Suppose the First Black Woman Crossed the Aisle

If I were the First Black Woman that President Biden nominated to the US Supreme Court I would be insulted.

Because after all, when President Biden says he is going to nominate a black woman -- as in East Asians need not apply -- that's racism, straight up.

I suppose that whoever he nominates -- and I understand that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is the front runner -- she will be a faithful liberal vote, always voting with the other two women liberals on the court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.

Mind you, according to Instapundit:

Judge Jackson grew up in a major metropolitan area, and her father was a lawyer. She would be the fifth sitting justice to fit that profile. She earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard and would be the seventh justice with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and the eighth graduate of Harvard or Yale law school.

So, a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class. 

That's really comical, representing a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class as the First Black Woman. A bit like First Black President Obama who was the son of an East African and a white woman, not a West African, from the people that were enslaved by other West Africans and sold to Brit slavers on the coast.

If I were the First Black Woman on the Court I would trot down to Justice Thomas after a day or two at the Court. And I would start to plot a bit of mayhem.

Because being a black woman I ain't gonna take no sh*t from nobody. Right Grrls?

But I doubt if she will. After all, she's a good little girl and went to Harvard and Harvard Law. You think she is going to break ranks and get combative?

For one thing, if you want to break the liberal ranks and start thinking for yourself you have to have done a bit of reading outside the liberal-lefty canon. You think that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has done that? I doubt it. My nickel says she has deadly boring ruling-class-conventional-wisdom opinions on everything.

Hey, if she had ever broken from the herd she wouldn't be the selection of President Biden to be the First Black Woman on the Supreme Court. Because what liberals want now, what they have to have, is an absolutely reliable vote that will vote as a block with the other two liberal women justices. Until Hell freezes over.

Because that's all that our liberal friends have left.

Today Victor Davis Hanson writes about the ruling-class strategy of nihilism, that all the stuff they are doing is part of a dastardly plan.

But if you mention nihilism then for chappies like me you invoke the shade of Nietzsche, who wrote that nihilism is the second consequence of your God dying, as in:

God is Dead, followed by decadence, followed by nihilism, followed by the eternal recurrence, followed by the revaluation of all values.

Eternal recurrence? Think Groundhog Day.

But, see, I don't think that the current ruling class clamp-down and nihilism is a strategy. I think it is a consequence of our liberal friends's faith, in leftist politics, in government programs, in quotas, in mandates, in feminism, in LGBT.

And that the God of Lefty Politics has failed. And our lefty friends do not know what to do. Except double down on their lefty politics.

There is no politics without an enemy, and so our lefty friends are finding enemies under every tree and on every street. If the Great Society failed and it wrecked the lower-income family, then it can't be the programs that failed. It must be some enemy that sabotaged it. If Charles Murray suggests that the lower average IQ of blacks is a fact and thus we will never get "equality" then he is a saboteur and a wrecker and must be condemned. If the stock market crashed in 2008 it can't be the low-down liar mortgages that Democrats have championed since the 1930s. It must be greedy bankers. If the COVID administrative mandates aren't working it must be the anti-vaxxers that are to blame.

But don't expect the two liberal justices and the new addition, the black woman Harvard educated daughter of a lawyer, to understand any of that. They are clueless, and will remain clueless, until the whole society is collapsing around them. But they still won't get it.

And frankly, even if Judge Jackson has half a brain, she would be afraid to use it. Imagine the storm that would engulf her if she dared to step out of line. I am not talking about columns in The New York Times and insults from race hustlers. I am talking about removal from the Court. You think they wouldn't stoop to that?

I gotta bridge...

Reviewing and Extending Downstreamism

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture." But did you know that SciFi author  John C. Wright has said that "In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion."

But is there something beyond religion? I like to misquote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and talk about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

In other words, if you really believe in the importance of downstreamism, then you will agree that

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And if you don't agree with that obvious truth, there is no hope for you!

Now, I have been reading a book that reviews the whole of philosophy, religion, science, and spirituality in the last 200 years written by a Brit J.J. Clarke, The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview. It is telling us all about the post-materialist, post-mechanical worldview that issues from what I call the "German Turn" that begins with Kant. Clarke is talking about a worldview that he calls "emergentism,"

a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in fields such as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems[.]

In other words, the way the world works is that some nobody -- it could be a nobody plant -- tries something new, and, wonder of wonders, it works. And that successful change changes the world. Not because it was forced on the world, but because it worked, and people copied the new idea. Because it worked.

So the way the world works is creativity, people creating new things, animals creating new things, plants creating new things, from the bottom up, not from the top down.

So, things just evolve.

But Clarke is an academic, so when he gets to religion and spirituality, he thinks that God is dead so let's reinvent spirituality as a creative enterprise. The old religious culture was based on an eternalist presumption, it

locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world as we experience it through our sense.

The new worldview is what Clarke calls a naturalist presumption, it is

a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, its meaning on the natural world of which we humans are an integral part.

This includes both what we experience in the physical and living world and also the "world of inner sense," the mental world, and also culture and history.

But what Clarke tells us is that the old "eternalist presumption" is done, finished, because we educated advanced humans know that the old world of God and Sin and the promise of eternal life in Heaven has been replaced by the new world of emergentism and the naturalist presumption.

That is where I part ways with the noble professor.

Because not everyone lives in the world of the creative educated philosophy professor for whom God has died. And clearly, for Clarke, there is no reason to respect or make a cultural space for the old people that still live with the worldview of the eternalist perspective.

I say that for the ordinary middle class person the old eternalist presumption still works pretty well. You believe in God; you believe that if you live your life by the rules then you will go to Heaven. So, you live a life of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

But for the educated elite this old worldview is a superstition and verges on bigotry.

Actually, I believe, further, that for the lower class, a still earlier worldview applies. For the lower class there is no happy land of Heaven if you do the right thing. In the lower class, power is everything, and what you need to do is get with a powerful person, and shelter in his powerful shadow. The old Nordic and pagan and Greek and Roman gods seem to apply. The newer Christian God of sweetness and light seems to be a fantasy to the lower class person.

Now I say, starting at 3:00 am today, that for all levels of society, the following applies, using the downstream hierarchy.

Politics answers the question: who is my enemy?

Culture answer the question: who are we the people?

Religion answers the question: who is God?

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" answers the question: What's it all about, Alfie? 

Who is my enemy? For the serf it's the cruel master; for the Commoner it's the tribe or nation next door; for the educated creative it's the dumb white middle-class racist-sexist-homophobes whose religion is pure bigotry.

Who are we the people? For the serf it is the people enslaved and oppressed like me; for the Commoner it is the nation; for the educated creative it is the global community of educated and evolved people.

Who is God? For the serf God is the cruel master; for the Commoner it is the God who made Heaven and Earth and declared that it was good; for the educated creative the god is the creative thinker, artist, activist.

What's it all about? For the serf it is just to stay alive; for the Commoner it is to live a virtuous life and get to Heaven; for the educated creative it is to create something that changes the world.

To be continued.

Let's All Blog on "Mass Formation Psychosis"

It should not be remarkable that humans, as social animals, all join together in moments of danger. In normal times social animals cooperate in peaceable pursuits; in abnormal times social animals combine to fight the foe.

So it's not surprising that in the COVID era, sold by the rulers as an existential peril, that all good men and women have come together for the good of humanity.

Some have called this "mass formation psychosis" and I understand why. If you think that the mass formation has coalesced to fight a phony foe, then it is not a healthy thing, but a destructive thing.

In a piece at American Greatness Malcom Pollack regards our current society as especially prone to the call to mass formation.

It helps if there is "free-floating anxiety" of what tomorrow might bring. I must say that I feel that right now, but not about COVID. Instead I worry about the hell we are going to go through wringing inflation out of the economy, and the increasing desperation of our ruling class to hang onto power.

It helps if there is "social isolation" with many people having "no meaningful relationships in their lives." I guess. But I think that is always true.

Finally it helps to have "a crisis of meaning." Deaths of despair and all that.

But I think that the COVID panic has actually been perfectly normal and physical. There came news of a dreaded virus from beyond the seas. Our political leaders rallied us to fight this invisible foe: of course we responded.

And then, of course, narrative control -- censorship when you are on the other side -- steps in. The natural instinct of the ruling class, as it raises its sword to rally the troops, is that we all speak with one voice, and silence all those that distract us from the One True Path to victory.

My special experience in all this is that I experienced a different response from men and from women to COVID.

Men, I think, respond to the call to go out and fight. But in COVID, apart from the brave Essential Workers, there hasn't been much call for brave soldiers to fight the foe.

Women, I think, respond to the call by doing all the right things: masking and cleaning and isolating and doing all the recommended things to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Notice, also, that women don't expect to be asked to risk their lives for the movement. Teachers unions were obviously more concerned about the safety of teachers than the safety of children.

I would say that since the first peak in infections and deaths passed in the summer of 2020 it was time to dial down the panic porn and reduce the social mobilization. Everyone wasn't going to die. We didn't have to hide in bunkers.

But, of course, political leaders love the rush that playing Henry V at Harfleur gives them. And bureaucrats love the opportunity to issue rules and let contracts for testing and even vaccine apps.

And in the general populace -- and especially with women -- there is clearly a mood to enforce compliance with the dictates issued from on high.

And when it's clear that we are not dealing with the End of the World, how do you dial down the Henry V act?

Very reluctantly.

So what is interesting at this stage of the mass formation cycle is:

the COVID Karens that still think we are all in existential danger

the administrative bureaucrats still issuing emergency edicts long after the emergency is over 

the politicians wondering how they can change the direction of march without causing chaos in the army. 

Otherwise, everything is fine. 

Remember "It's the Economy Stupid?"

Back in the day, they say, they had a big sign up in the Clinton 1992 presidential campaign headquarters: "It's the Economy Stupid!"

The idea, I assume, was that while all the people that politicians talk to are grifters and hangers-on, the voters are just thinking about the price of meat at Safeway this week and whether wages are keeping up with prices.

Oh and you'd better not mess with my Social Security and Medicare.

But I say that Obama in 2009 and Biden in 2021 ignored that golden rule. Obama's stimulus package in 2009 was all about throwing money at teachers and setting up Obamacare rather than restarting the economy after the generational Crash of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

The same is true of Biden's early stimulus package and subsequent "infrastructure" and Build Back Better packages. They had nothing to do with getting the economy on track after the disruption of the COVID scare. They were all about servicing elite Democratic constituencies and their demand for loot.

I suppose it is natural for the monarch in any regime to live in the bubble of his court, and not really pay enough attention to the real world outside. In the last few days, for instance, I have been writing about the willful failure of our ruling class to grasp the importance of the work of Charles Murray, that Great Society programs don't work and that the economy is favoring high IQ workers and really hurting ordinary average folks without standout talent.

My point is that, before the rulers hand out the goodies to their supporters, as all regimes have done since the dawn of time, they need to make sure that the Commoners and the peasants are doing OK.

And I would say that the Bidenoids are clearly acting as though the overall health of the economy, as experienced by ordinary Commoners, is not something that lordly courtiers need to concern themselves about.

I was reading Ben Stein at The American Spectator and he was talking about his dad.

Some of you will recall that my father, Herbert Stein, a noted economist from about around 1945 to 1999, was instrumental in helping the U.S. shift from a wartime economy to a wildly prosperous peacetime economy.

He served as a LTJG in the Navy, and then on a series of commissions and committees that planned how to get from huge wartime deficits under FDR — and rightly so, of course — to a sustained balanced budget peacetime economy[.]

Imagine that! The powers that be were thinking about how to transition from war to peace! And the result of their work was this:

I'd say that the reduction of federal debt from 1945 to 1980 was pretty decent. I'd say that the ruling class had its eye on the ball. But obviously, not since then.

I'd say, looking at the chart, that we are in for some unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in the next few years. The job of a ruling class is to make sure that any unpleasantness is confined to court circles and that it should not impacts ordinary Commoners and peasants.

Of course, that is to say nothing about the green agenda -- that I regard as a combination of ruling-class fashion parade and ruling-class moral preening. Greenology was referenced recently over at WattsUpWithThat in respect of how our greenie friends are in the early stages of turning the economy upside down in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable resources. They call it "deep decarbonization." As an engineer that worked for a while in electric generation planning, I am here to say that these chaps have no idea.

More than that, I say that our greenie friends are sending the economy off a cliff and you have no idea what we are going to experience when we hit the rocks at the bottom.

Except that fortunately the Germans are going to hit bottom first. And give us time to deploy our parachutes.

For those of us that have parachutes.

I don't know what the bottom line is for ignoring the "It's the Economy, Stupid!" My guess would start at losing Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. But what do I know?

Yes, But the Republicans Have Nothing

Now that our Democratic friends are staring utter failure in the face, the latest "messaging" is that Republicans don't believe in anything, e.g., WaPo's Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans are embarrassed to tell us what they are for."

Well yes. And part of that is that chapettes like Jennifer Rubin and the whole of the rest of the educated class sneers at the modest goal of ordinary American Commoners to live an ordinary life of going to work, obeying the laws, following the rules, having children and living in a nice house in the suburbs.

People on the right get in on the sneering act too. David Cole at Taki's is always up for a sneer at the utter ineffectiveness of Repubicans.

And frankly, I get it. What in the world is the point of arguing whether John Locke was a Christian or not when our lefty friends are telling us to worship their LGBT gods or else?

And what does the Republican Party have to offer to counter the wall-to-wall spending something-for-everyone spending spree and saving the world from climate change?

Because everyone deserves free stuff and everyone wants to save the world from burning up.

Well. I'd say that the free-stuff and save-the-world is on the way to self-destruction.

Free stuff? I discussed that yesterday in respect of Charles Murray's work. His books show pretty conclusively that the big-government model of the Great Society programs Makes Things Worse for the very people they are intended to help. And the current education and credentials system modified by racist DEI is making life really cool for the educated class, but Making Things Worse of average people and much worse for lower class people.

And I think that ordinary people are going to be reacting big time against the green agenda that means the end of personal transportation and cheap energy.

But then what?

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

I used to wonder about what the next regime would be like.

Wait, using the "downstream" notion of Andrew Breitbart, I'd have to say that I know what the next politics will look like, what the next culture will look like, what the next religion will look like, what the next meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will look like.

And I am here to say that I didn't invent any of it. It's all out there; all you have to do is look for it.

First of all, you must understand that there are three kinds of people. I didn't invent that; tons of thinkers have come up with the idea of Three Layers of humanity. Curtis Yarvin's idea is that the top layer is Educated Gentry; the middle layer is ordinary middle-class Commoners; and the bottom layer is Clients -- or serfs or underlings.

The Clients need a boss to tell them what to do; the Commoners need a set of rules to tell them what to do; the Gentry need the chance to invent new rules, be creative.

The next regime needs to help the Clients learn how to live by a set of rules rather than today's order from the boss. It needs to help the Commoners get a bit creative; and it needs to teach the Gentry that ordinary people are not their playthings: their creative projects should be about improving themselves, not improving others.

Second, we need to internalize what has happened in philosophy, and knowledge generally in the last 200 years. I call it the German Turn and it left the lefty dream of Heaven on Earth and the Road to Justice in the dust 50 years ago.

Roughly speaking, the human world of the future will not be a system, a political cultural machine. It will be an emergent lifeworld, a community in the world with other humans with whom we communicate and negotiate and develop moral agreement in an ongoing person-to-person process, per Jürgen Habermas.

Notice how, at present, the way the world works is that the Educated Gentry imposes its moral system on the rest of us rather than engaging and negotiating morals and values with others as respected people that just think differently than they do.

What sort of person would the people in the new Educated Gentry of the human lifeworld be? I've sketched it out in my series "A Good Life Better Than the Left."

I have to say that none of these ideas are mine. They are all ideas and concepts that are out there in the world that I have encountered in my reading. And I don't suggest that anything is the last word. Indeed, the whole point of the notion is that it is emerging, developing, through the interactions of people, and not a fixed eternal system imposed from above or from outside.

Then, of course, it doesn't matter if Republicans Have Nothing. Things will just develop, on their own.

Charles Murray and the Ruling Class

There's a podcast up on Powerline with Steven Hayward interviewing Charles Murray and Steve Sailer on race and Year of George and the Great Awokening.

Charles Murray, of course,  is the author of several books on big government and race and IQ, and Steve Sailer blogs on the Unz Review and always has naughty statistics on race. 

This gives me a chance to pass Murray's major books in review. Here are some excerpts from a review of Murray's work that I wrote in 2014.

First, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980, published in 1984, says that

the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.

Then came The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1996.

[I] thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read [the] warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then. 

Then Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010 in 2012 that I thought the best of his books.

Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that [Murray says] that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Coming Apart starting here.

Since then, Murray has written Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America in 2021. As the blurb says:

American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. 

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Facing Reality starting here.

But this week we had Charles Murray on a podcast, and the big takeaway for me was his comment on the reaction to The Bell Curve published in 1996.

The key section starts at about 10:00. Says Murray:

People didn't read The Bell Curve even when it first came out... Were there responses I respected and of course the politic thing for me to say is, to be very serious, yes, there were... Well, it's really hard for me to think of any that impressed me and there were some were written by very famous scholars that I just thought were pure "horse manure." and others in which I thought they were knowingly lying, that these people were too smart and too well informed not to know that they were lying about what was in the book.

OK. So there's a "tell" here. What is going on? Why don't liberals want to honestly discuss the question of IQ and race? The Bell Curve said that jobs increasingly required high cognitive skills, and that people without high cognitive skills would be at a disadvantage. E.g., especially, blacks.

The answer is The Sixties. In the Sixties liberals set the future by passing Civil Rights laws that made discrimination by race and sex illegal. And they passed the Great Society legislation that mandated a bunch of handouts to the poor. And they started Affirmative Action that deliberately discriminated against whites.

Charles Murray in Losing Ground said that the handouts didn't improve the lives of the poor.

Charles Murray in The Bell Curve said that the future belonged to the cognitive elite, and blacks would be particularly disadvantaged.

Charles Murray in Coming Apart said that, looking at whites only, the cognitive elite were doin' fine, the middle were doing so-so, and in the lower classes the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much. In other words The Bell Curve was right. The policy of the cognitive elite discriminates against all people with a less-than-magnificent IQ -- including whites with low IQs.

Oh, and by the way, since Coming Apart was published we now know about the white working class "dying of despair" from drink and drugs. Golly, that couldn't possibly be about the low IQ whites just not being able to make it in the economy that privileges high IQ could it? Nah! Not a chance.

You expect our liberal friends to say, oh well, looks like we screwed up? So let's all get together and try to fix things?

Well, the record of the last 35 years since Losing Ground in 1984 is pretty clear. Our liberal friends aren't going to admit that they screwed up: not on big government programs and not on race. Instead they say the whole thing is due to white racism. And patriarchal sexism, and vile homophobia. And anything else, including the kitchen sink, that they can throw at ordinary Americans.

And if you disagree with them you are going to be downrated on Google Search because "disinformation," fired from your job, and canceled from social media.

I mean, if the black crime rate is nine times the white crime rate it can't be because the politics and programs of our liberal friends in the cognitive elite actually Make Things Worse. No. It must be the "hate" of far-right white supremacist armed insurrectionists.

And that is where America is today. Unless and until we do something about it.

What I Think, and Why Regarding the Political Moment

All of a sudden, I am reading articles about what conservatism should be. "Common good" conservatism? Just regular old  conservatism without the modifiers? National conservatism? Or what?

I think it's important to know who is doing the asking. In my view the Hobbeses, Lockes, Burkes, that were celebrated in Buckleyite conservatism were a class of the high bourgeois trying to imagine a ruling class of people like them rather than the royalty of old. In other words, if you weren't anointed by God, how do you justify your regime?

I would say that it was a basically honest attempt to form a new politics, for it clearly was interested in the class interest of people like them, but it also thought that the lower orders would benefit too.

This view of ruling has been challenged by an openly educated, intellectual class that has justified its rule on the notion that it rules not in the interest of the upper echelons but in the interest of the lower class. That's what communism, socialism, the welfare state, the managerial state are all about.

I think that the view of the educated, intellectual class has basically been a lie. I would say that the liberals / socialists / progressives have basically ruled in their own self interest, based on a cruel hatred for the middling sorts of people and an agenda that seems to care for the lower class but in fact confirms it in its serf-like, dependent status, and actually Makes Things Worse for everyone except the educated ruling class.

The present mania for "systemic racism," in my view, is a confirmation that today's educated ruling class does not rule for the benefit of the lower class or "minorities." There would be no need to make a big fuss about racism if the progressives were really benefiting minorities and the oppressed; everyone would understand how the traditionally oppressed were making great strides under the benevolent rule of the educated and the evolved.

Thus, in my view, the big publicized racist incidents of the last few even-numbered years, from 2014's Trayvon Martin to 2020's George Floyd, are not an indication that eevil white oppressors are oppressing innocent oppressed people, but that there is a whole generation of minority underclass people who have been utterly trashed by the progressive administrative state and the educated class culture on which it stands.

I would say that the simple fact is that government programs supervised by the educated class cannot be the basis of human society. Human society is not an administrative hierarchy; it is an emergent phenomenon with interconnections and relations that we barely understand. Call it the "lifeworld" -- a term invented by the German Husserl and further developed by the German Habermas -- as, according to La Wik,

the "background" environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon.

This idea obviously has a connection with Burke's "little platoons" and the idea of a whole network of social organizations separate from and independent of government.

I say that the only warrant for government power is "existential peril," in other words an emergency that requires the mobilization of society and its resources to fight something that will destroy "us." Obviously, you would expect, the biggest problem in human society is dealing with would-be leaders that are selling an "existential peril" that is not, in fact, an existential peril. But how do we tell?

I think that the way to understand politics at the present moment is that the ordinary middle class, the Commoners, are starting to organize in an organic fashion, and are trying to coalesce around a politics that will represent their interest, to live responsible lives with marriages, families and children, and to live such lives by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law.

You can see that the old conservatism, based on the culture of the upper middle class, does not serve. And the progressive educated class has clearly shown itself, over the last century, as the enemy of the ordinary middle-class Commoner.

Who should lead the ordinary middle-class Commoners? Politically it is simple.

First it was Richard Nixon, with his vice president that championed the "silent majority." And you will remember that the Deep State dispatched him in his second term with a threatened impeachment in the House.

Then it was Ronald Reagan. I remember attending a Republican presidential caucus in 1980 and being amazed by the clearly Commoner Reagan supporters from down the hill that showed up to win the caucus. The educated class tried to get rid of Reagan with "Iran Contra" but failed.

Then it was Donald Trump. He connected with the Commoner middle class and won the 2016 election. They tried to get rid of him with investigations and Deep State shenanigans and two impeachments in the House, and eventually succeeded in the curious case of the election of 2020.

Looked at that way, you can see that the question of the political rise of the Commoner middle class is not a shocking new thing that started with Donald Trump.

I would say that the resistance to the rise of the Commoner middle class has been getting more and more determined. It seems that though the question will soon come to a head.

We may all hope that it does not include violence and a butcher's bill. But you never know. Sometimes ruling classes go quietly. Sometimes they have to be shown the door. Sometimes they have to be ejected.

Time will tell.

Really, Nobody Knows Nothing

So, after all the threats and backing and filling Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) failed to change the filibuster and failed to get the Democrats' federalizing-of-elections bill through the Senate. Today there's a thumbsucker from Politico to explain that it's all Chuck's deep strategy.

His long arc of aligning Democrats for a bill designed to fight gerrymandering, expand early voting and make Election Day a federal holiday ended up persuading literally dozens of them to change the filibuster — despite previous vows in writing that they would do no such thing.

Which means what? Other than Democrats understand that if they don't change the rules they are toast?

Meanwhile down in California Gov. Newsom is pushing a new CalCare state gubmint health plan, and some wild ones in the state legislature are proposing to double state taxes! I wonder what the people that already have health insurance think of that?

The Zman says that it's the end of the line for the left. Their old ideas had basically burned out by the 1980s. The post-Cold War reboot with cultural Marxism and the woke is basically self-destructing in the current crisis.

Meanwhile there is an argument on the right at The New Criterion between "common-good" conservatism, that proposes to use government power more than the traditional conservatism of the Founders and Buckleyite conservatism. Who really founded conservatism? Hobbes, Locke, or Burke, or what? It sounds like it's the end of the line for the old conservatism and the old conservatives don't like it.

Yes. Where do we go next? Assuming it's not the Sixth Mass Extinction. (It really is curious how "it's the End of the World" has gone from wacko religious cultism that everyone who is anyone sneers at to received wisdom in all the best circles.)

Look, I have no idea what the Next Politics is going to be, but the big challenge for the Next Regime is going to be unwinding all the free-stuff programs of the present regime.

Unless the whole current system crashes and burns, so that people are not saying "you'd better not touch my Social Security / Medicare / Gubmint Pension" and instead are pleading for a political Savior to save something out of the wreck.

I wouldn't wish the latter on anyone, but I'm not sure that political change is possible until people get desperate.

See, what I experience right now is that the Democrats see pretty clearly that it's the end of the road for them. Otherwise why would they be trying to pass everything including the kitchen sink and changing the voting rules as well? There's a pretty obvious "tell" in all that: now or never.

Also, you tell me: do humans tend to believe in End of the World religious cults in normal times or when there are unusual social stresses rending the social fabric? Or do political regimes adopt End of the World rhetoric in the autumn of their rule as a last desperate effort to stay in the saddle?

Or, for that matter, why do people believe in Revolution? What is millennial hope, and where does it come from, in religious or in political terms? And, where is it going to?

Now do you understand why Candide said that now he had to go work in the garden. In the garden? Isn't that what Mr. Craven heard, and what brought him back home to Misselthwaite in The Secret Garden? Is there something deeply philosophical and meaningful about gardens, and maybe it's about time that Chuck Schumer did a bit of planting and digging in his garden. Since Spring is coming up, and all? 

You do have a garden, Chuck, right?

No. The Rulers Really Do Believe

There's a Michael Goodwin piece out today about how the Dems are doing their usual blame game to explain why things are going wrong: Big Grocery, the "supply chain." Or even ordinary Dem voters, per Paul Begala:

“I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, OK?” 

Of course, as I point out, that is the way that the primitive mind works. There must be a fault, and most likely it isn't me, but that guy over there behind the tree.

But I had an Aha moment over the last couple of days, with the Biden administration announcing it was going to have to change the "messaging."

They really do believe their agenda. They really do believe that the planet is going to fry unless we cover the world with solar panels. They really do believe that systemic racism is the worst thing since sliced bread.

That's the way to understand the White House decision to change the "messaging." The program isn't the problem; the problem is just that "we" haven't communicated it properly to the American people.

The crazy leaders aren't the problem; the doubting followers are the problem, as Paul Begala tells us.

As in: Napoleon's crazy idea to invade Russia wasn't the problem. It's the soldiers that didn't fight hard enough at the Battle of Borodino. 

Let's concede that Joe Biden is an average pol that doesn't have an idea in his head. But he knows enough to wish that he had been a civil-rights campaigner and to develop the wish into an actual fantasy of being there. He knows enough to know what the other people around him believe and to imagine that he believes it too. He knows how to recite the responses.

So, the rubbish that the three liberal justices were talking when the Supreme Court was deciding on vaccine mandates: really, those liberal justices really believe!

Justice Sotomayor's reported meltdown over facemasks: yes, she really believes the lies and rubbish that has been coming from government experts for the last two years.

And you would believe too if your only media was regime media and your only friends were liberal friends and your only teachers were liberal teachers.

Now, of course, if you are in politics you naturally embrace ideas that call for bold leadership, that call for you to lead the people to the Promised Land. And, of course, you are tempted to believe in traitors or bad "messaging" when things go wrong.

And so the "march through the institutions" and the canceling of opponents. Because we are right, and they are wrong. And people are going to die if the racist-sexist-homophobe opponents get to set the agenda. So, the only solution is that people like us need to lead all the institutions in society. To save it from disaster.

That is what they believe, and that is what their friends believe, and that is what regime media teaches them to believe.

The Zman has a piece up today on how "the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts." And the way the system works is that, when the people get fed up they can exchange the in-party's experts for the out-party's experts.

But, people like me ask, what if the whole idea of government by experts is a crock? What if, according to the latest science, top-down expertism is folly, because the way the world works is through the emergence of new ideas and new people that just happen to have the right answer? I've just started a fairly accessible book, The Self-Creating Universe by J.J. Clarke, that is sifting all the ideas of the last two centuries to say that the creativity of self-emergence is the way the world works. It will be interesting to see how it deals with politics and the welfare state. After all, the book is written by a guy, a former philosophy professor that doubtless experiences himself as an expert.

Yes, of course the rulers cheat; yes of course they beat up on the opposition. And of course we hold them up to ridicule when they cheat and when they screw up.

But, I think, it is vital to remember that, besides all the cheating and oppression, they still believe. As political and religious leaders have always believed, down the ages. And don't think that Napoleon on St. Helena didn't still believe.

Nobody Saw Inflation Coming? Really?

Here's a puzzler, a piece that asks "Why Did Almost Nobody See Inflation Coming?" Really?

According to Jason Furman, "a survey of 36 private-sector forecasters in May revealed a median inflation forecast for 2021 of 2.5 percent."

Maybe their fearless economic models didn't factor in a doubling of the Fed's holdings of federal debt. Or wave after wave of "stimulus" otherwise known as free handouts. I mean, the federal government doesn't usually go pedal-to-the-metal like that too often.

Furman starts his piece with Queen Elizabeth II asking back in 2008 why "Why did nobody see it coming" with respect to the Crash of 2008.

Well, the answer is that a stock market crash reveals a lot of hidden rocks as the tide goes out.

Plus, of course, there is no telling how the central banks will fail to act as lenders of last resort. In the case of 2008, it was little Ben Bernanke who flinched from bailing out Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Because, he whined, he didn't have the legal authority.

And, with respect to 2008, what are you going to do? You had the Fed pumping out money. You had Congress demanding that Fannie and Freddie hand out low-down real-estate loans to minorities. So, at some point your get this, from usgovernmentspending.com.

Yes. That first peak is in 2003, and nothing happened. Then there's another peak in 2006 when the Fed started fighting inflation and the the Treasury yield curve went inverted. Agency debt, by the way, is principally Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt, which is mostly repackaged real-estate mortgages.

The point is that, if you were sitting looking at the numbers of Agency Debt back in 2000, you would be saying to yourself: Hmm. I wonder when this little bubble is going to pop, as Agency debt was going north of 40 percent of GDP.

As Herb Stein said many moons ago, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But the question is: when will it stop? 

The answer is: nobody knows.

And that is why fearless forecasters tend to get caught on the wrong foot. If you are a fearless forecaster you have to hedge your bets. You cannot say: the world will end in 47 days. Because the world might end in 37 days, or not for 20 million years.

Now, in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 we learned about The Big Short by Michael Lewis. But that book was written after the crash. If the chaps shorting mortgage debt had been wrong, or had mistimed their shorting there wouldn't have been a book. They and their investors would have slunk off back to their holes and we would never have known about them.

Same thing about today's inflation. Anybody could have told you that the money printing of 2020 and the succession of stimulus packages would not end well. But when? And why? In a year? In two years? No doubt there are some fearless investors that have made the right call, and we will be hearing all about them in a couple of years. But, as yet, we do not know how it will all turn out.

The only sure thing, I would guess, is that the Biden boys will screw it up. It's the one thing that Barack Obama got right in his life. "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to (expletive) things up."

Race Politics Ends When We Don't Care

Today is Martin Luther King Day and a holiday in the United States. Rev. King is famous for leading non-violent protests against racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s. It is said that he got his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent opposition to the British in India.

Now comes multiracial Ryan Bomberger to celebrate the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.

A hard-fought Dream has become a reality here in America. The codified systemic racism heralded as “heritage” met its demise because good people—both black and white—refused to stand by and do nothing.

But actually, it should be added, the non-violence concept only works against governments that already accept your premise. The ruling class in liberal America believed back in 1960 in ending racial discrimination. The Brits in India, from just after the "Indian Mutiny" in 1857, knew they would have to get out of India. Just not yet, old chap.

In the years after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s concerns about racism declined, according to Bomberger. But not any more.

From the mid 1970s through 2014 (except during the early 90’s Rodney King riots) 2-4% of Americans cited racism as the most important problem facing our country. It wasn’t until Obama’s second term when it jumped to 13% and 18% after the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Following a bumpy decline, it spiked again to 19% in 2020 under Trump as the rhetoric of Critical Race Theory spread like wildfire, sparking the very bitterness and hatred MLK denounced. 

So what is going on? Is racism increasing as a problem, or is it something else?

My belief is that it is "something else."  And that something else is the need of every politician or political party to have an enemy. It was such a glorious experience for liberals to fight the racist Jim Crow enemy in the 1960s, and it felt so good, that our liberal friends just cannot let go.

The over-under politics of the present day requires an enemy. Back in the day it was capitalism, employers, "robber barons," "malefactors of great wealth" who were pressing down upon the brow of labor. Capitalism, employers, bankers, exploiters were the enemy, and the Democratic Party would save the workers from their malevolence.

The Narrative, of course, to this very day is that but for beneficial legislation -- including wage and hour laws, unions, and government education -- the worker would still be exploited and poverty-stricken. I deny it. I say that the worker would be much better off today if the government weren't taking 35 percent of GDP and redistributing through a gubmint loot and plunder operation. But I could be wrong.

The Narrative today is that but for liberals and progressives the "oppressed peoples" would be as poor and helpless as blacks were in the South during the rule of Jim Crow.

Could that be true? The original Jim Crow was a cultural and political regime that deliberately discriminated against blacks. And there were laws to make sure that discrimination was the order of the day.

But today, our laws say that it is illegal to discriminate against blacks. And the whole of the ruling class is united to stop any re-emergence of a Jim Crow culture. And big corporations are along for the ride.

Yet the dreaded "white oppressors" are everywhere?

Actually, I'd say that 2014 mentioned by Bomberger is a tell. See, the first thing that happened after Barack Obama got elected as the First Black President in 2008 was that Republicans won 64 seats in the 2010 midterms. 

How could such a thing happen? President Obama was the liberal dream come true: I remember my university faculty wife friend expressing her emotional delight in that event at lunch in December 2008. A new era had dawned, so how come the Republicans won back 64 seats in the first midterm after Obama's election? There was only one possibility: racism, flat-out white racism.

It was after that that Democrats started with the race crisis in even -- i.e. election -- years. George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in 2012. Michael Brown was shot by a cop in 2014. George Floyd died under restraint while resisting arrest in 2020.

You might call these incidents merely lower-class small-time criminal blacks getting their comeuppance. Or you might call them representative of systemic racism in the United States. I don't know; more research is needed.

But Democrats and their pals in the media have built a huge narrative on the assumption that these events are examples of "systemic racism" arising out of a culture of "white supremacy" and executed by "white oppressors."

Only, of course the white ruling class of the United States is composed of liberals, progressives, lefties who have been spending the last generation or two doing a Gramscian "march through the institutions" and purging anyone that wasn't a card-carrying lefty. Eevil conservatives need not apply.

So what gives? in my narrative our liberal and lefty friends are finding that they are coming to the end of the era in which there is even a tenuous argument about helpless victims discriminated against by powerful right-wing whites. I dare say they were honestly shocked in 2010 when, instead of confirming the glorious new era of Barack Obama's First Black Presidency the American people voted against pedal-to-the-metal liberal agenda including Obamacare. But they couldn't admit that the world had moved on. And that Americans didn't really want huge new gubmint programs.

And like a businessman facing bankruptcy, they started to cheat, with fake racist incidents blown up into narratives of systemic racism.

There's another aspect to this. Liberals, lefties, and Democrats have spent the last 50 years insisting to black voters that, but for them, Americans would turn back the clock and institute Jim Crow 2.0. You can see how easily this narrative -- any narrative -- can work when you note how eagerly our liberal friends all drank the COVID KoolAid and bought the narrative of the moment on how to fight COVID, again and again. In other words, humans are tribal and they believe the narrative that their tribal leaders communicate to them. Doesn't matter how educated or racist they are. People are groupish and they believe the narrative. They believe the narrative up until the moment that it becomes inescapable that they have been roundly lied to. And sometimes even past that moment, because to abandon the narrative, the saving faith that defines their lives, is unthinkable.

My analysis of the liberal/progressive era involves what I call Little Darlings. Liberals operate their over-under politics by adopting and protecting a class of voters that they encourage to believe are hopelessly oppressed by "the system" and that but for liberal power would be ground into dust. And so these groups become virtual mistresses, serfs, of the ruling class.

But then the ruling class tires of their Little Darlings and leaves them in the lurch, as Democrats did for the white working class after 1965, and as, someday, they will leave blacks in the lurch.

I think the over-under politics with its necessary helpless Little Darlings is a monstrous injustice, for it encourages lower class people to stay as lower class, deriving their life and means of support on government loot and plunder and not from developing middle-class skills and culture. And when I get to set the Next Narrative I will create a politics where upper-class educated white liberals are the enemy, and are to blame for everything that went wrong in the last century.

Wouldn't that be fun! Actually, not really. I don't feel that liberals are evil, just fools and knaves.  They do need to be brought down a peg or two -- in their own best interest, you understand. But not made into enemies.

At the End of the Old Regime

OK. I'm not feeling too good right now. What with 10 percent inflation. What with Dems trying to ram trillions in loot and plunder spending down my throat. What with President Biden going to Georgia to wave the bloody shirt on race. What with Dems trying to federalize elections so they can vote by mail and harvest votes at will.

Then there's the stupidity of anti-racism and DEI at our universities. There is even a curious piece about a Cal State psychologist equating Jews and liberalism and how that is not good for non-Jewish whites and should this guy even be allowed to publish. Or there's this CIA-funded extremism expert who, of course, thinks that right-wingers in the US are just a few guns short of an insurrection. Because international NGOs agree.

Look, I get it. The glorious dawn of progressive administrative government that lightened the sky a century ago has become a dull wintry evening drizzle.  Or, if you like, the glorious nubile young thing of 1905 has become the monstrous old hag of 2021.

The problem is best illustrated by the race issue. Racial discrimination was abolished in the United States 55 years ago.

That means, sports fans, that it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. Does that mean the end of racial discrimination and racial stereotyping? Of course not. But it makes it illegal.

Guess what! That opens opportunities for people that want to make a buck on race. You can lower your wages a bit, so that whites won't show up, but blacks will. Or you can raise your rents so that whites won't want to rent. But blacks, who experience landlords telling them the apartment has "just been taken," will probably pay a premium to get a place to live. OMG! Raacist!

Look, I'll tell you what's racist. Flogging the race issue fifty years after race discrimination was outlawed.

And I get where the lefties and liberals and race-baiters and all the ships at sea are at. There is no politics without an enemy. If you want to strut your stuff in the ruling class you need some enemy to fight against. 

Jews? Hell no: literally Hitler. 

Welfare mothers? Hell no, it's not their fault. 

Black aspiring rappers? Racist! 

Corporations? But corporations are all woke these days. 

Racist whites? Ah, there's an enemy we can live with! 

Climate change? Hoo boy: and then anyone who disagrees with the vital importance of windmills and rooftop solar arrays is an evil climate denier, almost as bad as a Holocaust denier.

Pointy-headed intellectuals? Yes, but that's what George Wallace ran for president on in 1972.

Deep state? Now you're talking.

I tell you, the big thing in the next few years is for the nationalist middle-class leaders to find the right enemy to run against.

The enemy needs to be something of a joke, something or somebody that enables us deplorables to have a bit of fun, but not actually cancel or entrap with FEDS or impoverish with million-dollar legal bills. And certainly not put their heads on pikes.

As I say, the Age of Politics is over, because there really are no enemies at the border, against whom we must unite or lose our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

But how do we civilize politics into a sport, with two teams on the field, league tables, a national championship, and all that stuff. Without actually having a war, and without actually plundering the country for loot and plunder to reward the supporters?

I don't know how to do that, and I wish I did.

The Science Catches Up with Me on the Sexes

For a year or two, based on a lifetime of reading and especially since reading German sociologist George Simmel on women and the public square, I have maintained that men and women have profoundly different cultures.

Of course, being a man I like to make it jokey and insulting, and say that men have a Culture of Insult and women have a Culture of Complaint. Now comes Steve Sailer commenting on a piece in The New York Times and an email from Steven Pinker.

Men can cooperate while ribbing each other pretty hard. I finally watched the fine neo-Western movie Hell or High Water (script by Taylor Sheridan, creator of the hit TV show Yellowstone), in which the outlaws and the law both consist of pairs of guys constantly insulting each other while getting a lot done.

Women, in contrast, tend to compete with each other via snide remarks. So women tend to assume more that of course the authorities should silence anybody who is saying anything not nice.

This was in the context of "studies" that show that men support freedom of speech more than women.

So tell me: Am I right or am I right?

But I have a higher, nobler perspective on all this, which is my analysis of Simmel on women in the public square. He writes that the public square was created by men for men, but that the entry of women into the public square would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But actually, after long and harrowing thought, I decided that Simmel was wrong, and it looks like "the science" agrees with me. 

It is not that women will transform the public square, it is that women do not get the public square as constructed by men. The idea of guys sitting around insulting each other just does not compute for women. Wherever and whenever women get together they construct a culture based on the women's Culture of Complaint where women "compete with each other via snide remarks."

Now it is my belief that the women's version of the public square, of competition by snide remarks, is completely different and incompatible with the men's Culture of Insult. I expect that in the future we will see two cultures side by side, separate but equal. In areas where men predominate, there will be a Culture of Insult. In areas where women are more than 30 percent of the participants there will be a Culture of Complaint. 

And ne'er the twain shall meet.

Also, of course, there is the intersection of another Battle of the Sexes, that Women Expect to be Protected: as women public-school teachers who don't want to get into the trenches of COVID at school. While Men Know They Are Expendable: as men figure that, well, someone has to keep the grocery supply chain going, and if not me, then who?

But what happens in the future? I think that we will see a segregation of the public square into male and female sectors. Men will gravitate to areas where open competition is needed, such as in the culture of the Road Warrior, and women will gravitate to areas where competition is hidden, as with Burke, where "All the decent drapery of life is [NOT] to be rudely torn off."

I tend to be naughty about all this. But I really think that the feminists are wrong about "you go girl" and girl superheroes. As in clueless. That is just not how women interact with the world, and, more important, how women get their way in the world.

I think that this is an important thing to understand. Women don't get what they want and need by fighting or insulting. They get it by "manipulation," with their interpersonal skills with which they get what they want and need short of insult and actual violence.

As my daughter says: "my job is to keep my kids alive." This sounds rather trite. It is not, especially when you remember that back in the day human babies had a 50 percent chance of getting to age one. Really, there is no more important job in the world than keeping kids alive until it is time for them to leave the nest.

The point is, I think, that in the modern era the job of keeping kids alive has got a lot easier. And that gives women the opportunity to do other things than just keeping the kids alive.

But what? That is the question. And, given that all living things advance with two steps forward and one step back -- if they are lucky -- women aren't going to find a new role for themselves without lots of mistakes and heartache.

The Reign of Error

I was reading a piece at American Spectator about Soviet spies in the Roosevelt administration.

One of the things the spies did was get the US and Japan into a war. Why? Because the Soviets in 1941 were afraid of Japan attacking them "in the rear" and setting up a two-front war where they would be fighting against the Germans in the west and the Japanese in the east. They called it "Operation Snow."

The goal of Operation Snow was to influence U.S. policy in a way that would maintain Washington and Tokyo on a collision course. [Harry Dexter] White was told to draft policy and negotiating positions for the administration designed to further antagonize the Japanese government...

Yes, yes. I know. Roosevelt and World War II were the most glorious thing since sliced bread. I mean: Hitler! The Holocaust!

But if Pearl Harbor happened because the Soviets were stirring up trouble, with agents of influence encouraging the US to beat up Japan...

I know I shouldn't feel this, not as an ex-Brit. But I have been coming to feel that the US should have stayed the heck out of World War I. And let the Brits and the Krauts and the Frogs fight each other to a standstill.

Then we wouldn't have had the Treaty of Versailles that punished the Germans, and maybe not the hyperinflation in Germany after WWI and maybe not the opening for the Nazis to rally all Germans together, and maybe that would have meant no World War II and maybe...

Maybe in the 1940s we would have backed the non-Nazi Germans and the Japs in holding Stalin's murderous regime in check. Wow. Imagine that! Think of the movies!

There's another thing too, that you can see if you look at this chart of 20th century federal spending.

Notice how federal spending was about 3 percent of GDP before WWI? And about 5 percent in the 1920s. And then up to 10 percent of GDP in he 1930s after the failure of the federal government to deal effectively with the Crash of 1929 led, inexplicably to a doubling of federal spending. And then after the spending orgy of WWII, it was Katie bar the door, and now here we are with federal spending at 20 percent of GDP for the last 70 years.

Except for the temporary blip in spending in the late COVID disaster. I'm sure that won't result in permanent increases in federal spending. Could it?

Yes, but Social Security! OK, suppose that a wise federal government legislated a mandatory savings program that every private employer had to set up a retirement savings program for their employees, in which, we'll say, employer and employee each kicked in 50 percent. Imagine that!

See, with savings from that older people could mostly finance their own end-of-live health care and nursing care. So no Medicare.

Education? Well, how about the mothers in the neighborhood organize the 3 Rs. I'm sure they are all literate and numerate and qualified to do that. And I'm sure that public-spirited people could organize education for the children of aspiring rappers. And anyway, as soon as kids reached puberty they would bust out of schools and start apprenticeships, and eevil corporations would be legally bound to supplement work training with additional education.

But we don't have that system, do we? And I think there is a fairly simple reason why. It is that the whole point of the Progressive movement a hundred years and more ago was that the point of government was to provide scope for the education and intelligence and status of the educated class. Jobs for Gentry, you might say.

But the problem is that our educated class is really not that good at figuring out what the people need. That's why they got us into two world wars and a Cold War and a war against Muslims, and now a war against climate change. And why they built up an administrative full of Jobs for Gentry.

Actually, they are not that good at anything.

I'd say that World War I was a strategic error. I'd say that the New Deal was a strategic error. I'd say that World War II was a consequence of the follies of the previous 20 years and more. I'd say that the administrative state is a strategic error.

In fact I'd say that the rule of the educated class for the last century has been a Reign of Error, that has Made Things Worse, and will continue to Make Things Worse in the years to come.

But what do I know. I'm just a guy who has read too many books.

"Death March Through the Institutions"

Back in the day lefty icon Antonio Gramsci developed the idea of "the march through the institutions." The left would win by seeding and reseeding all politically related institutions with its supporters.

And then Justice!

The problem with this tactic is: suppose you are wrong? Suppose your brilliant plans to create justice on Earth are flawed? Suppose that, instead of creating Justice your ideas create Injustice?

How would you know? What would you do about it, given that everyone in The Institutions is now a card-carrying leftist?

Of course, we know what happens. You kill the institutions, as in Soviet Russia and Maoist China. And then what?

Then, as Scott McKay says at American Spectator, you have a "Death March through the Institutions."

The fact is that human society, like everything else in nature, is a work in progress, and the one thing it needs to do is correct mistakes, because life, the universe, and everything is one mistake, one disaster, after another.

But leftism, and government in general is a one-way bet. What is government designed for? It is designed to mobilize all resources to fight the enemy. And if it is defeated, it's the end of the government. Another regime takes its place.

Government is like debt. If you borrow money, say on a house, you are making the bet that you will keep your job and that house prices will not go down. If you are right, then life continues as usual. If you are wrong, then you lose everything. Governments, like debtors, put all their eggs in one basket. And that is not a good idea unless you are facing an existential peril and you are facing a choice of life or death, fight or be annihilated.

We have seen how the government applied this tactic to the COVID epidemic. Wear masks or we die. Lockdown or we die. Get vaccinated or we die. No wait! Today the CEO of Pfizer says, oh wow, maybe two jabs and a booster ain't enough. What? I thought you experts said that...

Well, so do-or-die isn't quite the right response in a complicated evolving situation like COVID..

Now, the miracle of the market economy is that it is an emergent, self-correcting phenomenon. The various actors make one mistake after another, but the prices tell you when you made a mistake, and you'd better fix it or you are out of business. The point is that even prices are always wrong. Today's stock prices? Tomorrow they are history, and the market will go up or it will go down, because the market is looking at the future through a glass, darkly, and every day is a new day.

Funny thing, isn't it. With religions and political systems and government the last thing you ever do is admit a mistake.

But the way to survive life is to be adaptable. Except when you are under attack from the Mongols or the Nazis.

But that's not what our lefty friends know. They live a life where they know they are under attack from systemic racism. They know that if they march through the institutions and purge the eevil racist-sexist-homophobes from power and then, then they can bend the arc of history towards justice.

OK. And then what, lefties?

It's Not Just a Political Malaise

Yes, everyone knows that politics in the US is broken. And the other guys are to blame.

But I believe in Downstreamism, from the famous Breitbart dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

I believe more than that. I believe that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

I go further than that. I agree with Kant that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," but only appearances. We spend our lives trying to figure out what the "things-in-themselves" are. Today the question is: are they atoms, aub-atomic particles, waves, probabilities, multiverses?

The fact is that all our fabuloso math and science and philosophy and religion don't tell us. So we make it up.

Thus every theory about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" -- the "things-in-themselves" -- is really a hot mess. It gets some things right and a bunch of other things wrong.

And every institutionalization of some theory of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is also a hot mess. As in churches, sects, political parties, ruling classes, corporations, families, marriages.

The eternal problem is this: when something is going wrong, how do you fix it?

When your marriage is going wrong, when your kid is going wrong, when your career is going wrong, when your business is going wrong, what do you do about it?

And when you get to governments, political parties, religions, the problem is even bigger because big-time institutions are designed to resist change. In fact, change to governments, political parties and religions usually involves war and the associated butcher's bill.

I would say that the current political crisis in the US -- and elsewhere in the western world -- is about the fact that the political ideology of the last 200  years has reached its sell-by date. I would say that problem is that there is a profound disconnect with the faith of the educated ruling class, that its knowledge and wisdom and power are the right combination to rule modern human society, and the reality that all government is a war against some enemy and the distribution of spoils among the supporters. And that war and spoils is always a net negative.

I would say that the current social crisis in the United States -- that involves among other things the white working class "dying of despair" and heightened deaths by drug overdose -- is a consequence of the culture of our ruling class. Charles Murray in his Coming Apart shows how, for white America, things are pretty good for the intellectual elite, but not so good for the middle middle. And at the bottom the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Ron Unz has a sprawling article about all this at his web site, starting with the fact that the death rate for US whites age 45-54 has gone up in the last 20 years while the death rate for US Hispanics aged 45-54 has gone down. Maybe the sharply increased death rate from "poisonings" has something to do with this.

The fact is that our educated ruling class has imposed its religion and culture on the rest of America and it is Making Things Worse. I think that the welfare state is a reason for this; the size of government and government regulation as well; the culture of women's liberation -- women entering careers and politics and sexual license just like men -- that assumes that women want to live in the public square is a wrong turn; the attack on middle-class religion is a brutal Reign of Terror.

And I believe that the ruling class's religious quest to transform the energy economy and the fight "systemic racism" are galloping disasters that will rapidly Make Things Worse.

I also believe that the educated ruling class believes in a false religion, that educated people are called by history to bend the arc of history towards justice, and everybody else should do what they are told. Problem is, I believe, that when you use government to bend the arc of history towards justice what you get is injustice. Always and everywhere, don't you think Stalin and Mao?

Yes, but what do we do about it?

Well, it starts with a new understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for our educated gentry, the present ruling class.

The idea is quite simple. The educated gentry must stop thinking of themselves as cultural and political metropolitans called to rule and correct the world for its sins. Instead they must think of themselves as humble sacrificial heroes, that sacrifice their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the border between Order and Chaos. Do you see the difference? It means that the magnificent Names that strut across the political and cultural stage will be thought of as second-rate poseurs. The true heroes will be people that struggle all their lives trying the make the world around them a bit better, knowing that most of the time their efforts may well be mistaken, probably won't make any difference, and nobody will ever know about them.

We can't have mega governments creating a loot and plunder operation out of 30 to 40 percent of the economy. We can't have lifer unionized women teachers teaching our children. We can't have health care cramped into government-directed corporate-driven systems like the present. We can't have government welfare administrators doling out loot to the poor and smashing the family to smithereens.

But it starts with the devaluing of politics down to a dull roar. Because there is no politics without an enemy; and there is no peace unless politics and its war on enemies is downgraded into a low-status activity that no well-born person would dream of descending to. And that no well-born person would truckle to any politician.

Somehow, we have to turn politics into a form of sports. But I don't know how to do it, because I'm not a genius.

The Strategic Error of Canceling Donald Trump

As I understand it, from reports on comments by regime operatives like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the whole point of the January 6 worse-than-Pearl-Harbor effort is to disqualify Donald Trump from running for president in 2024.

To which I say, be my guest. Throw me in the briar patch.

Because I think that disqualifying Donald Trump as per the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 is a stupid idea:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress...  or hold any office... who.., shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. 

See why they are bellowing about "armed insurrection?" 

Wanna know why I think that the Dems are making a big mistake?

Because the big problem for racist-sexist-homophobes like me right now is: what happens when Trump and DeSantis both go for the presidency in 2024?

Gosh. If you were leaning to DeSantis, like me, it sure would help matters if Trump were disqualified and DeSantis could rage up and down the country declaiming against the monstrous injustice of disqualifying a candidate for president just because one of his supporters dressed up in a funny hat.

So if I were Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and all the Democratic ships at sea, I would love to have a Trump - DeSantis fight to the death! Maybe they could divide the Republican Party for the next ten years!

But if DeSantis were running unopposed and bellowing about the monstrous injustice to Donald Trump to the reverberate hills, what's not to like?

See, I think the horse has left the barn on populist-nationalist politics. Donald Trump discovered the vein of political gold: how to appeal to the broad middle class who live a sensible life of work and family. This was the problem of Republican candidates ever since the Democrats abandoned the white working class in the 1960s.

But now the problem is solved! Trump solved it, and all Republican candidates have to do is follow his lead while not triggering educated suburban moms that don't like loud boastful men. And my grandfather would say, "it's all over bar shouting."

Still, I appreciate what our Democratic friends are trying to do. By trying to make January 6 a December 7 or 9/11 moment -- or Gulf of Tonkin moment -- they are trying to call America to arms. That's what politicians to: define the enemy, and rally the nation to fight the foe.

Only, I don't think things are gong to work out for them in the way they think. For one thing, think of the optics. Pearl Harbor: billowing smoke, capsized battleships. Twin Towers: billowing smoke, people throwing themselves out of windows. Capitol Riot: chappie with a crazy hat.

Also, I don't suppose they have really thought this through. In his Pearl Harbor speech, President Roosevelt was calling the whole nation to arms. But the Democrats are calling their partisans to arms.

Do they really want to be rallying their supporters to a civil war?

I just don't think they have thought this through.

January 6 and Regime Narrative

If you are an  unrepentant wrecker and saboteur like me -- but not an armed insurrectionist, oh no! -- you marvel at the ability of our beloved ruling class to run the Narrative.

If only, you think.

For over two hundred years, our intellectual and educated friends have glorified revolution and rebellion against the eevil ruling class, whether powdered French aristocrats or greedy bourgeois merchants and capitalists and white racists.

And in 2020, of course, we had a glorious ruling-class approval of riot and looting in the aftermath of the publicized death of petty thief and drugged-out George Floyd.

But now, we are to believe, the riot and penetration of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was the worst thing ever. Right up there with Pearl Harbor and 9/11, according to Vice President Harris.

Yep. when you are the ruling class you get to set the Narrative. And all the regime apologists fall into line, repeating the meme of  day. And great fun it is, as the sainted Rush Limbaugh would illustrate with a tape of half-a-dozen media celebrities parroting the Party Line of the day.

Truth is, you can't beat the Ruling Class Narrative. If the Narrative says that climate change and systemic racism are the two worst things ever, then that's the way it is. There is not a lot you can do about it until the Narrative collides with reality, Big Time.

For instance, I don't think that climate change goes the way of the dodo until we have major electric system blackouts from wind and solar failure, and ordinary people rise up in helpless rage at their sky-rocketing energy bills.

And systemic racism? Maybe it takes a combination of East Asian Tiger Moms that want university places for their children and Latinos that just want jobs, homes, and health care. Oh, and blacks that, at some point 50 year too late, realize that They Was Robbed by ruling-class anti-racism.

But in the short term, I suspect the January 6 Narrative is going to be left in the dust by barreling inflation reflected in crazy supermarket prices and sky-rocketing gas bills and electricity bills.

As a wise Democratic operative once said: "It's the Economy, Stupid."

See, I think that if we had a wise ruling class it would operate according to Rule One: The Economy. Rule Two: Cool Your Jets.

Thus it would keep all the activist rubbish down to a dull roar. Yes, there would be teensy subsidies so college professors and liberal ladies could buy electric cars. But the average guy could still fill up his pickup truck for less than an arm and a leg. Yes, liberal activists would peacefully protest and DEI administrators would make a good living from systemic racism. But the average person wouldn't find out to their horror that their kid was being taught "equity" in grade school. In other words, the sensible thing is an America where nice liberal ladies can pat themselves on the back as they shop at Whole Foods and buy fair-trade coffee, while average people shop at Kroger and buy Dunkin' Donuts coffee. For a whole lot less.

But a ruling class can never do this. That's because of the basic truth of politics, that politics needs an enemy. So ruling classes instinctively identify and lead their followers to war against some enemy. It's in the genes.

And wars tend to bleed the country dry, of young men and of prosperity.

If you go to war, you'd better win. If you come up with anything less than glorious victory, dear ruling class, you will probably get replaced. And a lot of victories can look like something less than glorious to the ordinary person. For instance, the whole COVID thing is starting to stink, and if you are an ordinary person and your ordinary job or ordinary business got hammered by the Laptop Class, you may be just a little bit angry.

So go ahead, ruling class, have a big party to mourn the horror of January 6.

But don't forget to keep your powder dry, and don't forget Rule One: The Economy.

The Old Regime Doesn't End Until It's Screwed Up Big Time

We armed insurrectionists complain away about Republican leaders as wimps and toadies, without backbones and cojones. They really don't represent us, we complain; they are as wedded to the system as the Democrats.

But I think we peasants protest too much. I don't think the current regime and its administrative state goes away until it screws up big time. The Zman recognizes this when he says.

[C]an the administrative state survive its own failures. A bad king in a monarchy can be replaced by the next in line. The bad office holder in a republic can voted out of office in favor of someone new. What happens when vast swaths of the administrative state have become gangrenous? How is that addressed. How are the rotten bits removed and who is given the authority to remove them?

That, of course, is the question addressed by Chantrill's Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. The whole point of the administrative state is that "we, the educated" get to rule and you peasants just do what you are told.

Yes, yes. But what happens when the administrative state changes its orders every other month and doesn't seem to know what it is doing? As seems to happen with the COVID crisis?

It is only then, to use a concept from our liberal friends, is when you get the opportunity for Real Change. 

Or, over at American Greatness Benjamin Braddock calls out the right "to stop being rank amateurs when it comes to politics and governance."

Yes but. I don't think the right has a chance to interfere with the current regime until the regime's politics and governance is shown to be a pathetic failure. As in a couple of years of 10 percent inflation. As in a couple of years of twerpy cock-ups on the COVID front.

And this is where, as Bismarck apparently did not say: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

Really, if God wanted a spot of regime change in the United States what would He do? I think He would arrange for a senile lightweight to become president during a time when the US really needed a chap with a bit of grey stuff in his noddle. And He would arrange for a 50-50 Senate and a Majority Leader like Chuck Schumer that doesn't seem to be that good at convincing his Republican opposition to get with the program but prefers instead to threaten everyone. And He would have Nancy Pelosi -- who started out adult life doing jobs for Daddy in the D'Alesandro political machine. and has never had a real job -- as Speaker of the House and using her power to prey on the opposition.

But you don't get Real Change until the old regime runs out of money and really starts to screw over ordinary people. In normal times the ruling class does stupid things -- like green energy, for example -- but it doesn't really hit ordinary people in the pocket book good and hard. So, even though ordinary people don't see the point of giving up their pickup trucks for electric cars and bikes, nothing happens to stop the ruling class in its silliness.

But then it all hits at once. Gas prices go through the ceiling as the regulatory monster shuts off oil exploration and transportation. Green energy checks out for a couple days because no wind and/or no sun and natural gas prices go through the ceiling. And refineries stop producing urea, because natural gas prices. Urea? Yep, urea is a "feedstock" for all kinds of things from fertilizer to plastics. 

I was there in the 1970s, and I remember how ordinary people were really riled up by spiking electricity prices and gas lines.

But things have to go wrong before we can set them right. Like Education. Education has been going downhill for decades, captured by teacher unions and by all kinds of special-interest pandering and general ruling-class conceit about "we know best." Hey, but when teachers say, oh dear, I'm too stressed to go to work because COVID, and parents suddenly find out about critical race theory in the schools, then maybe there is an opportunity to go to some kind of school-choice. And even liberal gay Colorado Gov. Polis reminds us he's all for school choice.

But you can't change things until they break. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But I wish it weren't like that.

Senator: Don't Do It!

Here is the long form of an email I am sending to my Washington State Senators Murray and Cantwell.

Dear Senator:

I am writing to urge you to get your Democratic caucus not to go ahead on the Build Back Better bill or the proposed voting rights legislation -- the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Look, I get that, if these bills come up for a vote, you will vote for it. You know which side your bread is buttered. But in the Senate cloakroom, or wherever it is that Senators get together these days...

I think that passing these items would in fact blow back on Democrats and energize Republican voters in the 2022 and 2024 elections. "Backlash" they called it back in the day.

I urge you not to pass the Build Back Better bill because the nation is right now headed into a hell scape of inflation brought on by the remarkable money creation done by the Federal Reserve System during the COVID emergency. Hey, last time we had big-time inflation and big-time interest rates in the 1970s the gross federal debt was 31 percent of GDP. You could look it up on usgovernmentspending.com. Today, the debt is over 100 percent of GDP. Imagine what would happen to federal debt payments if interest rates on the debt went to 7 percent or more from the present 0.5 percent to 2.01 percent. What would happen to Social Security payments? What would happen to Medicare? What would happen to Democratic elected officials?

The sooner that the political system -- that means you, Senator -- starts to fight the unfolding inflation the better for the American people and for Democrats. The inflation and consequent increase in interest rates are going to make the Crash of 2008 look like a walk in the park. And the longer you guys put it off, the worse it is going to get.

And the worse it is going to get for Democrats, because all this is happening on your watch.

So: you need to have stopped COVID-related stimulus six months ago. Good luck, Senator.

I urge you not to pass the two voting-rights bills, and certainly not by suspending or eliminating the Senate filibuster.

Yes, I know, all good people know that the Senate filibuster is associated with Jim Crow Southern Democrats blocking needed civil-rights legislation.

But then there is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He argued, according to David Frum writing in 1999, that you don't want to pass significant legislation by one vote.

When Ira Magaziner dreamed up his intricate health-care reform, Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned him that bold new policy departures pass the U.S. Senate by a 70-30 margin or they don't pass at all. In the Reagan era, Social Security tinkerers like David Stockman met with disaster for the same reason: They tried to alter the system suddenly and surreptitiously.

Sen. Moynihan wasn't saying that you can't pass stuff by one vote. He was saying that you will live to regret it, that "bold new policy departures" need broad support all across the political landscape, or they produce a blowback. He said that "alter[ing] the system suddenly and surreptitiously" doesn't work.

Sen. Moynihan would advise the Democrats of this time that when you propose to transform the economy with green energy, you'd better get a national consensus on it. When you want to transform the voting system, you'd better get almost universal buy-in. Or you'll regret it.

Then there is the "science." If you have ever read The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock you will know that, after a book full of discussion and analysis, they argue that the only just process for passing legislation is to pass it by unanimous consent.

Why would that be? Because unanimous consent forces the proponents of legislation to pay for the costs to be experienced by the opponents. In other words, every piece of legislation is typically experienced by its opponents as straight-up injustice, and the only way to get around that is to pay the opponents, to compensate them for the taxes or fees they will have to pay without getting any benefit. Reparations, you might call it.

I remember the day that HillaryCare died in 1994. I was driving home from work on the Ship Canal Bridge in Seattle listening to NPR and the host opined, sadly, as how the average American didn't like HillaryCare because she already had health insurance. That, of course, is why President Obama assured us in 2009 that his ObamaCare would reduce our health care costs. Fortunately, that was in the good old days before Donald Trump started lying to us, so no harm no foul.

Look, I'm a racist-sexist-homophobe, one of the worst sort on the planet. But at least I have the decency to plead with you before you do something really stupid.

Forget the Build Back Better bill; forget the voting-rights legislation. Take your lumps in the 2022 and 2024 elections. And I promise you, Senator, that by 2026 or 2030 the American people will decide it is Time for a Change.

Sincerely, 

Christopher Chantrill

Jan 6: They Don't Like It Up Them

On January 1, 2022, The New York Times published a mournful editorial about the January 6 riots from last year: "Every Day is Jan. 6 Now." Interestingly, the article URL contains the text "january-6-attack-committee."

It's worth reading because it rehearses every regime talking point you can imagine, and a few you hadn't thought of.

But really, as a racist-sexist-homophobe of the worst kind, I have to ask: where were you lordly lords at The New York Times for the last 50 years, where our rulers Newspeaked the language of riots and killing to speak of street violence by groups favored by the regime as "demonstrations", "protests", "peaceful protests." While calling an ordinary riot by regime opponents an "armed insurrection."

And it's a "tell" to speak of the January 6 Committee as a "bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives" and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) as "one of the vanishingly few Republicans in Congress who remain committed to empirical reality and representative democracy" tells us hicks a heck of a lot more about the regime's sanity than it tells your loyal liberal readers about the mournful state of the world, NYT.

"Empirical reality"? What? Why that's the most racist-sexist-homophobic white supremacist thing I've read in a while. Don't you know it's "lived experience" now, NYT? Go ask Nikole Hannah-Jones if you are confused.

Like I say. the editorial is a "tell." It tells us that the knightly knights of our regime are scared. They are looking at America and don't feel confident, don't feel in charge, as in the olden time. There are strange and frightful stirrings that just don't make sense to the good Americans that read The New York Times.

Or, as Corporal Jones is wont to say in Dad's Army, "they don't like it up them."

Yep. It's one thing to have The Kidz protesting the Vietnam War in the Sixties, and Negroes burning down Detroit. And it's OK for AntiFa to ruin Portland, Oregon. But oh dear, the very idea of ordinary Americans flooding through the Capitol, that until yesterday we all thought was safely protected with tilt-up vehicle barriers as far as the eye could see...

In a way, the NYT's quivering concern is comical. Whaddya think politics is all about, NYT? Maybe you should do a bit of reading. Politics is always on the edge of violence. The whole point of political rallies and demonstrations and "peaceful protests" is to do a show of force, as in, "this is how many people we can put into the streets today. Next time it may not be so peaceful."

If you do not understand that, NYT, then you need to get another job.

See, NYT, if you guys and gals had half a brain you might wonder why it is that the Republican Party has gone off the rails of nice NYT respectability. It could be that the party has been taken over by a cult of mad racist-sexist-homophobes. Or it could be that Republican elected officials have been responding to an organic movement of Americans that feel the current regime is unjust and illegitimate.

But which is it? If it is the first, then you can lock 'em all up and let them rot in jail. But if the currents in the GOP represent a genuine organic response to an experience of injustice among a large section of society, then maybe a wise ruling class should pay attention.

If you have read a chap like Gaetano Mosca and his book The Ruling Class you will have noted that he doesn't think that the ruled should just be pushed around by the rulers. He is conscious that the ruled need to be managed, and that the rulers need to understand what ordinary people are thinking and feeling. Indeed, he writes that a good ruling class should promote people from below to refresh itself.

I don't see any of the notions from Mosca in NYT rhetoric. I wonder why.

Of course, NYT, if you read my stuff you would understand what is going on. You would nod at my maxim "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." You would understand the import of "Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters." You would flinch a little at the truth of "Government is force plus loot and plunder."

And, having read Carl Schmitt and The Concept of the Political you would be haunted by his notion that the political is the friend-enemy distinction, that Curtis Yarvin reduces to "there is no politics without an enemy."

See, NYT, the more government, the more that the rulers are taxing people to give money to other people. You think that maybe a few people would think that is unjust? How would you know?

And, for you chaps to sit there in your skyscraper and be shocked, shocked that there are people that disagree with you and are organizing politically to Do Something about it betrays a tragic -- or comical -- lack of awareness.

You chaps really should get out more. I'm available for coffee most days.