The Crisis of White Liberal Hegemony

There are a lot of end-of-the-world opinion columns out today. I wonder why.

Why is the world apparently coming to an end?

Of course, the world is not coming to an end. But politically, culturally, economically?

I think that what is coming to an end is the rule of the white educated middle class.

You can say that the rule of the educated middle class goes all the way back to the late Middle Ages when educated priests in the Roman Catholic Church were setting the agenda.

In the early days, the question was how to wrest political power from the landed nobles and give the educated middle class their rightful place in history.

Then, let us say, it was about bringing the ordinary middle class into the equation. Then the working class.

Because politics is politics, this process always involved a fair amount of loot and plunder. You don't get the political support of people by descanting on noble ideas. You need to address the question of "what is in it for me."

And, in the current era, the government and ruling class have had a lot to give away. Until now.

Call it the Law of Overhanging Fruit. Over the past century, as government expenditure in the US has gone from about 7 percent of GDP to the present 35-40 percent of GDP, the rulers have handed out loot to the parents of school children, to workers for their old age pensions and health care, and welfare for the workless. And lots of jobs for the educated in the various bureaucracies in government, education and corporations.

But now all the low-hanging fruit has been harvested. If we increase government spending to 50 percent of GDP and beyond it is not going to be pretty.

Also, the over-under coalition preferred by the educated ruling class started out with a small educated class and a large working class against a modest sized middle class. It made political sense.

But now the educated ruling class is fairly big -- and that means a lot of Jobs for Gentry are needed before getting down to distributing loot to the lower class. And the middle class is much bigger.

So the voting arithmetic doesn't work as well as it used to.

You can see how this works by comparing the old Marxist equation with the new Wokey equation.

Marx proposed that the poor helpless proletarians should be helped by the Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, in their existential fight against the bourgeoisie. Back then there was a ton of proletarians, a fair amount of bourgeoisie, and just a few Communists.

Today our wokies propose that the helpless "oppressed peoples" should be helped by their lefty "allies" in the fight against "white oppressors." The "white oppressors," I assume are the white working class voters that are presently most notable for their Boat Parades and Car Parades in support of President Trump.

I mean who else could they be? Not the nice liberal ladies in gentrified neighborhoods sporting their #WeBelieve yard-signs. Not the university professors and administrators. Not the corporate execs down for Black Lives Matter. Maybe the local home-builder or construction-equipment rental operator.

The old Marxist political narrative was problematic, starting with the fact that the bourgeoisie was not, in fact, organized for the plunder and oppression of the workers. Indeed the story of bourgeois supremacy in the latter half of the 19th century is that the bourgeoisie was open to satisfying the political agenda of the working class.

Today, the wokey narrative is a lie from start to finish. "Oppressed peoples?" Would they be women who earn almost as much as men, even though they tend not to work at dangerous jobs? Would they be the Hispanics that are working willingly away all over my neighborhood building and remodeling homes? Would they be the Black women working in government bureaucracies and in healthcare? Would they be gentry gays and transgenders?

Whatabout "allies?" You mean gentry liberals in their professorships and activist groups and professional careers and nice liberal ladies with their yard-signs? And how do we know that the "allies" are really helping the "oppressed peoples" and not just using them in their own power project?

And are you seriously suggesting that the folks in those Trump Boat and Car Parades are really the "white oppressors" of the narrative? Do they really have any serious political power?

So my explanation for the current political crisis and the end-of-the-world rhetoric on all sides is that the political and cultural narrative of the educated ruling class is falling apart. So they are reduced to upping the ante to preserve their political hegemony. In an era where racial discrimination has been outlawed they accuse everyone of being a racist. In an age where gays get to marry they are accusing everyone of being a homophobe. In an age when young black men are the principal authors of violent crime they make a global issue out of police brutality against young black men. In an age where global termperatures are modestly increasing they demand to save the planet from runaway warming.

So I decree that the reality of the moment is that our current white liberal ruling class is facing an existential crisis, a terminal collapse of their authority, and, as Linda Lamont said, they cain't stand it.

The only question is: will the white liberal ruling class go quietly, or not?

Dems are for the Allies; GOPs for the Commoners

You know me. I see everything through the lens of my reductive Three Peoples theory. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory.

But our Democratic friends see the world through something close to another Three Layer theory.

In my theory and Yarvin's theory we have the Creatives or Gentry on top; we have Responsibles or Commoners in the middle; we have Subordinates or Clients on the bottom. This is a descriptive theory.

In the progressive or Democratic theory we have "oppressed peoples" who are championed by "allies" who fight against "white oppressors." This is a moral theory; I call it "allyism."

However both theories are kinda all about the proper role of the ruling class. It's clear that my theory suggests that the job of the ruling class is to provide a helping hand to all three Layers: to help Creatives be creative; to help Responsibles be responsible; to help Subordinates climb out of subordination into responsibility.

The lefty theory proposes a moral war, by the ruling class allies against the white oppressors on behalf of the oppressed peoples. That, of course, is what we are seeing on the streets right now as mostly white "allies" are mostly peacefully protesting against... Yeah, what exactly? The police? The businesses that they have been torching? Or what?

Now I think that both the party conventions have perfectly illustrated all this. 

The Democratic convention was all about young people and their activism on behalf of helpless oppressed peoples. 

The Republican convention was all about... Well, if you ask me it was all about persuading Black Subordinates that they really belong in the party of Commoners and that their struggle and sacrifices are understood and valued and that, if they make the awful decision, and #WalkAway, they will all live happily ever after.

All lies, of course, from both parties. Life is not that simple, and politics certainly is not the answer to your problems. But we humans are social animals, and politics is unavoidable.

So the question is really: how do the Americans in the middle react to all the play-acting? My judgement is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are really Commoners, people trying to Responsibly live the lives they are given and trying to make something good out of it all.

I think that the allies and oppressed peoples narrative is a conceit of the educated Gentry. It makes human life into an opera with the educated Gentry as the stars singing the most glorious arias and the oppressed peoples as the chorus of peasants. (It's amazing how many 19th century operas had a chorus of rural peasants).

My analysis of history is that, ever since the French Revolution, we keep getting outbursts of Creative conceit, that the educated Gentry are going to save the world with politics by bending the arc of history towards justice. And it always ends up with a very large body count.

Although, I would say, in the United States it has tended to result in the repudiation of the Creative Gentry by the middling sort of Commoners.

So here we are, at Labor Day, with another presidential election campaign before us. Will America elect to let Commoners live their ordinary lives or will we empower the educated Gentry to fight glorious wars against systemic racism and climate change?

That is the question.

We All Live in a Bubble

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me you are struggling to figure out the Democrats.  Really? They think they can get elected "defunding" the police? Really? They can call riot and arson a "fiery protest?" Really? They think they can win elections by insulting non-liberal whites as "white supremacists?"

I find myself asking myself: what planet are they living on?

The answer, though, is simple. They are living in their liberal bubble.

And everyone lives in a cultural bubble.

And in my gentry liberal neighborhood there are no Trump signs, not one.

• There are Black Lives Matter yardsigns.
• There are hand-drawn Black Lives Matter signs.
• There are #WeBelieve signs, mark one and mark two.
• There are Hate Has No Home Here signs.
• There are Be The One signs.
• There are Biden 2020 signs.
• Oh, and there is a Bye Don sign. Get it?

There is one, very modest, house with a Thin Blue Line flag.

This morning I went by a house with a hand-lettered "I Can't Breathe" sign. That, I assume, is predicated on the notion that George Floyd was being prevented from breathing when he was being restrained while police were waiting for the Medic One to arrive. Only, his autopsy established that his lungs weighed twice the normal, because of the weight of foaming water, probably due to Fentanyl.

One of the things that has struck me during the recent George Floyd era is the bullshit that police have to put up with from Black men that they stop and interview. Their arrestees seem to be expert in a just-short-of-active resistance to arrest. 

And then, a lot of the time, the arrestee is strung out on drugs.

If I were a cop, it would drive me crazy.

But, as we know, if the police don't treat their Black arrestees with the utmost patience and courtesy they will get the book thrown at them.

Of course, I live in my bubble. But there is a difference between my bubble and the liberal bubble.

I always know what is going down in the liberal bubble, because the liberal bubble is the default cultural norm. It's what you get in school. It's what you get on TV. It's what you get from The New York Times.

When you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me you have to know what is going on in liberal land. Just like you have to pay attention to the weather forecast.

But you can still hope.

And what I hope is that the present liberal craziness is like the liberal craziness of the Sixties, when liberals thought that they were riding a cultural revolution that was going to bury the horrid Fifties middle-class suburban conformism forever.

Only the American people elected Richard Nixon, twice. In 1972 Nixon won with a 61% to 38% of the popular vote.

As I say, it took until 1992 for Democrats to say, No, we've changed, we are New Democrats now. Then they got elected and immediately proposed to nationalize healthcare. So Americans elected the first Republican Congress in 40 years. Then the Democrats got moderate, for a season.

Is history repeating itself? No, of course not. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

Ever since the Obama election in 2008 Democrats have started to believe that this time is the time when we will transform society with politics and activism and programs and peaceful protests.

Are they right?

We Don't Know.

So we will have to wait until election night to find out.

My guess is that on election night my gentry liberal neighbors will discover that they have been living in a bubble, and that ordinary Commoner Americans will vote for law and order.

And then, as seems to happen whenever a Republican wins a presidential election, all across the nation therapists will be discovering a new post-election stress disorder.

But I could be wrong.

Is This The Week That Changes History?

Couple of minor items today: They say that Joe Biden didn't get the traditional "convention bounce" last week. And, as some joker said, it looks like the daily Dem memo that goes out to all the ships at sea is saying "hey, we better stop these riots!" cos they are costing us and may lose us the election!

You think?

Or you can look at it another way. Suppose that the Dems and the lefties and the cancelers can't redefine reality and gaslight and force their radical culture down our throats forever. Suppose at some point the American people upchuck. Not because they consciously can't take it anymore but because their cultural gut instinctively just vomits the whole thing up?

If you read the Zman or Vox Day you get taught that there is almost nothing we can do. The ruling class can't be beaten. we tried it areddy, and it doesn't work. The rulers always win in the end. Unless...

Or suppose, as Zman says today, everyone, left and right, is playing at revolution, but really trying to relive the imagined glory days of yesteryear. For the left it's nostalgia for the Sixties. For the right it's nostalgia for the Eighties. But in both cases the nostalgia is for a past that never happened.

So what happens when the music stops?

Now, yesterday, on Day Two of the Republican National Convention, the agenda was filled with good old American nostalgia for just good old Americanism with a full-press Trumpian bid for the minority vote. The Sandmann kid; various youngish black politicians backing Trump; Trump doing a surprise pardon on a black guy; Trump doing a special White House citizenship ceremony for a Bolivian, a Ghanaian, an Indian, a Lebanese, and a Sudanese. I kid you not. And the five new citizens were all what I call "nobodies," ordinary people that are plugging into the ordinary American economy doing ordinary middle-class things.

That's not what we are used to. Our liberal friends are always trying to ram whacko stuff down our throats, like the idea that BLM represents the Black Community. Like the notion that LGBT should be normalized as not just part of America but as bringing a special fragrance to the American home. Like the notion that the whole mess since the death of George Floyd -- a drugged out criminal that was passively resisting arrest -- is just regular old "peaceful protesting."

At some point, I'd say, an ordinary American nobody can't help noticing the glitch in the Matrix. All this stuff we are getting from our educated Gentry betters: it's too weird; it's too fake. It just doesn't add up. I don't get it.

Of course, if you look at the world through the glasses of my reductive Three Peoples theory, this glitch in the Matrix all makes sense.

If you are a Responsible you want a predictable world in which you can get a job, buy a house, get married and raise a family. Everything else is noise, a frightening whirlwind that just doesn't make sense and threatens to demolish your carefully built world.

Indeed, the whole whirl we experience today is all about Creative people having the scope to be experimental and creative.

I'm all for Creatives getting to be creative, but not to the extent that they marginalize ordinary Responsible nobodies as haters and bigots for not understanding, and not supporting and celebrating, the creative experiments of their Creative betters.

Here is something I got from new-age "integral" philosopher Ken Wilber and his take on developmental psychology. He points out that people in one developmental stage cannot understand people in another stage. They think that these other people are crazy or stupid. Only highly evolved "integrated" thinkers -- people like you and me -- can get their brains around the notion that other people are different and they live in a different psychological reality, and this is the way the world works.

Our liberal friends are not "integral" thinkers. They cannot get their brains around the idea that the dreaded bitter clingers and white supremacists just do not live in the same world as they do. And that they have a God-given right to live in a different world.

So they do what religious people have always tried to do when faced with the incomprehensible: they name and shame and shun them. Or, as we now say, "cancel" them.

Maybe our liberal friends are right, and the bitter clingers are evil and should be cast out of polite society.

Or maybe the liberals are fools and knaves that have never read a book, and don't intend to start now. Maybe they have gone about as far as they can go with their Creatives-only culture. Maybe we have got to the point where average people push back.

Or maybe not. That's why we have elections.

Whatabout the Greek Australian that says "Australia Belongs to Europe"

The American exile in Italy, Vox Day, likes to rail against what he calls "civic nationalism." La Wik defines civic nationalism vs. ethnic nationalism as united by values, such as liberalism, rather than by identification with a ethnic group. So civic nationalism is

an inclusive form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights.

So Vox Day rails against a Greek Australian, son of immediate post-war immigrants from Greece who identifies as Greek and thinks of Australia as belonging to Europe. But, 

Stefanos stated with great confidence that the recent Indian and Asian arrivals to the country were not Australians.

Vox Day piles on and says 

As long as you, your children, or your great-great-great grandchildren retain any shred of attachment to your home nation, you cannot be considered anything but a guest, at best.

The only thing is that while, say, all good patriotic Americans deplore the hyphenation of America, the brutal truth is that humans are a migratory species. We are never going to keep humans in their current boundaries maintaining their nations or cultures or whatever till the end of time. And we are never going to stop people having a nostalgic affection for their past.

And the brutal consequence of this is that "migration is invasion." Or at the very least, migration will change things.

In our case, in the good old US and A, the educated Gentry are trying to change the culture and politics of the US away from a nation based on the culture of northwest Europe and its Christian religions towards their own preferred "creative" culture of educated-class hegemony. They are doing this by buying the support of their recent immigrant voters and Blacks in whom they encourage a culture of retribution against past sins.

See, I don't think there is one kind of nationalism that can keep a nation together. I think that all nationalism is fake nationalism, that is, a myth, a narrative that declares some people to be "the" people and rightfully occupying their patch of ground and rightfully inheriting it from past generations and charged with preserving the patch of land and its people for generations yet unborn.

But then there is politics, and politics is the art of division. So even if some people experience themselves, today, as one people, you can be sure that there are politicians at work dividing them into "Us΅ and "Them." 

Right now we have two politics fighting it out. One of them says Americans are good and globalists are bad; the other says that oppressed peoples are helpless, their allies are good, and white oppressors are bad.

There is no way to stop humans from migrating and stop politicians from dividing us.

So what do we do? Well, I'm not sure that we can escape a future that Vox Day warns us against, that

in another 250 years or so, the globe will be divided between the Han and the Indians while every other nation is effectively eliminated through subsumption.

Except that I expect that this Han-Indian -- or rather Confucian-Hindu -- domination will turn out completely different than we expect.

My view of the last century is that the Hans and the Hindus have been desperately trying to play catch-up, trying on Nationalism and then Socialism and now predatory international trade on for size.

Right now we have a rather big Asian diaspora, for the Hans it is the educated stratum that is heading out across the world and in India is seems to be mostly Brahmins heading out to take over Big Tech.

I wonder what that does to the Chinese left behind and the lower-caste Hindus in India?

And then there are the billions of Africans. I wonder how they will mix it up with, say, our own Blacks from the west African slave trade.

And I wonder how an educated elite of white liberals and Brahmins and Confucian Hans in the US will do with respect to the rest of the US.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that it is all very well to sneer at civic nationalism or predict disaster unless we stop immigration. Maybe they will end in disaster; they probably will.

Or maybe our current educated Gentry masters are all idiots that really, as the Brits say, are "not fit for purpose."

You tell me: Is Nancy Pelosi fit for purpose? Is Joe Biden? Is the 1619 New York Times? Are the wokey professors? Are the safe space feminists? Are the soyboy Antifa rioters? Are the BLM urban arsonists? Does the Brahmin Kshama Sawant here in Seattle know what she is doing other than reading of the lefty wokey script?

Or are they all singing from a hymnal and don't have a clue what it means?

I think that we are at the end of an era, the era of the educated administrative elite and the lefty intellectual prattlers. But I also think that nobody has a clue how it will all turn out and what comes next.

The only thing I am sure about is that our educated Gentry rulers will not like the future, however it turns out.

The Two Kinds of Slavery

I just had an epiphany over the weekend with respect to slavery. And it came to me as I puzzle over my Great Reaction notion that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

But, of course, under feudalism they also had slavery: voluntary slavery. It is described in The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. You could go to your feudal lord in Britain in the year 1000 and place your head in his hands and become his bondsman. The lord gave you a bill-hook and three squares for the rest of your life. It was called "head for food."

So there are two kinds of slavery: conquest slavery and voluntary slavery. You can become a slave in the aftermath of your tribe being conquered. Presumably all the adult males would be killed and the women and children sold into slavery. But you can also place yourself into slavery, and say "I give up. Look after me, Master, because I can't take it any more."

Yes, but we are beyond all that, right?

I don't think so. Let's rewrite my Great Reaction maxim like this.

Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to conquest slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; welfare is a return to "head-for-food" slavery; identity politics is neo-tribalism; etc.

I have done a piece or two on welfare that indicates how close it is to slavery. In "A Brief History of Welfare" I note the various stages in England since the year 1000.

• "Head for food" slavery.
• Early vagrancy laws.
• First Poor Law in 1597.
• Workhouses in 1830s: "indoor relief."
• Modern welfare: "outdoor relief."

Let us try to think what happened between each stage. I imagine that in the "head for food" slavery days that there was no social space outside being the vassal of your local lord. And if you caused any trouble the lord had no trouble in dealing with you. But in the Tudor era of the 16th century two things were going on. First, the feudal monarchies supported by feudal nobles were turning into absolute monarchies financed by merchant credit. This meant that monarchs could finance their armies through the credit system rather than the private feudal hosts of the nobles. So the nobles weren't interested in "head for food" slaves eating their heads off that might be useful in the odd little war.

Second, the feudal lords themselves got involved in the money economy and started to "improve" their lands by draining the swamps and trying new agricultural methods: the agricultural revolution. Oh, and also by "enclosing" common lands. This created a "surplus population."

The first Poor Laws at the end of the 16th century were a way to keep the poor out of the cities, and dispersed in the countryside. Each parish had to look after its own poor, and the poor were not allowed to move around. Then, by the early 19th century, there was enough money to build "workhouses" to imprison the poor and put them to work. Was this just "head for food" slavery by another name? You tell me.

But really, the problem of the poor and vagrancy didn't get solved until the Industrial Revolution put the poor to work in factories. Then the landless, starving poor headed for the industrial cities where they got jobs. But here is a question: in the disciplined work of factories are things any different? Workers are extremely disciplined and ordered around, and after a while they start to believe that their employers "owe" them their jobs and benefits as a lifetime obligation. Is this that different from "head for food" slavery? You tell me.

In our age, with its real per-capita income about 30 times what it was two centuries ago, we can afford to throw our hand up with regard to the poor. So the poor apply to their local social-services bureaucrat for welfare and housing vouchers and EBT "cards for food." Is this not a kind of slavery? Do not the modern welfare recipients place their heads in the hand of the social worker in return for three squares a day?

And how different is this from the situation of the average corporate or government worker that works under an informal job-for-life contract? When a corporation or a government "down-sizes" do not the workers feel betrayed? Have they not, in fact, enslaved themselves to their corporate or government master in return for three squares?

This is thrown for me into stark relief with the situation of teenage migrant Chinese workers -- described in Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang -- that have left the farm, because nothing is happening -- for the crazy world of the big city factories, where they learn that it is up to them to get ahead, because they are on their own.

It makes me wonder what the English factory workers of the early 19th century thought about their lives and their work.

In our day we make a big deal about the conquest slavery of the plantations, where West Africans were sold by African chiefs to Brit and Dutch slavers and sent to the Americas.

And we've made a big deal about freeing the plantation slaves and how we owe them reparations.

But we don't make much of a deal of the hundred million Russians that were bundled into slavery in the Soviet Union. And how Mao Zedong enslaved hundreds of millions of Chinese into his slave-state hell. It seems, to our more advanced citizens, that these horrors are just "stuff happens."

But I think that subordination, slavery if you will, is still very much alive today, and for two reasons. First, there are a lot of humans that get off on subordinating other humans to their physical and moral hegemony. Second, there are a lot of humans that prefer to live as subordinates rather than accept the risks of responsibility.

So I think that we should be careful about patting ourselves on the back for "ending slavery." I think there is still a lot of slavery around. We just don't call it "slavery" and we don't call the subordinates in question "slaves."

Examples of Gentry, Commoners, and Victims in Everyday Life

Over at The American Spectator we have two pieces that allow me to interpose my reductive Three Peoples theory (or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory) to explain the world.

First, Tony Woodlief takes out after Vanity Fair writer James Woolcott in "In Praise of Commoners’ Sense — And Against Liberal Elitism." James Woolcott took after the "common sense" of the American people with regard to the China Flu epidemic. In other words, Woolcott goes with the experts on the response to the epidemic.

I realize that Woolcott must live in a different universe than me, because I believe that nobody has had a clue about the epidemic, not experts who have been all over the place, and not Commoners who commonly latch onto whatever meme suits their fancy.

Come on, James. Experts have recommended everything from Do Nothing, in Sweden, to allow the disease to work through the population until "herd immunity" is achieved, to total lockdown as practiced in China.

In my expert opinion, I would say that probably seniors should all be locked up and everyone under 60 forced to intermix in all normal ways except late-night parties and infect each other as efficiently as possible so that, in a month or two, herd immunity is achieved and we can let the seniors out of jail.

Also, I would say that any fool can see that President Trump has a political interest in getting the economy back on track as quickly as possible, so as to get re-elected, and the Democrats have a political interest in shutting down the economy as long as possible so they can blame Trump for it. If I can see both ways on this, as a reckless Trump partisan, what does it say about Vanity Fair writer James Woolcott?

What I would expect, using Three Layer theory, is that educated Gentry Vanity Fair writers would likely want to believe the judgments of experts because experts are Gentry like them. And Commoners would likely want to believe in common sense and make some sensible precautions against infection short of destroying the economy. So you tell me which is right.

We have another Three Layer issue in the question of "The Trayvon Hoax: Are Young Blacks Weary of Being ‘Played’?" by Jack Cashill. Young Blacks are encountering Joel Gilbert's film The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America on youTube. And one young Black woman wrote in the comments section "I can't bring myself to press play." Because, of course, it would be a glitch-in-the-Matrix moment for her.

Here we have a conflict between the Victim world where everything is the fault of the white oppressors and the common sense world of the Commoner, where you let the facts fall where they may. Or the members of the jury set aside their tribal loyalties for the evidence presented to them.

In my judgment the vast majority of Blacks are a generation away from becoming Commoners. I base my judgement on the US white working class that was basically abandoned by the Democrats in the Sixties and didn't give up on Democrats until the Trump election of 2016, fifty years later.

Blacks are supposed to have died and gone to Heaven with the election of the First Black President. The fact that they didn't ought to mean something to them. It will, I predict, but not yet.

And I base my judgement on the British working class that voted Labour until the 2019 General Election when the "red wall" fell in the north of England, home of coal mines and steelmaking back in the day. What took you so long, workers?

In other words, once an economic class has identified itself with a particular party it will take a political earthquake to dislodge the relationship. This should not be surprising: humans are groupish, and they substitute groupish loyalty for a serious discussion of the issues. Blacks are very groupish, particularly Black women, as witnessed by their 90 percent vote for Democrats in recent decades. So are feminists, who all vote Democrat even though you could argue that their economic interest does not really lie with Democrats. It's a tribal thing.

Now I argue, with my Little Darlings notion, that any group politically favored by the ruling class is heading for disaster, because politicians don't really care about you, they only care about your vote. And the day will come when they no longer care about your vote, because they found some fresh voter meat. But, as with many women in an "abusive relationship," or any employee in a dead-end job, it is really hard to give up on the benefits of a steady paycheck.

But there is this. I am sorta watching the Democratic Convention this week, and the TV stream is full of helpless women, victims of some health tragedy or spousal abuse who are eternally grateful to Joe Biden or to the Democratic Party for helping and protecting them. Do you see what I see here? I see Victims, that look to a powerful lord to protect them from the tempests of life. And that is what the Democrats are all about. Providing for the Victims.

But when you get to the point that you figure that politicians are in it for themselves, that is when you become a Commoner. 

I am reading an astonishing book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang from The Wall Street Journal. We are talking about teenage girls that leave their rural villages and take the train to the big city like Dongguan or Guangzhou just outside of Hong Kong and get jobs in the most appalling sweatshop factories. But these girls -- teenage girls -- have the most amazing courage and determination. Are they downhearted by their appalling working conditions? No! If they can't take it any more, they don't! They quit, leaving behind unpaid wages and go get another job.

Yes, that's the thing about the migration from the country to the city in China over the last 20-30 years. It is teenagers! With the most amazing courage! And making it, crawling their way up from the assembly line to clerk jobs, or higher. Just on pure determination and grit. And these are teenagers!

Do you see the difference? Here we have uneducated kids from the countryside dropping into the middle of an industrial mega-city, where the bottom factory jobs are all set up so that it always costs you a bundle to quit, or to go to the bathroom, or to take a couple hours off instead of working from 7 am to 10 pm day in day out. And they make it! And in the developed West we have everybody acting like helpless victims expecting the government or the employer to look after them.

It's the difference between Commoner and Victim, between Responsible and Subordinate. And I maintain that you can't begin to thrive in the city until you cast off the shackles of subordination and put on the armor of responsibility.

It's a choice. You can live at the whim of the local boss man. Or live at the whim of the market. You would think that relying on a human lord would be safer, more prudent. But it isn't. Rely instead on your smarts and the sway of the market; that's the way to live.

But it is a hard lesson to learn. Because there are sweet political talkers out there all over that entice you to put your trust in a politician.

The Terminal Bossiness of the Educated Gentry

A while back I did a piece on the problem of life as a creative person, "The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry." Life is hard for the would-be creative person. Real creativity is almost certainly a road to failure.

So what does the Educated Gentry, my People of the Creative Self, do? It fakes it; it plays at being creative, ringing the changes on sex, fiddling with a thousand activist projects from automobile safety to trash Nazism. And the nauseating yard-sign virtue-signalling of the #WeBelieve and #BLM set.

There are, I believe, two agendas in our educated Gentry. Part One is the loot and plunder operation, buying the votes of the "oppressed peoples" with the taxes of the "white oppressors." Nothing new here; ruling classes have been playing this game since forever.

Part Two is the bossiness agenda, that we experience mostly through the Activism Culture. If you have been watching the Democratic National Convention this week you will notice that almost all the actors in the videos are "activists" that are passionately and selflessly advocating for some vital moral goal.

We are utterly inundated with the urgent projects of educated Gentry activists. There is the issue of auto safety, triggered in the 1960s by über-activist Ralph Nader. The result is that automobile manufacture is festooned with ten thousand regulations affecting safety, gas mileage, fuel composition, and now climate change. I wonder what the net effect of all that regulation is in lives saved and energy transformed. Trash collection is transformed by the agenda of a generation of environmental activists that want you to sort your garbage into at least three bins: yard waste, recyclables, and trash trash. Every coffee house has at least two bins for garbage festooned with incomprehensible instructions as to what belongs in each bin. Now we learn that it costs more energy to recycle than is saved by recycling. Especially since the Chinese are not accepting our recyclables any more.

Washers and dryers and all other home appliances are subject to energy-saving regulations. Roof-top solar cells are given astonishing subsidies, including paying the homeowner for energy generated at the retail rate. Home construction is subject to ten-thousand regulations, from earthquake strengthening to multi-pane windows to energy-saving insulation.

There is the urbanist movement that pushes regulations to encourage high-density housing, mass transit, and discourage suburban "sprawl." Whatabout bike lanes and transit-only lanes? Bike lanes are mostly used by single young men. Bus lanes take lanes away from ordinary commuters who might be lower-middle-class workers that can't afford gentry-neighborhood homes and commute an hour a day to their construction jobs in the city.

And of course all electronic gear is subject to various regulations designed to save energy.

And that is just scratching the surface.

Is all of this a Good Thing? Could be. Or not. How would we tell? For instance, it might be a good idea to mandate robust home construction with 2x6s instead of the old 2x4s. But whatabout the poor? Are the poor best served by cheap construction that gets them a home or by expensive construction good for the next century?

But we don't really get to have an opportunity to have a frank and fair discussion of the issues on any of these topics, because when it comes to political and moral dialogue the educated Gentry pretty well has the whole thing locked up, in part through their communication skills, in part through their effective moral posturing, and in part from their connections with politicians and bureaucrats in the deep state.

We libertarian types like to say that the market can make most of these decisions without the need for activist soyboys getting into the action. Let the market decide, we say, with the qualification that, of course, we should deal with "externalities" that enable market participants to push costs onto others without paying for them.

But, I like to say, we humans are not automatons going around experiencing life as a profit-and-loss statement. We search for Meaning. As Jordan B. Peterson says in a bunch of videos, you need an "Aim" for your life.

And one of the characteristics of our age is that educated Gentry are forever thinking up a thousand ways to make our lives "safer" and the planet "greener" -- and their own lives more Meaningful.

Ah yes. But what do we do about it? Good question.

I know what we need. We need the educated Gentry to get themselves a new religion, one that emphasizes the right of other people -- Commoners -- to live their lives according to their lights. We need something like the situation that arises in the novel Quo Vadis where the Roman high muck-de-muck sneaks into a Christian meeting outside the walls of Rome and is flabbergasted by the notion of forgiveness and the rejection of vengeance. And then he gets forgiven by a bunch of Christians that he has been harassing. What? It is just beyond his ken. Only of, course, he is in love with Ligia, a Christian girl princess from Lygia, so he has to try to understand.

Yeah. Imagine the flabbergastedness of an average educated Gentry grandee when first introduced to the idea that white-supremacist Commoners have right to live according to their lights, dim as those lights might be. You can't be serious, you racist-sexist-homophobe!

Actually we are seeing this flabbergastedness right now with the Trump Derangement Syndrome among the MSNBC watchers. They can't believe it. They can't believe that Americans could elect a guy like Trump. Forget a glitch in the Matrix. How about the dimming of Betelgeuse?

But really, are they dumb or something?

The Trump phenomenon is pretty simple, if you step outside of your educated Gentry bubble. Trump represents the average Commoner, a voter that is neither educated and plugged into the educated gravy-train nor an "oppressed peoples" victim looking for handouts. That is all. Not remarkable at all.

But if your reality is liberal bubble, then you are talking existential shaking of the foundations.

On the other hand, if you can't see what is right in front of your face you must be as dumb as an ox. Or at least an educated ox.

Yes. Until the day that the educated Gentry can see past their noses and understand that there are people out there that just don't see the world the way they do, we are going to get more of the same: more terminal bossiness from the folks that know that they have our best interests at heart, and know better than we do what is good for us.

See here liberals and educated Gentry and all the ships at sea. There is a word for people like you that know what is good for the rest of America: Oppressors.

Trump Against the World

Our lefty friends like to tell us that Trump is an incompetent bumbler that just doesn't have the chops to be president. But Michael Anton, Mr. "Flight 93 Election," begs to differ in "The Case for Trump." Yes, he writes,

The presidency is hard enough to manage with decades of experience in politics and a series of elective offices under your belt. It’s that much harder when a president assumes the office not merely from the outside, but politically speaking, from out of nowhere.

In that case, it would be remarkable if President Trump even survived politically to run for re-election. For a big part of the Republican Party establishment is against him.

Then factor in all his open enemies from the other party, and virtually every other power center in our society, plus the steadfast opposition of the so-called “deep state”—i.e., the very federal bureaucrats whom he was elected to oversee and direct. Viewed from this angle, one may fairly wonder how it’s been possible for him to accomplish anything at all.

And yet he has achieved a lot. He's built a couple hundred miles of wall, in the teeth of Democrats that regard it as "a moral atrocity." He has pushed his trade deals, reversed Obama Mideast foreign policy -- so that now there is peace breaking out between Israel and the Sunni Arabs. 

[T]here’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve. More populism. More nationalism. More patriotism. More law and order. More full-throated advocacy for the neglected American people, for the working class, for the Rust Belt and rural America, for religious believers and law-abiding gun owners. More defense of free speech against tech and corporate censorship and suppression, more support for his voters when they or their interests are viciously attacked.

Then Anton goes into a long analysis of how to move the Republican Party to the center to represent the interests of ordinary people. In other words, using Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory, to represent Commoners rather than globalist Gentry and the Gentry's Clients. Then, in "A New Message" he goes into the details of his Commoner-friendly agenda.

But how do you bridge the "Red-Blue" divide, the present culture war?

You know, Anton's article made me think that the problem is that the present educated Gentry is not being properly educated to be a ruling class, but as merely as shock troops in a religious war.

But this is crazy. If you are the ruling class then Job One is to understand the people that you rule. But under the influence of identity politics and cultural Marxism our educated class knows only its own world view and the world view it has imposed upon its clients. It looks on the world view of Commoners as bigotry, unworthy of serious consideration. And the attitude of the liberal in the street is that the average bigoted Commoner needs to be canceled.

For me, this is rather startling, because if I were the ruler of America I would want to know the culture and beliefs of my subjects, and I would want to understand them, all the better to rule them.

And indeed, with my reductive Three Peoples theory I understand that it is right and proper that there are People of the Creative Self that would naturally think and act like our current liberal educated class and even be inclined to occasional woke ideological frenzies. I would understand that there is a large middling sector of People of the Responsible Self that go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. And there are People of the Subordinate Self that look to some powerful figure to protect them.

So, with my Three Peoples theory it would seem pretty dumb for the ruling class not to understand the culture and the self-perceived needs of the Responsibles, the Commoners. And yet that is where our current rulers live. They are appalled and disgusted by the ordinary sort of people.

That is why I am fairly optimistic about the future. Because I think that a ruling class that does not understand its Commoners and allow them to live, more or less, in their own way and according to their lights is really not long for this world.

But that is the wages of the current woke culture in the university. It does not attempt to understand anything except the precepts of its own woke religion and agenda. So the university graduate getting ready to step into the "deep state" knows nothing except how right he is and how bigoted the "bitter clingers" are. You see this in the texts of Strzok, Page, Clinesmith and the rest in the plot to get Trump. Those young'uns know nothing except what they have been carefully taught.

Yet the strategists from Sun Tzu on down insist that Job One is to get inside the mind of the enemy.

The impression Trump gives me is that he understands the Commoner mentality and also that of the educated Gentry. Who else would have thought of a Presidential Pardon for Susan B. Anthony?

Thing is: once you say hey, there are all kinds of different people in America and we ought to try to help all the different kids flourish each in their own way as far as possible, then the frenzy of our cultural elite just seems crazy. And President Trump seems like the voice of sanity. No doubt:

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

But which God? The god of creativity or the god of the various Axial Age religions? Or both? 

Hey Liberals and Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

OK. Nothing new. The whole point of my Great Reaction and my Activism Culture notions is that politics is not the answer. And these two pieces, "Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics" and "Two Centuries of the Great Reaction," say it all.

The Age of Politics is Over.

But why?

Let's reduce the whole thing to a Three Stages concept. 

Back in the day, we humans lived in the Age of War. That's when "land was the only thing that lasts," according to the fictional Gerald O'Hara. You had to have strong leaders to defend your food-growing land and protect you from pirates and plunderers. Call it the feudal system, if you like. Although when the real thing, like Genghis Khan, happened the usual kingly king wasn't up to snuff and everyone got killed or enslaved.

Then came the Age of Politics. The perfect instantiation of this age was the American Revolution. I am reading a history of the run-up to 1776 -- Desperate Sons by Les Standiford -- all about Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in the decade between the Stamp Act and the battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775. What comes out at me is that the Yanks were objecting to the top-down "we know what is good for you" stupidity of the Brits. The Brits were forever writing laws that screwed up the economy of their North American colonies, because reasons. But the colonials were middle-class Commoners and working-class mechanics, not serfs on the farm. They wanted, they expected, to govern themselves, being the men on the ground that knew what needed to be done and accepted the responsibility to do so.

But once the post-feudal political order is established, with a separation of powers in government and a Greater Separation of Powers between economy, politics, and religion, then the need for political organization and the fisticuffs of revolution is over. You just need someone to man the front desk and make sure people sign the register.

A characteristic of the Age of Politics was the nostalgia for the good old days when knights were bold: the Tournament and the Medieval Romance. Both were favorites of nobles that had become courtiers in the early years of the absolute monarchs but longed to relive the glory years of rough tough warriors.

Now we have the Age of Trust. Do you realize how much you can trust that everything will work? We assume that we can work anywhere in the world. We assume that corporations produce good products at good prices. We assume we can jump onto an airplane and go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice, and when we get there our credit card and debit card establish our trustworthiness anywhere in the world. A teenaged girl can drive across three states to go visit the family of her prospective roommate in college, and think nothing of it.

Who needs politics when we have trust?

But now we have two nostalgic movements. First, we have the Activism Culture that is trying to relive the glory days of revolution, when revolutionaries were out in the streets, Les Mis style, outdaring the dangers of the time. This, I propose, is like the medieval romance, spinning stories about the good old days. Second, we have sports, which is a second iteration of the retreat from the Age of War. Instead of the clash of arms in the Tournament we have sports, where men can relive the glorious days when courage and perseverance were the only thing that mattered.

The point is that in the Age of Politics you don't need war anymore. Because you have politics to resolve disputes. In the Age of Trust you don't need politics anymore because all the trustworthy people are identified by their carte de confiance -- I made that up: It means trust card -- so you can live happily ever after just dealing with trustworthy people and steering clear of the rest.

OK. So you and I are convinced: politics is so vieux jeu. Now, how do we persuade our wokey Gentry friends, whose homes are presently festooned with #BlackLivesMatter and #WeBelieve signs, and for whom political virtue-signaling is the meaning of life? 

I propose we leave the solution of that problem for next week.

What Does Soros Want?

Over a century ago, it was Oscar Wilde (no, Freud) who worried about "what do women want." Now, the question is what does billionaire speculator George Soros want? And why?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and was prompted to focus my mind on it over the weekend when I read a piece about Soros and his Open Society operation: "Mapping the Open Society Network on Soros’s 90th Birthday." Hayden Ludwig dismisses Soros thusly:

Each group in the Soros Network is a cog in the larger “open society” machine, so named for Soros’s affinity for the philosophy of the communist-turned-lefty-libertarian Karl Popper, Soros’s professor and personal mentor during the young man’s time at the London School of Economics...

Their vision of an open society is globalist and utopian, rejecting both objective truth and established tradition in favor of technocracy: rule by the “experts.” The net result is open borders, supranational governments such as the European Union, enforced secularism, and dissolution of the U.S. Constitution by a new American Revolution designed by plutocrats to wipe away the republic and replace it with socially engineered tyranny.

OK, I decided, let's check out Karl Popper and George Soros and try to understand them. I have several of Popper's books and my rough feeling is that Popper isn't quite as eager to pull down the USA as George Soros. 

But there is this. Both Popper (b.1902) and Soros (b.1930) are assimilated educated Jews from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These folks all tend to be anti-nationalists and supra-nationalists. Like Stefan Zweig (b. 1881) in The World of Yesterday, they believe in Europe. It makes sense, of course, especially when you consider the opposing view of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ethnic Germans were getting the shaft in multi-cultural Austria-Hungary before World War I. The supra-national Austro-Hungarian Empire worked well for assimilated Jews, until it didn't.

You can see this attitude working out in Soros's equivocal attitude to Israel. His Jewishness wants to support it, but his anti-nationalism wants to deplore it. So he kinda sits on the fence.

I've always been a bit flummoxed about Soros and his anti-nationalism because I didn't read Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies as an indictment of the nation state, but as a broadside against totalitarianism from Plato to Marx and Marxist historicism, that "history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws." Popper believes in the transition from

the magical or tribal or collectivist society [that] will also be called the closed society, [to] the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

So he believes in the opposition between magical thinking and logic and reason. But, of course, so do Plato and Hegel and Marx.

And I'm sure so does George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. But then, you might ask, why does the Open Society Foundation support the "trained Marxists" of Black Lives Matter?

I suppose because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." If Soros experiences nationalism as the enemy, then the Marxist enemies of the nation state are his friends.

Yes, but can't Soros see that the trained Marxists are just taking him and his money for a ride? It's a good question. I answer it by invoking my idiot theory of conspiracy. Don't think that there is a dark conspiracy out there that is cunningly planning the destruction of all we hold dear. The conspirators are probably bumbling idiots; they imagine themselves a lot smarter than they really are. I suspect that Soros, like the rest of us, has not really thought through exactly what he wants, and is reluctant to change his plans in the light of mistakes and new information. Plus, the guy is 90. His sons, that are already in charge of the Soros empire, seem to be ordinary woke members of the educated Gentry.

It comes down to this. Soros, like many of his generation in the educated Gentry, thinks that nationalism is the foundation of all our miseries. For him, the lesson of World War II is "never again." And I get it, for central European Jews like him, that the nation state is problematic.

How about another idea? The rule of the educated supra-national Gentry is problematic? That, to me, is the meaning of the populist nationalism of which we've heard tell. It is saying: hey wokies: you may think that you chaps are the first and the last in human wisdom and ordained by Gaia to bend the arc of history towards justice, and you may be right. But meanwhile, we Commoners think we are getting screwed.

See, what is going on right now is that the educated Gentry is just dismissing the critics of its rule as far-right, or white nationalist, or systemic racist, or whatever pejorative comes to mind. You can see this in its Three Layer theory of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Who says that the "allies" really have the interests of the "oppressed peoples" at heart? Oh, the "allies" say that. Could it not be that the "allies" are interested, first of all, in their power and status and vanity? Just sayin'.

And that's the problem with George Soros. He's concocted this Open Society notion from his understanding of Karl Popper. But suppose that his understanding of Popper is mistaken and that his notions would lead to a closed society of lefty neo-tribalism and magical thinking? How would we know? How would he know?

Is all the "mostly peaceful protesting" and liberal prosecutors that Soros is funding going to lead to the political destruction of Donald Trump and systemic racism? Is the current Thing about mail-in voting and protests at the home of the Postmaster General really going to advance the Democratic cause? Or will it inspire a counter-movement?

Does George Soros really know what he is doing? Does Nancy Pelosi? Does anyone?

I'm reading Desperate Sons by Les Standiford about the Sons of Liberty in the ten years leading up to the American Revolution. It suggests to me that the opposition to British rule was deeper and wider than I had previously understood. One of my takeaways is that the Brits in London -- that were passing Stamp Acts and Quartering Acts and banking laws that resulted in severe deflation in the colonies -- really had no clue about what was going down in the colonies.

Same thing applies to George Soros and our global elite. They know they are the good guys, the evolved and educated guys, but they really do not know what is going down on the ground. They do not know whether their policies help or hurt. They just know that they are the good guys, so shut up, peasant.

The Wokies Really Do Have a Beef

Over at American Greatness Ned Ryan sympathizes a little with the Wokies that are having such a great time ripping up downtown all over liberal America in "The Misdirected Rage of Young Rioters."

Problem is, he says, that they have been taught all their lives that they are special, that they are winners, and they aren't. Most of them are just average.

Then they get shipped off to 

indoctrination centers of higher learning where they are spoon-fed all these lies about how evil our country is, that this place is rotten to the core, and that it should just be burned to the ground.

No wonder they are angry.

They can’t find jobs, so they rage against the system they’ve been indoctrinated to believe is the source of all their troubles: that evil, free-market capitalist system that has betrayed them. They’re blaming the wrong system.

Instead, they ought to be blaming the indoctrination centers and the flawed parenting methodology according to which they were raised up to believe these lies. 

Well, allow me to disagree. The young'uns ought to be angry, but not for this reason. Indeed the foulest injustices have been committed against them. But it is not the fault of systemic racism or eevil capitalists. 

No indeed. It's all the fault of the liberal educated Gentry that has run things for the last century. What else could it be?

Nothing remarkable here. Government is force; there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. So you would expect that after a particular ruling class had been in power for a while the result of its governance would be an accumulation of injustice. I am not saying that the injustice was deliberate. Mostly it is just the result of "unanticipated consequences" of government action.

But you would also expect that they young sprouts, while feeling the chill, would not really know enough to figure out where the arctic blast was coming from.

Here kids, let me help you. Here is what you should be mad about.

Government education. If you are half paying attention, you might notice that the union ladies that currently run the government schools don't want to open school this fall. But they still want to be paid. It is a profound injustice that your parents do not get to send you to the school of their choice, or, even better, club together in their neighborhoods to set up mini-schools that can cost a mere $5,000 per year per student. And, when the government runs the schools it is not going to tell you that it makes a dog's breakfast of education. Hey kid! The clients of government education are not parents, not children, but union teacher ladies.

College for All. Back in the day youngsters got their start in life through an apprenticeship. Sometimes, the apprenticeship amounted to "indentured servitude," where the apprentice was the virtual slave of his master. But once you had served your time you were now a "journeyman" and free and clear of educational expense. Not like today where college is "free" or funded by a student loan that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and may hang around your head for decades. Hey kid! Do you realize how unjust the current university system is? And how it screws you and benefits the professors and administrators?

Immigration. The labor market is simple: supply and demand. The more immigration, the lower the wages for everyone, including native-born Americans. Moreover, the benign neglect of illegal immigration encourages under-the-table "informal" employment which also undercuts wage rates, if you are an employer that doesn't mind not paying taxes on your employees. Hey kids! Don't you realize that immigrants are your direct competitors in the labor market?

Home mortgages. Ever since the 1930s, the government has subsidized home mortgages in various ways, including providing a secondary market in mortgages, particularly 30-year mortgages. It also encourages low down payments. The result is to allow more people to bid for houses. Back in the day you couldn't get a loan with more than a 10-year term, and you couldn't often get away with less than 50 percent down. Do you see how the old system helped frugal savers and the new system allows everyone to bid up the price of houses? Of course, the current system has benefited the World War II and Baby Boomer generations because they bought their houses before prices really took off. Hey kids! Wouldn't it be cool if the OK Boomers experienced a 30 percent drop in their over-priced homes and you could afford to buy?

Social Security. The way Social Security works is you pay a tax on your earnings for 40 years and then the government gives you a pension based on political considerations. Suppose instead you saved your own money and kept it at Fidelity or Vanguard. Then you could use the money to start a business or send the kids to college, and finally you could retire whenever you had accumulated enough and the SPY and QQQ had grown your savings enough. Instead, the government sequesters your money in a so-called "trust fund." I wonder what the government does with that money? Build highways that grow the economy? Or bike paths that don't. Hey kids! Do you realize what it would mean if you could save your own money instead of the government taking it, in your own best interest?

Medicare. Actually, Medicare is probably not too much of a problem, because most of its funding comes from the federal income tax which means that most of the money comes from rich people. But, no doubt, Medicare rules tend to make the health care system more expensive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people. Hey kids! Government health care means that you are not the client: Big Health and Big Drug and the Medicare bureaucracy set the rules!

Welfare. Welfare is not all that expensive, at least, not compared to the expense of Social Security and Medicare, but there is the little problem that welfare encourages poor women to have babies without fathers. Something like 70 percent of Black babies don't have fathers around. You think that might have something to do with the fact that over 50 percent of murders are committed by Black men? That's what the experts say when they are not writing for The New York Times. Hey kids! How about the biggest systemic racial injustice of them all: to deprive Black kids of fathers?

Economic Regulation. The science is clear on this. Economic regulation of business does not work, as first pointed out by George Stigler, because "regulatory capture." This means that all regulatory agencies eventually become "captured" by the industries they regulate.Think railroads and trucking, back in the day. Think doctors and lawyers right now. Think environmental regulation. Hey kids! Don't believe the activists promising to protect you from Big Business. All they do is make it impossible for Little Business to compete.

Gentry Activism. The higher orders of our society are full of ideas to "benefit mankind." Mostly, these ideas do not benefit mankind, but they do make the educated Gentry feel good about itself. And our economy is riddled with ideas that some Gentry-funded and Gentry-staffed NGO has advocated. An easy example is ethanol in gasoline. It makes cars more expensive; it tends to corrode engine parts; it makes cars less efficient; it benefits Big Ag; it increases the price of corn which hurts poor people; it puts more land under the plow. There are thousands of regulatory interventions like this that well-meaning activists have introduced into our economy. And the trouble is that, according to Chantrill's law, it is nearly impossible to walk these programs back. Hey kids! Do you realize how much goody-goody regulation costs you?

Race Politics. I wonder how much of the present rage is due to the straight-up racial and sexual discrimination against young white males, the youngsters we call beta-males and soyboys. We made discrimination illegal half a century ago. We said, if you discriminate on the basis of race or sex it is criminal. But that wasn't enough for our moralists. They had to go to work to change the effects of discrimination with quotas and Affirmative Action and Diversity and Inclusion. I agree, morally, that we ought to have a society where every race and group is properly represented in the structure of power in every walk of life. But should we use the apparatus of force to do that? And would it make things better? See, it is one thing to say: hey, you discriminated in this instance on the basis of race. It is another thing to say, well, we should put a thumb on the scale for a while until this or that classification of human is no longer "underrepresented."

The problem with all populist explosions is that while the people are rightly angry, they usually have no clue about why things are all screwed up.

And when you are the ruling class, the fact that people do not know what is screwing them over is not a bug, it is a feature.

And so, the angry kids lash out, not knowing who is really screwing them over. If only they could listen to people like me!

Nothing New: Movements that Decide to Cleanse Society of Evil

The indispensible Angelo Codevilla, pseudonymous author of "The Flight 93 Election" back in 2016 has another one. It's called "Millenarian Mobs" and it's about the movements that arise all the time to cleanse and purify a fallen world.

Our present movement of purifying wokies are nothing new.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness...

Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them.

And the toppling of monuments is nothing new: "Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare."

But down the ages the social-cleansing have been attacks by subordinate revolutionaries on the ruling class, today's revolutionaries are not exactly opponents of the ruling class. As we would say, the wokies are youngsters often from the educated Gentry class that, in normal times, would expect to ascend in good time into the ruling elite. But, 

Always, millennial movements grow out of ordinary struggles. A few firebrands interpret the struggles radically, gather followers, and lead them along their own apocalyptic logic to bloody disaster. Social dislocations, as well as injustices, failures of leadership, and excessive expectations have been like tinder waiting for sparks.

In our time these millennial movements have tended to be "violent, revolutionary totalitarianism," combining political hegemony with a secular-religious puritanism.

Almost invariably the leaders have been outcasts, or what Marxists call “lumpen-intellectuals.”... Their initial focus was some obvious evil. As often as not, they claimed heavenly messages or apparitions as their authority. Their audience was twofold: those who saw themselves as the evil’s primary victims and those who wished to shed their responsibility for it. To the former, the prophets promised redress and immediate relief, while to all, and especially to the latter, they promised a role in a holy enterprise. Some sort of confession of sin and cleansing ritual would follow.  

 "Those who had undergone cleansing believed themselves so pure that they were no longer capable of sin." But there was work to be done: cleansing the rest of society. And lower down the scale it was simply a question of killing your enemies.

I think this is the key point of the article. Educated people don't justify just going out and killing people; they have to persuade themselves of their innocence; they need to rationalize their revolution. Only when educated people feel that they have cleansed themselves do they proceed to the vital task of cleansing others. Don't they just!

But the rioters that plundered the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, they are just looking for an excuse to lurch to the primitive, back to good old loot and plunder and vengeance. As one BLM organizer put it: "That's reparations."

In our day we have a political elite concerned with holding onto power, and apparently using "the revolutionary movements as allies against their socio-political competitors." As I would say, they are Gentry using their lower-class Clients to sock it to the Commoners. Thus we have the rulers joining with the wokies to make ideological war on the Commoner middle class that, led by Trump, is getting restless.

Don't be fooled by the talk about the "oppressed" and the "oppressors," says Codevilla.

Today, we need not imagine that the corporate magnates, the hard-bitten politicians, the FBI officials, who kneel draped in Kente cloth in penitence for “white racist America,” who declare solidarity with the mobs that deface statues—that any of them believe in anything other than their own power and advantage. Nor need we imagine that the majority of those mobs’ members are doing anything other than enjoying a holiday from the law.

 These people are playing an old, old game, the game of divide and conquer to stay in power. And the only thing to do, the only thing that would ever do, is "to treat the millennialist mob as the enemies they are" and do something about it.

It may just be necessary to win an election or two. Or not.

The Moment Before Wile E. Coyote Falls to Earth

The recurring drama of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner is that the Coyote keeps coming up with a cunning plan to blow up the Roadrunner, but every time the cunning plan blows up in his face.

I am reminded of this as the unremarkable Joe Biden picks the unremarkable Kamala Harris as his running mate. They are both, I think, caricatures of who we do not want as president.

I wonder if that has been true about the Democratic Party for the last 50 years. Let us suppose the Democrats were genuinely shocked when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968. But hey, accidents happen.

Then Nixon won a second term, going away. Well, the Democrats taught him a lesson and booted him out of office. But then came Reagan, the "amiable dunce," in swampy Clark Clifford's memorable phrase. And a Republican Senate.

OK, so things returned to normal in 1992 with Bill Clinton, the master politician of the ages. But the next thing was the first Republican Congress in 40 years!

OK, so we got the First Black President in 2008. But the next thing was a Republican House in 2010 and a Republican Senate in 2014.

What in the world is going on? 

What is going on is that the Democrats are becoming more and more desperate to hold onto the reins of political power that they had come to regard as theirs by divine right -- or at least the arc of history -- and the good old ways just aren't working any more.

Let us say that the problems began when working-class Americans first started breaking away from the New Deal coalition and voting Republican. It started with Nixon's Silent Majority, and reasserted itself with the Reagan Democrats.

I experienced the Reagan Democrats directly in 1980 at a Republican presidential caucus in Kent, Washington. There was I and another gentry guy as Bush supporters. But on the other side of the room were guys that looked like phone-repair technicians: they were Reagan supporters and they carried the day. On that day I knew that the world had changed.

Democrats have been pretty cunning about neutralizing this trend, by increasing immigration and turning a blind eye to illegal immigration. They understand that most immigrants start out as Democrats until they find their economic place. And they respond to a racist appeal until they experience themselves as Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

The problem is that this approach to politics requires that you taint all ordinary un-hypenated Americans as white supremacists. Thus the progressive three-layer theory of politics, as suggested by Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

So, in this lefty world there are the innocents, the good guys, and the bad guys. 

Contrast that with my reductive Three Peoples theory, which has People of the Creative Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Subordinate Self. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory, which has Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

In the Chantrill/Yarvin world, there are special people, ordinary people, and subordinates. It is a world which naturally has different kinds of people, but they ought to be able to rub along, with a little give and take.

But in the lefty world, things are black and white. And the only thing to do is for the allies to defeat the white oppressor monsters with the votes of the oppressed peoples before they grind the noses of the oppressed people into the dust.

I don't think it is that tendentious to suggest that the left's three-layer theory is, as lefties like to say about other people's ideas: Overdetermined.

And the Democrats' politics seems to have got them to a weird place, where the leading candidates for the presidency were a couple of old guys, one a socialist and one an old wheel-horse of the New Deal era. The rest of the Democratic candidates were diverse caricatures from central casting. The gay guy Buttigig! The fake Latino O'Rourke, the black guy Deval Patrick. The fake Indian Elizabeth Warren.The hedge-fund guy Tom Steyer. The Jewish billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Who among them could you say "cares about people like me?"

Let us notice the Big Lie at the heart of the three-layer "members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors."

It is that the ordinary white middle class, the Commoners, are in fact implacably powerful "white oppressors." Really liberals, are you sure? The conservative guys that I had lunch with last week are a cabal of white oppressors just back from their white-supremacist meeting?

And yet this is the lie that powers the whole Diversity and Inclusion politics of today's Democratic Party, and what prompts corporate America to immediately side with Black Lives Matter upon the death of George Floyd -- who, it turns out, was resisting arrest, was clearly under the influence of drugs, and was being restrained merely until the emergency medical folks got there.

When you play ducks and drakes with the truth, you get Trump. Because Trump is the candidate of the Commoners, of ordinary Americans without gorgeous qualifications, without access to power, without special privileges.

More and more I get the point of Curtis Yarvin's notion that the ruling class strokes the "ambition, honor, and vanity" of the Gentry layer. All the folderol about the First Black President, the First Woman President is all bubba bait for the Gentry. Oh yeah! We are so evolved! Isn't it wonderful that we elected the First Black President! Finally, gays get to marry! We are so evolved! So compassionate! So inclusive!

But, it seems to me, this politics gets you the present gargoyles on the Democratic ticket for president. Joe Biden, the underwhelming senator from a tiny state, Delaware, Chosen By Obama so as not to outshine the underwhelming guy at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris, who made her way to headline politics as the creature of Willie Brown, the Mr. Big of California politics, and has clearly not developed an essential instinct for what to say and what not to say.

The question is: how do these gargoyles get to be presidential candidates? The answer, I think, is the poisonous race and gender politics of the Democratic Party that cannot let ordinary politicians make their way to prominence, but must be always putting the race/gender finger on the scales, must always be reducing everything to good-guys/bad-guys race war.

And the bottom line of their politics is that if the rulers can get the votes of the Gentry and the votes of the Clients then who cares about the Commoners?

Well, nobody cares until the Commoners rebel, because of the injustice of the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" theory of politics.

And then the Democratic Wile E. Coyotes are stunned when the latest cunning product from Acme Corporation blows up in their faces.

Message to Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

So, yesterday the Seattle City Council decided to Defund the Police. Next year. When you think about it, this is exactly how politics works. 

Some interest group gussies up a bunch of rage, and the politicians realize they have to Do Something about it. But they know, in their heart of hearts, that it's all baloney. So what do they do? They pass a bill to make it look like they are doing something but push the big stuff off till next year when, maybe, the patient's fever will have subsided.

Anyway, the black woman Seattle chief of police Carmen Best resigned. Or rather, retired.

Doesn't that make the whole Seattle City Council into racist sexists? You tell me.

But I think there is a bigger issue here. And I think it is this:

The Age of Politics is Over. 

You think? I think that the Age of Politics ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts 55 years ago.

I went to the website of my Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss and he says this.

My priority as a Councilmember will be to create bold solutions at the scale of the problems we are seeking to address. I will fight to ensure Seattle is a healthy city, one connected by transit, that supports our small businesses, that has accessible and affordable childcare, and has safe, affordable places to call home.

Know what, Dan? The Age of Bold Solutions is over. What we need is an absence of bold solutions, a long withdrawing roar of undoing the Bold Solutions of yesteryear. For the only Bold Solution worth thinking about relates to my maxim that "Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them." Which is to say: don't even think of a bold solution.

Of course, you can reform government programs, but only when they are broken -- completely broken, as in government can't borrow money any more. 

But we are better than that. 

This is why I say that the left -- liberals, progressives, choose your poison -- is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is a return to slavery, the welfare state a return to feudalism, and the activism culture a replay of the medieval romance, when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

See, the whole point about humans is that we are social animals. That means that we do a bunch of things in order to reduce violence and conflict. One of those things, highlighted by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster thingy, is hierarchy. Male lobsters don't fight over every little thing; instead they have a hierarchy. So unless a male lobster just can't take it any more, he accepts his place in the hierarchy. Lobster Lives Matter.

Now, one of the Big Problems down the ages is that humans have lived by the food available to them on the land. They have attempted to secure this food supply be defending a territory. Men have specialized in territory defense. Because land, and the food grown there, was life.

But now things are different, as I keep saying. It doesn't matter where food is grown. You can buy it. You can buy it thousands of miles away and have 100,000 ton grain ships move it all over the world from where the food is grown to where it is wanted. It doesn't matter where any product is produced; it can be loaded into a container on a container ship and dispatched across the world.

The only real wealth in the world is "intangible capital," the knowledge and knowhow in human minds. And this knowledge and knowhow can create incredible fortunes: the Microsoft fortune, founded by a guy that bought an operating system for personal computers and sold it by the item to IBM; the Apple fortune, starting with the iPod music machine and culminating in the iPhone that has transformed the world.

Notice what is missing from these tales of fabulous wealth? Force. Government. Politics. Bold Solutions.

Now, all is not completely copacetic, not yet. It is true that we no longer need to live as the underlings or the thralls of a Strong Leader that will protect us from all the dangers of the world. Instead we now are subservient to the market, what other people are willing to pay for our services and our products. It is, many people think, a worse slavery than the old household slavery or plantation slavery. For there is no hiding from the market in some rural paradise. We must all mark to the market every day. We must all keep updating our skills and improving our products. If we don't then we will find that the market no longer rewards us very much for our trouble.

And we need police to bash the heads of knuckleheads that haven't yet got with the program. That still like to loot.

But is the new market order unjust? Does a social animal deserve to thrive even if it is unwilling to serve its fellows with services and products that those others want to buy? That, of course, is the Great Question that all of us are confronted with every day. By what right can and should we demand to be supported by others when we cannot provide for ourselves?

There's a yard-sign on my morning walk that declares "Equality Hurts No one" and it features the clenched fist of Black Lives Matter. Well. So equality doesn't hurt anyone but if you don't provide it we have a clenched fist ready to enforce the notion. Thanks, pal. 

I would say that the only way to have equality is to enforce it. And you'd have to do it every day because tomorrow some entrepreneur will have a remarkable idea that is worth millions -- or maybe trillions. And that would be the end of equality until you enforce it. So equality needs a clenched fist.

In fact, though, social animals have found that equality is impossible. The only thing that works is a benevolent form of hierarchy, just like the lobsters. In our society the chap that ascends the hierarchy is often an entrepreneur with a good idea that turns out to be worth trillions. Then there is the politician that ascends the hierarchy by promising Bold Solutions.

And there is the fact that young men are programmed, coded to be defenders of the border. That is what all the LARPing AntiFa warriors are doing. They are doing what comes naturally.

Only, in our day, we don't need no stinkin' border warriors. We have road warriors, professional sports stars, the chance to found a new business and take it public in an IPO, instead.

And a glorious thing it is, to be, not a pirate king, but a software billionaire.

But you tell Councilman Dan Strauss. Or Councilwoman Brahmin-from-Puna Kshama Sawant about that.

Because I don't think they would understand. They still live in the primitive world of the Age of Politics and don't understand that the world has moved on.

Think of them as primitive savages, or primitive progressives. What does a primitive progessive understand about the market and the idea of trusting anyone that acts trustworthy?

The Question of George Washington and His Slaves

My line on slavery is the same as my line on conquest and plunder.  Slavery Does Not Pay. 

And that is why we don't have slavery any more. Not because we are moral giants but because we can calculate profit and loss.

But then I read an interesting biography George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World, by John Berlau.

Did you know that George Washington started work as a surveyor at age 14? His dad had died and the kids from dad's first marriage got all the money. So the father of our nation had to get a job.

When Washington married his Martha, he was marrying money, for Martha was rich from her first marriage. Lots of slaves and all.

Here's the deal: Washington had a few slaves personally, and when he died he freed them all. This was considered a bit radical in 1799.

But the big thing for me was that George Washington, and a number of other slave-owners, had determined not to buy and sell slaves if it broke up the slave families.

In other words, he experienced his slaves as people, rather than commodities. But, when you experience your slaves as people there are all kinds of other issues, like what do you do about slaves that are too old to work.

That is where the Does Not Pay comes in.

The thing about slaves is that while you get work out of them -- if you are lucky -- you are also responsible for housing and feeding them. And clothing them and I know not what. 

OK, here are the details. In his will Washington stipulated after the death of his wife Martha all his slaves should be freed, and that former slaves unable to support themselves due to advanced age or disability should be clothed and fed by his heirs. And he provided for the education of "many of the former slave children." And no slaves were to be sold.

So if you actually care about them as people, they could cost you a bundle.

In other words, as soon as you start to care about slaves as people, Slavery Does Not Pay.

Do you see how free labor might appeal to the business class? If you are a good guy like George Washington the care and feeding of your slaves is going to cost a bundle. But if you free them and give them wages in return for their work then the responsibility for the care and feeding falls on the now-freed slaves.

So now it occurs to me that my line that conquest and plunder and slavery went out because They Do Not Pay has an important qualification.

If you do not care about the Other as people, then conquest and plunder and slavery are cool. If you conquer and kill, nobody cares about the widows and orphans of the conquered. If you plunder the conquered of all their grain, who cares if they all die of starvation. If you enslave the conquered, who cares if half of them die on the Middle Passage, or the voyage from Kaffa in the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East.

But once you do start to care about the Other as people, then everything changes. And all of a sudden the cost of treating people like people starts to come into view.

So you tell me the answer to this moral dichotomy: which is moral, to have people as virtual slaves and thralls and accept the responsibility to look after them? Or to employ them as free labor and just have to worry about the work they do and how much you pay them?

So, in our welfare state we have struck a middle course. We expect people to get a job, but we also look after the people that fall by the wayside. Is that a middle course, or a muddle? You decide.

Here's an interesting way to look at it. Our wokey friends divide the world up into oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors. Makes life pretty easy, don't it? You care about the "oppressed peoples" and the "allies" -- who are people like us wokies. The "white oppressors," whoever they are, can go hang.

Here's my take on morality. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

What I Believe

I'm going to lunch with some regular guys today, organized by a man that emailed me a couple of weeks back to thank me for my American Thinker articles. So maybe we will talk politics, not to mention "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

So I thought: what do I believe? What is "the meaning of life?" I think that my basic belief is that "we don't know." But everyone feels the need for a purpose, a meaning in life, so we make it up.

Correction: we don't make it up; we pick up someone else's belief system, a religion or ideology, and believe in it. Here is how a Portland stay-at-home mom experienced the woke belief system:

I started noticing [in 2016], throughout the neighborhood, a massive movement. Resistance to everything without an understanding of the issues themselves, the underlying data, what was really happening, it just felt so surface oriented, emotionally driven, and a repeat of media talking points. Yard signs popped up everywhere and are still on proud display. 

I believe that different people have different beliefs, and that this is natural and physical, and comes out of the modern understanding of the human psyche through things like developmental psychology. On this view, you would expect a hunter-gatherer to have a different world view than a college professor. You would also expect a construction worker with a mega pickup truck to have different ideas on transportation and grocery shopping than a college professor driving a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods.

I try to understand this "diversity" through my reductive Three Peoples theory. I use the word "reductive" because of course I know that things are not so simple that you can put all humans into three boxes. But, you have to start somewhere, and dividing humans into three parts is better than the more usual two-part "Us" and "Them."

Thus, I believe that we humans in the modern world come like this. There are, first of all, Subordinate people. These are people that experience themselves as victims, tossed around by indomitable powers. So the answer is to find a powerful lord or political patron and stick to him like glue. Then there are Responsible people. These are the middling sort of people that have a basic competence and skill set that enables them to make it in the market economy of the city. They think it is their responsibility to follow the rules, go to work, and follow the law. Finally, there are Creative people. For these people it is not enough to go out in the world and live a responsible life. As rich-kid Karl Marx wrote,

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Now I think it is important for Creative people to understand that it's all very well to talk about "changing" the world. But what if you are wrong and your plan for change is a disaster? You got insurance for that, pal?

I also think it is important for Responsible people to realize that it is all very well for them to say "get a job" to the Subordinate people of the world. But there is a whole cultural transformation between the life of the subsistence peasant in the feudal countryside and the knowledge worker in the city. I discuss this in my book The Road to the Middle Class.

I also think that it is important for Subordinate people to realize that their feudal lords or elected politicians or woke "allies" don't really care about people like them. Subordinates are what I call the "Little Darlings" of the rulers, at best, and their cannon fodder, at worst. When the day comes that the Subordinates are no longer useful for the lordly political project, they will be cast aside like an aged mistress. Case in point, the white working class, that progressives once loved, and now dismiss as white supremacist bigots and fascists.

Like everyone, I do have plans for how other people should live. For Subordinates, that I experience as people learning how to make it in the modern city, I propose The Road to the Middle Class, a program to learn the ways and the culture of the city, that I define as learning the code of Axial Age religion, education in modern skills, mutual aid rather than government welfare programs, and learning to live under law rather than under a lord. In other words, I recommend growing from Subordination to Responsibility.

For Responsibles, I recommend growing from Responsibility into Creativity, to experience life as not merely living according to God's law and living within set parameters, but learning to create a little, as in creating your own business, trying out some idea of betterment, of doing things better.

For Creatives, I have a plan. See, I think that the wokies -- ever since Marx -- have made a fatal error. They think that the future will be made by Creative people like them "fighting for change." This kind of person I call the Egoist Hero and they think of as the Revolutionary Hero. It is the modern equivalent of the tribal leader leading his people to victory on the border against the dangerous tribe next door. So I have developed my own idea of "The Good Life" which comprehends the wokey approach but reaches higher. 

For Creatives, I propose, the highest goal should be to become a Sacrificial Hero. This notion comes out of Jungian psychology and his idea of "archetypes." As developed by Jungian adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, the Sacrificial Hero means a person that conducts the Hero's Journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and if he survives this dive into the depths he may return to help his fellow humans, by illuminating the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown. And he probably sacrifices his life in the process.

The key thing to understand, I think, is that politics is not the way to the future. Politics, in my understanding, is the defense of our tribal patch of land from others that would conquer, plunder, and enslave us.

Only, in my understanding, conquest, plunder and enslavement are so yesterday. No, not immoral, so much as belonging to another age. For the point is that in our world, conquest, plunder, and slavery Do Not Pay.

Why? Because in modern developed countries 80 percent of wealth is "intangible capital" between the ears of intelligent creative responsible people. If you conquer, and plunder, and enslave, you have gained nothing. Because the wealth of the world is intangible.

If only our lefty friends would wake up one day and realize this.