study. “Very often,” she says. “Sometimes when I’m talking to someone or trying to concentrate on something, a melody will come. It never comes when you want it to come.” But, she points out, “composition is not like inspiration that just comes out of the head and onto the page. It’s work. I have studied many scores. The greatest teachers are the old masters. I’ve studied the scores of Richard Strauss,  of Beethoven,  of Mozart and many others.”

Deutscher raises an interesting question for me. How do we recover a tradition of beauty in art? From the people that insist that we live in an ugly world, riven by exploitation, oppression, hegemony, and all the rest. And that irony is the only thing?

Not that our Betters in the Gentry ever exploited, oppressed anyone. Oh no. Because they are the good guys.

You know. I would say that our modern problem is not that we are too ugly but that we are too bland. If anything, the appetite for ugly among the cognoscenti represents an effort to get away from bland and experience something real, something original.

And, of course, the easiest way to be original is to be ugly, or break something. Being beautiful is a lot harder. And imagining beautiful without getting into kitsch is harder still.

It's interesting, innit. Right now we are experiencing a number of teenage-girl phenoms, from St. Greta Thunberg of Climate to her German opposite Naomi Seibt. And now Alma Deutscher.

What I experience in Naomi Seibt and Alma Deutscher is a complete absence of postmodern cant. They almost sound like they actually read a book rather than recited teacher's lesson.

Considering my prejudice about Good Little Girls that hate and fear from day to day as they are carefully taught, it is a welcome dose of reality.

All I can say is God bless the good ship Alma Deutscher and all that sail in her.

Uncertainty Doesn't Go Away

In the middle of the current Coronavirus panic Martin van Creveld, the strategist, reviews the scene to remind us that things are not tied down.

He remarks on a new book about how we are soon going to transform ourselves from Homo Sapiens into Homo Deus, where we will be able "to look into the future and control our fate" much better than before.

But will we really? We thought we had it all tied down back in the Age of Reason with mechanical theories from the likes of "Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and others."

Many nineteenth century scientists in particular believed not just that the world is deterministic but that, such being the case, they would one day be able to predict whatever was about to take place in it.

This was considered to be a great improvement on the old days when the only way to get a handle on things was with divine help from gods and spirits and seers. Even after the revolution in physics with relativity and quantum theory scientists, even including Stephen Hawking, were still spinning the idea that "there only remained a few minor gaps to be closed."

But Creveld is having none of it. Responding to young students who wondered how they could ever learn what he knew, he drew a little square on the blackboard, and a slightly bigger one next to it. The little square was the students' knowledge. The slightly bigger one was his, Creveld's, knowledge. The blackboard was the scope of all available knowledge.

That is my understanding of the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We still don't know nothin'.

And it's remarkable. On the one hand we have evolved as animals that have wived and thrived on this earth to a remarkable extent. On the other, the whole of the world of life except us operates without our fabulous human reason. How does that work?

Used to be that we sneered at our forefathers for their ignorance and superstition. But what exactly should we do about the current Coronavirus scare? There are all kinds of possibilities, from Do Nothing and let the virus work its way through the population and pick everything up after it's all over, to Stop the World and quarantine everyone until the virus gives up. So, which one does our science recommend? And which one does our human social instinct, which, scientists say, is the key to our survival thus far?

You tell me.

In other words, we are just as hopeless at forecasting the future as we ever were. And no sooner do we figure that we have it all figured out than life comes along and reminds us that we don't have a clue.

You will notice that there are several strategies for life and survival. There is the small organism and thousands of eggs approach, favored by the insect world. There is the large organism and succor of the young approach that mammals and humans prefer. There is the non-social plan of solitary species like the orangutan and the incredibly social organization of termites. And every combination in between.

What does it all mean? And what if it doesn't mean anything?

The fact is that life and the world were a mystery when humans thought of the sun god riding his chariot through the heavens. And it is all still a mystery when we reckon the universe as unimaginably big, and we can't decide whether there is a universe or multiverses.

To use the current fashion of talking about "scale," it seems that the the world we live in is a mystery, at whatever scale you choose to experience it.

And what does that mean?

Are Democrats Getting Desperate?

One of the basic tent-pegs holding up my world view is the notion developed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. The idea is that there comes a time in every revolution where the revolutionaries get desperate. Despite the glorious prophecy, the New Age has not dawned.

Why? It's got to be the reactionaries, the kulaks, the saboteurs and wreckers. In our day, of course, it's the racist-sexist-homophobes. Did you know that it is xenophobic to refer to the Chinese Flu instead of the WHO approved COVID-19?

What to do? The answer is always the same: pedal to the metal. Push the movement's agenda to the utmost. Stop compromising with the other side. Push them out of the way.

In the French Revolution it was the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In the Bolshevik Revolution it was Death to the Kulaks. In Maoist China it was the Great Leap Forward followed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Now I believe that in the United States we are seeing the failure of the progressive agenda. I think we are seeing that the big government adminisrative state doesn't work. I think we are seeing that the Sexual Revolution doesn't work. I think we are seeing that the regulatory state doesn't work. I think we are seeing that "I am woman, hear me roar" doesn't work.

That is why the left is accusing everyone of being a racist-sexist-homophobe.

And so our wokerati friends are overreaching. In California they are trying to kill the "gig" economy -- meaning especially Uber and Lyft -- with the so-called AB5 act -- and are demolishing the arts, including writers and musicians. In Oregon they are so determined to save the climate that they are steamrollering a cap-and-trade policy past a desperate GOP opposition and the Democratic governor is now implementing the policy by executive action. Here in Washington State the Democrats are pushing a cap-and-trade bill. What is cap and trade?

a system for controlling carbon emissions and other forms of atmospheric pollution by which an upper limit is set on the amount a given business or other organization may produce but which allows further capacity to be bought from other organizations that have not used their full allowance

See? Another "system," beloved of bureaucrats and ideologists.

Because there is no time to be lost! The climate deniers, funded by eevil oil and gas interests, are going to kill us. Unless we act now.

And the Democrats in Washington have been running a three-year campaign to hinder and humiliate President Trump in every way possible. Including a special prosecutor investigation and an impeachment effort. Now, according to reports, House Democrats are trying to put abortion policy into emergency legislation to help deal with the Hunan Virus Epidemic.

Yeah, you might say. What is wrong with these people? What happened to bipartisan compromise and both sides working together?

What is wrong is that the world promised by the prophets is not working out for them. All the things their prophets told their supporters are turning out false. And so they are getting desperate; they are turning up the volume.

Well, here's my Prophecy. It's all going to collapse, the whole lefty world view. Because? Because the progressive agenda is a conceit of the educated Gentry that does nothing for ordinary Commoners. It is an excuse for the educated Gentry to puff itself up with Important Issues and activisme and peaceful protests and Goals and Timetables. But it does nothing for ordinary people.

And, I would argue, it devastates the Clients, the Subordinates, the grateful serfs that suck on the tit of the admninstrative state and its entitlement programs. But that is another story.

So our lefty friends are desperately lunging for the finish line. One last WWI-style Big Push. One last ideological purge to clear the world of deplorables and haters.

The argument of Anatomy of Revolution is that the Reign of Terror is followed by a Thermidorean Reaction that ends up as Napoleon.

The Thermidorian Reaction was a liberal-conservative counter-revolution that followed the toppling of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794. It wound back the Reign of Terror, purged the government of Jacobin influence and attempted to restore some of the political, social and economic values of 1789.

Brinton argued that the ideological frenzy of revolution cannot be sustained. Eventually, people demand to return to ordinary life.

In our day, if you like, the Sixties Kids were followed by the Nixon Reaction of the Silent Majority and the Reagan era.

And the "fundamental transformation" of Barack Obama was followed by the Trump Reaction of the bitter clingers and deplorables.

Notice the common denominator of the Nixon and the Trump Reaction? Both Reactions were really revolts of the Commoners. Or, as Nietzsche might have said if he were writing today, revolts against the hoity-toity Gentry secular "priests" that were teaching us to hate ourselves.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe this time really is the Millennium of the Wokerati. Maybe.

What's that? You are looking for a bridge to buy?

Keeping a Proper Distance: A Strategy for Foreign Policy

About four years ago this crazy orange-haired businessman ran for President of the United States on a platform of putting America First. As Conservative Tree House puts it, this whacky guy proposed:

1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States.  A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States.  A return to economic independence.
3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products.  China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

Well I Never! Whaddya think of that, here in the US and A on March 12, 2020?

What I want to know is: who is the brains trust behind President Trump? Is it really Trump himself? Or his son-in-law Jared Kushner? Or who or what?

Because today it looks almost like divine intervention, the old saw about God taking care of children, drunks, and the good old US of A.

The alternative is to accept that Donald Trump has an astonishing strategic mind. And that is impossible, right, geniuses?

The point is that Trump has been pretty cagey about a lot of things. We were all taught to believe that his 2016 campaign was a complete amateur hour. Then, after the election, Brad Parscale appeared on FoxNews and talked about their social-media campaign and how they targeted this and that, and so on.

What! I thought that Trump was supposed to be totally winging it. And yet managed to target exactly the states that put him over the top -- with the help of Parscale who was creating websites at the Trump Organization back in the day.

Now, with the "foreign virus" -- yeah! Call me a xenophobe! -- he is looking like a genius. What! You mean to say that nearly all our antibiotics are made in China? Who knew? We oughta do something about that!

When you look at the three principles listed by CTS above, you see that Trump is arguing for a certain distance between the US and other nations.

But the question is: how distant? I have an idea.

Take President Putin's latest announcement, that allows him two more terms as president of Russia. I'd say that the US needs to keep a distance from nations that have presidents-for-life. Nothing personal, you understand.

So that would also mean we keep a distance from China, with President-for-life Xi.

Nothing personal, you understand. Nothing xenophobic. Heavens no. It's just that any guy that signs himself up to be president for life is missing the point. In fact he is dumb as a post, and dangerous for that reason.

You see, politics is a blunt instrument, basically designed to defend the border from the baddies. It doesn't take a genius to do that. But the dirty secret about border defense is that the defenders expect to be paid for their trouble: loot and plunder. So the longer the current leader gets to run the border-defense racket the deeper will be the corruption of his regime.

And since politics is usually a succession of one stupidity after another, it can't hurt to change one idiot for another.

Plus, we democratic societies have found, after about a decade of one chap in power, the voters start to feel it is Time for a Change.

So we Yanks should keep regimes at arm's length that go in for president for life or for mullahs for life. Just not our kind, darling.

Here's something to think about. How about the European Union, that seems to be a bureaucracy for life? Yeah. Good point, senator. Maybe we should keep a certain distance from those chaps too. Not as much as the presidents-for-life, of course, but still...

Here is my thought on politics. In chimpanzee society it makes sense to defend the border to the death, because the whole troop depends on the food -- and baby-chimp -- growing capacity of the troop's territory. That is according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. But as soon as you get humans on the job the absolute necessity for enough food on the land becomes less important, because humans trade, and human trade seems to go back about 200,000 years before even the Dawn of Agriculture.

Still, right through the agricultural era, the basis of wealth and security was food-growing land with a bit of trading on the side. So humans put a high priority on defense of the homeland.

But now, food is something you put on grain ships in the harbor of Vancouver, BC, and send across the world.

But do you see? The less that the food-growing capacity of our sacred land equals survival the less we need warriors on the border and charismatic leaders to lead them.

Put it in a different way: the less important food-growing becomes to our well-being, the less we need brave warriors and a warrior elite to protect us.

Thus, to say that a President Putin is so essential that he must stay as president into his 80s is baloney. Russia doesn't need to be led by a charismatic leader. Same with China. Just get on with producing stuff and selling it. And never mind being the charismatic leader.

But whatabout the danger of Donald Trump, the charismatic leader?

Good point. But see, here in these United States we have a Constitutional Amendment restricting presidents to two terms. And we also have a cultural and political elite that would take poison rather than allow Trump a third term.

So, no worries. And anyway, I dare say that Trump will have a recession in his second term, and everyone will agree that we need the Democrats in office again.

And in 2021 Trump will leave office and everyone will live happily ever after.

'Splaining the Democrats for Deplorables Like You and Me

Well. Now we know. After Super Tuesday and Mini Tuesday, now that Joe Biden looks like the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democrats in 2020. In the Democratic Party, the party of equality, there is too a hierarchy.

It goes like this.

Top dog is the old hand-out-the-free-stuff guy still keeping on keeping on: that's Joe Biden. And it makes complete sense that he is barely able to put a sentence together. Because the program of the administrative welfare state has really got past its sell-by date. We know that slowly and steadily bringing everything under the aegis of political control really does not work. It usually buys the next election, but at what price?

Second-in-command is the politics-as-religion guy, who is trying to make the ancient practice of border defense amped up into loot and plunder into a sacred faith: that's Bernie Sanders. Interesting that the Kidz are the key supporters. What is it about our normal religions that does not speak to the educated young'uns?

Third is the high-status feminist woman: that's Elizabeth Warren. It's interesting to me that her line is part free stuff, part the moral necessity of free stuff, and part identity politics where you are sexist if you don't support her.

Back of the bus are the varous Coalition of the Fringes candidates: the gay guy, the minority woman, the black guy, the fake Hispanic guy.

Do you mind if I say that all these notions are bankrupt?

Look, I can understand that, back in the 19th century, it seemed like a good idea to bring the working class into national politics by offering them free stuff. On a modest scale it doesn't hurt too much. But if entitlement programs add up to 20 percent of GDP then, old chap, we are pushing it. In particular we have a problem because it becomes impossible to reform the entitlements, the free-stuff handouts. That means that they will only get fixed when we have a generational economic crisis, one that makes the 2008 crash look like a walk in the park.

Look, I get the moral framework of socialism -- in the context of the mid 19th century when it seemed sensible for a chap like Marx to imagine the future dominated by power-hungry capitalists like the feudal era had been dominated by power-hungry lords and barons. Only it turned out that the capitalists were not that interested in power. Indeed, the lesson of the last century is that the socialists are the power-hungry monsters, not the capitalists. And the socialists refuse to learn the basic lesson that it is not a good idea to combine politics and religion. I mean, how dumb-or-somep'n can you be not to see that ideological political regimes that totalize religion into politics are a recipe for global human disaster?

Look, I get the ambition of high-status women. Why should high-status men get all the power and the adulation? Hey! I'm as good as any man! Look at my degrees! Well, I would say that there is no privilege in America that comes close to the privilege of high-status white women. The feminist idea that women are helpless victims is a bunch of baloney. Oh sure, low-status women have it pretty rough, and one of the reasons is the sexual revolution advocated by high-status women. Ever thought about that girls?

Look, I understand the logic of identity politics. The Frankfurt School guys were bloody geniuses to convert Marxism from the dialectics of class to the dialectics of race and sex. And if you look at the story of America for the 150 years you see that in wave after wave of immigration the immigrants camped out for a couple of generations in ethnic ghettoes in the cities, each with its private army of criminal gangs. Politicians understood this from the earliest days, and appealed to immigrant voters on the basis of their ethnic origin. So we had the Irish vote, the Catholic vote, the Jewish vote. And now the Hispanic vote and the black vote.

But I say that all this is rubbish, to be tolerated as inevitable survivals from the pre-industrial past. That's why I call it a Great Reaction, a foolish and ignorant return to political and religious memes that had their day but are now worn-out husks.

We must backtrack on entitlements for all, because all economic relationships need to adjust to new social realities, from decade to decade, and the whole point of government programs is to protect favored people from change and make other people pay for it.

We must, all of us, even Good Little Girls like AOC, realize that combining moral ideologies with politics is a recipe for disaster. It leads directly to slavery and economic failure, and millions of dead. Look, our Founders knew that 250 years ago, because they had learned the lessons of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. Then we had a global test on human subjects, something that would never be allowed if we were testing vaccines, that caused the deaths, probably, of 100 million souls.

High-status women need to get a grip and stop mean-girling the rest of society.

We need to understand the sub-national loyalties of people newly arrived in the city. But we need to teach them to leave the culture of Subordinates and become Responsible Commoners that have learned to wive and thrive in the city. Did I tell you I wrote a book about this, Road to the Middle Class?

The amazing thing about the present moment is that President Trump, coming out of nowhere, has invented the politics of catering to the Commoners, the vast world of ordinary people that just go to work, follow the rules, and obey the law.

Instead of the politics of the Democratic Party that caters to the conceits of the Gentry and to the tribal loyalties of the Subordinates.

Golly Geewillikins! No really! Why didn't anyone put this together before. It's so obvious! The very idea! Centering politics and economic policy on the needs and aspirations of ordinary Commoner Americans!

Why in the world did it take a businessman with a flair for reality TV to figure this out? Where were all the intellectual geniuses? The political scientists? The moral philosophers? The political consultants?

Well, I guess the answer is pretty simple. It never occurred to anyone because the thinkers and philosophers and intellectuals and politicians are all educated Gentry. And really, none of us can think outside the box of our own class interests and think about how life looks to the lowly Commoner.

What is Best in Life for Children of the Privileged?

Back in the old days things were simple. What is best in life?

For a male chimpanzee: Get to the border with two of your pals and kill any chimp from another troop that shows up.

For a hunter-gatherer: Have a jolly good hunt, and, by the way, keep the other tribe on their side of the border?

For a medieval romance hero: Make sure it is your opponent's lance that shivers into splinters. And then head for bed and hope to wake up to discover some sweet damsel dressed in green samite bathing your face in her tears.

For Conan the Barbarian: To drive his enemies before him and hear the lamentation of their women.

For a feudal aristocrat: To boldly outdare the dangers of the time and get to wear that kingly crown.

For a post-feudal aristocrat: Get a seat in the House of Commons and make a name for yourself.

For the sons of the bourgeoisie: Become a lefty activist, like Marx and Engels and Horkheimer and Marcuse and Bill Ayers.

And now this kid, one of a generation of "Liberal Children of Privilege" that are having a grand old time acting like the tribunes of the marginalized.

[Carlos] Maza, who goes by the name “gay wonk,” is known for whining about people who’ve earned a lot of money and trying to “cancel” conservatives for making fun of him.

HIs mother and her fiance made millions with a software startup. So the kid has plenty of money to get on social media and "cancel" people.

Actually, I think that this highlights the Great Problem of this age, and indeed all previous ages.

Whatabout the children of the rich and powerful?

We all know that What is Best in Life for Conan the Barbarian. But whatabout his son? Yeah! You ever thought about his problem? What does he do, given that his dad already did all the enemy-driving and lamentation-of-women stuff?

In The Millionaire Next Door social scientists Stanley and Danko proposed that what millionaire moms do is they send their kids into the well-paid professions, like doctors and lawyers, because to repeat the millionaire success of dad goes against the odds. And, of course, that solid professional life starts with the most selective college possible.

But obviously the hands-down favorite for rich kids is to become a lefty activist. And it obviously appeals to the young: see the Bernie Bros and the enthusiasm of lefty college activists to descend on their cancel victim of the day. Like that girl student who dared, dared to say that socialism was more deadly than the Wuhan Flu. Well, the activists taught her a lesson!

But let us be serious, for a change. Our era is a revolutionary era, meaning that in the last 200 years we have utterly transformed society from agriculture to industry. And now, it seems from industry to the knowledge game.

In the old days the future of rich kids was clear. You inherited the lands of your father; you made a good marriage; you jostled with the other grandees at Court. Second sons and daughters, of course, had a harder time of it.

But now the war cray is "to become creative." An artist, a writer, an activist. It all sounds pretty straight forward, only it ain't.

The problem is that the whole point of being Gentry or being a People of the Creative Self is that just having a good job, good marriage, home and kids is not good enough for someone that wants to differentiate himself or herself from ordinary Commoners. Gentry kids want to be something special.

Only, being something special is really hard.

Here's the deal. And the philosophers and psychologists and mythologists are pretty clear on this.

To be a shooting star, a Hero, means becoming not just a tin-pot dictator or social-media "cancel" artist. It means being a Sacrificial Hero. It starts with the perilous journey into the underworld of the unconscious, from which you probably won't return. And if you do return from a successful encounter then, following Joseph Campbell, you may indeed return with a "Boon" for mankind.

"The Ultimate Boon" is the benefit, favor, or blessing that is bestowed on the hero figure. There is a drive for the hero to share the boon with humankind, whether it is an elixir of immortality, a holy grail, true love, perfect knowledge, or the meaning of life.

Or, in the version from Jordan B. Peterson, you return as the Sacrifical Hero, dying on the border between Order and Chaos while converting a small area of unknown Chaos into known Order.

Or, you become Nietzsche's Übermensch and that means stepping out of the "herd" and daring to go where no man dared to go before, stripped of all the comforts of home and the swaddling blankets of religion.

In other words, a real creative life is not Sunday in the park. It is a confrontation with demons; it is being "stressed" to the limit. It is to submit yourself to the Ultimate Truth -- and certainly not submit other people to your Ultimate Truth.

And that is one of the reasons I say that everything about the Left is a lie, including "and" and "the." In the narrative of the left the Noble Activist gets to bend the arc of history towards justice and the activist or the progressive politician, participating, as AOC recently said, in a mass movement.

No it ain't. They lied to you, honey.

White Trash: The View from Mt. Olympus

I had been thinking I ought to read White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg ever since it was published in early 2016. Naturally, I was afraid that it would be just the usual liberal rubbish. But you never know: I might learn something!

Yes indeedy, the Better Sort of people have every been worried about

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.

And the Better Sort has been worried about them for centuries.

But who are they, these problems? How, for instance, do they fit into a three-layer social theory like Curtis Yarvin's Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

Well, I have to admit they don't. They are lower-order people that aren't part of the system. They are "off the grid." And that is what is so threatening about them. They are living in the swamp, in the woods. They are people who upped and went "out west" and now they are living in despicable shacks up in the hills, multiple generations in one room and who knows who is shacking up with whom. Of course, they don't work. Instead they forage, or hunt, or steal, or... well, who knows exactly how they manage?

But what are we going to do about them? I guess when you are the ruling class, or the Gentry class that does the ruling class's bidding, the fact of an unorganized rabble out there that isn't connected into your power tributary system is clearly a problem. Suppose they get out of control?

Obviously the solution to the White Trash problem has changed over the years. Back in the day, they got shoved off the land they occupied as it got scarfed up by politically connected gentry. That was when agricultural land was the foundation of wealth.

At the turn of the 20th century Gentry people were into Darwinist eugenics. So the solution was the stop these defectives from breeding.

During the New Deal the solution was to try and round them up and put them into model communities funded by the government. Or build bloody big dams with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In the Sixties, it was time to make fun of them with TV series like The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Or was it? After all, by putting hillbilles into Beverly Hills, you get to hit two birds with one stone, White Trash and Movie Moguls.

ON the other hand, with NASCAR and 1970s TV series like Smokey and the Bandit we are starting to celebrate hillbilly values. Or with the movie Deliverance showing the country hicks as dangerous monsters threatening young male city-slickers.

Or, with the 1980s, we get Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at their PTL Club evangelical TV show. And later reality shows like Here Comes Honey Bo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

The truth is that Our Betters really don't have a clue what to do with the out-of-control White Trash. And Isenberg reflects that truth. She's a professor at Louisiana State University and her book carefully hews to the liberal line.

So she's outraged by the snobby attitude towars mudsills and clay-eaters in the 19th century. She is appalled by eugenicists in the early 20th century. She is understanding about the New Deal effort to clean up the dirty whites. But then what?

Thing get complicated in the Civil Rights era. Because the victims du jour are now poor blacks, not poor whites. So the helpless victims of the New Deal era become the racist followers of Southern segregationists. And Sarah Palin, who came up from pretty humble beginnings to get elected Governor of Alaska and GOP vice-presidential nominee, is dismissed as an ignorant simpleton, the "first female redneck on a presidential ticket... [that] had attended six unremarkable colleges."

Look, I get it. You wanna get a book published by Viking; you gotta toe the ideological line. And these days, we Gentry chappies are concerned about our intersectional Little Darlings, from upper-class women sobbing about sexism in politics to blacks to helpless gays and transgenders, the homeless, and migrants.

So Isenberg gives us a helpful look at conventional Gentry wisdom about the white underclass. In today's Gentry firmament the white underclass is a bit of a bother.  It is, you may think, a "glitch" in the Matrix, something that does not compute with your world view. You brush it aside as an annoying interruption of normally scheduled service. So you understand why President Obama talks about bitter clingers and Hillary Clinton about a "basket of deplorables." And why the media condemned the tiki-torch bearers of Charlottesville as white racists.

Nothing remarkable here. We humans have to brush off things that don't conform with our view of reality. Otherwise we'd never get to work in the morning. Indeed, scientists say, there is no reason to bother about any unexpected informaiton unless it looks like it is going to kill you.

And that is why everyone from professors to activists to the media are out to get Trump. Because if Trump suceeds then he is going to damage their nice comfortable world of sinecures and cultural hegemony.

But White Trash for me points out that all the upper class frenzy down the ages about the fractious lower class is just so much idle chatter. Instead the upper class should just do its job: don't get into stupid wars, don't loot the economy to reward your supporters; don't allow people to scam the system and erect privileges for themselves; don't fall down on the job in the next credit crisis.

Looking at the bigger picture I'd say that every time you have a big event, whether the Industrial Revolution or a big war or a big credit crisis then millions of people are going to be thrown out of the system; many of them will never get their lives together again. But it certainly helps to hand out money to the victims: keeps them from tearing the whole thing down.

Can we do anything else? Education? Training? Model communities? Maybe. But I'd say that 97 percent of all government programs is the Gentry wanting to feel good about itself.

Separating Church and State in Woke America

Courtesy of Instapundit I got to read a Cosmopolitan piece by a woman, Amanda Litman, telling how she felt after the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The night Hillary Clinton lost, I was in the staff section behind the stage at the Javits Center in New York City. Before the grief really hit me, before I took a cab home, sobbing so hard, I had to pull over to throw up, and before the physical toll of two years of working on a presidential campaign overwhelmed me, I remember standing with a coworker, each of us folding our arms in front of our bodies, as if trying to contain all the feelings from flooding out.

And then she babbles on and on about Elizabeth Warren and the Question of the First Woman President, and whether now "'They' would have called it a rule: Women can’t win."

Hey Amanda, you sexist you, how come it matters whether a woman can win or not?

Or this babbling about "A Closer Look at 'White Fragility'Theory," by Valerie Tarico going on forever about white people choking on workplace accusations of racism. Well of course they do, because they can't win against HR and the DIE committee, so they know which side their bread is buttered.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves that we are underlings.

But the bigger question is this. Is racism/sexism/homophobia a Crime, that is a job for policemen, judges and jailers? Or is it a Sin, that is a job for "the priests" and a question of confession and absolution?

Oh well, we don't believe in absolution where racism is concerned, do we, dear liberal friends?

The question of Crime or Sin provides another answer to Nietzsche's problem, about what happens when God is dead.

Nietzsche says that it creates decadence and nihilism and the Eternal Recurrence of the same-old same-old. Until cometh the Übermensch!

Obviously, he lost the plot on that one. Because what has happened is that politics and religion have coalesced into a single totalitarian dictatorship where the police and the priest are combined in one Committee of Public Safety, now known as the local Human Rights Commission in cahoots with the Twitter mob that uses the combined power of government force and social pressure to determine whether you are a sinner against the state religion.

In fact, it is not that hard. Government is what we use when force is required to restore order to the Cosmos. To use an older American argot, Government is what we use to deal with knuckleheads.

Religion is what we use to deal with lesser affronts to social comity. Obviously it is what we should use against fragile whites and their concealed racism. Because it takes a religious expert to see into peoples' hearts. Policemen and jailers, not so much. Policemen are good at dealing with situations where a baton -- or in India a lathi -- would be helpful. Jailers are good at dealing with situations where a lock and key would sort things out.

Now, in my opinion, the reason that President Trump is such a success with the deplorable Commoners is that he doesn't pretend to be anything other than the chap carrying Theodore Roosevelt's Big Stick. Make America Great Again! Keep America Great! Any tribal leader down the ages could have come up with that slogan to keep the young men in the tribe ready for action against the dastardly tribe next door.

But everything else that government now does is girl stuff. By which I mean that when we say that we ought to help the elderly with pensions and health care; we ought to educate the kiddies; we ought to help the poor; we ought to save the climate we are making a moral point. All good people should help the helpless, and if they don't they should be named and shamed and shunned. And serve them right.

But put them in jail and fine them?

And the point is that if we try to deal with knuckleheads using the name and shame method of religion we are going to make fools of ourselves. And if we try to deal with moral lepers that won't help little kiddies with batons and lathis and jail cells we are going to make a complete dog's breakfast of things.

Actually, in the universe imagined by Michael Novak in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, there are three sectors, not two: political, economic, and moral/cultural. And when you combine them you into one you get totalitarianism, straight up.

And that is something about which most people, and especially our emotional lefty women friends, have no idea.

Not surprising of course. Because nobody ever sat them down like good little girls in class and taught them.

Explaining the White Wokerati

I've been complaining for a while about the post-civil rights racial culture. Because I say that if racial discrimination is illegal in these United States then that is final. Any time someone commits a racist act then prosecute them and name and shame and shun them. And yet the interest in "racism" has soared in the post-civil rights era as this Google Ngram chart shows.

I know. How could it be that people have got more concerned about racism since the 1960s, the decade when the US made racism illegal?

(Ngram only goes up to 2008. Lord knows where racism has gone since.)

Up until now I have credited the notion that, once a political movement gets power it can stop being nice and really set about driving its enemies before it and enjoying the lamentation of the women. Or, when the Revolution fails to bring on the millennium, the believers ramp up their belief in a frenzy similar to the Reign of Terror and Virtue in the French Revolution.

But Christopher Caldwell, in his new book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, has another explanation. He has written an article about his argument in Age here.

Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 amounted to a new Constitution. That's because the ruling class decided that it wasn't enough to pass laws against racial discrimination. It had to stamp out the glowing embers.

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964... 

It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.

The point is that the tools that the Civil Rights Act created were thought of originally merely as a tool to humble the South. But that's not what happened.

If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination. 

Wow, the activists realized. This is a tool that we can use to drive our enemies before us. And so,

other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism—ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it. 

And then LGBT got into the action.

Basically, if you are a white male under the new Constitutiojn you are guilty unless proven innocent. And, of course, this guilt falls on ordinary Commoner male whites, folks whose parents might have been the immigrants of the late 19th century that came over in steerage and struggled through two wars and a Great Depression to get their heads above water.

And now, it turns out they are bigots, baskets of deplorables. Shame on them!

OK. Too bad for us Commoner male whites.

Now, according to Caldwell, this new regime goes beyond the normal government sphere of hunting down malefactors. It contains a "moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics."

Do you see how this changes the game for all male whites?

When you have a moral regime you have good and evil, you have saints and sinners. Nobody wants to be a sinner. Heavens no. So what do you do to become a saint and purge yourself of your racist sexist guilt?

Perfectly simple. You join the woke left. You damn everything about white northwestern European culture and become a flagellant monk in the Holy Order of the Bernie Wokerati.

But if you are a dumb Commoner you just go on living your life as a racist-sexist-homophobe deplorable.

However, for the wokerati, this really is a matter of life and death, because a white male cannot get on in a career in the professions, in public corporations, in the arts, in education and especially higher education unless he is a fervent believe in the wokerati faith.

So of course all your educated Gentry are driving Priuses and Leafs and making a public display of their wokeness, and eagerly read their New York Times for new memes with which to sneer at President Trump. That's how you prove that you have acknowledged your sin and been baptized in the River of Jordan, and been born again and saved your evil racist soul from eternal perdition.

Yeah. Funny how it all echoes the moral framework of fundamentalist Christianity that our wokerati absolutely despise! But as Hegel wrote, there's really no difference between the north pole and the south pole of a magnet except that they are opposite.

But how can we escape this moral Underworld? Well, I think that President Trump has made a start. He has stood tall for average Americans, and he has invited blacks and Hispanics into his America First tent. He is inviting them to become all-American Commoners instead of being unequal and separate and Little Darlings in the woke plantations of the educated Gentry.

If that happens that the moral anchor of lefty wokism will be destroyed. Because then lefty wokism will be all about special privileges for upper-crust women and Gentry LGBT, the most privileged people in America.

Gosh. Privileged people defending their privilege. Where have I heard about that before?