Advice to Progressives on Memorial Day

Vice President Harris has been properly cautioned for a tweet just prior to Memorial Day that said "enjoy the long weekend.

What, you may ask, is wrong with that? Thank you for asking.

The simple answer is this. Memorial Day is not a long weekend. It is the holiday -- as in "holy" day -- on which we make a pathetic effort to make amends for all the young lives uselessly thrown away in the nation's stupid wars.

But we never admit this truth. We cannot; we must not. For, it cannot be that the men and women that gave their lives in America's wars died in vain.

Now, of course, if you are a progressive you think that they all died in vain and it is an offense against social justice. And you feel "silenced, broken, and limited" by the systemic racists that insist that every American should honor the fallen.

Quite so. But here is my practical advice to you moral exemplars in your next mostly peaceful protest against America's wars.

It is that it cannot be that the sons of average American women, the mothers of which you've heard tell, lost their sons in vain.

Yes, I know. They did lose their sons in vain in stupid wars for America's imperialist agenda. And slavery. And colonial domination. And racism. And so on. But do not ever suggest to ordinary American women that their sons are or were mere cannon fodder. They are heroes; they were heroes. Period. Full stop. End of story.

That is the point of Memorial Day, first called Decoration Day for decorating the graves of the fallen in the Civil War, as opposed to Veterans Day. Veterans Day is about celebrating all who served in the nation's wars. Memorial Day is about honoring the fallen.

See, the thing about all women, except wokey upper-class feminists, is that the children that they conceived, bore, and raised are the most important achievement of their lives: really the only achievement of their lives; really the definition of their lives.

So, to suggest that the sons died in vain is the same as to say that the mothers lived in vain, that they were fools ever to get married, ever to conceive children, ever to bear them, ever to raise them. Don't do it, lefties.

By all means blame the racist sexist homophobic politicians. By all means blame the fascist military leaders. By all means blame the capitalist war profiteers. By all means blame the monstrosity of systemic racism. But do not blame the young men that joined the colors and died.

Do not be misled by the upper-class women who have accepted the leftist narrative. Do not be misled by women of "oppressed peoples" that have been carefully taught to hate their homeland. Remember that for the vast majority of ordinary women their children are the light of their lives and cannot have lived in vain.

So, go to a Memorial Day parade and listen to the VFW worthies and the service at the graveyard and the invocations and the prize speeches by student essay-contest-winners. And look around at all the ordinary people in attendance and think about their lives and the meaning of their lives

And think about how those ordinary people are way less privileged than an educated, evolved person like you.

Then remember always to honor the fallen on Memorial Day. Because.

"Progressive Fatalism?" How to Miss the Point

The culture war, writes Samuel Kronin at Quillette, is characterized by "a deepening progressive fatalism about race in America." That's where BLM and the current cultural hysteria comes from.

I Don't Think So. But here's what progressives think.

Before 2008, many believed the country was simply too racist to elect a black president. And then, just like that, it happened and Americans forgot what it felt like before it happened. For progressives, the optimism that came with a two-term black presidency in a white majority country with a recent history of overt racism was thwarted by the realization that racism hasn’t gone away and black disadvantage abides.

Hey, I know. Maybe the problem is that the left's whole religion on race is a false religion, that for decades liberals have gone to church on the notion that America is irredeemably racist and that only liberals have the moral chops to redeem America.

And then when we elect a black president and the "black disadvantage" -- liberalspeak for black dysfunction -- doesn't go away, why, as the primitive mind has it, according to Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return,

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

America's blacks cannot be dysfunctional fools, ruined by half a century of liberal post-civil-rights-era politics. Oh no. Systemic white racist-sexist-homophobes must be to blame. Let's recast Eliade's notion.

The liberal... cannot conceive of flat-out black dysfunction issuing from unjust liberal policy. It arises from the systemic immoral malevolence of gap-tooth white bitter-clinger deplorable white oppressors in their insurrectionary far-right terrorist cells. There has to be a right-wing fault at the bottom of it -- at the bottom of everything -- otherwise maybe the whole liberal project is a wrong turn, a moral horror, and an unjust monstrosity.

Liberals have to believe that "racism hasn’t gone away," because if it has the world doesn't need liberals any more.

Earth to liberals: ordinary American Commoners all wish that liberal race politics would just go away so they could get on with working and wiving and thriving without looking over their shoulder to make sure that some liberal isn't about to cancel them for a wrong word 20 years ago. And without ever thinking about race again.

The current left-wing ideological terror is not just "the sharp cultural turn toward identity issues in the 2010s." It's been there all along. Here's what Paul Kengor wrote in The American Spectator about liberals circa 1990

I recently happened upon a folder of my columns for my college newspaper in the late 1980s. I was the editorial page editor for our daily newspaper (published Monday through Thursday), The Pitt News. My goodbye column in May 1990 lamented the liberals who reflexively called conservatives names like “Nazi,” “fascist,” “racist,” “homophobe,” “hater.” Yes, way back then. This was when the political correctness movement really launched. We were already referring to liberals as the Thought Police.

I mean. When you are calling the opposition names, using pedal-to-the-metal pejoratives like "RACIST," we are not talking "progressive fatalism." We are talking people that think that the "other" has no place in polite society, and that the "other" needs to be purged from the public square.

Did I mention that pejorative comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "to make things worse?"

We are talking about the human need for a moral narrative, the need for a meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." And that every moral universe needs a Satan, an Old Scratch, a scapegoat upon which to blame all the evils of the world.

And if your need for a moral narrative comes from a need to justify your status as a ruling class, then, in the modern era, that requires you to pose as the educated enlightened lightbringers, the allies of the oppressed peoples fighting the white oppressors for justice.

So, if you have passed your civil rights acts, if you have elected your First Black President, if you have midwifed a second rate race narrative called the "1619 Project," if you have railroaded a poor dumb cop to jail for not preserving the life of a drugged out black habitual criminal resisting arrest, why, the last thing you are ever going to do is declare victory and give up the game to a new, improved ruling class.

You tell me: when has any religion declared that Satan or the Evil One has been decisively defeated, so now we can wind up the old religion and hang out in cafés drinking lattes until the next religion comes along?

Like old soldiers: religion never dies. It only fades away as the believers, one by one, fail to turn up at regular Sunday services.

If you want to call that "fatalism," be my guest.

"Wittgenstein's Vienna:" When a Ruling Class is Losing It

Do we care about Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, which is all about putting philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and work in the context of the fin de siècle Vienna in which he grew up?

Well, I do, for several reasons. First, I am interested in the decline and fall of a ruling class, and what it looks like. Second, I am interested in better understanding the context of Wittgenstein's philosophy and thought. Third, I am interested in the cultural clash between the feudal-era Hapsburgs, the 19th century Viennese bourgeoisie, and the creative class chappies from Karl Kraus the journalist, Adolf Loos the architect, Arnold Schönberg the composer and, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein the rich-kid philosopher and dropout. Fourth, I want to believe that our current ruling class is as clueless and myopic as the ruling clique in Hapsburg Vienna.

Decline and Fall of a Ruling Class: The Habsburgs were perhaps the most successful ruling class in history. Habsburg Castle was built in 1020, and Habsburgs were heads of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to 1740 and produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Galicia-Lodomeria. At the end of the 19th century the emperor Franz Joseph I ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Vienna. You can imagine that all the lefty rich kids chattering in the cafés of Vienna absolutely hated this tottering remnant of feudalism into the modern era.

The Habsburgs ruled on the basis of Hausmacht which translates as house-power, and I interpret as governing to preserve and protect the power of the House of Habsburg. That is to say, everything that Franz Joseph did was an act to keep the Habsburg thing going. And so it did, until the defeat in 1918. Hey, it worked, keeping the ancient family in power until World War I swept the old order away.

Philosophical Context: Philosophically, I am a Kantian: I believe that we humans cannot know "things-in-themselves," only "appearances." Put crudely, I think that we cannot know the real reality, whatever it is -- if it is. Between things-in-themselves and appearances are all the theories and assumptions and science and philosophy that flesh is heir to and that we have such a grand old time arguing about.

Now Wittgenstein grew up in the era when all the science that we now take for granted was being proposed and argued about. For instance, Heinrich Hertz  was developing a "model" theory of science and Ludwig Boltzmann was developing the idea of statistical mechanics that is now the core of quantum mechanics.

Then there was Ernst Mach who proposed to reduce "all knowledge to sensation;" so "the world is that sum total of what appears to the senses." 

Hertz in his Principles of Mechanics proposed a "model" theory of science, that tests of "a representation of mechanical phenomena are logical consistency, correspondence with empirical data, and simplicity or elegance of presentation." Wittgenstein used Principles in his university studies.

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics is too complicated to discuss here, except to note that Max Planck picked up on it.

In this way, one could eliminate finally all subjective references, to "sensations of warmth" and the like, which lingered on in Machian accounts of heat theory and replace them with rigorous mathematical descriptions.

Needless to say, Wittgenstein was a Hertzian and a Boltzmannian, not a Machian.

Cultural Clash: Let us propose the following clashing cultures: the feudal Habsburg monarchy, the various nationalities in the Habsburg empire, the rising bourgeoisie, the rising industrial workers, the Jews, the rising intelligentsia. The Habsburgs were trying to manage all this to stay in power; the nationalities were each agitating to advance their separate national interest; the bourgeoisie was creating wealth and prosperity in the new industrial era, and building ornate houses to reflect their satisfaction; the new working class was having problems because of a severe housing shortage in Vienna; the Jews were shooting into the stratosphere after centuries in the ghetto; the creative intelligentsia was fit to be tied by the insult of Habsburg power, the mindlessness of the rich bourgeoisie that thought that just copying the fashionable taste was the way to organize life, and the need to create the world anew.

Wittgenstein's family history is canonical. His father, Karl, rebelled against his father, wanting to get a technical education, which his father considered beneath his status as a "gentleman." So Karl want off to America, and went to technical school on his return.

Over the next twenty years the financial world of Vienna witnessed the meteoric rise of Karl Wittgenstein to the heights of business success. He had an extraordinary capacity for utilizing his technical knowledge to transform failing factories into booming and productive enterprises.

But this immensely creative man -- he took his violin everywhere and just about everyone in the family was a talented musician -- would not allow his children to go their own way, Elder brother Hans wanted to be a musician; dad said no, and eventually Hans committed suicide. "His second son, Rudi, committed suicide in similar circumstances[.]"

Karl Wittgenstein had all his kids educated at home by tutors. But this meant that Ludwig could not go to a Gymnasium, because he didn't know Greek. So he went to Realschule and then engineering school (like Einstein) where he read, learned, and inwardly digested The Principles of Mechanics of Heinrich Hertz.

And of course, there was the intellectual culture of chaps like Kraus, Loos, and Schönberg.

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Notice the compulsion to épater la bourgeoisie. And note how the young sprouts of Vienna represent an emerging creative class desperate to break out of their embarrassing bourgeois origins and streak across the sky as creative gods of creation.

Myopia of Our Ruling Class: Steve Sailer has a piece on "The Future of Floydism" where he ponders what on earth our ruling class thinks it is doing with the "the worship of the holy martyr George Floyd and his racial brethren." Hey, writes, Sailer, gun murders are up by 34.4% in the year After Floyd. And we don't know what proportion of the murderers were blacks. Not yet.

Unsurprisingly, nobody in The Establishment is stepping forward to forthrightly apologize and admit that, yeah, the bad people (like, say, me) were right: America’s biggest criminal justice problem is not police brutality, it’s black brutality.

But is it all a conspiracy to screw us all over, a Macchiavellian plot by the Ruling Class? Sailer thinks not.

As reassuring as it is to imagine that when disasters befall America they must be the work of an all-knowing conspiratorial deep state out to get you, it seems more likely that there is no Inner Party. Nobody knows how things really work because, like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes, anybody who expresses doubts about Floydism is, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “unfit for his office.” 

Maybe that's a good thing; maybe our ruling class doesn't have enough of a culture of Hausmacht to guide it in maintaining its power. Maybe its determination to get rid of Trump at all costs was not such a good idea. Maybe making liberal urbanist urban dwellers less safe will not end well for the rulers.

Of course, I would rather not have our ruling class exit stage left like the Habsburgs after losing a World War. That might not be too much fun. 

I have in mind that one day soon some Trump or DeSantis will get up and, like Cromwell tell our ruling class: 

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

And, like the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls they are, our ruling class will do just that. 

"Equality Never Hurt Anyone"

When COVID shut down the gym last year I had to figure out: how does a 74-year-old keep exercising and stay healthy? The answer was to take a 45-minute walk up to the top of Phinney Ridge here in north Seattle, go down the other side and then climb the hill again. And let me tell you, after the second hill I am really panting and breathing to the depths of my ageing lungs.

Part of the walk involves walking north along the street with the best views -- and the most expensive houses -- at the top of Phinney Ridge. I won't say that the houses along the street have more than their share of Black Lives Matter and #AWeBelieve and Be the One yard signs, but they certainly display their share.

But one house in particular seems to have gone the extra mile. As well as BLM signs in the window, it has a hand-painted "Black Lives Matter If Not Now When" sign and a "Equality Never Hurt Anyone" sign that sports a BLM clenched-fist logo. On top of that the house sports a RV trailer parked partially on the sidewalk planting strip.

Last Saturday was "Garage Sale Day" and as I came up to the BLM house I noticed an older man putting out stuff to sell on a table in the middle of the sidewalk (since the planting strip was already blocked with the RV trailer).

And sitting on a bench was a thirtyish man with the usual wokey beard. I asked the young man if he was the author of the racist signs, and he retorted that there was nothing racist about "equality."

I then spewed my fancy-pants argument from Hegel that "the thing is the same as its opposite." Thus, racism, anti-racism: both indicate an obsession with race. I ended by recommending that he get out and read his Hegel.

Well, maybe, in l'esprit d'escalier I should have suggested that in the interests of equality he should sell the fancy-pants house at the top of the hill and buy an equivalent one at the bottom of the hill and give the difference to Black Lives that Matter.

And I could have mentioned that it is really curious that right alongside his innocent slogan is a clenched fist, suggesting ever so innocently that unless we get Equality real soon a little fisticuffs might be in order.

But really, the point is that, as Jordan B. Peterson pointed out in his lobster story, all animals, even primitive animals like lobsters, do hierarchy. And the point of hierarchy is to reduce violence, reduce the number of occasions when hierarchy is established or re-established by force. Why? Because violence is expensive and costs lives.

In other words, if you have Equality then the next thing that happens is that the males will start a fight to reestablish a hierarchy.

And whatabout elections? An election is all about which politician and which political party shall be first and have power to tax people and spend money on people. How does Equality fit in with that? Where do the losers go to get their Equality back?

And so on.

Sometimes I think that the left is driving us all into a cruel and merciless one-party state. But then I also think that their current hysteria is really an unconscious realization that their whole project has gone wrong and is heading into the ditch.

Which is it? I dunno. Probably a bit of both.

The Juilliard Raciss Meltdown

The Juilliard School is, obviously, part of the ruling class. When you get a school, founded in 1905, devoted to academizing and bureaucratizing the performing arts -- music, dance, and drama -- to inject a steady stream of highly-trained professionals into the non-profit performing arts, well, it has to be part of the ruling class, holding up a mirror for the ruling class to admire itself.

And now the Juilliard School has got itself tangled, hook, line, and sinker, in the race wars.

See, according to the incomparable Heather Mac Donald at City Journal in "The Revolution Comes to Juilliard School," the Drama[!] Division is convulsed in race activism. See, the Drama Division is 50 percent black, and it looks like they are all "trained Marxists" from Black Lives Matter.

Now, according to Data USA, the Juilliard School in 2019 was 34.5% white, 11.9% Asian, and 6.25% black. So, if the Drama Division is 50% black...

See, back in June 2020, right after George Floyd Day, the students got up a petition, a Call To Action.

The Call to Action charged Juilliard with “systemic injustice.” It demanded an end to the school’s “almost completely Eurocentric” faculty, curriculum, and performances and a “complete in-person season featuring the works of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] artists.” It called on Juilliard to create #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd scholarships in music, drama, and dance.

But get this. In the Drama Division things are much worse.

Its “racist environment is hazardous to BIPOC students’ bodies,” the letter charged. “Some students are silenced, broken, and limited by racism within the Drama Division . . . [They] have to endure harm and violence [and] sacrifice their physical and mental health every day in this institution.”

I suppose you could say that liberals had this coming. It is like the story of the submarine firing a homing torpedo that circles back and blows up the submarine that launched it.

Here are the things that, to me, are tragically comical about all this. If there is such a thing.

"Silenced, broken... mental health" Hello, honey! The whole point of the performing arts is that it is a brutal animalistic survival of the fittest and the best and brightest. Many are called, but few are chosen. Most likely, very few of the students in the Drama Division will go on to get a professional career after graduation. If you don't have the steel balls or intestinal fortitude to rise above your fears and hesitations, if you don't have the courage to confront your weaknesses, if you don't have the single-minded determination to succeed at all costs, if you aren't bat-shit crazy, then this performing arts world is not for you. Honey.

"Almost completely Eurocentric" Well, yeah! The whole point of the "arts" is that it is an expression of the highest and most exotic and most fancy-pants stuff imaginable. That means that the "arts" is going to be almost completely European high art, Hindu high art, Mughal high art, and Chinese high art. Everyone else need not apply. At least, not yet. My primary interest in the arts is with Drama and Music. I'm really interested in Shakespeare, and I'll watch an August Wilson play out of his "Pittsburgh Cycle." I really like Tom Stoppard, but frankly you can take your average lefty drivel and put it where the sun don't shine. Why? Because lefty playwrights and lefty directors are recycling dead-as-a-doornail memes from the last 200 years that have nothing to do with the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Only 11.9 percent Asian? I would expect the Music Division to be 75% Asian, because Tiger Moms. Unless, of course, there is racial discrimination going on. And I expect that the 50% blacks in the Drama Division are deeply conscious that they are mere flotsam and jetsam compared to the Tiger-Mommed kids in the Music Division.

See, back in the day, half a century ago and more, when I was a teenager, I understood that I was not going to go to Oxford or Cambridge for university. Because I wasn't brilliant, I wasn't a top-tier student, I wasn't driven, I just didn't care that much about dominating the world.

And one thing I would have understood perfectly would have been that, as a pretty desultory music student -- I had studied piano until my early teens -- I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting into a top-notch music school. By the way, I notice that all the music schools today are careful to notice how they are really into jazz and pop and electronic music.

But see, notice how the music schools are basically conservative. Jazz? None of the jazz greats went to music school. They learned it on the streets and from fellow musicians. Pop? The pop music greats didn't go to swank music schools. They figured it out on their own; that is the meaning of "garage band."

That's why they call music schools "conservatories." Because they are in the business of conserving the arts. Until some fool comes along and destroys the whole edifice, because "mental health" or "Eurocentric." And when some cool new art comes along, out of the street, then in the next generation the sons and daughters of the ruling class want in, because "coolness."

Roger Scruton on Life, the Universe, and Everything

Back in 2014 the recently departed Roger Scruton published The Soul of the World. The book is about God and the two basic facts of life: "the nature of reality" and "how we should live." The point is that you may know everything about the nature of reality but the knowledge tells you nothing about how you should live.

Our current atheist educated class teaches us that science tells us how we should live. But the Islamists have another approach, that "originates in a need for sacrifice and obedience." They

believe that they are called to sacrifice themselves on Allah's behalf, and that their lives will acquire a meaning when thrown away for Allah's sake.(p.1)

And not just Islamists.

The desire for sacrifice is rooted deep in all of us, and it is called upon not only by religious but also by secular communities, especially in times of emergency and war.

Scruton calls this "cognitive dualism," that the world can be understood in two ways, "the way of science, and the way of interpersonal understanding." The natural world and the "lifeworld," or Lebenswelt for us intellectual snobs.

But then Scruton divides the lifeworld into two. There is the Order of the Covenant, of which the best known is the covenant between God and the Jews,

a binding agreement, in which God commands obedience only by putting himself under obligations toward those whom he commands.(p.78)

But then there is the Order of Creation, "another world beyond our daily negotiations." This is

another order, where being and nothingness, creation and destruction, wrestle together with no fixed result.(p.177)

This, says Scruton, is the world of sacrifice, of giving and forgiveness. In the Order of the Covenant, nobody has a right to forgiveness, only "to honor his obligations and receive his rights." But in the Order of Creation,

Forgiveness comes, when it comes, as a gift... It is a moment of mutual recognition, when who people lay down their resentment in an exchange of gifts.(p.182)

(Is this why women have such a culture of "gifting?")

Now comes the heavy stuff.

The experience of the sacred is the revelation, in the midst of everyday things, of another order, in which creation and destruction are the ruling principles. the great junctures of life are precisely those in which this order shines through, so that deals lose their meaning and vows come in their place.(p.183)

And so to the junctures, each in turn:

New life is a gift from the place where things are created and destroyed for no merely human reason. Birth is therefore marked by rituals of acceptance and gratitude...

Sexual love is the moment in which two people make a gift of themselves, and also prepare themselves for the sacrifices required by family and the love of children.

Death is the moment when the gift of life is surrendered and the funeral is the recognition in retrospect of the gift[.](p.183)

Community and its web of deals, its Order of the Covenant, cannot long endure without people making the gift of the sacrifice of themselves, in renouncing resentment and vengeance, and even making the ultimate gift, the sacrifice of life. Thus the need for rituals that extol the sanctity of sacrifice.

And in the end, God, the eternal question: "why?"

It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the Order of Creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die... In the faithful frame of mind we are aware that being is not simply a fact but also a gift, and aware that gifts have reasons. And the response of faith is to recognize that we too must give.(p.191)

And so, Scruton argues, we create a "space at the edge of reason, where faith can take root and grow."

Faith looks beyond nature, asking itself what is required of me by way of thanks for this gift.. It is open to God, and actively involved in the process of making room for him.(p.192)

And what does that mean, you ask?

It's a good question. I'll think about it. 

Abolish Cops and Billionaires? Oh Please!

I was walking around Green Lake in super-liberal North Seattle, and noticed a "tag" on the path. It said: "ABOLISH COPS & Billionaires." Oh, and "Defund / SPD / ^^ / (100%)."

 

Aren't they special, those highly intelligent AntiFa types!

Because that slogan encapsulates exactly what we should not do.

COPS: Imagine no policemen / It isn't hard to do. But what would it mean?

Why does a society create a police force? The answer is that if you don't have a police force then people will enforce the peace with vigilante groups and gangs -- where the gangs could be criminal gangs or clan enforcers. Oh, and lynching. 

OMG! I can't even! Yes did you know that back in the day, whites were lynched as well as blacks. You didn't?  OMG! Like, Whatever! Sure, blacks were lynched more than 3 to 1 over whites. But still! OMG! Here are the numbers on lynchings from The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. If you want more details the original table breaks the numbers out by states.

US Lynchings: 1882-1968

White	Black	Total
1,297	3,446	4,743

To give you a flavor of what a world without cops means, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali in on "Tribalism has come to the West."

Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

See what I mean? To the pre-urban human, you only get protection from the people related to you by blood, your kindred. Or we would say, your clan, your tribe, your ethnic group. And the idea that there is any other way is laughable.

The whole point of a police force is to take the maintenance of the peace away from warring kindred groups -- or in US cities ethnic gangs -- and give the job to boring bureaucrats. Or Mr. Plod, as they say in Britland.

So, if you turn the clock back, and "ABOLISH COPS" then you are going to find that the maintenance of law and order will devolve upon the enforcement arms of other groups. Actually, we already know how this works, because in many US lower-class urban neighborhoods the police hardly dare police; the local ethnic gang is the de facto government and police force. This is clearly happening in so-called "no go" areas where Muslim immigrants live in cities like Paris and Stockholm. It also occurs in US cities where the citizens are afraid to testify in court -- because intimidation from gangbangers.

The point is simple. One way or another, somehow, someone will enforce the peace and go after peace-breakers. And one way or another those peace-breakers will be the kind of lawless young men that our liberal friends have recently canonized: the George Floyds of the world, the kind of guys that Curtis Yarvin calls the "human rubble of the old regime's failed experiments." And you aren't going to like the rough justice of gangs and lynch mobs, you nice liberal ladies.

BILLIONAIRES: Imagine there's no billionaires / You can do it if you try. But what would it mean?

It would mean that nobody was creating businesses that made a really significant improvement over the status quo. You know the stand-out guys of the last 200 years. The chap that invented the steam engine used to pump out the mines in Cornwall. The chaps that invented steam railway locomotives. The guy that turned the Bessemer process for making steel into a mega-business, mining coal and iron ore and then transporting them to the smelters to make steel. The chap that invented the modern business of refining and distributing illuminating oil for lamps. The guys that systematized the manufacture of automobiles. The guys that invented and manufactured electric generating equipment and electric motors. The guy that paid $50,000 for an operating system that he modified and sold to IBM to power its IBM PCs. And so on.

These millionaires and then billionaires made staggering fortunes not because they "accumulated" wealth from the surplus labor of workers but because they created businesses that utterly changed the world for consumers. And the consumers flocked to buy their products and the workers flocked to work for the billionaires.

We know what happens when you ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES. You get the Soviet Union, in which millions died in a government-induced famine, and millions were sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. You get Mao's China, in which about 30 million died in a famine when Mao decided that the farmers were going to make steel out in mini-furnaces in the countryside.

And when you decide to allow billionaires again then your economy revives a bit, as in today's capitalist -- but KGB-ruled -- Russia. Or it takes off, like in capitalist -- but Communist-ruled -- China.

Now, the real question is: how do AntiFa twerps come to believe the twerpish things they believe? How can they believe five impossible things before breakfast, and imagine that there were no policemen. And no billionaires? And not know that that would be a really bad idea?

But that is a topic for another day.

The People of the Creative Self

Most ordinary Americans do not raise their sights above the notion of ordinary life: following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. You might call it the agenda of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. 

But some people, as Charles Taylor writes, yearn for something higher, fuller -- you know -- creative. In his Sources of the Self Taylor calls this experience "expressive individualism." These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't just want to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. In their religion humans, not gods, are now become the creators of the world.

I call such people the People of the Creative Self.

It is important to understand how radically new and revolutionary this is.

Back in the old days humans understood that they lived under the sway of powerful gods and spirits that might, at any moment destroy them, just because. Then, in the Axial Age, humans invented new gods that created the world, announced a book of rules -- a Ten Commandments or a Hammurabi's Code -- and left humans to get on with it.

But now, with the marriage of science and technology, it seems that humans can create their own world, that with human intelligence and creativity and scientific knowledge we can fashion the world ourselves. we don't need a god to create the world and then set forth the rules; we can invent the future; we can set the rules. Gods need not apply.

But not everyone. It is clear, from the fact of oppressed peoples and other marginalized humans, that some people still experience the world as a chaotic place under the sway of malevolent forces. It is clear from the emergence of middle-class populism that there are a lot of people that just want to be told the rules so they can get on with it.

So the People of the Creative Self are a minority, but an influential minority, because they are the most educated, the most evolved. And, since their culture encourages them to create and imagine they naturally reinvent everything, from architecture to business to politics to sex. 

There is a tendency in creative people to imagine themselves as "free spirits" as opposed to the rest of mankind's "fettered spirits." As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, 

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Nietzsche doesn't like the "fettered spirit," especially because of its tendency to anathematize the "free spirit" and the "free spirit's" tendency "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." 

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

Thing is, of course, that any creative work, successful or unsuccessful, will cause what Joseph Schumpeter so famously called "creative destruction." Creative destruction means that people are going to get caught in the undertow. If you start a business with a brilliant new invention, then it is likely to put people out of work in other businesses. If you implement a brilliant political idea, it may change the world for the better and inaugurate a glorious era or peace and prosperity, or it may change the world for the worse and cause millions of deaths and ruin tens of millions of lives. Moreover, it is also true, for instance in business startups, that many are called but few are chosen. Most creative endeavors, whether in business or politics or the arts, end in failure.

As Nietzsche teaches, if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else. 

This truth has not yet penetrated to the heart of the People of the Creative Self. They are creative because they were raised to be creative. To them, a normal life is a creative life, full of interesting challenges and projects. Nobody has taught them that creativity is hard, and likely to fail. They tend to think of themselves as the beneficent Oz spreading goodness and light everywhere. They are concerned about the Precautionary Principle where fossil-fuel companies are concerned, but not with respect to their own creative plans.

But creative people run the world: get used to it.

Capitalism Isn't Accumulation. Get It?

Because I've been reading around Marxist economics recently I have developed an allergic reaction to the word "accumulation." Marx and his epigones are always using the word in respect of capitalism, as in:

Primitive Accumulation: Marxists say this started with the enclosure of land and the expulsion of the resident population to create a landless proletariat. OK. Good point. Only it wasn't the capitalists that did this but the feudal nobles who, upon being disarmed by the absolute monarchs, kicked the peasants off their land because they couldn't use them as soldiers any more. By the way, Sir James Steuart, quoted by Marx, was a mercantilist who believed in a ban on the export of gold and silver (thus encouraging their "accumulation.")

Capital Accumulation: In Marx's notion (from La Wik), 

capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits.

Do you see the problem here? Marx and his epigones assume that capital accumulation is simply a mechanical or hydraulic operation. You pump your profits back into the economy and it accumulates as more profits. But it's not that simple.

Let us start with the profits from an investment. What should the capitalist do? Should he spend the money on a yacht? Should he reinvest it in his existing business? Should he put the money into creating a new line in his business? Should he start a completely new business? Should he invest the money in stocks and ETFs? If so, which ones? Should he invest the money in government bonds? The point is that his profits from this year do not just "accumulate." They must be spent or invested in a good idea, a good idea that works. To talk about this as "capital accumulation" completely misses the point.

Over-accumulation: According to the Marxists "A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy" and this is what causes capitalism to self-destruct and lead to socialism. I think that what he means here is that opportunities for profitable investment tend to reduce over time, leading to a crisis of capitalism.

Of course, there is a grain of truth in this. A General Motors may grow itself into the biggest automaker in the United States, but then what? What does it do for an encore? What does it do when the profits in auto-manufacturing start to level off and even decline? What does it do when business turns down and it can't afford to pay the above-market wages its workers have come to regard as their birthright? What does it do when the talent of its CEOs and managers reverts to the mean? 

We see this all the time in business. Any big corporation tends to be tuned up to do one thing. And then the world changes. And the corporation drops out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 top corporations.

OK. Enough about Marx. Let's talk reality, and the reality is that accumulation has nothing to do with the case.

"Intangible Capital:" The naked truth about capitalism is that that it bares the facts of human cooperation. Nothing is guaranteed; nothing works forever; even hard work isn't enough; good luck doesn't go on forever. You must serve the consumers or go broke.

And the biggest fact of all is the fact in the World Bank's study of capital: "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" Guess what: in the advanced nations, 80 percent of "capital" is so-called "intangible capital."

In other words, if you want to understand "wealth," the biggest part of it is not "natural capital," like oil or gold or silver or land. It is not "produced capital," like factories and industrial plants. It is the knowledge and know-how, the "intangible capital" that humans carry around with them between their ears.

Let's create a little table from the World Bank's Appendix 2 on the Per-Capita Wealth of Nations in 2000.

National Capital in $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Capital
Iran	$14,105	$3,336	$6,581	$24,023
Ireland	$10,534	$46,542	$273,414	$330,490
United States	$14,752	$79,851	$418,009	$512,612

Yipes. Notice how our three candidate countries all have about the same amount of "natural capital." But that don't mean nothing. Hey, "produced capital" ain't beanbag, but it is still second tier. The only thing that matters is "intangible capital."

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Chuck old chap. And the same to all you Marxists and lefties and all the ships at sea.

The Importance of "Victims with Attitude"

I had a minor Aha! moment over the weekend. It had something to do with the Hamas rocket attacks in Israel and the Associated Press's Sergeant Schultz moment when they said that they Knew Nothing about the Hamas offices in the same building as theirs.

In other words, what's with the left that they are so wedded to victim groups like the Palestinians?

And then I realized that for the Allyism thing -- oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors -- to work the oppressed peoples can't just be sitting around like slaves on a plantation or touching their forelocks like the folk on Bathsheba Everdene's farm in Thomas Hardy's Wessex.

The victims need to have Attitude. They need to be protesting; they need to complain about the cops; they need to make "the boss" into a villain; they need to burn it all down. Otherwise the lefty process doesn't work.

So that's why our lefty friends have continued to radicalize blacks in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Revolution. That's why all good BDS believers think that the Palestinians are helpless victims and the Israelis are Literally Hitler.

Blacks are "victims with attitude." Palestinians are "victims with attitude." And so are all the Islamist communities in Europe and Britain. So are "trans" people.

You don't count as a registered "oppressed people™" unless you have "attitude."

Hispanics in the US need not apply. They are too busy getting on with their lives, urging their children to go to college, starting a small business, rising up the social ladder.

East Asians need not apply. They are Ice People. Not enough attitude. They just get on with life, working hard every day and helping family and other East Asians.

Brahmins? They seem to be auditioning in the US as Allies. Not victims, but leaders of the victims. Although, of course, Dalits, untouchables from India, need not apply.

When you think about it, the need for "victims with attitude" is essential. And really, not just for lefty Allyism, but for all politics.

The point is that, unless you are making a ruckus, and telling the ruling class that unless they trim their sails you very well might bust up the place, then you don't exist in the political firmament. Because politics is all about Us and Them, how We are the noblest, most innocent, most virtuous people since the Creation. And those Them, they are rascals and monsters, and if we don't take arm against that sea of troubles, we will get run over and demolished, maybe even annihilated.

The trick of our lefty friends is that they are the ruling class, but justify their power because they care about the helpless victims. Only, of course, they need to select as victims folks who are not just victims -- after all, slavery has existed since the dawn of time -- but  victims with attitude who are not going to take it any more.

And guess what: if the victims du jour don't have enough attitude we activists and advocates and Rules for Radicals chappies will teach you the rules of Attitude. We will lead you into a glorious future of perfect equality and justice. And hey, you deserve that 50-inch 4K TV down at Walmart!

Note that all politics needs this dynamics. It's just that populist nationalist politicians don't need a local source of "victims with attitude." They assert the innocence of the nation and then blame the Russkies or the Chinese or the Deep State for all our problems.

So, a candidate for president like Donald Trump represents himself as the leader of the Commoners against the overclass of the Deep State. He is almost playing the same game as the Allies of Allyism. Because, of course, in reality Donald Trump is part of the overclass and when he represents himself as a Commoner he is pulling a fast one. He is no more a Commoner than Bill Gates, billionaire son of an establishment lawyer.

So what is the difference?

Donald Trump advertises himself as the leader of the American Nation of Commoners against the Deep State: the leader of the whole nation of ordinary Americans. Anyone can be an ordinary American, even members of the overclass that have half a brain.

The liberal overclass represents itself as a avant-garde of Allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

So what's missing? In the Trump version, he is missing the fact that there are a lot of lower-class Americans who identify more with their class or ethnicity or religion than as American.

In the lefty Ally narrative, everything is a lie, including "and" and "the." The Allies are not the allies of the oppressed peoples. They are simple power-seekers using the oppressed peoples as their political foot-soldiers until they degrade into "human rubble." The oppressed peoples are not really that oppressed, except as being enslaved by the welfare state and its failed programs run by the Allies. The white oppressors are not really white oppressors: they don't have the power. In fact, like the LTC in the Space Force they can be fired for any crime against the narrative right here right now. 

So. The left's politics requires victims, but victims are no use unless and/or until they have attitude. Thus the importance of "Victims with Attitude."

You read it here first.

The Left: Just What Is Their Problem?

I've been reading a number of books that deal with the lefty mindset, not exactly in an organized project to dissect the lefty world view, but just because.

For instance, in Ellen Meiksins Wood and her The Origin of Capitalism she is trying to advance the notion that things were pretty good before agrarian capitalism came along and marketized the agricultural sector. OK, so in the modern era people live under a "market imperative" instead of what I would call a feudal imperative. Instead of having to keep a weather eye on the local lord and his use and abuse of power we moderns have to think about our skills and how they are priced in the market. The Horror.

With Marx and The German Ideology we get another directed analysis of the move from feudal to market society. Marx's intent is to unearth the secret of how the bourgeoisie with their money and their capital and their circulation got to turn the world upside down and put the working class into wage slavery. The Horror.

Now I am reading Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. The premise is that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not really about the philosophy of language but is an ethical commentary on the decline and fall of the Hapsburg empire. What the heck does that mean? Well, Vienna in the pre-WWI decades produced a gaggle of commentators who wanted a moral revolution away from the bourgeois ethos of late-19th century. 

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Just what is their problem?

And just what is the problem, in our own day, of the academicians and Wokeys and activists whose whole world view is about The Horror! The Horror! of ordinary middle-class people and their "systemic racism?"

Here's a piece on "The Paranoid Style in Progressive Politics" by Lee Siegel echoing the famous book of Richard Hofstadter's essays on The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You know: Red Scares and McCarthyism. It was the status anxiety of small-town America wot did it, according to Hofstadter. Maybe, just a teeny bit. But maybe the opposite is true, in spades.

Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left.

So maybe the feverish anti-bourgeois culture of the educated rich kids of the late 19th century is reflected in the feverish anti-deplorable culture of the educated not-so-rich kids of the early 21st century. It is good old fin-de-siècle all over again.

In The Soul of the World the recently departed Roger Scruton cuts through all this. What does it mean, he asks, to be a human in human society?

I exist as a subject, that is, as a self-conscious being with immediate knowledge of an inner realm, which defines my point of view of the world... [But then there are] others, with whom I share language... And language presupposes a shared world, a Lebenswelt, in which others are represented as subjects like myself.

The beginning of wisdom, in his understanding, is to step outside of your own self-obsession and think about other people from their own point of view. The amazing result is that you may find yourself able to share that world with others.

Do you see how the lefty world presupposes that the world cannot be shared? Not with those capitalists, not with those stupid Viennese bourgeois and their over-decorated houses, not with bloody Wagner and his reduction of music to pure emotion, not with those deplorable racist-sexist-homopbobes?

Just what is their problem? 

While our Ruling Class Runs Out the Clock

My big problem is life is that rulers gotta rule. If you are in the ruling class what you do when you get up in the morning is think about some new way to direct traffic and harvest loot and plunder. You do not just go out to lunch with your political pals and plot how to stick a dagger in their backs and wait for a crisis to boil up. You actually create crises out of whole cloth.

So, 97.2 percent of what ruling classes do actually makes things worse. And yet nothing happens.

Thus, our heroic Seattle City Council had a meeting Tuesday on the vitally important issue of defunding the Seattle Police. But what were they actually discussing?

A Seattle City Council committee will look to take a step Tuesday toward making good on moves made last year to move operations out of the police department after mass protests in the city called for a vast defunding of law enforcement.

So what does that mean, in practice?

The city’s 2021 budget brought a cut of about a fifth of Seattle’s more than $400 million annual outlay in police spending along with changes to reduce the size and power of the department by moving 911 and traffic enforcement operations outside of the Seattle Police Department and spending more money on social, community, and BIPOC services and programs.

Oh, I get it. We are talking about taking police union jobs away and giving them to other unions. The "Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers’ Guild" wants the jobs to go to the new Community Safety and Communications Center. No kidding! So the meter maids have their own union? But Mayor Jenny Durkan wants the meter maid jobs to go to the Department of Transportation.

So this is just business as usual, moving the deck-chairs around on the Titanic, and responding to the various public employee unions demands. Meanwhile the bright and shimmering stars in the political firmament of the Seattle City Council pat themselves on the back for Defunding the Police in accordance with the non-negotiable demands of the progressive and race activist groups for justice.

And so it goes. Until crime really starts to build in the nice-liberal-lady #WeBelieve neighborhoods.

Then there is Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm telling us that if we were only driving electric cars we wouldn't be bothered by the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. 

Never mind that electric car are powered, probably, by natural-gas powered electric power stations, and guess how natural gas gets to the power stations? Never mind that in the future it is physically impossible to replace oil and gas with renewables -- even assuming that, at some point, activist liberals don't decide that the moral safety of the planet requires that we stop uglifying the landscape with wind turbines and solar farms. Remember the horror of paving the nation over with freeways? I used to look out of the windows of airplanes and ponder about that. All in all, it seems to me, the paving companies did a pretty poor job of paving the nation over. Today I look out of the window and am staggered by the number of gigantic wind turbines on every ridge between Seattle and Chicago.

But let us talk about California going to war against charter schools.

New legislation would clamp down on all charter schools — and would target those schools that specialize in providing distance learning. 

You would think that the one thing that minority parents would want for their kids would be good schools, as the road to a better life, and the one thing they would want was to be able to send their kids to the school of their choice. And that would be the one thing that would determine their votes.

Actually, they don't. That's what Michelle Rhee found out as Chancellor of the DC schools. Minorities think of the public schools as a jobs program.

And when minorities finally follow the white working class out of the Democratic Party it will be half a century -- or even a full century -- since the ruling class had started to make them into "human rubble" with their failed programs.

The trouble is, as Pareto argued in his theory of the "circulation of elites," that

Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.

And if you ask me our elite is pretty united on the fact that we "ordinary people" should shut up and just follow our betters.

Trouble is, I don't see a new elite forming that could replace the current elite. I wish I could, but I don't.

A Strategic Appreciation of Where We Are

What does it all mean? What are the Biden people trying to do? What are the Wokies all about? What is the meaning of the populist phenomenon and the working class move away from the left in the UK and here? Will the GOP ever get a clue? We all would like to know what is going on, and what is coming next.

And, of course, nobody knows, for sure. Hey, nobody even knows a thing.

For me, it all starts with the basic need of every ruling class. It has to have a political formuls, a narrative -- a Mandate of Heaven -- that justifies its power. In the good old days the justification centered around protecting the people from foreign threats and from domestic troublemakers and rebels.

Since today there really aren't any foreign and domestic threats, our rulers have to make it up out of whole cloth.

That's what the whole climate change thing is about. It's a global, planetary threat to everyone and everything. Therefore we must mobilize as if for war, and everyone must do their part to fight climate change. Oh Boy! What fun we will have directing the armies of climate warriors in their sacred quest.

On the domestic front, the rulers need a doctrine that justifies their power. In the old days the aristocracy just were. They were the best people and the best people were the obvious people to rule. But things changed with the rise of the educated class in the 19th century. Ever since the educated class has justified its power by some sort of over-under narrative. For Marx, it was the Communists fighting for the proletarians against the bourgeoisie. For the US liberals it was the progressive educated people designing and implementing a New Deal for the workers devastated by the Great Depression and moderating the power of the malefactors of great wealth. 

In our day the rulers justify their power because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors. That is what Critical Race Theory is all about. It is about affirming the truth of white supremacy and the truth of the oppression that traditionally marginalized people have suffered throughout the history of the United States.

This switch is not remarkable, it is makes complete sense. If the white working class no longer feels particularly oppressed and no longer feels that the Democratic Party is its ally, then the progressive rulers need to find a new doctrine to justify their power, and they need to develop pejoratives to replace the old ones about malefactors of great wealth, about Big Business, about WASPs, and about exploitation of the workers.

In the UK the process is a little behind the US. Our white working class has felt unhappy with the Democratic Party at least since Nixon -- that's what the Silent Majority and Reagan Democrats were all about. So it is utterly shocking, beyond comprehension, for the North London sophisticates that the working class in the North of England (where the workers of the industrial revolution once did their thing) has switched parties. Expect that the North London luvvies will embrace a more direct Allyism, and completely dump the working class so that the helpless victims are no longer the workers at all but the traditionally marginalized non-whites, helpless professional women and gays, and all the rest of the woke agenda.

Let us say that, back in the days of Obama, there was a fair amount of concern about not appearing too radical. And Nancy Pelosi's two big mid-terms, 2006 and 2018, were all about electing nice moderate Democrats who were people just like you. Only, when it came to the crunch, those moderates voted the party line.

I suspect that the cooler heads in the Democratic Party have lost control of the process. I suspect that today they have to package all the crazy wokey agenda items into their legislative agenda because there is no moderate faction left to balance the crazies.

In a way, the Democrats seem determined not to learn the lessons of the past 50 years: not the lesson of the Silent Majority, not the lesson of the 70s stagflation, not the lesson of Reaganomics, not the lesson of the Trump populist phenomenon.

Because here they are doing a full court press as though they owned the Congress with 70 Senators and 350 Representatives. And, as we see, the Biden agenda is already coming unglued, with chaos at the border, hedges against inflation -- from housing to crypto -- going crazy, and employers bidding in vain for workers who would rather enjoy their unemployment benefits than go back to work.

For a guy like me, it is all rather surreal. You mean you guys didn't see any of this coming? Really? For Sure? 

But that's the point of a religion, of a cult. It is to advance a narrative about the world and keep its believers believing through all hardships and reverses, and to teach them that there is no way back, but only forward.

One of the naughty little lies that our liberal friends tell themselves is that the AstroTurf groups like Occupy Wall Street and BLM and AntiFa are the authentic voice of the people, the oppressed peoples. In fact there is no real oppression for the oppressed groups, unless you reckon that the oppressed peoples mainly consist of what Curtis Yarvin calls the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments."

Here's something I want to suggest. The populist groups going all the way back to the Tea Party of 2009-10 are not AstroTurf. They are organic groups organized by ordinary Commoners. And I think that the Trump Car Parades were such a phenomenon. Here's a report on one such.

You couldn’t miss them. Hundreds of vehicles paraded up and down Texas Avenue in College Station on Sunday to rally and show support for President Donald Trump... In all, it’s estimated more than 1,200 people were part of the event that was organized by Luke Holland. "I posted the idea on Facebook last Monday, and now look at this," exclaimed Holland[.]

And now we have reports of people spontaneously organizing to push back on Critical Race Training in schools. Our liberal friends have exhumed their favorite word from the Seventies: "Backlash." 

The thing to remember is that activism is what liberals do for a living; it is what gives meaning to their lives. They have activist groups up the ying-yang and the highest and best thing for a liberal is to be a national-headline activist. Their activism is, of course, all about advocating for the oppressed peoples. And so it has nothing to do with the oppressed peoples, except the importance of the oppressed as stage machinery. Look, the main problem with the oppressed is that they are the human rubble still bouncing after the latest failed program advocated and rammed down our throats by our liberal activist friends.

Ordinary Commoners do not do activism for a living or for an avocation. But, they do have the skills, if motivated to do so. They can get up a car parade on Facebook. They can give 'em hell down at the school board. And when they do, the liberals are shocked, shocked, at the "backlash," and go at once to the dictionary to find a new pejorative ending in "-phobe" with which to malign them.

So what happens next? I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.

A Marxist Misinterprets History

I first read Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view back at the end of 2015 and wrote my review here. But then a month or two I picked it up again. Because.

It's an odd thing, to read a book by a Marxist, because Marxists live in a different universe, and they use the language of Newtonian mechanics -- moments, laws of motion -- that Marx used when he wasn't being all materialist with Feuerbach. Oh and "self-reproduction," presumably as in Darwin.

Oddly, when I reread the book I seemed to have no recollection of reading it previously!

Wood's narrative is basically this. Back in the old days, humans lived through "non-market access to the means of self-reproduction, and specifically land." Thus, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." But then, with the "improvement" movement, in which landowners started to want to make money on their land, people became proletarianized, they became "market-dependent;" they became wage slaves. Today people live under a "market imperative."

But, Wood notices, the English aristocracy was "demilitarized" before the lords in the rest of Europe.

I can see why I reread The Origin of Capitalism with new eyes. Because, you see, in the intervening years I have read about what this demilitarizing of the aristocracy was all about, and why it led to "improvement."

See, back in the day the feudal lords were basically mini kings and ruled their estates as royalty. And the peasants that tilled the land on their estates were not just there for the convenience of "passively appropriating" rents. The peasants, or at least the male ones, were there to constitute the army of the lord, what the notables in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays call "our powers."

But when Henry VIII disarmed the nobles he effectively dissolved their mini-kingdoms and their mini-armies. See what that means? Back in the day, the idle peasants were useful as cannon- or at least arrow-fodder. Not any more. So that's when the lords started kicking their peasants off the land and enclosing the common land, and trying to make money with "improvement." As Marx put it:

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

Well, they were useless now, but not back in the day when they were part of the feudal host, available to march to the battlefield. Then they were useful as soldiers, as part of the lord's power projection.

Wood talks about how the proletarians live today under the "market imperative." So they do. So we all do. They must prostitute themselves in the labor market and work for wages -- and the wages are determined by the market, the ebb and flow of supply and demand for human labor, and not justice. 

Yes, but back in the day, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." So they did. And they allowed to peasants to scratch around and utilize "common lands" and the peasants worked out a communal approach to share the use of the common lands. And everything worked out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Until the day that the lord needed the peasant and his billhook in the lord's army. Jolly good fun, unless the lord lost the battle and some other lord came to lord it over the peasant, and maybe loot the lord's land and kill the peasants and sell the peasants' wives into slavery.

Of course, in our day the peasant is not completely living under the "market imperative." He or she can subordinate himself or herself to the ruling class and get passively appropriated benefits from his or her loving lord. Call if living under a "political imperative."

The last word in Wood's book is telling.

The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic. But although the alternative is unavailable, there remains the real alternative of socialism.

 Do you see the utter head-in-the-sand determination not to see what is right in front of you?

For I would say this:

Two steps forward and one step back, the economy of the free market has performed the miracle of increasing the real income of humans by 30 times in 200 years. Meanwhile all experiments in socialism have been criminal, murderous failures. What is wrong with people that can still conjure up a vision of "the real alternative of socialism" despite the evidence of 100 million dead in 100 years?

 Socialism is not a "real alternative." It is not sitting there, waiting to be tried. Instead it is a proven failure. Because every time it has been tried it has been a failure. No, not just a failure, but a bloody failure, a starving failure. And it's about time that lefties admit it.

Narratives: 1776 Commission, McClanahan, Gottfried, and Anton

There's been a little spat in intellectual conservative circles lately. I caught up with it by reading Michael Anton, who was criticizing Paul Gottfried who was criticizing Brion McClanahan who was criticizing Trump's 1776 Commission report. Or the other way around.

McClanahan didn't like the 1776 Commission report because it advanced the "proposition nation" notion that "all men are created equal" that was advanced by President Lincoln. The Founders, he writes, were not particularly interested in phrases from the Declaration of Independence. 

In McClanahan's view the Americans involved in the Founding of the Constitution were interested in state sovereignty and that "the people had a right to “alter or abolish” either a state government or a central government." Nor was anyone that interested in the "proposition" that "all men are created equal" in the 1850s.

The question is whether this is an original sin or not, whether the Founders should have known that slavery was the great sin of the ages etc., and whether the Founders are to be eternally banished for not endorsing the modern agenda of rights including votes for blacks and for women.

I think all this misses the point. First of all, back at the Founding, the various actors were politicians, playing both ends against the middle as politicians did then and do now. A lot of people wanted a Constitution, and so they looked to what would get a Constitution written and ratified.

By the 1850s there were different issues moving men's minds, and so the argument was different. And in the Civil War and afterwards the various participants were creating narratives to justify the war and the regime that came after it. 

The ruling class of the Founders was pretty well a ruling class of landowners, and in the South those landowners were slave-owners.

By the time of the Civil War a new ruling class was arising in the North, around the new economy of industry and steam transportation.

Our present ruling class is an educated upper class of credentialed bureaucratic careerists, and they naturally think that the old landowners and the industrialists that replaced them were moral cretins compared to themselves. So any pejoratives or insults that diminish the guys of the old era are just part of the narrative that extols the present rulers as moral and political giants.

In our time we are faced with easing our present corrupt ruling class out of its sinecures and power positions and encouraging them to get a real job. One of the things we need to do is create a new narrative that damns the present rulers into the moral basement as people who have created "human rubble" with their failed government programs and created a new lower class where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. That's how you play politics; you try to put your adversaries on the back foot.

In other words, one of the things we need to do is to create moral fairy tales that teach the young'uns to hate the moral turpitude of the present rulers just as the present rulers regale the kiddies with their moral fairy tales about racism and white supremacy as Literally Hitler.

I have a fantasy that helps me get up in the morning. It is that we are transitioning to a new era in which the ordinary Commoners that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, are reaching critical mass and are beginning to demand that the rulers take account of their needs and their right to live their lives according to their beliefs.

My fantasy is that if you want to understand Brexit in Britain, and Trump in America, and the movement of the white working class in Britain from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party and the movement of the white working class in the US from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, then you need to understand the phenomenon of the rise of the middle-class Commoner.

There's a good piece by Melanie Phillips on Substack about the recent by-election in Britain where a solid Labour constituency just elected a Conservative woman to Parliament. She points out that in Britain the "working class people are deeply attached to their country as the place where they know they share basic values, traditions and assumptions[.]" But the Labour Party

had become instead the party  of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.

Sound familiar? That's exactly what we have here in the US. We are ruled by an urbanist educated elite that doesn't get that the world is full of people that are not like them, and have a right to live their lives just as much as educated liberal activists.

My view is that all the talk about the Founders and racism and equality misses the point; they are old narratives heading for the scrap-heap of history.

What we need is a narrative that glorifies ordinary middle-class Commoners living ordinary lives. And I believe that the narrative has to start with the proposition that you can take your pejoratives, your accusations of racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and put them where the sun don't shine.

Are We Heading to Civil War II?

I just finished up two books prophesying bad times ahead. The first was The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It advances a cyclical theory of history using Jungian archetypes; there are "saeculum" cycles -- lasting about 80-100 years -- and then there are generational cycles with Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists. Here's La Wik.

The second was Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin, which proposes a secular cycle based on demographic data like GDP and immigration and intra-elite competition. Peter Turchin was born a Russian; he came to the US in 1977 when his father was exiled from the Soviet Union. Here's La Wik.

Both of the books propose that we are heading for a crisis that may well involve a civil war in America.

I'd say that The Fourth Turning reduces to the notion that we all tend to turn to squabbling in times of peace, leading to a crisis. And then in the crisis we all have to unite and pull together. In the aftermath of the crisis successfully concluded we all sit around for a while telling each other how nice we are. Until people start to squabble again. Right now we are headed for a crisis, because it is 75 years since we were united by the experience of World War II.

Ages of Discord proposes that people get angry in tough times. Thus, for the ordinary commoner, things get tough when real incomes are flat or going down; so people get angry. For the average elitist things get tough when there are too many people competing for elite jobs like politician and doctor and lawyer; that's what makes elitists angry with each other. Right now everyone is angry. Commoners are angry because incomes have been flat ever since 1970; Elitists are angry because the explosion in college education means an explosion in people that think the world should listen to them.

I am reminded of radical Randolph Bourne's maxim that "war is the health of the state." People come together in a crisis. In other words, a war. Another way of saying this is that politicians are always looking to fight some frightful foreign foe. They instinctively know that their dream of leading their people depends on there being a threat to overcome. Alternatively, if there isn't a foreign foe, then you lead your partisan faction to battle against the other partisan faction who, as everyone knows, are monsters.

Incidentally, this is the meaning of the two front war proposed by the Biden Administration. The first is fighting climate change, a very cunning way of mobilizing the whole country as if to war. The second is fighting "systemic racism," fighting for "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors."

And again, this reflects the truth about government, that its only warrant is to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. Real or imaginary.

Let us analyze things using Turchin's "Well-Being Index" and "Political Stress Index." Back in 1820, the "Era of Good Feelings," ordinary Americans felt pretty good. The Well-Being Index was high, and American had united during the Indian Wars. And there was no real conflict in the elites.

But then began the great wave of 19th century immigration, and wages suffered. Then began the rise of the North with manufacturing and railways challenging the dominance of the South's cotton economy. So, by the 1850s the commoners were pissed off by the Irish and German immigrants pulling wages down and the Northern industrialists were pissed off by the lordly South that had dominated politics and government since the Founding. It was time to teach the other guys a lesson.

And everyone stayed pissed off until after World War I. But then Congress wrote a bill to sharply curb immigration and real wages started to rise. The crisis of the Great Depression and World War II inspired everyone to pull together under the brilliant leadership of FDR and Jobs for progressive intellectuals. By the end of WWII we were all united, and in the 1950s and 1960s commoners benefited from a surge in real incomes.

But all good things must come to an end. In 1965 Congress passed a new immigration bill that sharply increased immigration. And real wages stopped climbing in the 1970s. The sharp increase in college education meant that more would-be elite people were competing for doctor jobs and lawyer jobs and political jobs.

So now you come to today, where the commoners are rebelling against half a century of no real increase in income, and the cognitive elite is pushing back against the nerve -- the noive -- of the commoners critiquing their wisdom.

I have two ideas. First, let's limit immigration (hey, I'm an immigrant, but I got mine). Then maybe the incomes of ordinary Americans will start to rise. Second, let's replace college with technical schools and apprenticeships and internships for most Americans. Then there won't be so many people educated for political leadership competing for the same glorious prizes. And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Could it work? Maybe.

But first, I suspect, our glorious elite will have to screw up big time -- like they did in the 1970s. Politics does not proceed on the well-tended garden of good ideas, but on the bonfire of bad ideas.

I just hope we don't have a civil war.

Implementing a National Liberation from Lefty Colonialism

Over at American Greatness Stephen Balch comes up with a good idea. He says that we the people are presently suffering under a colonialist regime, and we need a national liberation project.

To be sure, the colonial analogy is far from perfect. Western colonies often gained from being colonized; for us, it’s a dead loss. But there are enough similarities to help us understand the strategies our elites are following, how they could be better resisted, and why, as with most colonialists of the past, they’re likely to fail.

If we are to neutralize our colonialist ruling class we need not just "mass activism" but also "mass education and inspirational ceremony," Balch writes. Yes. Ceremony.

We should also organize mass observances of traditional and newly created holidays, commemorating events like the Yorktown surrender and D–Day, or solemnly memorializing the victims of totalitarianism... so let’s consider the creation of a counter-calendar to our elite’s parade of apologetic commemorations, filled with holidays reinforcing national consciousness and pride.

Brilliant idea. Actually, when you are talking ceremony, you are talking religion, the celebration of the sacred. And we need to re-sacralize our national myth, to make holy again the sacred history of the American Founding. I say, for instance, that we should counter the lie of the 1619 Project with my "1584 Project." In case you didn't know, 1584 was the year that the first shipload of White Trash arrived in North America.

Yes, let's celebrate the "waste population" of Europe that was cast upon these shores by the hoity-toity ruling classes of Old Europe. Instead of sneering at white trash and rednecks.

This is all part of the downstream notion: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

When we are not celebrating America in religious ceremonies, like President Trump at Mount Rushmore, I think we should push back on all the lefty pejoratives.

Racism? There's nothing more racist in today's America than Black Lives Matter. Period.

Sexism? There's nothing more sexist in America than the old tired movement of feminism. Which has done what, exactly, for women lately?

Violence? There's nothing more violent in America today than a lefty Antifa "mostly peaceful protest."

Homophobia? What could be more oppressive than the brutal cancel culture promoted by Big Gay? Imagine what would happen to you if you got up at a Critical Race Theory session at work and said: "you know, I think we should teach children that, while gay is all very well, you will probably live a better life if you act hetero, and marry and have children.

Slavery? Apart from the fact that the biggest slave states in all history were founded in the 20th century in Russia and in China there are other questions to consider. What do you call a regime that forces its people to go about wearing masks? What do you call a regime that taxes over a third of its peoples' income? What do you call a ruling class that metaphorically flogs any impertinence from the plebs with cancel culture? What do you call a regime that drafts the whole nation into a Green New Deal to "save the planet?"

Hate? I'll tell you what. Every politician, at every level of government, is in the hate business. That's because, stripped of all its fol-der-ol, politics is about two things: foreign war and civil war. In the foreign war the politicians teach the people to hate the horrible Frogs, or Krauts, or Nazis, or Commies. In civil war the politicians teach the people to hate the N-word, the white trash, the white oppressors, the white supremacists, the robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, the conspiracy theorists, the armed insurrectionists. Etcetera.

Colonization? There is nothing more colonizing that the rulers and the swells telling ordinary American commoners that they are subhuman white oppressors or deplorables or bitter clingers or white racists. There is nothing more colonizing that the top-down administrative state. There is nothing more colonizing than forcing workers and students to attend diversity training or critical race theory sessions. Colonization of the Curriculum? Yeah. Starting with the uber-colonizing 1619 Project.

We all of us need to be ready with the comeback. Racist? I'll tell you what's racist: BLM. Hate? If you are in politics, you are in the hate business. White Oppressor? Yeah, and I could be fired tomorrow for saying the wrong word -- in private. There's always the Mary McCarthy line. Everything the left says is a lie: including "and" and "the."

Yup. First we celebrate America in every way possible. Second, we push back whenever the left uses a pejorative. Onwards and Upwards

Transportation and the Lower Classes

For years I've been quoting the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to railways. My quote has been that "railways would encourage the poor to travel around needlessly."

Because there is nothing worse than ordinary people traveling around needlessly and distracting from the vital importance of important people traveling around importantly on important affairs of state.

But I could never find the original quote, and I worried that maybe I was imagining things. Now I understand why. Because in a piece by Will Lloyd at UnHerd.com about the decline and fall of the English eccentric there was mentioned a Col. Sibthorp who, as soon as railways were invented,

began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

Only, when I Googled the quote, I found Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw, and he writes something a bit different.

[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways -- 'the Steam Humbug' -- which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."

Hmm. It just shows how things can get all bollixed up. Bit of a cock-up on the quoting front.

The funny thing is that, today, the Col. Sibthorps and Dukes of Wellington worrying about "moral ruin to wholesale slaughter" are our liberal friends that want to keep the deplorables in high-speed trains and light rail and TGVs and not in their evil SUVs on the nation's highways where they are emitting CO2 and pitching the Earth into runaway global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind that the cities with mass transit -- along with women and minorities -- were hardest hit by the COVID epidemic.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the book North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, about the textile industry in the north of England in the 19th century, the climactic scene between hero Mr. Thornton and heroine Margaret Hale takes place in a house in London. But in the 2004 BBC TV serial they meet at a train station somewhere between London and Milton where their trains, going in opposite directions, have stopped. So, back in the day, Mrs. Gaskell never thought of a climactic train rendezvous. But in the modern BBC adaption brought to you by North London luvvies, what could be more romantic!

What appeared to be a horror back in the nineteenth century to the high and mighty seems like a walk in the park to today's haughty ruling class. And don't get me started on the eevils of unrestricted airplane travel! Why, I was to Denver last weekend and, let me tell you, the hoi-polloi are back to traveling around needlessly. The concourses are full, the planes are full, and the carbon emissions are outtasight.

Just wait till the cruise industry starts up again. The Horror!

Earth to liberals. Humans are a nomadic species. We like to go walkabout. You liberal swells "fly private" from one vitally important global conclave to another to plan your next "Reset." We lesser mortals fly the commercial airlines, because that's all we can afford. And the average deplorable drives his F-350 crew-cab truck.

Now go back to your regularly scheduled activism and don't let me hear from you again until next time.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what I think. I think that planes, trains, and automobiles are the best thing since sliced bread. There is nothing I like better than driving north on I-5 and looking at all the folk driving who-knows-where in their personal transportation, unless it is walking down an airport concourse looking at all the average folks waiting for their flight. As far as I am concerned there is a clear penumbra and emanation in the US Constitution that makes personal transportation a basic human right, and I like to see American citizens exercising that right.

And, frankly, I can't wait for the chance to fly to Mars. On vacation.