Progressives: The Bill of Indictment

I think that there are three basic issues on which the ruling class of our time has utterly failed.

The first is the welfare state that supports the working class. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for the working class. I believe that what we should have done was encourage the mutual-aid aspect of labor unions, set up a legal framework to encourage workers to save for retirement and against sickness and unemployment, and keep government and its heavy hand out of the market economy.

The second is the promotion of feminism and the sexual revolution and abortion. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for women. I believe that the idea that the highest and best thing for women is to have careers is an utter misunderstanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for humans in general and women in particular. We humans are social animals, not economic animals. We only work in the market economy to bring home the bacon. Men have careers so they can acquire high-status women for marriage. The sexual revolution goes against the instinct in almost all women, that sex is something you gladly and freely give to the man you love -- forever. And, of course, sex means children. A society needs abortion only when its women are expected to give themselves to men who can summarily dismiss them after they have won their love, or when women are expected to schedule children to suit the demands of their careers.

The third is the utter injustice of the post civil rights era. I believe that the resort to quotas and affirmative action and diversity and "underrepresentation" and equity in race relations is more than a strategic mistake, it is a vile injustice that has divided society and Made Things Worse for blacks and whites, but great for the administrative class. The point about law is that it is a replacement for the culture of revenge. You gotta problem, you appeal to the legal system for redress, not to your kindred or your race or your class. The whole point of law is that unless you treat everyone as an individual you enter an impossible thicket of special pleading  that will fail to resolve anything. That is the point of saying, in law, that government and businesses may not discriminate on the basis of race. It means that institutional decision makers are expected to treat people as humans, not as members of a particular group. That approach is not perfect, because humans are not just human individuals but people with individual characteristics and history and ability and weaknesses. But any other approach in a large society is doomed to failure and conflict.

Because our ruling class has imposed these three great errors on us and Made Things Worse, and doubled down on its mistakes, it must be removed as a ruling class and replaced with another. I suggest that the new ruling class should be drawn from the ordinary middle class, because the ordinary middle class is not that interested in power, and I believe that human society in the future is a society that needs a lot less political power. That's because, I believe, the last two hundred years of the Great Enrichment has demonstrated that the market economy is a much better way to resolve human differences than the old way of defending food-growing land from the Other.

The only question remaining is whether our present ruling class releases its grip on political power voluntarily or not. The only question, therefore, is the size of the mountain of skulls. It could be zero. Or not.