Missing the Point of Jane Austen

Apparently there's a whole industry out there criticizing Jane Austen for not being woke enough. Or praising her as the world's first feminist. Or taking her to task for not turning her novels into tirades against slavery. That's what I get from a fairly sensible article about "Interrogating Jane" by Lona Manning.

Oh dear. What fools these mortals be.

I want the novels of an era to be drenched in the conventional wisdom of the time. That's because I don't trust history, don't trust politicians, don't trust historians to tell me the truth about the Good Old Days.

Instead, I want to be able to winkle out of the text and the story what was really going down back then. The value to me in Jane Austen is precisely that. That servants don't exist as people. That when Fanny Price asks a question about the slave trade there is a dead silence. That Anne Elliot is good dutiful girl that rejects the marriage proposal of the young Captain Wentworth without a fortune on the advice of elders, and then grows up to marry him anyway. When he is as rich as Croesus.

I want to be able to feel the grinding harshness of life in the English countryside that is described by Thomas Hardy. I want to be able to experience the social crosscurrents in George Eliot's Adam Bede, from the rising young carpenter, to the woman preacher, to the twerpy orphan girl to the twerpy son of the manor. And I want to read about the pride of long-term farm tenants and their tradition of honor and respectability. I want all this without so much as a single fashionable word from today's moral framework.

I want to experience the emergence of the servant as almost a person in North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, in the person of Dixon, the servant of the Hales.

I want to read what Anthony Trollope writes about blacks and creoles and whites and what have you when he travels to the West Indies in the 1850s in The West Indies and the Spanish Main. And I don't want to hear any wokey flim-flammery about his whiteness and his upper-class Victorian sensibility and his apology for European colonialism.

And I don't want to hear a single word about how the slavery in the United States was uniquely evil and has condemned the United States to bottomless perdition forever.

What is interesting is that slavery, ubiquitous since forever, became a scandal during the 18th century. What is interesting is that after the abolition of African slavery in the 19th century in Europe and the Americas the world saw the founding to two slave states held up to the world as the very incarnation of truth and justice. What is interesting is that after the 19th century saw the elimination of whole forests of subordination the 20th century saw the replanting of a sort of neo-feudalism in the welfare state.

What is interesting is that after the righteous elimination of eevil absolute monarchies and their subjugation of the people and commerce for their dynastic adventures, the 20th century has seen the growth of monster state loot and plunder, where the ruling class extracts 40 to 50 percent of the income of ordinary people in order to reward their political supporters -- who are often, but not always, the very people that cough up the revenue.

What will be the fate of today's authors when knowing commentators from the virtuous future bemoan today's moral obtuseness and cowardice. And conclusively prove how today's writers deliberately and hypocritically avoided facing up to the monstrous injustices of our age.

Dems in Cloud Cuckoo Land

I'm at the airport this morning, and let me tell you, America is back. Albeit that all the men have black masks and all the women have pretty masks. Well, almost.

But I have to tell you -- if you will believe me -- that there is no sign of the systemic racism and white supremacy that President Biden warned us about last night. Why, I just saw a black woman and a white woman walking past the gate and they didn't seem in the least angry or frightened of each other.

The question all we racist-sexist-homophobes are asking is whether this is the last Big Push in a century of big government of the educated class, by the educated class, for the educated class, before the whole thing collapses. Or whether the educated class will succeed in sewing the place up into a totalitarian monostate where you'd better behave or you'll be sent to Critical Race Theory Reeducation Camp.

I tell you what. Nobody knows. The Dems are pressing all the buttons that worked for them in the past, from trillions for public works to trillions for women and children to race-card accusations. 

And if they don't work? The record of the past is that you can't expect the old warriors that knew how to fight the old way to suddenly reinvent themselves. So when they realize that the old levers and buttons don't work it will be too late. Of course, if they hammer on the old buttons hard enough, you never know.

After reading the reports on the Biden speech last night I'd say that the strategy of bashing all the buttons at once may not work too well. After all, the political art of loot and plunder requires that you tell you supporters that they are going to get their share. But you really don't want to rile up the opposition with too much taxation and sequestration and outright insult. I suspect that if President Biden were a little more on the ball his agenda would be a little less pedal-to-the-metal on every left-liberal wish list.

I'd say that one problem with the liberal interest-group / activist organization culture is that with every organization superbly organized to trumpet its issue to the reverberate hills there is a real problem getting any of them to cool their jets for the larger liberal interest. I always remember Nancy Pelosi confidently talking about AstroTurf during the first few months of the Tea Party. Of course she did, because every single liberal organization is a fake pretense at Representing the People, and instead is a special-interest scam.

But my belief is that the populist rebellion of the last ten years is organic, from the grass roots and not the AstroTurf plastic.

And that is the problem that is going to change the world. That the ordinary American can't take it any more and the average clueless rulers just don't have a clue.

A Panorama of Slavery: The Privateersman

Captain Marryat, he of The Children of the New Forest, was a naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane. His last naval adventure novel was The Privateersman, which turns out to be a reflection on slavery, for our hero, a disinherited gentleman from the north of England gets tricked into the slave trade, is then enslaved and then... Well you shall read the story.

The story opens in media res with a series of naval encounters in the Caribbean while our hero is a crewman on the privateer Revenge commanded by Captain Weatherall. First the Revenge captures a Frenchman, then is overwhelmed by a French and a Spanish ship acting together, then our hero is freed by the Hero and sent to hospital in Port Royal, Jamaica to recover. Then it's back to Liverpool, England and he meets the owner, Mr. Trevannion, of the privateer on which he had served in the Caribbean.

Now he sails as mate on a ship trading to Senegal, but is wrecked and captured by "natives" and carried off into the desert and sold as a slave to a fierce Negro desert king. But one of the king's women, Whyna, takes pity on him, and he becomes her personal slave. But then he and his companions are ransomed, return to the coast and sail back to Liverpool.

His time with the Negro queen excited interest in the gentry of Liverpool but soon it was time to ship out as first mate on another trip to Senegal. He uncovers a plot to capture the ship, foils the conspirators and sails back to Liverpool.

After a trip to London our hero gets command of his own ship for a bit of privateering. But first he takes some escaped Jacobites to Bordeaux, France and makes the acquaintance of the French that he fought in the Caribbean. Of course the Frenchie wants another fight, but our hero beats him and takes his ship as a prize back to Liverpool. But then he is arrested for helping the Jacobites escape. After being condemned to death and a short stay in the Tower of London as a traitor condemned to death he is pardoned and returns to Liverpool.

But his imprisonment in the Tower of London has persuaded our hero Elrington that privateering is not for him, and so he tells his employer -- in the hearing of the employer's daughter, the fair Miss Amy Trevannion, who is much impressed. He agrees to one more privateering cruise in which he captures three ships. But first he rescues a drowning man from a sinking ship that turns out to be his younger brother, Philip.

His employer is so pleased with him that he proposes to take him into business after a year's trial, but at the end of the trial Elrington refuses partnership because his employer's business is privateering. Miss Trevannion is cold towards him, and yet our hero observes her, later, weeping.

After numerous trials and excursions Elrington -- did you know his real name was Musgrave? -- heads to London to enroll his pal Captain Levee's ship to sail for the Royal Navy as a naval rather than a private ship. Then he captains a ship to Senegal for his employer, to take advantage of a special deal in elephant tusks and gold dust. 

But then Elrington gets the fever and when he wakes up his crew has exchanged the tusks and gold for slaves and they are on their way to Brazil and he is a prisoner of the mate Olvirez who hatched the slave plan. And when the ship arrives Rio de Janeiro in Brazil Elrington is sent off to a government diamond mine, for life, as an effective slave. But of course, he gets released by an extraordinary coincidence, and soon gets on a ship to return to England.

Only the ship gets wrecked on an island off North America. Elrington and the captain repair the ship enough to float it and get off the reef but they and the crew are captured by pirates and stripped of everything from clothes to money. The pirate soon anchors off the coast of America and cut the captives adrift in a rowboat.

By the way, did I mention that Elrington -- or Musgrave -- had scored a diamond from the diamond slave mine that he hangs around his neck in a leather pouch?

The former captives land and separate, and Elrington and a companion find a canoe and paddle up the coast, but then get captured by Indians, escape, and then recaptured. His companion is killed but he is forced to marry an Indian woman: slavery? One day while out hunting with the Indians he encounters a white man and would have joined his ship, except its crew were called the "Jolly Rovers:" pirates. He walks on and comes to a house on a hill. It is a plantation run by a woman who employs two convicts as slaves, and now also our hero, who finds himself once more a prisoner, a slave. But pretty soon he find out he is to be her sex slave as well: marriage or your life. Impossible: because Miss Trevannion! He tries to escape, but is captured and put in irons.

Pretty soon the plantation is attacked by Indians and set afire. He and his mistress run off in the smoke, and then he runs away from her and into the Jolly Rovers and joins their ship. But he refuses to join their crew or become their pirate captain. Even so, it's back down to the Caribbean and Jamaica. On the way they run into the pirate ship that had despoiled Elrington before and capture it. While engaged with the other pirate ship a British corvette shows up and blasts the pirates to smithereens.

Guess who the captain of the corvette is? Elrington's brother Philip.

So Elrington, first name Alexander, real surname Musgrave, makes a swift passage to England, sells his diamond for £38,000, finds out that his baronet father and his two elder brothers are dead, so he is now Sir Alexander Musgrave, and he can go to Liverpool and make his beloved Amy Trevannion into Lady Musgrave.

What a life: enslaved three times, imprisoned twice, captured any number of times. But things are much better now.

The Fourth Turning: Trying Not to Frighten the Rulers

About five years ago (I think) my daughter recommended I read The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and last week I finally read it.

The book makes the unexceptional argument that history goes in cycles, with typically a crisis once a century. Obviously, you might say, any ruling class gets weak and flabby after a century and either gets its back stiffened by an in-group replacement, or the less amiable war and revolution.

But Strauss and Howe butter up this notion with some Jungian archetypes, that the century long cycle is driven by a generations of Prophets succeeded by Nomads succeeded by Heroes succeeded by Artists.

Which, in my opinion, gets a bit confusing and turgid, and allows them to predict anything about anyone.

The key to their argument is the "fourth turning" when the accumulated detritus from a three generations of rule in any political entity creates a mess that provokes unrest and rebellion and/or war. The result is a reset that refreshes the society and begins a new cycle. When the book was published in 1997 the authors were predicting a Crisis era beginning in about 2005 or maybe as late a 2020.

Because a book like this is targeted at an educated audience, the "cognitive elite" that is basically the ruling class, it has to step rather daintily. After all, the reason we are in a mess right now is that we have had about a century of rule by the educated class that has ramped up government spending from about 10 percent of GDP to 40 percent of GDP and we are soon going to run out of money. Plus, as Charles Murray relates in Coming Apart, the last 50 years has been good for people with good cognitive skills, but not so good for the less cognitively able. So life is good for the cognitive, but not so good for the rest.

So I think that all the talk about Jungian archetypes is a smokescreen to hide the unpleasant truth that the Crisis is going to be all about the injustice dished out by the educated elite and experienced by ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives struggling through the brambles that have been sown in their gardens by their educated and cognitive betters.

And, the book is all about the changing fashions and enthusiasms in the ruling elite. I suppose that is inevitable because rebellions never succeed and wars never start without the ruling class -- or a resentful cabal in the second rank -- stepping up to lead. Slave rebellions and peasant revolts never succeed. Even the Spartacus rebellion in 73 BC of 70 slave gladiators that swelled into a host of over 100,000 was put down by the Roman legions. So, the question is what cabal in the ruling class is likely to form a head of rebellion.

We could say that the Fourth Turning in the US started with the Tea Party and the 64-seat GOP gains in 2010 that flipped the House and ended in Donald Trump getting elected president in 2016. The question is whether the rulers can put down the revolt. I suppose that the answer is: they probably can unless a significant splinter of the ruling class decides to go for broke and side with the rebels. Right now they have beaten back the rebels, but only just, with a questionable presidential election and a 50-50 Congress.

But can the Biden people clinch the deal? Can they intimidate Big Business into suppressing the yokels? Can they keep the economy on track and still satisfy their supporters? Can they, er, manage the elections? Can they keep the blacks riled up? Can the ruling class get its act together?

I suppose that is really the question. It's not whether the Deplorables have an argument or that the Commoners of Middle America are getting screwed. The question is can the ruling class stay unified, or will some sector of the ruling class decide to put itself at the head of a movement to "take back America."

And then, of course, the question is how far the rebels are willing to go to make their point, and how ruthless the rulers are willing to be in stopping them.

A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokeism

Over the weekend I wrote up a 4-part review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Because, even though I bought and read Coming Apart back in 2012 when it was published, I wanted to be sure I knew all the ins and outs of his book.

As you may know, Murray wrote the book after being anathematized as a racist for The Bell Curve published in 1994 which first advanced the idea that modern society was becoming one in which you needed good cognitive skills to succeed and that certain groups -- blacks in particular -- that exhibit lower IQ than the norm were going to be on the short end of the cognitive age. OK, he said: I'm a racist. Let's analyze the cognitive age for whites only.

I tend to summarize his book thusly: "the top 20 percent is doin' fine, with great careers and merger marriages, the middle 50 percent just so-so, and in the bottom 30 percent the men don't work much and the women don't marry much."

My new summary goes something like this: The US economy over the last 50 years has transformed life and work, and in particular benefited a "cognitive elite" of people with extraordinary cognitive skills. This cognitive elite is now the "new upper class" in America. But people lacking in high cognitive skills have not done so well, and in particular the bottom 30 percent has been hard hit. There aren't many good jobs for people without at least a high-school education, and so we also have a "new lower class" in America, where people don't work much, and don't marry much, and don't feel at all happy.

Perhaps the strongest point in Coming Apart is Murray's analysis of the new upper class of the cognitive elite that has segregated itself off from the rest of America into a cultural "bubble" and doesn't know much about the rest of America. Back in the day, when nearly everyone went to church and belonged to fraternal organizations they necessarily mixed -- and had to get along with -- people very different from themselves. No longer. And the growth of the welfare state means that people no longer have to get together to achieve social and community goals. They leave it up to politicians, government and its bureaucrats.

Murray proposes that to live a happy and meaningful live you have to score on the four ancient virtues: industry, honesty, marriage, religion. The new upper class scores well on all four virtues: they live worthy lives with, as I say, "great careers and merger marriages."

Writes Murray, "the new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them." It is a "hollow elite." For, while the new lower class has suffered and declined over the last half century, the new upper class has no idea that there is a problem; has no credible analysis of the problem; and demonizes anyone that tries to develop an analysis and a solution to the problem.

Things can't go on like this, Murray reckons: something has to give. And he comes up with a four-part prophecy, that involves the collapse of the European model of the welfare state and its intellectual underpinnings, the development of an alternative to the welfare state, and Americans asserting their allegiance to basic Americanism.

That's when I understood what the new ruling-class woke-ism is all about.

If a ruling class is challenged it has two basic options. It can grant the validity of the challenge and start to reform its corrupt institutions. Or it can double down and declare war on the insurgents. And that is how to understand the culture war, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and Wokeism.

I dare say that in 2009 with the inauguration of the First Black President and a Democratic Congress with a 57-41 Democratic Senate and a 257-178 House our new upper class imagined that politics as we know it was all over and social justice -- fundamental transformation -- would rule for a thousand years. Instead they got a series of jolts. First of all was the Tea Party in 2009-10 and the flipping of the House with a 64 seat GOP gain leading to a 242-193 alignment. Then President Obama won reelection with less of a majority than his first election. Then the Senate flipped in 2014 to 54-44 Republican. Then the impossible happened in 2016 and a crude populist nationalist won the presidency.

Do you see the point? You can interpret these events in two ways. You can either say, that "we" have a problem. Or you can react with incredulity: "Inconceivable" as Wallace Shawn (son of New Yorker editor William Shawn) said in The Princess Bride. And that's when people start looking under rocks, or start chanting "Russia, Russia."

This is what you call a failure of prophecy. And governing elites tend not to say: wow, our whole world view is contradicted. Instead they tend to double down and to opt for a Reign of Terror and Virtue. Or Great Purge. Or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And society ends up with a mammoth butcher's bill.

Now my guess is that the current wokeism and cancel culture and war on "systemic racism" is making things worse for the new lower class, and not better.

This is not rocket science. Ask yourself: how do "we" help people with less than stellar cognitive skills live a meaningful life in a congitive age? Give 'em welfare? I doubt it. I would say that we need, just to start, a reform of education and credentialing that creates pathways for people without high cognitive skills. And it would help create a adult culture for such people to help them get married, have children, own a home of their own, and live a meaningful life with modest security. In the larger sense, this means encouraging the lower orders to develop a sense of "agency" and permit them to create a world in which they can live lives of meaning.

Ask yourself: do I have a clue how a person of low cognitive ability would go about building a life with meaning in a cognitive age? I sure don't. 

But since our new upper class lives in a bubble and uses its cultural and political and economic power to dominate the rest of society with no backtalk allowed we have done nothing to help the "cognitively challenged."

You can see this bubble mentality in the #WeBelieve yardsigns that I like to believe are the work of the women of the new upper class. All of its assertions, from Black Lives Matter to Science is Real to Love is Love are trite expressions of new-upper-class conceit. They mean nothing to the new lower class, except for Black Lives Matter which will lead blacks to utter ruin.

I like to say that politics is division and government is force. The point of politics is for a warrior to rally the young men to his banner to fight the foreign foe on the border. The point of government is to reward the supporters of the rulers after they have won the great victory.

The problem is, of course, that the need to rally the nation to war happens only once in a generation, or less. So what do the politicians do the rest of the time? And there are other people, besides the supporters of the regime, who, you might say, also have a right to live a prosperous and meaningful life. Whatabout them?

The current administration's agenda has been simply stated: climate change and systemic racism. Do you see that there is nothing for the ordinary American in this agenda? Climate change is a ruling-class fantasy that empowers the rulers to spend vast quantities of money and order people around in a rerun of World War II. Systemic racism is a play to rile up the lower "people of color" and teach them that "they are owed," tempt them with government handouts and their problems are the fault of "white oppressors" who are...

Yes, the oppressors are not the new upper class that has an almost complete control of culture, politics, and the economy but, presumably, the white Commoners of the middle class. Who have absolutely no input into the national political and economic agenda, except when they vote for Trump to "Make America Great Again."

There is nothing in the Biden administration agenda to address the agenda of ordinary American Commoners, and there is nothing to address the problems of the new lower class that goes beyond handing out goodies.

Look, every upper class screws up. It must do so, because it looks out on the world and instinctively tries to adapt it to suit people like them and to dangle baubles that it imagines will attract the support of others. And there are millions of people who are not like them, who will eventually get angry about the blindness and the injustice of the rulers.

But when the people have clearly said that, hey, things are not working out for people like us, then the ruling class has two options. It can admit "we screwed up" and try to achieve a "redress of grievances." Or it can double down.

It is pretty obvious what our "hollow elite" has decided. And it is telling that its decision demonstrates an astonishing hubris, to ignore the possibility that there might be problems out there among the peasants about which we bright shining stars in the political firmament know nothing.

Coming Apart: Why It Matters

After establishing in Parts I and II of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 that a new upper class -- a "cognitive elite" -- was coming to dominate the culture, politics, and the economy, and a new lower class that didn't work much and didn't marry much was causing a cratering of lower-income America, Charles Murray now turns to the question: What do we do about it?

As he says: 

The trends of the last half century... signify damage to the heart of American community and the ways in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.

So, something has to change. Social democrats may call for a "distribution of wealth." Social conservatives "may see a compelling case for government policies that support marriage, religion, and traditional values." Murray, a libertarian, sees "a compelling case for returning to the founders' conception of limited government."

Central to his argument is the difference between the Italian town of Montegrano in the 1950s, where nobody did anything for anyone that wasn't family. Compare this to St. George, Utah, where, on one day in the 1950s, the town newspaper reported a blizzard of volunteer organization meetings and accomplishments -- in a town of 4,462 people.

Or take the 112 Protestant churches in Manhattan and the Bronx at the turn of the 20th century and their 38 industrial schools, 45 libraries, 44 sewing schools, 40 kindergartens, and so on. Then there were the secular fraternal organizations: Elks, Moose, Odd Fellows.

They drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes.

To get these organizations to work, their leaders had to "mobilize and interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds or they were not successful."

Whatabout today? Well the data seems to indicate that the new upper class is doing fine, with attendance at city council meetings and parent associations in the schools. It is pretty clear that social and civic interaction has declined drastically in the new lower class.

This is reflected in estimations of other peoples' trustworthiness: high in Belmont and declining in Fishtown. Ethnic diversity erodes social trust, even within an ethnic community.

All of which leads to deep unhappiness. Wanna be happy, in the Aristotelian sense of "lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole?" Then you need to practice the four virtues, because

Happiness = Baseline happiness + satisfying work + happy marriage + high social trust + strong religion

In other words, happiness is a combination, of success in the four "sources of deep satisfactions: family, vocation, community, and faith." They are entwined and go together. In the welfare state all these activities are separated and enfeebled and run or supervised by government.

A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life... If that same man lives under a system that says the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then the status goes away... Taking the trouble out of life strips people of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say "I made a difference."

Report of people being "very happy" has gone down a bit in Belmont, from 50 percent to 40 percent. But in Fishtown from 35 percent to 15 percent.

 The new upper class practices the four virtues, but issues a "set of mushy injunctions to be nice" to the rest of society. The upper class practices the old virtues, with hard work, stable families, civic work and higher religious membership, but "we have to respect everyone else's way of doing things, regardless of gender, race, sexual preference, cultural practices, or national origin". "No derogatory labels for anyone" except for "people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." The new upper class practices the old virtues, "but it no longer preaches them."

What of the future? Murray has "four predictions" that are really prophecies.

First, what happens in Europe will not be pretty as their welfare state implodes.

Second, science will undermine the moral underpinnings of the welfare state, because human nature cannot be changed.

Third, there will be an increasing understanding that there is a fairly simple alternative to the entire apparatus of the welfare state, a basic income proposed by Murray in his In Our Hands.

Fourth, Americans will prove their allegiance to the American project, in some kind of Great Awakening.

America's new upper class must "once again fall in love with what makes American different." It needs something more than piecemeal legislation or Supreme Court decisions. We need to talk about how America is exceptional and why it should stay exceptional.

Coming Apart: The New Lower Class

Just as America now has a new upper class "who are more and more removed from the lives of everybody else" we now have a new lower class.

In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level white collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms... [By] 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs... In the years after 1960 America developed something new: a white lower class that did not consist of a fringe, but of a substantial part of what was formerly the working-class population.

Murray asserts that the pre-1960 America was notable for the practice of four "Founding Virtues." Industriousness: even "the penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was consumed by it." Honesty: "the extraordinary respect which people pay to the law." Marriage: Feminist Harriet Martineau thought that "marriage is in America more nearly universal, more safe, more tranquil, more fortunate than in England." Religiosity: Although many Founders were Deists, they all agreed that "Religion was essential to the health of the new nation."

Murray proposes to track what happened to the founding virtues between 1960 and 2010 in two representative neighborhoods: Boston's upscale Belmont and Philadelphia's downscale Fishtown. In real life the two places are not purely upper class or lower class, but Murray will assume they are.

In 1960 64 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Fishtown and only 6 percent of prime-age white Americans qualified for Belmont. By 2010, only 30 percent qualified for Fishtown and 21 percent qualified for Belmont.

Marriage: In Belmont in 1960 95 percent of white people were married; in 2010 83 percent were married. In Fishtown in 1960 84 percent of whites were married; in 2010 only 48 percent were married. In Belmont in 1960 about 75 percent of white reported "very happy" marriage. In went down in the 1980s but in 2010 was back up to 73 percent. In Fishtown, 67 percent of marriages were "very happy" in 1960. In 2010 only 52 percent. OK, how about this. In Belmont, the percent of children living with both biological parents dipped from 97 percent in 1960 to 87 percent in 2010. In Fishtown this percentage dipped from 94 percent in 1960 to 35 percent in 2010.

Industriousness: Prime-age males not in the workforce went from 5 percent to 15 percent for men with "high school diploma or less." That went from 1.5 percent to 3 percent for males with "BA or higher." Whatabout women? In 1960 40 percent of Belmont women were in the labor force and 33 percent of Fishtown women. By 2010 nearly 80 percent of Belmont women were in the labor force and 72 percent of Fishtown women. Heads of household? In Belmont in 1960 about 90 percent worked 40 or more hours per week and in Fishtown 81 percent worked 40 hours or more. In 2010, Belmont about 88 percent of heads of household worked 40 or more hours a week but in Fishtown a little over 60 percent worked 40 or more hours a week.

Honesty: Using violent crime arrests as an index, In Fishtown it went from about 120 arrests per 100,000 population in 1960 to about 750 per 100,000 in 1995 and descended to about 600 per 100,000 in 2010. In Belmont violent crime arrests are almost non-existent, less than 20 per 100,000 in 1960 and lower still in 2010.

Religiosity: In Fishtown "de-facto seculars" went from about 40 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2010. In Belmont it went from about 30 percent in 1960 to about 40 percent in 2010.

In the real Fishtown, these days, they talk about "family people" and "lower class." The family people are slowly moving out. Still, Fishtown appears to be gentrifying, with factories "turned into chic loft apartments." And so houses "that were worth $30,000 in the 1990s are selling for $200,000 and up." So pretty soon the family people will cash in on their houses and move to the suburbs, and the lower class will be unable to afford the rent.

Murray ends up with "three problematic categories" in the new lower class: 

1. Men who aren't making a living -- from 13 percent to 30 percent in Fishtown
2. Single women with children -- up from 5 percent to 18 percent in Fishtown
3. Isolates -- people with no involvement in community organizations

Or, as I like to say: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Up next: What to do now.

Coming Apart: the New Upper Class

In Coming Apart Charles Murray proposes that today's America has a three class system, with a new upper class that features a "cognitive elite," along with a new lower class, and "everybody else." His first job is to describe the new elite that is different from the old elite.

Back in the day, "upper class" meant the "old-money rich of the Northeast United States" and the closest equivalent of today's new upper class was called "The Establishment," and the thing about them was that they weren't that different from ordinary Americans. They just "had more money." Even in Cambridge, Mass., the world of Harvard and MIT was not that different from the rest of America. In those days, "the intellectuals of Harvard Square didn't have the critical mass to reshape the community." 

But now? David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise describes Wayne, PA, once a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia.

The town... has six gourmet coffeehouses... [a] fabulous independent bookstore... [There is] Studio B, a gift emporium that hosts creative birthday parties... Sweet Daddy's sells gourmet jelly beans... The Great Harvest Bread Company... where they sell apricot almond or spinach feta loaf for $4.75 a pop.

Mainstream America does not read newspapers, but new upper-class America reads The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, and they read the New Yorker and the Economist. The upper class doesn't listen to talk radio, but they do listen to NPR. They don't watch much TV, and certainly not "game shows, soap operas, music videos" etc. Foreign travel is a big deal to mainstream America, but routine for the new upper class, which has "coworkers and colleagues from around the world." Then they put an enormous investment into their children as "helicopter parents."

In the working world, the new upper class has a flexible, creative environment. For "everybody else" things are still pretty regimented.

And, of course, the new upper class tends to be liberal. And high IQ. As Murray writes,

the higher-tech the economy, the more it relies on people who can improve and exploit the technology, which creates many openings for people whose main asset is their exceptional cognitive ability.

This is where Murray got into trouble with The Bell Curve when he observed that blacks to not score high on cognitive ability. The new upper class did not want to here that in the mid 1990s.

But if cognitive ability is really important and affects the bottom line big time then it make sense that such people will be making a lot more in 2010, relative to others, than in 1960. Median family income for the top one percent shot into the stratosphere starting in the mid 1990s.

If you have exceptional cognitive ability you will be bullied by the kids at an average school. No problem, elite colleges have been selecting out the exceptional students since at least 1960. The exceptional students do well at selective colleges and marry exceptional students and have exceptional children that get into selective colleges. As Murray says:

Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper-middle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite.

Guess what. Racial residential segregation has been decreasing, but socioeconomic segregation has been increasing, and "the affluent increasingly segregate themselves off from the rest of American society." They live, increasingly, in SuperZips (in the 95th to 99th percentile of income). For instance, if you take graduates of Harvard Business School class of 1979, 61 percent lived in SuperZips in 2004. It's no wonder that the new upper class has a "whiff of 'we're better than the rabble' mentality." Call them Overeducated Elitist Snobs (OES). Oh and SuperZips vote Democrat, big time. And they are typically represented by doctrinaire liberals in Congress.

And they live in a liberal bubble. Murray provides a questionnaire for his urban educated readers to determine how bubbly they are. For instance: "Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?"

But there is a bright side to the new upper class. "As individuals, the members of the new upper class are just fine -- engaging, well mannered, good parents and good neighbors." And they are good performers. When the NYPD hired 300 policemen in 1940 on the basis on test scores the results were spectacular, for the 300 "achieved far higher rank and suffered far fewer disciplinary penalties than the typical class of recruits."

And the new upper class has made spectacular improvements to the economy, from the information economy to the design and durability of most consumer products. And the medications!

But could we roll back the inequality? Hardly, for the talented would head for the hills. 

The new-upper-class culture is not a product of great wealth... It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities.

Places like Marin County are not about wealth so much as about culture.

But the new upper class is "ignorant abut what much of the rest of the population lives." The question is how to change that, assuming that force majeure will not work. 

Up next: The new lower class.

Coming Apart: The Setup

Why is Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 just about white people? Is Murray a racist?

Well, there's a history on that. In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It argued the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future, which Murray and Herrnstein said would be an economy in which you needed to be a member of the cognitive elite to thrive. But what about the low IQ people, especially blacks, that test lower on IQ that whites? How dare you, said liberals, you racist.

So, in 2012 Charles Murray said, OK, let's see what has happened over the last 50 years in white America, and see how things worked out on the intelligence front. So that's what Coming Apart is all about the new cognitive elite Upper Class, the kind of people that live in Belmont, a fancy suburb of Boston. And it's about the new Lower Class, the kind of people that live in Fishtown, a down-at-heels neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Murray starts the book by painting a picture of American life the day before the Kennedy assassination. It was remarkably homogeneous, with a third of households watching The Beverly Hillbillies every week. There were only three TV networks, and limited restaurant choices. Almost everyone was married and only 3 percent of children were "illegitimate." At the movies the Production Code limited nudity and sexual situations and cursing. But Jim Crow still reigned in the South and 20 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.

But still the times they were a-changing, with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nader would soon publish Unsafe at Any Speed. Bob Dylan was in the air and the Beatles were changing popular music.

And then President Kennedy got assassinated and legislative genius Lyndon Johnson became president and legislated civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and increased welfare. The rest is history. And the subject of Coming Apart. But only white people, because it would be racist for Murray to write about the rest of America.

Next: The New Upper Class.

In Humiliation, Rage. Solving America's Race Problem

I just solved America's Race Problem. It's simple really.

Just ask yourself: why are blacks so angry?

The answer is obvious. Because blacks never had to fight for their freedom. All along, from Wilberforce to Waters, they have been mascots, political toys with which whites play their virtue-signaling games.

Anti-slavery campaign? It was started by William Wilberforce, rich-kid son of a merchant from Hull, England, in the Baltic trade. One thing about rich kids, from Wilberforce to Marx and Engels to Horkheimer and Adorno to Marcuse: They desperately need to do something to make their meaningless lives meaningful.

Civil War? It was a war between virtue-signaling whites in the North and Southern whites who vowed that the prissy Northerners could take their slaves out of their cold dead hands.

Civil Rights era? It was mostly a whites affair. Smart Jewish kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Cherished mascot of white liberals. And King used the non-violent protest concept that Gandhi developed. And how did Gandhi develop it? Because the Brits allowed this high-caste Indian to go to Britland to study to become a barrister and get inside the whole culture of British law and figure out how to beat it.

But whatabout slave rebellions? Here are PBS's five favorite slave rebellions:

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. "About 20 slaves."
2. New York Conspiracy of 1741. Never got to a rebellion, but about 130 blacks and others were hanged, exiled, or "sent to the stake."
3. Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800. Bit of a cock-up on the rebellion front. Gabriel planned to rally more than 1,000 to his revolt, but bad weather made his supporters lose heart.
4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. Charles Delondes and "about 25 slaves" rose up and attacked their plantation's owner.
5. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831. Nat Turner and "about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them."

Notice that two of the five rebellions are termed "conspiracies;" they never made it to full-blown rebellions. Not exactly Kirk Douglas and Spartacus, when about 70 slave-gladiators were eventually "joined by 120,000 men, women, and children" forming "a surprisingly effective armed force" in the Third Servile War.

So, basically the whole slave and civil-rights and critical race theory thing was all about whites virtue-signalling each other. With blacks as the mascots, the sacred objects to be sacrificed to the gods on liberal feast days.

If I were a black I would be humiliated by all this. No wonder that black males have such a super-macho culture. It is a compensation for their actual humiliation at the hands of rich-kid white liberals.

Now let's get all Churchillian about this. Remember his immortal lines:

In War: Resolution,
In Defeat: Defiance,
In Victory: Magnanimity,
In Peace: Good Will.

Yes, but whatabout the humiliation of blacks in being the 200-year special mascots of whites from Hull to Our Nance's San Francisco? Exactly,

In Humiliation: Rage.

Now you know why blacks are so angry.

OK. I've identified the problem. Now, how about a solution? 

Thank you, Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

The solution is simple, and comes right out of the current mass frenzy about police killings of blacks.

I agree with blacks. It is intolerable to have white police officers offing their best and brightest, when they are only mildly resisting arrest.

So I propose that no white policeman be allowed to arrest or use lethal force against any black suspect. Period. Because justice. 

But wait, you say! That means that our Democratic cities will all go up in smoke and violence, and the murder rate will double and triple.

Exactly. And then, maybe, blacks will form an organic movement -- trained Marxists need not apply -- and demand that their municipal leaders fund the police, crack the heads of the gang-bangers and homeboys, and restore peace to "our communities."

Then the rest of the Churchillian homilies will apply.

In War: Resolution,
In Victory: Magnanimity,
In Peace: Good Will.

For blacks will finally, organically, in the teeth of opposition from all the white liberal virtue-signalers, achieve what they have always lacked. Self-respect.

Ain't I a stinker? As Bugs Bunny put it so many moons ago.

My New Reality on Race and Economics

One of the central beliefs of conservatives for the last half-century is that the "broken-windows" policing using the CompStat data-driven approach, associated with Bill Braxton and Rudy Giulani, is a Good Thing. Police need to concentrate on the areas with the most criminality, and they need to get after the routine criminal acts of the criminal class.

The value of this was confirmed in nice liberal journalist Jill Leovy's Ghettoside when she wrote that the problem of policing in big cities is that people daren't testify in court about gang killings, because intimidation, but that people in big cities blame the cops for harassing the gang-bangers for minor infractions.

Or killing, or failing to resuscitate said gang-bangers when they are shot or restrained when resisting arrest.

I now realize that this policy was wrong. We should let the folks in the inner city kill each other to their hearts' content until they organize politically and demand that the majority whites are complete racists until they stop the killing.

Back in the day, in "Mau-mauing the Flack Catchers," Tom Wolfe captured the problem with policing the ghetto, reported recently by Steve Sailer. Back then the political types thought that the way to deal with riots at Hunters Point in San Francisco was to talk to the gang leaders, or anyone in control.

What they didn’t know was that Hunters Point and a lot of ghettos were so disorganized, there weren’t even any “key gangs,” much less “key gang leaders,” in there. That riot finally just burnt itself out after five days, that was all.

And now we are seeing, in the Ma'Khia Bryant killing where allegedly a cop shot Bryant because she was allegedly attacking another young black girl with a knife, is that it's none of his business. He killed a black girl, a child. That is all.

OK. I get it. White policemen have no business enforcing in the law on blacks. Period.

And actually that follows the logic of my reductive Three Peoples theory. People only accept law enforcement by their tribal leaders. For middle-class Responsibles, the tribe is the nation, so the national -- or municipal -- police force is the right organization to enforce the peace. But Subordinates identify with their race or their ethnicity or their country-of-origin. They need to be policed by the leaders of their tribe or race. Although, of course, we all know that race is a social construction.

Exactly. People identify with their socially constructed race as they have been socialized to do by their socially constructed leaders. 

Therefore, while Blacks identify as Blacks, white police officers should not enforce American law in Black ghettos. However, when a Black ventures out of the ghetto into America...

When Blacks start to identify as Americans, citizens of the nation called the United States of America -- as some already do -- then it is OK for white police officers to enforce national law.

I have had a similar realization with respect to economics. Back in the day, I thought that Reaganomics had conclusively demonstrated for all time that Big Government and Keynesian economics were sick and wrong. That is what the recovery from the Carter years of "stagflation" conclusively demonstrated, when the Reagan administration instructed the Federal Reserve Board to kill inflation, and it did. And the Reagan administration forged an agreement with the Democrats in Congress, Tip O'Neill presiding, about cutting taxes and spending. The result was Morning in America, even though the Democrats decided not to honor their commitment to cut spending. The Dirty Dogs.

But now the Biden administration has been told by the best economists not to worry about the debt, not to worry about inflation, and that its trillions of dollars in "infrastructure" will boost the economy.

It's as though the Reagan years never happened.

In other words, the Reagan years saved the bacon of the Democrats, and allowed them to continue to believe in their fantasies that license them to continue with their program of spend-and-elect.

Or, to make the problem bigger, per Ike, if you believe in power, as everyone in politics does, you necessarily glomm onto ideas that propose a national mobilization to fight a war against an existential peril. Thus, today's headline that "Biden pledges to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030." Because if we don't mobilize as one and buy Teslas the planet is going to burn.

So, the Black problem is that, until Blacks are crying out in sheer terror to insist that the white man comes into their neighborhoods and stop the killing, nice sensible ideas like CompStat and "broken windows" ain't gonna fly. 

Likewise, until our Democratic friends are utterly demolished by their big government spend-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes political philosophy and are deposed by a successor regime, successive Reagan revivals ain't gonna help.

And all of that, I believe, is a shame.

The Question of Men, Women, Stress, Hierarchy, Complaint and Conformity

Responding to my piece on "Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues, But..." regular reader Sara reminds my that my notion of the women's Culture of Complaint was corrected a while back by a woman red.hibiscus who wrote:

I don’t agree that woman have a Culture of Complaint. That is what men perceive, not what women experience... The actual culture is a Culture of Conformity. Negative tools are shame, guilt, threat of expulsion. The civilized version is rule of community ties and on-the-ground social ties, eg family.

Perfectly correct. Actually I would say that, in a perfect world, men have a Culture of Courage. After a couple of drinks it descends into a Culture of Insult. In a perfect world, women have a Culture of Conformity. After a couple of disagreements, it descends into a Culture of Complaint. Ying and Yang, and all that.

The piece on Liberal Women got into the question of "stress" which I think is a Girl Thing. I also think that "mental health issues" has a lot to do with women experiencing conflict in the man-designed public square. Conflict is part of the game for men, but intolerable for women.

In view of all this, Sara writes, we need to remember

1) The idea that open confrontation (instead of gossip) is anti-female culture 

2) The idea that stress AKA conflict is intolerable to women and they won't stand for it. 

Men live in a dominance hierarchy, Sara writes, and "see their survival in the world around them as a fight to be on top of the pyramid." But

Women however, because of the nature of their female bodies, necessarily see their own survival in the world around them as a fight to be left alone and survive in an EXISTING CONTEXT set by men.

Actually, I would refine this to say that most men most of the time know their place in the dominance hierarchy, and only occasionally attempt to change it in a fight, a point made by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster hierarchy argument.

I suppose the same applies to women, wanting to be left alone to run their households and raise children in the context created by marriage, and only occasionally being challenged by the gossip of the women's Culture of Complaint -- which is, no doubt, concerned about the woman in question appearing to violate the Culture of Conformity.

To get all Hegelian we would say that the male Culture of Courage has its negation in the Culture of Insult, while the female Culture of Conformity has its negation in the Culture of Complaint.

I would say that, despite the male hierarchy, there is among men a curious counter-current of equality. When men greet each other with an insult they are expressing that notion: "hey, pal, you are no better than I am." And, for instance, when I had my interview with billionaire Steve Ballmer I was careful to treat him as an equal, and behave as though I expected to be treated as an equal.

And I think that in the women's Culture of Conformity that asserts an equality among women there is a hidden hierarchy that every woman knows but nobody talks about. The Culture of Complaint is all about adjusting that hidden hierarchy.

Also, another woman corrected me on the Culture of Complaint saying that the ideal among women is Kindness. (This explains the last line on the virtue-signaling #WeBelieve yard sign that insists "Kindness is Everything").

I suspect that the Culture of Conformity and the Culture of Kindness are different aspects of the same thing.

Don't ask me how all this aligns with the left's insistence that everything is a social construction, except when it isn't.

"I Will Make You Safe"

Here's how to get elected president in 2024. Tell the women of America: "I will make you safe."

Because by 2024, what with the gathering chaos of Biden-world, women won't be so worried about Trump's rudeness. No indeedy. They will be wanting a Strong Man that will stop the madness and Make Them Safe.

Normally, as I say, Women Expect to be Protected. In normal times, when it really seems that they are being protected, it is natural for women to look askance upon aggressive men that like to duke it out in the public square. It seems like the rude men are making them unsafe.

I disagree with that, but I get it. What Women Want is to get on with their womanly tasks of keeping the kids alive and protecting their reputation as chaste women in the community of women. Aggressive men don't fit into that world.

They are wrong of course. What they should be doing, in normal times, is encouraging men in their manly sports, to keep them up to the mark. Most manly pursuits, from hunting to sports to politics, are relatively harmless. Indeed, they are genius, by deflecting men's natural propensity to quarrel into safe channels.

But when chaos looms, then women stop expecting men to cool their jets; then they start expecting men to sacrifice themselves and protect them, the women.

Now, my guess is that the current Democrat policy circus, from chaos at the border to chaos in the cities, to loot and plunder for the educated Snobs and the helpless victim Scum, is going to make women really afraid, perhaps even including the virtue-signalling women of the #WeBelieve brigade and the "Hate Has No Home Hare" huffers. 

Because what our Democratic friends are forgetting, as they go pedal-to-the-metal on every lefty activist notion imaginable, is that all their activism makes ordinary middle-class Schmucks less safe and less secure and less prosperous.

As I read the Strauss and Howe Fourth Turning I realize that the Big Thing that sparks their "Crisis" is the accumulated injustice of the current ruling-class regime. This is not to damn our liberal ruling-class friends in particular. It is just in the nature of the beast that every ruling class favors and feeds its own supporters and neglects the rest of the community.

Let me just boil it down to one chart from usgovernmentspending.com:

Do you see how, over the last century, government spending steadily increased as a percent of GDP up until about 1980. When, shall we say, it had gone about as far as it could go? And by the way, when ordinary American workers stopped participating in the increase in wealth and income?

Think of all that government spending as loot and plunder that the ruling class takes out of the hide of ordinary people and puts in the hands of its supporters. And I mean everyone from Social Security recipients like me to unionized teachers in the public schools to college professors to grant-wielding scientists to all kinds of people getting government contracts and subsidies, etc.

The more money that government takes out of the hide of ordinary people making their ordinary living, the more that it creates victims of injustice, people who cannot make a decent life for themselves because of the rip tides in the economy created by the government playing favorites.

Now Strauss and Howe gin up a cutesy Jungian theory of the circulation of archetypes, Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists to explain the political cycle. I think it is a cutesy way of covering the nakedness of the truth with a decent drapery, to drag in Edmund Burke. Because, after all, Strauss and Howe are educated class Snobs, and they know that the educated class can only take a little twinch of truth at a time. We get to their "Crisis" when the current ruling class is running out of ways to hide the naked injustice of their rule -- and pretty well all ruling classes are unjust, because "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Hey, we are all human, and we all like a bit of free stuff. But it leads in the end to a situation where a ruling class is trying to cut corners -- like ours right now -- because the sums don't add up. So the ruling class launches its BLMs and Antifas into the streets, and demonizes the opposition as an "armed insurrection" and pretty soon women start looking for a Savior to Make Them Safe.

To Be Continued. As they say.

A New Three Layer Theory: Snobs, Schmucks, and Scum

I was reading The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, after my daughter recommended it five years ago.

I agree with its notion of historical cycles, and that they tend to be about the length of one full human life, eighty to one hundred years. And that it is convenient to break up the cycles into 20-year generations.

But I'm not sure I agree with grafting Jungian archetypes onto the generations: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist.

And I don't agree with the idea of distilling hundreds of topical best-sellers as a real view of social and cultural reality. The picture that Strauss and Howe paint is really the ebb and flow of educated-class fashions. It does not really deal with politics as the ebb and flow of who-whom, to coin a phrase.

I'd say that a better way to understand history is to think about how the ruling class, living in its bubble, is often clueless about the miseries it is committing on the rest of the society. Let us rather say that a cycle begins with a new elite dishing out loot and plunder to its supporters, and then dealing with the unanticipated consequences of its actions. For instance, it might have seemed like a good idea to offer loot to senior citizens with Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, but what happens when these programs end up eating the budget? And the well-to-do seniors make sure the politicians know that they'd better not mess with their entitlements.

The basic fact is that the ruling class, any ruling class, is nothing but a bunch of Snobs. The ruling class thinks it is the fount of all wisdom, and no wonder when nobody dares to challenge it, because consequences. In our case we have a ruling class that is endlessly coming up with cool ways to buy votes and launch impressive projects of self-admiration. But what happens to the ordinary middle-class Schmucks on the receiving end of the ruling-class brilliance?

For instance, take California, please. In the 1970s, my first decade in the US, California was already in the lead in controlling suburban development and saving the coastline from development. But the result was to make housing brutally expensive for the young'uns just starting out. It was clear to me that I could never afford to live and work in California. But the existing residents of California that I met seemed to be copacetic with the new order: they accepted the importance of saving the environment for future generations.

No wonder. Because the new California worked well for the establishment Snobs, and for minor Snobs, people already enjoying modest positions of honor from the ruling class. Ordinary middle-class Schmucks, not so much.

And then there are the lower orders, people just trying to get by, somehow. The Snobs have spent the last century telling the helpless victims how much they care for them and how much welfare and housing and benefits they are going to get. But in truth the Snobs do not care about the Scum; they only care about their votes.

I wrote 20 years ago that a truly enlightened elite would set up the culture and the economy -- a Road to the Middle Class -- to encourage the lower orders to acquire the skills and the culture of the middle class and rise up from indigence and the lower-class culture of subordinate serfdom or rebellious gang-dom into the responsible culture of middle-class work, home, family, and order. That is not the policy of our ruling-class Snobs.

The result, as Charles Murray described in his Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, is an America where the Snob class of educated professionals has great careers and merger marriages, a Schmuck middle class is doing so-so, and a Scum at the bottom where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The beauty of the current system is that the ruling class Snobs get to tell the Scum how much they care, and then blame the Schmuck cops and other notorious white supremacists for the travails of the Scum.

No doubt at some point this false ruling-class narrative will fall apart. And then the only question will be the size of the butcher's bill.

"Gammon:" The Latest Leftist Hate Pejorative

We all know that the worst thing in the world today is the racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacist next door. But maybe there is something worse.

See, in Britland today the educated-gentry lefties have invented a new pejorative: "Gammon."

What in the world is "gammon," you ask? I will tell you. Here is Brendan O'Neill at Spiked!

Mainly aimed at angry men of a certain age who are pro-Brexit and possibly a bit iffy about mass immigration, this fleshiest of epithets reduces people to lumps of meat. Pig meat, at that. It is the closest any side in our maddening culture war has got to likening human beings to animals.

Get it? Gammon is pig meat. Or, as the OED says "The ham or haunch of a swine." But it also means "the lashing of a bowsprit." And the game of backgammon. And in thieves' slang, to gain someone's attention while another is robbing him. And it also means "to talk (plausibly or persuasively)." Or, "to feign, pretend." Or "to stuff with ridiculous nonsense, to humbug, deceive, hoax."

When referring to working-class middle-aged white males that the educated graduate might encounter in a pub, the pejorative dramatizes the likelihood that the said "gammon" may get red in the face, like the actual pig-meat product available at your local butcher's. The pejorative was created back during the "Brexit Wars" about whether Britain should leave the European Union.

According to Brendan O'Neill, the pejorative is really a reflection of the confusion and disorientation that the graduate left experienced in Britain during and after the Brexit vote -- and indeed in the demolition of the "red wall" of working class Labour constituencies in the North of England in the 2019 British General Election.

It can't be that the policies of the educated gentry of the last century has created divisions and winners and losers, and indeed has victimized the very people that the left claims to represent.

I think that the current wokism, the cancel culture, the left-wing street thugs, the new pejoratives invented every day by our educated betters: all these things issue from the fact that the glorious certainties of the last century are crumbling.

And when the glorious certainties are crumbling the chaps who rode the wave -- we thought it would never end -- cannot believe what is happening.

It's not a problem for me, oh no. As a naive Kantian I believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves, that everything is a crude theory that papers over the cracks, and that one day there will be a minor earthquake and the cracks will reappear.

So I go through life wondering about what cherished assumption will get demolished tomorrow.

And I laugh at my lefty friends that think they have it all figured out. Not to their faces, of course.

And I hope that we can get to the next regime without too much of a butcher's bill.

But that's how politics and religion and science work. Part of it is an attempt to understand reality. Part of it is an attempt to convince ourselves that we have everything figured out and there is no need to change the benevolent and compassionate arrangements that so benefit us, the shimmering, glowing stars in the political firmament. And part of it is an attempt to imagine how much better left, the universe, and everything could be. If Only.

And part of it is a cowardly and base attempt to blame everything on some pathetic scapegoat. Like the "gammon" in the local pub.

What Do the Bidens Think They Are Doing on Ukraine, Taiwan?

I asked a military acquaintance about the Obama Iran Deal: did he have any information about what the Obamis thought they were doing, back in the days Before Trump. He came up with some notions, but nothing that really stepped inside their thinking.

So what do the Bidens and the Europeans think they are achieving by normalizing relations with Iran? Especially when it seems like the whole of the Sunni world is making peace with Israel.

Now Victor Davis Hanson is worrying about mixed signals and confusion from the Biden administration on the Russians massing on the border of Ukraine and China invading the airspace over Taiwan. Are they going to get us into a war?

Do they even know what they are doing?

And, by the way, do we really want to Do Anything about Ukraine and Taiwan?

Put it this way. The Global Threat if communism is over. But Russia certainly wants to secure it's non-Arctic access to the sea. And just generally remind everyone that they are the big dogs in the region.

I'm sure that China has a similar agenda, to end the 200 years of humiliation and restore the Han people to their rightful place as the boss of East Asia.

Ok, but then what?

I'd say that it wouldn't hurt to have Russia embroiled with their neighbors, and it wouldn't hurt to have China riling up its non-Han neighbors from South Korea to Japan to the Philippines to Vietnam.

That's because I think that the world is now in a post-imperial age. It doesn't make any sense to have an empire. The Brits figured that out over half a century ago, after more than a century of knowing that "these chaps don't like us" in India; we Yanks are in the middle of figuring it out, as in: why are we paying to defend Europe? From what?

Problem is, of course, that everyone in the political arena believes in the importance of political power. It must be important, right? Because if it weren't then why are you politicians politely listening to the dumb voters just so they'll reelect you, or think you are a great leader saving them from some existential peril. Why are you wasting your lives being "some damn politician?"

Yes, politicians, why are you wasting your lives trying to pretend that there is some existential peril out there, from climate change to systemic racism to anti-Asian hate to the Russia threat to the China threat? The world would like to know.

See, the way I look at it, all these emergencies and existential perils and hates and oppressions come down to one thing: you guys get to spend more of my money on your power trips.

And I don't see any percentage in any of that for me. And that's how politics works, right? The politician gotta pay off the rubes for their support.

Yes, Young Liberal Women Have Mental Health Issues. But...

All of us racist sexist homophobes are having a grand old time with the latest news -- reported by Instapundit -- that "Over 50% Of Liberal, White Women Under 30 Have A Mental Health Issue." Akshully the article's text puts it slightly differently, and in the interests of truth, justice, and the American Way, the result comes from people answering a poll, whose question was:

"Has a doctor or other health care provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?"

So, 56.3% of liberal white women aged 18-29 answered "yes" and 33.6% of liberal white men answered "yes." For white conservatives the numbers are 27.3% and 16.3%. The numbers go down as whites get older.

But do you see a rather important point? It is not "woman have mental health issues" but women reporting that a doctor told them they had a problem.

I think that we should take all this with a grain of salt. First of all, mental health treatment is what we might call a "cure of the soul," a job that was performed in the old days by priests and ministers. You would expect that secular people like liberals would seek "cure of the soul" from a mental health professional rather than a minister. Second is that no doctor or other heath professional would tell someone that they have a mental health problem unless their patient "signaled" to them that they would accept such a recommendation. I find, on the rare cases that I interact with the health care system, that the medical practitioner in question is keenly interested in knowing what you want to hear.

The other thing is the "women in the public square" issue that I keep an eye on. It comes from German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote, over a century ago, that women were coming into the public square, due to various trends, and that we could expect that they would change the public square "to suit a more feminine sensibility."

I say that women do not like the male-created public square, which is a domesticated version of male fisticuffs. Women don't confront each other; they just don't.

Women also, you may have noticed, find "stress" to be a problem. For men, the whole point of "stress" is whether you are man enough to deal with it.

So I would say that educated women today have embarked on a life that is not well adapted to "a feminine sensibility." And I mean everything from consecutive "sexual relationships" to living together before marriage to abortion to combining career and family to divorce to managing finances. In my view, all of these aspects of a modern woman's life are experienced as "stressful" and an unjust imposition.

As I say, "women expect to be protected." What does that mean? It means that no woman can successfully run a household and raise kids and keep everyone healthy -- in other words create the next generation -- unless she is protected from the physical vicissitudes of life. And I say this not in a patronizing way, but as a definition of reality.

And when Simmel talks about adapting the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility" I interpret that as everything that women are trying to do in the public square from "safetyism" to "microaggressions" to sanctioning students in college that raise controversial questions.

This, in my view, goes right back to hunter-gatherers. If a male hunter-gatherer gets into a row with his band-mates, do you know what he does? He quits the band and joins another.

What! And you thought that tribes were tribes and ne'er the twain shall meet! Wrong! Tribes were invented later.

But here is what I read into that. If you are a woman in a hunter-gatherer band and you don't get on with the other women, then you will literally descend into hell. The other women will shun you and name and shame you and your life will be a perfect hell. And leaving the band for another was not an option, I suspect.

The whole culture of women not confronting each other, but complaining about each other behind their backs in conversations about "I can't believe she said that" is  all about the situation of women since time immemorial: that they have to make their life within the community that they were born into or were married into. It means that women have to get along with the other women.

To expect women to suddenly adapt to a more male culture of open outcry and verbal fisticuffs is essentially demanding that they drop the culture that human females have practiced since time immemorial.

And most women will find the "stress" of that to be intolerable. And blame the patriarchy. And encourage their doctor to recommend that they seek care from a mental health professional.

Some Things I Don't Get

I don't get why we -- and the Europeans -- are holding the hands of the Iran regime. To do what? To put off its acquisition of nuclear weapons by a couple of years? To help it get more money for its military adventures in southern Arabia and in Syria and Lebanon? What's the point of that?

Is there something I am missing? I've had my antennae out for a while, hoping to catch a careless word from one of the actors that will tell me what is going on.

Otherwise, I suspect that we will eventually discover that the whole thing was a cluster you-know-what. That it goes back to some action made back in the 1970s. Maybe it even goes back to the left's opposition to the Shah and his notorious SAVAK secret police? Or something the Carter administration thought it was doing in the months before the mullah regime attacked the US embassy in 1979?

I don't get why the Democrats are still advocating big-time immigration. I understand the notion of "replacement" of the ordinary white American people with Democrat-voting immigrants. I understand the lordly notion of being above nationalism and racism. But surely, our Democratic friends must care a little about the lower wages that must inevitably paid to native-born Americans, particularly black Americans, if immigration numbers continue. And there is the question of what happens, a decade or two down the road. I recall reading a few years ago that the Tony Blair government of 1997 opted for increased immigration to teach the Tories a lesson, to stick 'em in the ribs. Really?

I don't understand why we are getting involved in Ukraine vs. Russia. I can see the idea of helping the little guy against the big bully Russia. But really, what do we know about the whole mixture of eastern Europe, from the Baltics to Belarus to Ukraine? Not to mention Romania, Bulgaria, the various fragments of Yugoslavia. I just think that the potential for doing something really stupid is really high. And I don't have much confidence that our noble and worthy foreign policy experts have a clue.

And then there are BLM and Antifa. I wonder if our worthy rulers really know what they are doing by turning a blind eye to the rioting and looting of their street thugs. The whole point of city policing and due process is that, in the famous icon, justice is blind. I understand the position of the activists: their religion requires that they find and advocate for helpless victims. But I have this idea that the adults in the room, the Democratic Party leaders, understand that street action should be kept down to a dull roar.

But that's not the message we are getting from the Democratic Party leaders. What does that mean? Does it mean that the activists run the show, and that the wise heads in the corridors of power know that they must accommodate the activists?

I don't understand why the Democrats, with a 51-49 Congress, are pushing the pedal to the metal and imposing their agenda on the nation as though they had 70-30 support -- and then lying about what they are about, saying that their Green New Deal policies and loot-and-plunder for every liberal activist group is "public health" and "infrastructure." And then pushing gigantic multi-trillion spending bills.

I just don't get what the bigger picture is supposed to be. And I don't know what the strategy is for the inevitable inflation and economic cock-up. Of course, it is easy to say "modern monetary theory" and say that deficits don't matter for "governments that control their own currency." That's what Keynesianism was all about. Keynesianism, as I recall, came a cropper in the "stagflation" of the 1970s. And so did a lot of Americans.

Of course, this could all be explained by the notion that our rulers are idiots and can't think beyond the current crisis, and do whatever it takes to win the next election, and spend whatever they can get away with. This week.

But I'd rather not think that. So I'm still confused. I just don't get it.

Four Laws: Government Cannot Reform

There are, I believe, Four Laws, scientific principles, if you like, that need to be understood in relation to all proposals for More Government.

The First Law is that Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. This law was discovered in 1920 by Ludwig von Mises.

The Second Law is a corollary of the First Law. It argues that the Man in Washington cannot outperform the millions of producers and consumers: he just doesn't have the bandwidth. This law was enunciated by F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.

The Third Law is that government regulation of the economy cannot work, because of "regulatory capture" of the regulators by the regulated. It was developed by George Stigler.

The Fourth Law is mine own. It states that government programs cannot work because government can never reform them.

Why is this?

It is because every government program is a program of loot and plunder, taking money from the general population to give to the supporters of the regime.

This is obviously true in the case of Vikings in their longships sailing up the rivers of England in the autumn to kill the men, enslave the women and children, and empty the storehouses of grain and the churches of silver. It is obviously true of the Pirates of the Caribbean of yesteryear and the Somali pirates of today.

You can see it in the operation of the feudal system where the kings needed to reward their baron supporters with manors and estates that would be taken from the baronial opponents of the king.

You can see it in the various leftist ideologies from Communism to Critical Race Theory. The whole point is to rally the helpless oppressed to your banner and smash the capitalists or the racists. And then each supporter will get his share.

But the same principle obtains in every democratic election in these United States. The Democrats always offer new spending -- in the interests of Justice, of course -- and the Republicans always offer tax cuts. Donald Trump in 2016 proposed to benefit the middle class by reducing immigration and increasing tariffs on China. The middle class understood that these measures were designed to increase their wages.

But no politician is out there saying: "hey, this program doesn't work, so we better cut it back." Not if it benefits his supporters.

So you can never reform Social Security; you can never reform Medicare. You can never reform education.

Let's look at an example: the folks at AntiFa.

Here's what I read in Andy Ngo’s Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. He wrote of Antifa members that

While some are indeed highly educated and in white-collar professions ranging from law to academia to health care, those who are involved in the street violence are disproportionately individuals dealing with housing insecurity, financial instability, and mental health issues like gender dysphoria...

Grievance ideologies resonate with millennials and Gen Z because of an economic reality they experience: crushing student debt, job insecurity, and the inability to ever afford a home.

Now, I would say that "crushing student debt" is a direct result of "free money" flowing from students to universities arising out of the federal government's student loan program. You think that anyone, Democrat or Republican, is going to turn off the spigot? I'd say that "job insecurity" is a direct result of increased immigration since 1965. You think that the Democrats are ever going to agree to reduced immigration? And "inability... to afford a home" is a consequence of the subsidies for long-term mortgages that started in 1938. You think that any damn politician has the cojones to turn off the spigot for low-down payment long-term fixed-rate mortgage loans?

Notice how Democrats are perfectly happy to encourage Antifa to riot in the streets and loot mom-and-pop stores. But they are not going to do anything about the "root causes" of the grievances of the millennials and Gen Z.

The normal way in which government responds to the failure of its programs is to throw more money at them. Of course it does, because all politics is an appeal to supporters that are looking to use their vote to obtain benefits, and all government is a mechanism for the rulers to distribute loot and plunder, "free stuff," to their supporters.

You see confirmation of this in the incidence of hyperinflation, of which the marquee example is Weimar Germany after World War I. In the years before World War I Germany had been the leader in creating social democratic programs like pensions and health care. But after World War I and the Allies' demand for reparations there was No More Money. Did the post-war German government cut the programs down to match the reduced revenue? Not a bit of it. They kept the programs and printed the money until the economy completely collapsed and then the people were desperate enough to agree to anything, in the hope that some sort of life could emerge from the debris.

We see this principle operating in US politics over the last half century. Back in the day, Republicans were all for balancing the budget. So when Ronald Reagan became president, what did he do? He cut taxes, and gussied up some sort of a deal with the Democrats to cut spending. Only spending was never cut. Since then Republicans have just pushed for tax cuts and left the spending alone. Candidate Trump was specific that he would not cut Social Security and Medicare. And believe me, pensions and health care is where it's at:

Total Government Spending in the United States Federal, State, and Local Fiscal Year 2021
Government Pensions	$1.5 trillion
Government Health Care	$1.7 trillion
Government Education	$1.1 trillion
National Defense	$1.1 trillion
Government Welfare	$0.4 trillion
All Other Spending	$1.8 trillion
Total Government Spending	$7.7 trillion
Federal Deficit	$1.0 trillion

So. Nothing will be done about reforming the system until we run out of Other Peoples' Money. And maybe not even then.

Like I say. Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

The Eternal Misdirection of Leftist Politics

I finished Andy Ngo's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy today at the gym, and my takeaway comes in the last chapter, where he describes -- after telling the story of his Vietnamese "boat people" parents -- "who they are" in Antifa.

While some are indeed highly educated and in white-collar professions ranging from law to academia to health care, those who are involved in the street violence are disproportionately individuals dealing with housing insecurity, financial instability, and mental health issues like gender dysphoria...

Grievance ideologies resonate with millennials and Gen Z because of an economic reality they experience: crushing student debt, job insecurity, and the inability to ever afford a home.

Gollygeewillikins, and I wonder how student debt and housing unaffordability came about? It couldn't be the Democratic Party shoveling cheap debt at everyone over the last 50 years, could it?

Suppose that we say that we actually are going to solve the problem of student debt. How do we do it? By making college "free?" By forgiving student debt? By regulating college fees and housing payments?

See, the basic problem is that government is always about loot and plunder. College debt started with free stuff for students, and free money (from student debt) for colleges. The net result has been that college debt and college fees have risen to meet the available demand. So the obvious solution is to stop the student debt program.

Only, of course, then the students are going to be mad, because they can't afford to go to college, and the colleges are going to be mad because they need that free student money, and the parents are going to be mad because college will cost them more. Hey, don't worry! No government is ever going to do that. Because no government ever dares to reduce the loot and plunder.

Same with home prices. High home prices came about because of the fixed 30-year loans from the New Deal era Fannie Mae. Government could afford to guarantee those loans, because it's government. Naturally, home buyers borrowed the maximum amount they had in mind, and home prices soared into the stratosphere to the benefit of existing homeowners. 

The solution is clearly to end the subsidy for mortgage loans and for low down payments. But any program to do that would result in, at best, 50 years of flat home prices and, at worst, a housing price collapse. That would not be good. And anyway, as right now, the government is often in the position of wanting to gun the economy to fight recession with low interest rates, and that usually results in a boom in housing prices.

So, if you are in education you are not going to stand for a policy that cuts the flow of Benjamins. If you have a home that has gone up by 500 percent in the last 30 years, you are not going to stand for a policy that will lower the value of your house.

If your are a millennial or a Gen Z you blame "the system," and you take to the streets.

If you are a politician then you blame "systemic racism."

If you are a corporate CEO you try to keep one step ahead of the "liberal activist groups" or "lefty racist hate groups" with occasional corporate virtue-signaling.

So the only way the madness ends is the day that the US gubmint can't sell its debt in the financial markets.

Any other ideas? I've seen the proposal that makes colleges liable for student debt. My own idea would be to replace "free" education with direct payments to students that would slowly fade away and to encourage employers to fund their employees' education.

I'd end the mortgage monster by slowly reducing the amount that could be borrowed down to about 50 percent of the home's value, and slowly reducing the maximum period of a home loan from 30 years down to 25, then 20, then 15.

But I doubt if any of these ideas are politically possible, Because the only way government works is by buying votes at the next election, and paying off the supporters with loot and plunder. The last thing government will ever dare to do is cut spending programs. That's why you get hyperinflation in Weimar Germany and today's Venezuela. Government dare not reduce its programs, because voters.

The Eternal Dilemma of a Ruler

Here are a couple of pieces that don't quite get it. Victor Davis Hanson does a take on the corporate boycott of Georgia for its new racist Jim Crow election laws in "Wealthy and Woke." Yes it's true that Delta CEO Ed Bastian thinks he's virtue-signaling by condemning those gap-toothed Republican lawmakers and staving off the liberal activist groups. And that it seems like all the corporate execs have got the message. But:

First, the corporation never harangues unless it feels it has more to lose—whether by boycotts, protests, or bad publicity—than it stands to gain in staying neutral and silent. 

Second, class concerns are never mentioned. Bastian is paid about $65,000 for each working day of the year. In a sane world, he might seem a ridiculous voice of the oppressed. 

Third, CEOs never fear offending the conservative silent majority, who are assumed not to boycott or protest. 

And Cal Thomas berates President Biden for pretending he's a capitalist. He recalls Chevy Chase's line: "I'm Chevy Chase... And you're not."

That line came to mind over President Biden's massive tax-and-spend proposals, which are unlike anything since FDR, after whom Biden appears to be modeling himself. The president thinks he's a capitalist ... but he's not.

Yes, yes. All true. And "capitalism is an economic system... made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations" rather than gubmint. And socialism is "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and control of" the economy "usually through a centralized government."

But I have made it my business to make a sharper analysis of what is going on.

And what I believe is that "the only warrant for government power is existential peril." There must be Mongols or Nazis or Commies or "white supremacists" threatening to annihilate civilization as we know it. Otherwise why are we paying all these taxes? Otherwise there is no need for a rich and powerful ruling class.

And because we humans are programmed to see existential threats as a moral threat, there is usually a condominium between the political ruling class and the religious ruling class. Thus the First Estate of the clergy and the Second Estate of the nobles.

It was the genius of Marx to imagine a new existential threat, the evil capitalists who were going to "immiserate" the working class. Because science.

But in fact we live in an era when the Mongols are no longer a threat. Why? Because, as I say, the old game of conquest and loot and plunder doesn't really give the conqueror much in the way of riches, because wealth is the present value of all the production and exchange of ordinary commoners all across the world. If you destroy or steal the means of production and exchange then you evaporate that present value of all the production and exchange.

It is important to understand what a revolution in human reality this is. And how it has forced the political class to invent new existential perils to justify their power and perquisites.

Thus Climate Change. OMG, if we don't cover the world with wind turbines and solar panels and completely switch from "fossil" fuels to renewable energy and electric cars and trains the whole world will come to an end.

Thus Systemic Racism. OMG, if we don't hunt down those white supremacists and their guns then all the Sacred Negroes and Sacred Gays and Sacred Transgenders will be annihilated in mass shootings.

And the same with capitalism. OMG, if we don't keep a rigorous watch on all those capitalists they will take the last dollar from the last helpless worker and keep all the loot for themselves.

Do you see the point?

Let's put it another way. Maybe there really is serious climate change going on. But maybe, even if there is, the best strategy is to let the market and individuals respond and adapt. Maybe the temperate zone where we grow the world's grains will move northwards into Canada. Oh well. Maybe we'll run out of "fossil" fuels and the scientists will have to hurry up and develop safe fusion power. Maybe the oceans will rise a bit and all those rich corporate chieftains with their waterfront homes will have to abandon them and move.

Maybe there really is systemic racism. But then the highest income people in the US are Asians and there are several non-white races that have higher income than whites. Maybe the best way to counteract systemic racism is not to fight it but just stop talking about it all the time and for the ruling class to insist on treating people as people rather than as Sacred Relics.

Maybe capitalism does create inequality, but since per-capita income has increased by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years -- and nobody, least of all Marx, had a clue about that -- maybe we should admit that we really don't know how to control and direct capitalism. And anything we do might make things worse.

Do you see the problem? If climate isn't really such an emergency, if systemic racism isn't quite such a moral horror, if capitalism muddles along, but mostly brings people out of poverty, then what do we need a strong and purposeful ruling class for?

Needless to say, you are not allowed to ask that question.

Because the one thing all our rulers all agree on is that après nous, le déluge. That is just another word for "shut up, peasants."

I really appreciate the dilemma of our rulers. Suppose they are surplus and unneeded, despite their fervent belief?

Inconceivable.