Panic at Activist Organizations

Now, as never before, because Trump etc., progressive activist organizations need to be effective so they can fight injustice. And yet, progressives worry, today's activist organizations are becoming totally ineffective. Said a progressive organization head:

[there are] millions of people depending on these [progressive] organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way.

But, it's as if the right wing had deliberately succeeded in sabotaging them.

Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.

This is in an article by Ryan Grim at The Intercept about how progressive advocacy groups are so embroiled in making the organization itself a just place -- and free from racism, etc. -- that they have abandoned their sacred duty of making the world a better place. He starts with meetings at the Gutmacher Institute, the pro-abortion research organization in the wake of George Floyd.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy... talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward... Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings.. With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.” 

In other words, the cancel, safetyist, self-care culture is not just ruining the effectiveness of our schools and colleges and woke corporations, but the very social justice organizations that are trying to create a better world. It has resulted in "wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years" in organizations like "The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement." Oh no!

But my interest in the article was really the taken-for-granted idea that progressives today are fighting like never before against a tsunami of injustice.

• In the wake of George FLoyd progressives were united in "a reckoning with racial injustsice".
• In mid 2021 the Biden administrations program of "transformational change" stalled as organizations broke down into "internal strife and internal bullshit" instead of fighting for "reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change."
• "Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike... A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist."
• "The ACLU alone collected almost $1 million within 24 hours of Trump’s election and tens of millions more over the next year."

Know what I think? I think that when social justice organizations are as focused on the internal justice of an organization it means that the threat of injustice from those monster racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell is not that urgent.

That's the way humans are programmed. When there's an emergency, and our lives are threatened, we all come together and we subordinate ourselves selflessly to the self-appointed leaders.

But when the emergency recedes a bit, then we start to want to renegotiate our place in the hierarchy and demand that the boss is nicer to us. And whatabout that promotion he promised in return for a job well done!

Which goes to prove that the existential threat of injustice is not quite as bad as we've been told.

Civilizing Social Media: Try these Three Simple Tricks

I expect you think, like me, that social media is ungovernable, an automatic descent into hate and bigotry unless wise content managers beat back the baddies. And now Elon Musk is opening up Twitter! The Horror!

But the Zman says otherwise. Back in the day, he writes, social media kept the nasties under control. Not any more.

Most of the complaining, however, is coming from the sorts of people the internet used to exclude. Online culture used to be a haven from the scolds and busybodies who haunt daily life.

In ordinary life, he says, we are pretty good at marginalizing the nasties.

In daily life, no one likes the woman who is always creating drama. People organize their lives to limit their exposure to that person and anyone who enjoys her drama. Further, the guy who keeps talking about Hitler or how much he hates the left gets ignored. They keep this stuff to themselves so they can be included in the community. Social pressure works.

Wat?

First, he says, you need to remove mechanisms for scolds and busybodies to cause trouble.

Removing all of the mechanism to report other users takes away the appeal to the scolds and busybodies. If they are stripped of their ability to rat out fellow users, most of the fun of the platform goes away for them, as well as the people who enjoy taunting them. 

Second, how you deal with the bad actors? Simple. Down-voting.

Similarly, down-voting is a powerful weapon against troublemakers. No one likes to be told they are the problem. It is why booing at public events remains popular. It works, and the down vote works the same way. The reason YouTube removed down-voting is they hated being booed by their own user base. Social pressure is the best way to compel conformity in a community,

Really? I had no idea. What civilizes users is that they get "reputation scores based on the up votes and down votes."

Thirdly, whatabout moderators?

Another lesson from the golden age of the internet is that the sorts of people who want to be moderators are the people who should never be moderators. It is the scolds and busybodies who lust for these positions. The Trust and Safety committee of Twitter is composed of the worst, most petty despots humanity can produce. The platform would improve greatly if Musk just threw these people off the roof of the building.

 Again. I had no idea! You mean that Twitter is actually designed to be a sh*t show?

The main thing is to

select against the scolds and busybodies who make life miserable for everyone. A reorienting of the moral hierarchy that places these people at the bottom, rather than the top, not only fixes Twitter, but sets a positive example for the rest of the public platforms.

And to think that all these problems had already been solved, and I didn't know. Until Twitter came along and unsolved them, because, I suppose, the left wants to reward scolds and busybodies. As long as they are approved lefty activists, of course,

Really, I am kinda shocked by this. I had no idea that with a few simple tricks we can solve the social media problem and everyone can get back to wiving and thriving.

A Window into Activist World

There's a poster in the window of the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, just up the street from the ferry dock. This poster says:

#TAKE CARE OF

MUSLIM
BLACK
WOMEN
QUEER
LATINX
NATIVE
IMMIGRANT
P.O.C.
TRANS
DISABLED
L.G.B.T.Q.+
LOW INCOME
ACTIVIST
REFUGEE
UNDOCUMENTED
INCARCERATED

FRIENDS, FAMILY & COMMUNITY

Now, let's unpack this, because there seems to be a victim hierarchy here.

Sex/Gender: 5
Immigrants: 3
Race: 3
Religion: 1
Upper-class: 1

Well, you can see who is really important in Activist America: the various flavors of upper-class sex and gender creativity.

And think about the travails and the discrimination suffered by the humble upper-class activist working away for nothing at some Soros-funded NGO!

Let's see who is missing from this list. First of all, The Jews! Then, of course, the Homeless. You know what: I'm a bit surprised about that. Then, naturally there is no mention of bitter clingers, presently dying of despair from various opioid addictions, armed insurrectionists, and all the rest of the unmentionables.

You know, I'm afraid that I find this amusing, for it confirms what I believe, that our friends in the Activist Community have no room for any reality other than their activism.

I suppose that, for every victim on the list, there is a vitally important "intransigent minority" activist group that lives for its saving truth and spends every hour of every day fighting for justice.

Yes. I imagine that there must even be an NGO out there fighting fearlessly for the rights of Activists!

But really, what happened to good old religion?

No Liberals, Politics is Not the Answer!

Want to know the why of "gun violence" in black Chicago? It couldn't be, could it, that 

According to City of Chicago data, in every year from 1999 to 2009, more than 80 percent of all black women who gave birth were single.

I mean, imagine if poor women were pretty careful to keep the father of their baby around so that 1) they would have the financial support of the father and 2) the children would have a father around to teach them whatever it is that fathers provide.

Yes. Back in the day George Gilder wrote Visible Man about a teenage girl that had a baby and the father, a disabled ex-Marine, worked and supported her. Until she was old enough to apply for welfare and a gubmint apartment. Then she dumped him. I first wrote about this in 2011.

Then there is Ron Unz reviewing his California anti-bilingual education initiative of 25 years ago. Proposition 227 it was: "English for the Children." He was prompted to "do something" about bilingual education because he had read in The Los Angeles Times the following.

A group of poor Latino garment workers in Downtown Los Angeles had become so outraged at the refusal of their local Ninth Street elementary school to teach their children English that they had organized a public boycott.

Here are my takeaways on the issue from Ron's article:

• Republicans had opposed bilingual education for decades, but had done nothing about it.
• Experts said that the older you were, the easier it was to learn English.
• "schools were paid more money for every child who failed to learn English and financially penalized for those who did."
• "The official dogma behind bilingual education held that a young immigrant child required five to seven years to learn English,"

When the campaign got started, the anti-campaign (to keep bilingual education)

was a traditional, well-funded operation led by ace Democratic political consultant Richie Ross and a veteran campaign staff, backed by a field operation of thousands of local activists. It counted the public support of President Clinton, the chairmen of both the state Republican and Democratic parties, all four candidates for governor, every educational organization, every public and private union, and nearly every newspaper.

The anti-campaign tried to provoke a white backlash by portraying the measure as a giveaway to immigrants. And it messaged Latinos -- on Spanish speaking media -- to say "that the problems with bilingual programs had recently been fixed and that Proposition 227 would actually prevent children from learning English in school." 

But the measure passed with 61% of the vote, even though the anti-campaign had significantly reduced Latino support. 

Unz describes his experience talking to the Latino caucus at the California state legislature at the time.

At one point, I began suggesting that many Latinos didn’t like bilingual education, and [Diane Martinez] immediately interrupted and cut me off. “I know that!” she said, “Every election I walk door-to-door in my district, and everyone is always complaining to me about the bilingual programs. They all say that the system is no good, the classes don’t work, and their children aren’t learning any English. But they’re all stupid, ignorant immigrant parents, who don’t know anything about education. I’ve talked with the academic experts, and all the experts agree that the bilingual programs are successful.”

Guess what:

At her insulting characterization of her own Latino immigrant constituents, some of the other members of the Latino Caucus seemed to shrink down into their chairs in embarrassment, but none of them dared to challenge her harangue.

As Unz relates

Although the bilingual advocates were relatively few in number, they were fiercely committed to their programs and intensely focused upon that sole, overriding issue, expressing the sort of fanaticism that persuaded far larger organizations to steer clear of any direct conflict.

And so the Latino organizations in California kept out of the campaign and the Republicans stayed away, afraid that they would be tarred as extremist racist-sexist-homophobes. 

That's really the way that all politics works. Most people just want to live their daily lives and not get into arguments with other people.

But then there are the political activists -- and there is no politics without an enemy. The activists cow ordinary people and ordinary leaders who don't want to rock the boat. 

And so, you get a country bullied and bashed around by extremist political activists.

Like the "trans" issue.

Honestly. I don't know how we neutralize this power of the activist. Especially since all good little girls have been raised to believe that there is no nobler -- or more fashionable -- calling than to become an activist.

But politics divides, it make enemies out of friends and it makes people duck their heads to keep out of trouble.

And, of course it creates a political support system of "academic experts" who get government grants to produce the "science." In other words, they are well paid to support the activists.

And so every political issue reduces to "defeat the enemy, plunder the losers, and reward the supporters."

There's gotta be a better way.

ABC of Politics: Activism

Back in the day, I had never really thought much about "activism." I knew about it, disliked it, but had never tried to understand it. It was a political "ism" that belonged to the left-wing world -- as are many isms. It was a foreign country and was no concern of mine. But one day a friend told me that she was quitting her corporate job in order to go back to school and become an activist. She had always wanted to "get into activism."

One can ignore the madness of strangers, but a friend one has to try to understand.

Why would a educated woman in mid-life want to get into activism? It was not because she wanted to rebel, I decided, but because she wanted to conform; she wanted to be the best person she could be, and that, she believed, meant activism. I suspect that her yearning was a consequence of the fact that today's youngsters are taught, from kindergarten through graduate school, to believe that political activism is the highest and noblest form of life.

After years of investigation I have come to believe that today's Activism Culture is very similar to the Medieval Romance culture of the olden time. That is to say that I believe it to be a ruling-class conceit, a form of high-class virtue-signaling.

Why do we teach our children to become political activists? It is a long story.

Politics, according to Nazi Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, is the distinction between friend and enemy. Simply put, according to neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy." Or, I would say, the more politics the more enemies.

Now back in the good old days every human community was surrounded by enemies, and it was the job of the men to put a stop to any dawn raids that might be visited upon the community. So, back in the day, political activists were border warriors defending the community against the enemy. 

Later on, in England, King Alfred was sorely tried by various Danes that liked to come a-viking to loot the Wessex villages of grain and silver and sell the women and children as slaves. Looters and slavers as enemies.

Later on, wars developed into high-toned arguments about dynastic succession: the Wars of the Roses. Rival lords as enemies.

Then there came a change: the age of religious wars: Puritans against Cavaliers. The Thirty Years War of 1618-48. And the Protestant Dutch invaded England in 1688 to create a counter-force against Catholic France. Rival religions as enemies.

But then there was Frederick the Great. He may have been an Enlightenment intellectual, but his conquest of Silesia was reactionary: back to simple loot and plunder. Silesia was much richer than the sandy Brandenburg lands around Berlin that he had inherited from his father. Think of the revenues!

Next we get to the French Revolution. It ended up in a Reign of Terror, but it began with an Assembly of Notables -- princes of the blood, archbishops, dukes, marquises and counts -- proposing fairly sensible revisions of the tax system. Then came the men that made the French Revolution a revolution, the Mirabeaus, the Marats, the Robespierres, ideological activists punishing moderates for their moderation with a bit of regicide on the side. And there was no war at all until the peasant revolt against the revolution in the Vendée. The French Revolution was an ideological war, with the old regime, the moderates, or anyone, as enemy.

There is no politics without an enemy. So, as society has changed and politics has changed, the enemy has changed. In our day, we are no longer surrounded by enemy Vikings and looters, but we are still surrounded by enemies. The US Pentagon just announced that climate change and China are both "security threats." The Biden administration early on advertised its determination to tackle the two existential threats of climate change and systemic racism. There is no politics without an enemy.

China? Climate change? Systemic racism? Of course. Each one is an existential threat, an enemy to our way of life, experts agree. If those enemies didn't exist there wouldn't be a need for a government to protect us from anything. No enemy? No need for a government? Fuggedaboutit.

If the foregoing has not persuaded you about the change in political enemies since the good old days of the dawn raid, there is another "tell" that might convince you to believe that the enemies problem has changed in recent times. The "tell" is that our modern ruling class in the developed countries is not a warrior class but an educated class. A warrior class is the ruling class you want when you need to fight military wars to protect the homeland from Vikings, Goths and Vandals. But what is the point of an educated ruling class? What wars would it be needed to fight?

Test Question: What is the difference between a warrior ruling class and an educated ruling class? Explain.

The answer is obvious. Our modern ruling class fights ideological wars, as Robespierre and his ilk did in the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In World War I we were fighting against the horror of old-school Teutonic emperors with stupid mustaches and with knightly stars on their chests; in World War II against the monstrosity of fascism and another mustache; in the Cold War against the horror of Communism and Stalin's mustache. And in the War on Terror? Mullahs with beards.

Of course, we moderns like to sneer at the dynastic wars of the old kings and princes and the religious wars of the 17th century. But is there anything more contemptible than the ideological world wars of the 20th century and the ideological civil wars of the 21st century? And don't get me started on our current Wars of the Wokies that began in the USA and is spreading throughout the mind-world of the West.

I repeat: politics always needs an enemy, and it is the particular talent of an educated class to be able to call up an ideological enemy from the vasty deep on demand. Yes, but what enemy?

Perfectly simple. The ideological enemy of today's ruling class is the ordinary middle class, people that we might call yeomen or commoners. This is a necessary consequence of the over/under political formula that has inspired today's ruling class ever since Rousseau invented it in his Discourse on Inequality and Marx supercharged it in The Communist Manifesto. Our rulers experience themselves as the noble protectors of the lower class against the dawn raid of the bourgeoisie. In the Ally narrative, the rulers are the allies of the "oppressed peoples" and fight the "white oppressors."

There is a difference between olden times and today. The old nobility was a nobility of blood; the new nobility is a nobility of education, of selective college, and credential. In the high Middle Ages the king and his nobles were warriors. In high modernity the leaders of the intellectual class were revolutionaries. But you can see that nothing has changed: the key to any ruling class is its self-perceived specialness.

Every ruling class needs a self-congratulating narrative, especially when it is in decline.

In the Autumn of the Middle Ages the ruling class fell deeply in love with the medieval romance -- stirring tales of knightly virtue, damsels in distress and Holy Grails -- to enjoy before the blazing fire of an evening in the castle keep. Of course, these late feudal nobles were not saintly knights shepherding pilgrims to the Holy Land; they were just powerful men looking after No. 1. But it was their conceit to think of themselves as soldiers of Christ searching for the lost Holy Grail from the Last Supper. They needed something that would make them feel special.

Why should things be any different in the Autumn of the Administrative State? Today's stirring tales of activism are merely the modern version of the medieval romance, putting lipstick on the pig of ideological warfare, elevating the sordid loot and plunder of the modern state into a sacred reparation to peoples oppressed since the dawn of time. Activists are the noble knights -- or at least aspiring squires -- of the ruling class, ideologically setting forth from their NGO castles every morning sans peur et sans reproche to rescue victims in distress from the bigotry and violent extremism of the middle class.

More than that, the activism concept answers a real social need for our well-born youth. In any society it is a real challenge for the child of a wealthy or high-status parent to find a métier that accords with her noble status. In our age the problem is bigger than in the Middle Ages, because children don't automatically inherit the status of their parents. For instance, Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door asked: how does a millionaire mom raise her children? Not to go into business, because of the risk of failure. Instead she raises her children to the high-status and well-paid professions of medicine and law. That was then; this is now, and the most prestigious of today's professions is surely activism. Our universities teach activism as they once taught theology to well-born youngsters fated to become priests in the state established church, and our billionaires fund activism. Activism is a way of acquiring high moral status in a society ruled by an educated elite.

One question that still troubles me: what on Earth did Richard Wagner think he was doing in the middle of the 19th century with all his medieval-romance operas about swan knights and Grails and Teutonic myths?

Ruling classes like to flatter themselves, because the reality of political power is not very pleasant -- since politics is about the enemy. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages were the original robber barons, not noble knights. Today's activists are the bribed apologists of today's ruling class, not dedicated monks of truth and justice. We can tell that as we look back on the riots of the US 2020 election season. Our rulers seemed to be quite untroubled by the riots staged by the activists of Black Lives Matter and AntiFa. But they were deeply offended by teenager Kyle Rittenhouse battling the Kenosha rioters in August 2020 and the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021. The lesson is obvious. Left-wing activists are tolerated by the regime; their riots are judged to be "mostly peaceful protests." Right-wing activists are not even rioters; they are "armed insurrectionists."

For us, the medieval romances and Wagner's operas are delightful entertainment. And there is nothing more delightful than watching Shakespeare's Harry Percy and Prince Hal duke it out at the battle of Shrewsbury.

But the melodrama of modern activism is not so funny. For it is based on a lie, that modern society does not care about the travails of the oppressed, and that the only way for the voice of the oppressed to be heard is through the intercession of well-born activists. Not at all. Our era is remarkably sensitive to the cry of the oppressed, beginning not later than the Duke of Wellington persuading the British House of Lords to pass the great Reform Bill of 1832 that broadened the franchise to include small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers.

Indeed, the concurrence between the medieval romance and the modern activist romance is telling. It is telling us that the present age, in which all good people are devoted to digging out oppression wherever it can be found, is in its autumn. Just as aristocrats down the ages sported the stars and crosses of various orders of chivalry on their chests, so do our modern aristocrats sport their NGO exploits on their college applications and resumes.

Politics needs an enemy. But a ruling class also needs to believe it is doing good.

The Rich Paid at the Office

On American Greatness and elsewhere, Salena Zito wonders why The Rich (or C-suite as she calls it) are not as community minded as in olden times. Such as when Mark Twain lived in Hannibal, Missouri.

Zito tells the story of John Garth, playmate and school friend of Samuel Clemens, how he went to New York City.

Garth and his wife Helen, also a childhood friend [of Clemens], had briefly moved to New York City, where he prospered in the banking, brokerage, and manufacturing industries[.]

Then they returned to Hannibal, built a fancy house, and devoted themselves to good works.

They provided jobs, donated to worthy causes such as the Home for the Friendless, and attended church shoulder to shoulder with the people in the community. And when Garth died, his wife donated $25,000 for a stand-alone library to be built in the center of town.

But today's rich don't do that. Imagine Jeff Bezos doing that. According to Steve McMahon, "Washington-based public affairs professional and co-founder of Purple Strategies",

those who run the corporations that employ millions and dominate the culture have shed their connection with both their employees and their customers. 

And who among us, who live in America's super ZIPs, knows or cares about the ordinary middle class?

Back in the day, Zito wants us to think, the rich and successful did not look down upon the ordinary.

That cannot be said about today’s cultural curators in our C-suites of legacy media, corporations, education, bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, who have decided that those who live outside of their super ZIP codes deserve nothing less than a daily onslaught of vigorous attacks on their values and way of life. 

So what has changed?

I'd say it is the over / under culture of our present ruling class.

Our present ruling class experiences itself not as the top of a natural cultural and political hierarchy, but as noble activists fighting for the rights of the oppressed against the oppressors.

Yes, you may ask, what "oppressed" and which "oppressors?" Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked me that.

The difference is clear in the whole Black Lives Matter frenzy of 2020.

Back in the day, the kid that made it big in the big city came back to the town of his birth, built a fancy house, and did what was expected of him. He built libraries, helped the poor, and was ready to lend a hand.

Today, the well-educated resident of a gentrified neighborhood puts up a BLM sign and the billionaires put up millions to support left-wing activism.

And in Washington DC our ruling class erects museums celebrating their support of helpless victims, as I write today in The American Thinker in "Let's Build a National White Trash Museum. Not." 

What is the point of the National Museum of African American Culture and History? It's obvious. It is to celebrate how advanced and anti-racist our current ruling class is, and how its support for the oppressed former slaves is just about the most wonderful thing in history. The same with the Holocaust Museum. There was no Jewish Holocaust in the United States. But the US ruling class wants you to know that it attacked Nazi Germany and ground it into dust for the mass murder of Jews. And the same with the National Museum of the American Indian. The museum does nothing for the conquered and decimated tribes of North America. But it certainly puts our modern ruling class in a good light.

Do you see the point? The modern elite is all about virtue-signaling its magnificence, and nothing about actually helping people in their communities.

Put it this way. Back in the day, the ruling class built magnificent palaces to demonstrate its magnificence. Today's ruling class builds virtue-signaling museums to demonstrate its magnificence.

And having paid for the museums, and made contributions to left-wing activist causes, and paid its taxes, and contributed to politicians, our modern overclass figures it has made its contribution to society. That it already paid at the office, thank you.

Hey, who can blame them?

But I dream of a better America. 

But we won't get it while the Department of Good Works is a government department spending north of 35 percent of GDP per year.

Doughnunt Economics: For Well-born Activists

In the rarified heights that I live I had never heard of Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Brit academic Kate Raworth until last week when I encountered the book in a used book store. It's a manual for well-born women activists like this one.

Yuan Wang arrived at Oxford University to study economics. Born in China and raised in Yorkshire... [she] was determined to make a difference in the world.

She thought that economics was the way to do it, but soon got "frustrated."

She found the theory -- and the maths used to prove it -- absurdly narrow in its assumptions.

She found that there was a huge disconnect between the economic theory she was being taught and the real world "visible in the gulf between the preoccupations of mainstream economic theory and growing real-world crises such as global inequality and climate change."

Ms. Wang is a stand-in for author Kate Raworth who "is an economist focused on exploring the economic thinking needed to address the twenty-first century's social and ecological challenges." There isn't an "Early Life" section in La Wik's piece on her, but she describes herself as a former "London schoolgirl." Another website says she was raised in Surrey, a wealthy suburb of London, the daughter of a businessman and a florist.

My take is that well-born young women in the world today all want to get into "activism" working for some NGO. So I experience Doughnut Economics as a manifesto for their world-saving faith.

But what is this "doughnut" Raworth is talking about? It is a world model, rather like the Solar System model we are all brought up to believe in (Image By DoughnutEconomics - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75695171).

The idea is that the outer ring of the doughnut is an "ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond" and the inner ring of the doughnut is a "social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below."

You can see that this is almost a perfect view of the universe from the perspective of an educated elitist that wants to make a difference in the world. If there is a global ecological problem then global-minded ecological activists should be tasked with policing the ecological ceiling and solving the problem. If there is a social problem, social activists should be tasked with policing the social foundation and solving the problem. All with manipulations of the economic system through taxation, subsidies and government force. It's another top-down secular-religious fantasy in the tradition of rich-kid Marx and rich-kid Engels and their determination to make a difference.

Yes, what is the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" from the perspective of a Yuan Wang or a Kate Raworth? Look no further than the Doughnut.

To make it "real simple" know that if we are predicted to penetrate the "Ecological Ceiling" then the ruling class activists must intervene. If we are reported to have fallen through the "Social Foundation" then ruling class activists must intervene. All roads lead to Rome.

The interesting thing is that Yuan Wang and her generation of well-born activists seem to think they are rebelling against the ruling class. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Wang and "her fellow rebels" all over the world got together to demand that economics "catch up with the current generation." Economics needed to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, "from financial stability, to food security and climate change."

I'll believe that when I see it.

But what is it that Raworth and her well-born activists want to do?

1. Change the goal from GDP to "meeting the human needs of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.
2. See the big picture and move from the hydraulic "Circular Flow" model of Paul Samuelson and the "neoliberal" faith in "the efficiency of the market, the incompetence of the state, the domesticity of the household and the tragedy of the commons" to "the power of the market, the partnership of the state, the core role of the household and the creativity of the commons.
3. Nurture human nature and move from a vision of "rational economic man" to a vision that is "social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world."
4. Get savvy with systems, moving from supply and demand curves to systems thinking and feedback curves. Go from "control levers" to an "ever-evolving complex system."
5. Design to distribute, going beyond redistributing income to "exploring ways of redistributing wealth."
6. Create to regenerate. Don't think of a "clean" environment as a luxury good, but build build clean into the entire economy.
7. Be agnostic about growth. Nobody has created the dangerous diagram of the long-term path of GDP growth. It may be hard to give up growth as an economic goal.

Actually, many of these ideas make sense. The devil, of course, is in the details. Will the noble activists insist that they and only they are allowed to direct traffic. And in regard to the "dangerous diagram" of GDP growth, how about this, from my usgovernmentspending.com?

Isn't it interesting. It shows that growth is slowing in the US and Europe and Japan, while China and India are in the exponential phase of growth, with China showing a slight indication of slowing down after its meteoric growth since 1978. But Kate Raworth says that we are merely focused on growth. I wonder why.

We'll see, in the next exciting installment of this series on Doughnut Economics. Of course, there is bound to be a disconnect between me and Raworth. Her story of economics goes through Quesnay, Marshall, Samuelson, and introduces Kuhn's paradigms, Goffman's "framing," Korbyski's a-model-is-only-a-model, Lakoff's demand for "an alternative frame," e.g., "tax justice" to counter "tax relief."

My story of economics goes through Adam Smith to Marx. Then to Menger, Jevons and Walras in the marginal revolution and Bagehot on central banking. Then to von Mises and Hayek and supply-sider Arthur Laffer. And to me your Keyneses and Samuelsons and MMT advocates are fools and knaves, tools of the globalist ruling class. Like I assume Kate Raworth to be.

And what I want to know is how come little Yuan Wang didn't know about Walter Bagehot and his understanding of central banking and thus did not know that the 2008 crash was all about the ruling class ignoring the advice of Bagehot after the Crash of 1873? Hey Kate Raworth: Didn't you teach her the central banking facts of life?

The Three Functions of a Ruling Class, Then and Now

I was checking out the meaning of noblesse de la robe yesterday, and of course it led me to the three Estates of old-regime France. Let us rehearse it.

The First Estate was the clergy. Their job was managing the moral framework of France.

The Second Estate was the nobility. But they had two jobs! Nice work if you can get it. There was la noblesse de la robe. Their job was running the higher administrative echelons of the justice system, where, I suppose, they got to wear cool robes lined with ermine or something. La Wik:

[They] were French aristocrats whose rank came from holding certain judicial or administrative posts... The most influential of them were the 1,100 members of the 13 parlements, or courts of appeal.

The tippety-top of la noblesse de la robe was the Parlement de Paris, the closest thing to a Supreme Court. And, in the years before the Revolution of 1789 the Parlement de Paris sometimes handed down decisions that challenged the power of the KIng, Louis XVI.

Then there was la noblesse de l'epée. Yessiree, the nobles of the sword. La Wik:

[They] were the noblemen of the oldest class of nobility in France dating from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, and arguably still in existence by descent. It was originally the knightly class[.]

And it got me to thinking. I dare say that, if you are a person with pretensions to be part of a ruling class, you probably need to be in one of the three noble categories: priest, high administrator, or warrior.

Because some things never change, and our brains are still programmed in much the same way as in 1788.

Now obviously, our cancel-ologists and our Karens and Beckies are the modern priests, searching and destroying sin and corruption wherever they find it in unredeemed racist-sexist-homophobic sinners. And some of them are like itinerant friars, our activists, that don't just sit there issuing sermons on Sundays, but go out into the community to purge it of evil elements.

And just as obviously we have our own special noblesse de la robe. That's all the educated snobs in administrative government and its regulatory agencies, that love to issue ukases to the rabble about recycling and vaccine passports.

Whatabout the vitally important noblesse de l'épee, working out at the local fencing club? Well, it's pretty obvious. These folks are the heroic peaceful protesters celebrated in verse and song, the BLMs and AntiFas heroically battling it out with far-right extremists that dare to pollute the sacred streets of our progressive cities with their conspiratorial disinformation. And as you get older, you learn the fencing skills of elective politics.

One of the things that exercise my mind is that the old male pursuits of war and aggressive hierarchy are less vitally important these days than in the good old days when you never know when the Vikings or the Huns or the Mongols might show up.

But men still want to smite the attacker of their sacred ancestral lands. And they still want to be cock of the walk in whatever society they strive, whether in politics, business, religion, activism. If nothing else there is the necessity of achieving high status because hypergamy as practiced by our female friends.

But can't we do better?

Isn't there a better way of moral preening than cancel culture and Greta Thunberg style "How. Dare. You?" Isn't there a way of setting a moral example without the abomination of what we call "virtue-signaling?"

Isn't there a better way of serving the administrative needs of society other than nice cozy sinecures in administrative bureaucracies funded by the state, you professors?

Isn't there a better way of protecting society from violence than posturing in the street as the street thugs of the regime, as close as you can get to the fascist Sturmabteilung of the National Socialist German Workers Party without actually putting a swastika on your arm?

There's gotta be a better way than the corrupt and vile culture of our present ruling class.

Yes, Whatabout Gay-Lesbian vs. Full-on LGBT?

Here's an interesting take. Gay writer Bruce Bawer in "The Great Consonant Shift" wants to know how come, all of a sudden around 2000, the gay-lesbian rights movement transformed into LGBT? See, according to Bawer, gay-lesbians and transgenders are about as different as different can be.

Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is about which sex one is attracted to. To be transgender is to claim that you’re a member of the opposite sex[.]

You see, to Bower it is perfectly natural and physical to have gay marriage, but to have trans rights and the right to transition is completely different.

Probably not. The whole game of modern politics is "rights." That how the educated ruling class justifies its power. It conducts its "over-under" politics by championing the "rights" of some marginalized group against the insufferable heedlessness or active opposition of the booboisie.

I say that some marginalized groups championed by the ruling class are genuinely marginalized; others are "fake," members of the ruling class playing oppression theater and acting the part of a marginalized group. I say that workers of the industrial revolution and the blacks of the Jim Crow era were genuine victims. Feminist women, gays, lesbians, transgenders, post-civil-rights blacks, etc., are fake victims.

Your mileage may vary.

Actually, my question is really: "why gay marriage?" That's because I believe that the purpose of marriage is the protection of women. Men are naturally sexual predators and need to be curbed, and marriage is one of the ways that human society puts the curb on men. But gays and lesbians? What's the point beyond, of course, the question of gubmint benefits.

Oh yeah, I get it. Humans are social animals, and the point of gay rights and gay marriage and the pejorative "homophobe" is to raise the social status of gays and lesbians. Because all the world's a stage for social status games.

Back in the day, before the narrative was changed to tell us that gays and lesbians had been discriminated against and marginalized since the dawn of time, you get Eveyln Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited which represents homosexual love as a kind of Oxbridge-upper-class exoticism: a stage that our hero goes through at Oxford with a troubled scion of the decaying aristocracy.

But Bawer inspired me to check up on the history of human marriage practices, starting of course with our pals the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee marriage. Chimpanzees are territorial, and the males defend the food growing territory and form a male hierarchy: the higher up the hierarchy the more sexual opportunities with the females. See Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

Gorilla marriage. Gorillas seem to live in bands officiated by a single silverback, and the females seem to attach to a silverback for safety reasons. Gorillas are not territorial like chimpanzees; they just move through the countryside in search of food but do not establish territory. They do not compete for food-growing territory.

Human hunter-gatherers. Scientists say that there is some polygyny -- multiple wives -- but mostly hunter-gatherers live by arranged marriage using "brideprice" or "brideservice," where brideprice is payment by the groom's family to the bride's family and brideservice is "labor performed by a prospective groom or newly-wed husband for the family of the bride."

Agricultural humans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the agricultural age men had as many wives as they could afford -- until the Catholic Church started asking high-status males the reason why. So high status men had lots of wives. But for low-status men it is clear to me that you were only allowed to get married if you could afford it. That was the whole point of doweries. A guy would only marry a girl if the bride's family coughed up enough of the ready money so he could keep the new family alive. Note that slaves didn't get married except in the Americas where more slaves meant more field labor. And note that domestic servants in all 19th century novels and 20th century TV serials about the good old days were, and remained, unmarried.

Industrial humans. The whole point of the industrial era is that it is the era of the Great Enrichment. The economy was no longer static, founded upon the food from food-growing land. Anyone could get married and hope for the best. Exit arranged marriage and enter romantic marriage, because the chances are that any young man and young woman could make it, because economic growth.

See, my line is that in the post-industrial era we have sexual freedom because we can afford it. Not because we are advanced and evolved and special. We can afford to have gays getting it on with multiple partners because AIDS vaccine. We can afford to have lesbians living together because we don't need a male around the house to do the plowing. We can afford to have childless couples because we don't need child labor on the farm any more.

And we can afford to have the scions of the educated elite running around getting into "activism" and gay rights and transgender rights and "1619 Projects" not just because of Adam Smith's old maxim about "a great deal of ruin in a nation" but because we can afford to have a lot of people running around doing stupid things. At least, we think we can.

Of course, I believe that modern politics is a domestication of the old warrior ethic. Just like chimpanzees, territorial human males had to defend their territory from other groups. The defenders were heroes and were rewarded with high status. But now we have brave road warriors competing for market share; we have brave startup entrepreneurs risking everything on a business idea; we have brave "activists" challenging the bigots and the oppressors and demanding their "rights." And we have a new feudalism as many people choose the low-risk neo-serfdom of work at a corporation.

The interesting question is what happens next. I think that modern "rights" politics and its domesticated "activist" warriors has gone about as far as it can go. I think that "liberation" especially in sexual matters is probably going to reverse itself, because I think that women instinctively hate the sexual free-for-all: they expect to be protected. I think that the big-government welfare state with its domesticated form of loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go.

But I doubt if we will see the end of the "rights" activists in our lifetime. They are having too much fun. So the question really is:  what comes after "trans"?

I suspect that in another twenty years we will be reading articles by transgender activists that are mortally offended by whatever it is that comes next on the gender front.

Politics Equals Us vs. Them Equals Hate

In my eternal quest to understand the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" I come back again and again to politics. Here are all my maxims that mention politics:

Politics is the art of division.

Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external and internal enemies — in the present emergency.

Politics is the royal road to injustice.

Politics is the exercise of collective power against human opposition. (Curtis Yarvin)

There is no politics without an enemy. (Curtis Yarvin)

The only thing that politics knows is hate and loot and plunder.

The more politics, the more injustice.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t go home.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t have to play nice any more.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it is time to crush its enemies.

Nietzsche: “the priests” teach us to hate ourselves. Me: the politicians teach us to hate others.

Politics is the division between “us” and “them;” Religion is the division between “good” and “evil.” Totalitarianism is the division between “us good people” and “them evil people.”

Politics is about trying to get things you shouldn’t want.

The first rule of politics is: never tell people the truth.

Politics and government are all about force; law is all about private property; religion is all about morality.

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).

I think it is time to add a couple new ones

Politics equals "Us" vs. "Them."

Politics equals Hate.

See, the guy that got me going on this is my own special Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss. I had a phone conversation with him a while back, and before he got to his signature line "I have a meeting in five minutes" he allowed as how he was all opposed to "hate." And he spoke the word "hate" with particular affect to show how he hated "hate." Hatey hate hate.

But really, Dan old chap, if you are in the politics business, you are in the "hate" business. Why? Because the whole point of running for election is that there is a crisis! If we don't act now, our city will wither away. Because greedy landlords. Because lack of needle exchanges. Because lack of affordable housing. Because potholes in the street. Because lack of public transportation. Because lack of social workers to help people in crisis. And why do we have all these crises? Because there are evil people out there preventing helpless victims from getting the help they need.

Politics is all about "Us" the good people and "Them" the bad people. See, if things weren't that bad then we wouldn't need politicians to "fight" for us.

The same goes for "activists" that are all about fighting for justice. If you are fighting for justice there must be injustice out there. What kind of person perpetrates injustice? An evil person. So activists hate evil unjust people: probably white supremacist patriarchs, I expect. They usually are. The point is that once you have declared a moral quest, as activists do, then you have divided the world into "Us" and "Them" and you have determined to fight the Evil One.

Notice the cunning of religion on the Evil One front. Religion tends to say that it is not you that is evil, but Satan that has tempted or corrupted you. So, all an evil person needs to do is repent and all is well.

Notice the un-cunning of Allyism. Allyism says that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Do you see how the only thing for the Allies to do is to defeat the "white oppressors" utterly. The "white oppressors" are the enemy, not Satan.

See, I think that politics is problematical, on its face. Because once you make something a political issue then you have reduced it to "Us" and "Them" and the only thing to do is to hate the "Them" and fight to defeat them.

And then, when the fight is over, it is time to reward the loyal soldiers and supporters with loot and plunder taken from the evil defeated "Them."

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I say that the world is not "Us" vs. "Them." I say that the world is peopled by different people, who look on the world in different ways, and expect different things from it. So, immediately the "Us" and "Them" of politics is problematical. The question becomes how to understand and organize the world so that different people can live in it and work and wive and thrive in it -- and just get along.

That is why I say that the Age of Politics is over, because the need for "Us" to fight against "Them" is over.

Tell that to your lefty friend.

Exploiting the Power of Sacrilege

Here's a thought, from the notorious David Cole. He says that there is nothing more powerful than the sense of the sacred and defending the sacred from the profaners.

“Something sacred to you—the thing that is the very core of your identity—is being profaned and disrespected by people who value their ‘free speech’ rights over your right to protect what is hallowed. Your identity commands you to take up arms.”

Case in point, the Mohammed cartoons. You can bomb the heck out of Muslims, and meh. But draw a cartoon and the whole Muslim world explodes.

A white guy in France or the U.K. can say, “I support bombing Syrians,” and he’ll be fine. But if he draws Mohammed, some individual Muslim, acting on conditioning rather than direct orders, will murder him (or try to). 

So then Cole turns to another sacred totem: black skin in America.

Black Americans have the highest levels of self-esteem of any racial or ethnic group in the country, yet arguably (on average) they have the fewest accomplishments to back up that narcissism. What a perfect group for leftist “imams” to target with the message that it’s your skin that’s sacred. Your holy skin makes you valuable, not your accomplishments. Those who speak disrespectfully of that skin are blasphemers; it’s your duty to eradicate them. 

Earlier in the piece, Cole goes into the story of the radicalization of blacks at his high school, Alexander Hamilton High School in Manhattan. All it took was a lefty activist group, African American Parent Coalition for Education Equity (AAPCEE), funded by white educated-class foundations:

AAPCEE operated under the umbrella of a well-heeled organization called “Communities for Educational Equity,” which was funded by the James Irvine Foundation and (since the early 2000s) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

With the help of white money and black radicals the whole black majority at Hamilton High got radicalized.

Course, it didn't do the blacks any good in the long term. Hamilton High is now majority Hispanic and

Blacks barely count anymore, surrounded as they are by Latinos who don’t give two shits about their “sacredness.”  

 But there's a missing link in Daivd Cole's narrative. The global left-liberal elite.

If it weren't for the global left-liberal elite and their liberal activist groups (read lefty racist hate groups) -- because Islamophobia, darling -- nobody would give a hoot about Muslims killing cartoonists. Put 'em in jail and hang 'em high: that's what would happen.

And the same thing with sacred black skin. If it weren't for liberals -- because racism, darling -- the cops would simply arrest the perps, and the schools would tell the AAPCEEs and the BLMs and the Antifas to go pound sand.

So that's why I say that we should never talk about liberal activist groups. That's a lie. We are talking about lefty racist hate groups, straight up. Left liberal racists get their jollies by encouraging small groups to feel their innocence and sacredness and victimhood. Until the the left-liberal global elite of racist haters tires of the victim group du jour.

And we should always refer to all liberal groups, from the ACLU to the SPLC as lefty racist hate groups. Because  that's what they are.

The Ten Woke Ideas from FiveThirtyEight

 The chappies at FiveThirtyEight founded by Nate Silver have produced a piece on the ten issues that make up the Woke Agenda.

I thought I should put up a table of the ideas, with the validity of each idea and a counter argument.

	Idea	Validity	Counter
1.	America "not an exceptional nation." "U.S. has disempowered its Native and Black populations and women throughout its history," and has "never been a true or full democracy."	Baloney. Every nation is an exceptional nation. Every political entity favors the agenda of the ruling class and its supporters.	Yes, but the US has made extraordinary efforts to balance the agenda of all kinds of different people. US ruling class used to favor whites in the past, now it's anyone-but-whites.
2.	White people, particularly white men, are especially advantaged in American society (“white privilege”).	Actually, it was more Virginia plantation owners, followed by New England Protestants, followed by WASPs, followed by today's educated elitists.	Are white men -- ordinary middle-class white men without advanced degrees -- privileged in today's America? I don't think to.
3.	"People of color in America suffer from not only individualized and overt acts of racism" e.g., racial slur,  "but a broader 'systemic' and 'institutional' racism."	True up until 1964 Civil Right Act. But not enough. Otherwise why do you need Jim Crow laws to enforce racism and segregation?	It is one thing to use the government to prosecute acts of discrimination. Another thing to discriminate by affirmative action and diversity.
4.	Capitalism as currently practiced in America is deeply flawed, giving way too much money and power to the wealthy.	True. Humans are flawed, and capitalism is human! But capitalism doesn't "give money." it rewards good ideas until replaced by newer ideas.	Don't you mean Government "gives way too much money" to the wealthy, the middle-class elderly, to the politically active?
5.	Women suffer from systemic sexism.	Women only entered the public square in 1900ish. Prior to that, of course, upper-class women ran the world from their salons.	Women "expect to be protected" and will complain until protected. Only upper-class educated women with #WeBelieve signs need apply.
6.	People should be able to identify as whatever gender they prefer or not to identify by gender at all.	Yeah. Why not? But do we force the rest of the world to pay for gender reassignment surgery?	One little problem. If people don't have kids there won't be any genders in a generation. Just dust and ashes.
7.	The existence of a disparity — for example, Black, Latino or women being underrepresented in a given profession or industry — is evidence of discrimination, even if no overt acts of discrimination are visible.	No it ain't. People are different.	This accusation is just an application for a license to discriminate. In my America an absence of disparity would be prima facie evidence of government discrimination. Let the lawyers loose!
8.	Black Americans deserve reparations to make up for slavery and post-slavery racial discrimination.	Reparations is vengeance. The whole point of the legal system is to reduce vengeance to a dull roar.	And just who is to pay this? The Irish that suffered under the Brits for centuries? The Jews from the Russian pogroms or Nazi Holocaust? And to whom? The children of Barack Obama, scion of a tribal chieftain in East Africa and raised by whites?
9.	Law enforcement agencies, from local police departments to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are designed to defend America’s status quo as much as any public safety mission.	Yes. law enforcement is designed to protect people (especially women) from "domestic enemies," e.g., violent lower-class males in cities. That's why the Brits invented modern policing.	Hey, no skin off my nose. The police are there to keep violence in low-income communities down to a dull roar. And given the absence of fathers in low-income communities, what do you expect wokies?
10.	Trump’s political rise was not an aberration or a surprise. Politicians in both parties, particularly Republicans, have long used racialized language to demean people of color — Trump was just more direct and crude about it.	This is a straight-up lie. Trump is a "nationalist," meaning that he values Americans as Americans. And in 2020 increased percentages of Hispanics and Blacks voted for him. I wonder why.	If I were Trump I would sue for slander. The key and obvious thing about Trump was that he encouraged all people living in America to think of themselves as Americans and not as ethnic, or racial or gender minorities.

This sort of thing is going to increase until it gets batted down. The whole point is that the ruling class, our educated elite, obtains power from the Woke Effect. Because it gives them the right to use political power to help their supporters and to punish their enemies. 

That's the point. If there is no discrimination, no systemic this-or-that, then there is no need for allies to save the oppressed people from the white oppressors. QED. Period. Full Stop. 

That is all.

Another Four Law. But What to Call It?

I've been pondering adding another law to my Four Laws. Did I mention what they are?

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

My fifth law has to do with our current Big Problem, that the lower part of the Ruling Class -- not the actual ruling clique but the whole educated Gentry -- overloads the political system with 1,001 different wizard wheezes for government programs. And the legal system. What we call "lawfare," where 1,001 activist groups are manipulating the legal system with attempts to mandate this or that use of government power to bend the arc of history towards justice.

One example of this problem is, of course, climate change. The whole educated class is down for the cause, and is pushing it in a hundred different programs and a thousand different legal cases. Meanwhile the media and activists and leading government scientists all turn the question into a moral crusade and stigmatize any opponent as a "climate denier."

The point is, once the educated gentry has got the bit in its teeth like this, what can the average person -- or the aggregate of average persons -- do against the flood tide of educated and expert opinion, except brace for the inevitable crash landing.

And, in the broader context, where is the justice in a system where the ruling class can bully the rest of the country into submitting to and paying for its 1,001 wizard wheezes, which are not really about making things better but flattering the activists in question into thinking that they are "making a difference?"

Because it is really hard to come up with a political program that really does make things better, rather than merely feed the conceit of the activist in question. Here's a potential maxim:

All activism comes from a place of privilege.

But that doesn't quite get where I want to go. I am thinking about the right of the average Commoner to live his life in peace without being jostled around by privileged Gentry on some conceited mission to save the world.

What I am really asking for is a political threshold that must be exceeded before an eager activist can lasso the whole of society into his moral crusade.

It goes back to the other Four Laws. Don't muck about with the economy and its prices, because 1000 to 1 you will only make things worse, Mr. Socialist. Don't think you can run the Districts from some bureaucracy in the Capitol, Mr. Credentialed Bureaucrat. Because you don't have the bandwidth to do so. Don't think you can regulate the malefactors of great wealth, Mr. Regulator, because all you'll do is get captured by the regulated. Don't start any new program, Mr. Activist, because you will cast some social/economic activity in stone and prevent its improvement.

I guess this goes back to my notion that "the Age of Politics is over." What I mean by that is that politics, the practice of civil war by other means, really should not go much beyond resolving and compromising conflicts that might lead to civil war. Anything else should be done outside of politics.

On the other hand, by meddling around in politics, our liberal friends are actually creating new instances of conflict where the people adversely affected by their noble activism may be prompted to form a head of rebellion to obtain redress against new injustices. I guess that is what I mean by suggesting that our lefty friends represent a Great Reaction. They are returning us to an age where people feel the only way to get their voices heard is by force.

RIP Rush Limbaugh.

But Tear Gas and But Hate

I had my jolly little phone chat with Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss yesterday, and here are my takeaways.

When it comes to policing, Year Zero for Strauss is the occasion of the mostly peaceful protests in Seattle in 1999 against the WTO. You can see what the ruling-class conventional wisdom is, from La Wik's "1999 Seattle WTO protests" with a picture of Seattle Police doing a spot of pepper spraying.

That's interesting to me, because Dan Strauss, born in April 1986 according to La Wik, would have been 13 at the time of the riots. Was he on the street back then? Or his social-worker parents? Why exactly would a 13-year-old be exercised by the WTO protests? Was he pepper-sprayed? Or one of his parents?

So Dan Strauss is interested in reducing the Seattle Police Department use of violence and tear gas and pepper spray. At least, that is what I understood from his comments.

Later on I introduced the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral narrative -- Allyism -- and proposed that it was problematic to describe the world with a moral narrative before you have described the world with a descriptive narrative. 

I advanced my reductive Three Peoples theory as an example of a descriptive theory, that tries to understand the world before judging it. Mind you, the idea of a descriptive narrative rather than a moral narrative is incredibly modern and progressive. If we are dealing with ancient religion, the whole of creation is subject to the wrath of the gods, and, as Mircea Eliade argues in his Myth of the Eternal Return:

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

See, I'm so sophisticated that I hesitate to blame my neighbor's malevolence for all the sins of the world.

And the narratives that arose later in the Axial Age are all moral narratives, too.

I went on to mention to Dan the virtue-signaling yard-signs so common in the gentry liberal neighborhoods of North Seattle that Dan represents: the Black Lives Matter, the #WeBelieve, the Hate has no Home Here signs.

In response Dan Strauss muttered about Hate. At least that is what I understood him to say.

Unfortunately I did not get in my Hegel zinger, that Hegel says that the thing is the same as its opposite, as in the north pole and the south pole of a magnet: the same, only opposite. On this notion, when you are exercised about racism as an noble anti-racist you are really putting yourself on the racist's level: obsessed with race. And if you are fighting Hate, you are probably a hater, because after all, you hate the Haters. Right?

The joke, to me, is that our liberal friends have become precisely the people they have criticized all these years. They used to rail against McCarthyite witch-hunts -- although back in the day Hollywood actually took fairly good care of the Commies in their midst. Now they get people fired for their political beliefs. They used to rail against censorship: now they applaud it. They used to sneer at enthusiastic Christianity and its obsession with sinners. Now they are obsessed with sinful racist-sexist-homophobe Haters.

Like they say: be careful who you choose as your enemies, because you will become them. 

Well, well, well. It's Nietzsche who said that:

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.

Or Marcus Aurelius arguing the opposite:

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Or Sun Tzu:

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. 

Golly Geewillikins. Who knew?

But it does raise the question of how we deal with our liberal friends. Really, we don't want to wipe them and their hatey-hate Hate from the face of the Earth. We know that if we were to wipe out all liberals they would just be reborn as something just as foolish and knavish. Correction: as something more foolish and knavish.

Hey liberals! Ever thought that if you utterly cancel all the bitter clingers and deplorables they will return as something far worse?

And, of course, it is my conceit that I understand liberals and the left, that they are reactionaries lurching back to the past, that their activism culture is a kind of neo-Quixotic movement, pretending to be revolutionaries way after the end of the Age of Revolution.

And it is my belief that liberals, devoted to the idea of the creative life, of making a difference in the world, have totally misunderstood how the creative life works. It is not a triumphant bending of the arc of history, but a harrowing journey into the unconscious that, if successful, may well end in the death of the Sacrificial Hero rather than the applause of a grateful world. As I rehearse in my Good Life concept.

But hey, if the gentry liberals of North Seattle want a councilman concerned about police brutality and Hate, why, they got exactly what they want in Dan Strauss. Bless their hearts.

Yarvin: Trump Never Had a Chance; Plus He's Incompetent

Now that Trump is returned to Florida, Curtis Yarvin reminds us that Trump's job as president was to be a King. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the skills and attributes to be a king.

Trump has never shown any particular gift for management or delegation, and he has the attention span of a rabid chipmunk. 

Nor did any of his people know how to be a king and actually run the government.

But then, Yarvin continues, what authority does the president have anyway? Practically none, especially if he is going up against the System and its bureaucracy.

With regard to the System he references a 900-person Zoom call of all the lefties where they coordinated the street action -- or lack of street action -- after the election. Wow. I get that the lefties all somehow coordinate like a flock of birds.

With regard to the bureaucracy he notes the case of Trump and a Pennsylvania lawmaker getting together, in a "Plot" with a mid-level Justice Department appointee to maybe get a bit of investigating on the Big Steal. But the other bureaucrats shut it down.

So, in fact, the left's Activist Central decides what goes down, or does not go down in the streets, and the permanent bureaucracy decides what goes down in the actual government. Presidents need not apply.

Who knew?

So, the benefit of Trump is that he did get to do some pro-Commoner stuff for four years, and in the aftermath the lefty Activism Central were part of the System, and the bureaucrats showed their teeth.

If we didn't know how the System worked before, we do now.

Bottom line is, of course, that the current System of the ruling class ain't going down until it runs out of money and thus can't keep all its bureaucrats and its activists on-side.

So of course the Biden administration is executive-ordering the agenda of the lefty Activism Culture. In particular because, since President Biden is in mental decline he really lacks the horsepower to moderate his lefty crazies.

And of course the bureaucracy is not going to apply the law to its own and to the lefty activists that break the law.

Says Yarvin about Trump's real achievement.

[The left] has succeeded brilliantly in pretending to be the underdog. Thanks to Trump, and to its response to Trump, this charade seems no longer viable.

So now the left will have to be upfront about power: that it has the power, that it believes in power, and that you'd better behave because power.

It's a start. 

Biden's Two Front War: Climate Change and Systemic Racism

Everybody knows that fighting a two-front war is a Very Bad Thing. It was Germany's fate in both World War I and World War II. And it didn't go well.

Now, the Biden administration is proposing to fight both climate change and systemic racism. All at once.

Now, according to my theory, governments exist to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. So your average foreign war is all about protecting the people from the furriners. And your average civil war, or political campaign or witch-hunt, is about the domestic enemies and traitors and witches.

Of course most wars and most politics are ginned-up rubbish, because if you don't have a war you don't have a reason for all that taxing and spending and borrowing.

But still: only one war at a time, Senator.

For instance, after 9/11 we had unity in the United States for about a year because all Americans were united to Do Something about crazed Islamic terrorists. But after a while normal politics resumed and our Democratic friends went back to posting ReDefeat Bush bumper-stickers on their Subarus.

Good old FDR had a grand old time uniting Democrats against the dastardly Republicans from 1933 till 1939. Although, in fact, the scapegoat President Hoover was a pretty progressive Republican in favor of government solutions for most everything, just like FDR.

But then, when FDR wanted to get into World War II, suddenly we were all Americans, united to defeat the Japs and the Huns. Democrats, Republicans? We were all Americans.

Now, I am wondering if President Biden should be making a decision about which war he wants to fight. Does he want to save us from the nightmare of climate change and unite all Americans to fight that existential threat? Oh, how glorious that day will be when climate change has been arrested and our human community saved! Or does he want to hunt down and cancel all the racist-sexist-homophobes wherever they may be found? Oh, the wonders of an America purged of all the white oppressors by the noble allies!

Because if President Biden wants to fight both existential perils, then maybe he is Literally Hitler. Too dumb to avoid getting himself into a two-front war.

Of course, I realize the difficulty of the president's position. He is the leader of the party that includes a whole barrel full of different activist interests. Every educated woke person must be into activism, and the key is to find a new activist field for your very own. But when all these activisms all come to power... Well, it is the job of a wise leader to make wise decisions about which activist agenda to concentrate on.

(Yes, I know. If he were really wise he would tell all the activists to take their activisms and put 'em where the sun don't shine.)

Of course, it is a bit of a problem when the president is already well advanced into senile dementia, and is merely the creature of his activist staff. It becomes hard to make sensible, strategic, decisions that are good for the Democratic Party and good for the United States of America.

Actually, of course, I believe that the president is making a mammoth strategic error by not concentrating all his power on the post-COVID economic recovery. Never mind all the activist rubbish about climate change and systemic racism.

Now I am a retired guy and my IRAs are doin' fine thank you very much what with all the money printing and such.

But, just between you and me and don't tell your wokie neighbor who won't get it, I think that tens of millions of Americans have had their lives blitzed into oblivion by the COVID economic shutdowns. And it is going to take years to dig them out the the hole we have pitched them into.

Correction: In my belief many of the tens of millions of Americans will never recover from the hell that they were pitched into. Shades of the Great Depression and the Skid Rows that resulted. And, I believe, this fact will very likely transform American politics.

Yep. I reckon that President Biden is making a strategic error, and his court historians will have their work cut out for them if they expect to give him an honorable place in the history books.

Where is the New Miguel Cervantes When You Need Him

You all know Miguel de Cervantes. He was the cheeky chappie that wrote Don Quixote in 1605, making fun of the whole medieval romance genre.

I agree. That was really meanie-jelly-beanie. You literary snobs are always trying to deep-six the latest genre. I mean, sci-fi, fantasy: who needs it, darling. How about a bit of plotless James Joyce for breakfast?

Anyway, Cervantes was pretty harmless. Despite his fun and games we are still having great fun reading about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Not to mention Frodo and Co. And, apart from Parsifal (as in Sir Percival) Richard Wagner spent his whole career unearthing Nordic and Teutonic myths. Although, according to the late Roger Scruton, Wagner recast the pagan myths in a post-Christian mold designed by German philosopher Feuerbach and then changed his mind and used the mold designed by Schopenhauer. Fun!

But, dear God. We need our modern Cervantes now. To write the uplifting story of Don Qui-wokey, and his heroic battle against the windmills, er, the pipelines, of Keystone XL.

See that's the way I experience the left's Activism Culture. It is like a medieval romance. Back then, the medieval romance enabled dumb scions of the barony to imagine themselves as noble knights saving helpless maidens from dragons and evil castellans, and searching for the Holy Grail. Now we have the mindless romances celebrating the delta-minus rich-kid morons bravely trying to stop capitalism in its tracks with Heroic Acts of Activism against the Polluters! Peaceful Protests against the Fossil Fuel Companies! Marches Against White Supremacy! And OMG, fracking is polluting the water supply! Not.

I fear, alas, that we are some years, maybe decades, before the American people will help us racist-sexist-homophobes send the systemic racist climate Don Qui-wokeys to where the sun don't shine. Because apart from us bitter-clinger deplorables, the rest of America is either embarrassed by populist nationalism, or enjoying their bennies as Little Darlings of the ruling class. Oh, and don't forget the Wokey Allies.

Only thing is that if I were to tell the story I would forget Soy Qui-wokey and make the story into a remake of the Parsifal legend, with Soy Parsifal -- the pure fool -- starting out as the child of an activist lesbian couple. The young lad naturally yearns, as xe plays mostly-peaceful-protest games with xis non-gendered pals, to get to activism school and take xis place in the glorious community of social justice activists bending the arc of history towards justice. Oh the glorious day when xe begins his first internship at the Climate Justice Matters NGO funded by tech billionaire George Porous! Oh, the joy of the day when xe has finishing xis "trained Marxist" training, and knelt before xer Marxist trainer and got xis Soyship in the Global Active-hood of Pajama-Persons and can lead xer first real Mostly Peaceful Protest.

One day, years later, he is driving his electric car in the forest on the way to a protest against an oil pipeline, reciting the chants he will lead, when he accidentally runs over a swan crossing the road. The local yokel Gurnie O'Mans curses him out for a fool. Having stopped his electric car -- whose battery is getting dangerously low -- he observes a number of bedraggled men by the side of the road. Who are these bums, he asks Gurnie? These men, Soy Parsifal, were once frackers, but they lost their jobs ten years ago in the first days of the Biden administration, and because of the shame of being fossil fuel workers, have been canceled and cannot get jobs in the soy economy.

Well, that's a start. We'd have to have a Kundry, Soy Parsifal's liberal activist mother who is now a sour and angry cat lady. Whatabout the Fisher King, Am-trump-as, wounded by the impeachment spear flung by the wicked witch Soya Nancy? A chorus of feminist flower maidens? And whatabout the evil magician Klingsor? What is he up to?

Of course, before the activist Soy Parsifal can heal the wounded Am-trump-as he must learn the error of his ways, and discover how activism is a path of cruelty, a Trail of Bloody Tears, that has killed more people in history than all the Genghis Khans and Hitlers -- put together. He must renounce activism forever, and bring his angry cat lady mom Kundry back into the light. That would be a story!

Then, and then only can Soy Parsifal eat his first meal of meat, and renounce his Soyish ways, and come to the castle of King Am-trump-as, and heal the king's wound, and light the light in the eyes of the MAGA faithful once more, and Make America Great Again. Once more.

"Ain't I a stinker!" ©1950 Bugs Bunny.

Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It

So you, Mr President and your Democratic friends have got rid of the awful Trump. So what comes next?

I'd say that the most important thing for your administration to do is to avoid the mistakes of the early Obama administration. There were two big ones.

First, there was the decision to make the "stimulus" all about loot and plunder for Democratic Party constituencies like public-school teachers instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Second, there was the push for Obamacare, all about making health care a totally centralized administrative system, instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Incidentally the financial crisis was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble caused by gubmint subsidy of home mortgages that encouraged Americans to buy houses on low down payments and 30-year fixed mortgages. This housing subsidy is the big reason why housing prices, to this day, are sky-high and very difficult for ordinary young middle-class Americans trying to buy a house for the first time.

I noticed that President Trump, in his farewell address, catalogued all the wonderful things he had done for ordinary Americans. But you, President Biden, have emphasized, after restarting the economy, climate change and systemic racism. And the stimulus bill you have proposed so far sounds just like another loot and plunder operation for the Democratic Party supporters.

Frankly, I believe that climate change and systemic racism are both catnip for the educated Gentry, and provide nothing for the vast majority of Americans.

I don't have much to say about climate change, although I think it is an instance of the Left's Conceit that it knows what is good for the rest of us. 

The decarbonizing plan is an utter folly that will visit enormous hardship on ordinary Americans. Cheap energy is, and will continue to be, the basis of a healthy economy that extends prosperity to all walks of life. I maintain, according to the notion of Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies, that there is only a climate problem if the climate changes too fast for plant and animal species to migrate with the climate. An example of dangerous climate change is cold weather on the farms of folks in the far North and the harvest fails and they all die -- as in Scotland in the 1690s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.

It's telling that the Scottish famine in 1690 was a tragedy while the Irish potato famine 150 years later was a scandal. The difference is that by 1840 we Westerners had the means to get food to a famine area. Today we have probably an order of magnitude more "means" to adapt to climate change.

Then there is systemic racism. One fine day, a brave politician is going to call an end to what I call the School of Hate. But I doubt if it will be you, Mr. President.

I get the liberal obsession with race. The civil rights movement was, for liberals, an ecstatic moment, a supernova of surpassing brightness that lighted up the moral universe. But once you have made discrimination by race illegal then, as my grandfather would have said, it's all over bar shouting. By placing the chains of race guilt upon ordinary white Americans for the last half century you have committed a moral crime that, to me, is morally equivalent to the Jim Crow laws that you fought to eliminate. But this moral crime is, to me, just one of the Left's Crimes.

It seems that our problems are insoluble. But, as Ike said, if you have a problem you can't solve, make it bigger.

I think that our Big Problem is that our educated ruling class operates according to a political formula that violates what I call the Four Laws of modern governance. I wonder if you have heard about them, Mr. President. I would recommend putting them on your desk, as President Truman had "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. Here they are:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Really, everything that our educated ruling class has attempted since the turn of the 20th century attempts to violate these laws. But breaking these laws is catnip for the ruling clique and the larger ruling class, because they all provide for the satisfactions of ruling class members: ambition, honor, and vanity. 

Now I think that the present violations of the Four Laws have gone "about as furr as it can go." Any more ordure piled on top of the mountain of legislation and regulation of the past century is going to seriously break the United States. But your party, Mr. President, wants to double down with Medicare for All, which violates all four laws, and your Green New Deal which will probably be mostly a regulatory scam and only violate the last three laws.

But that is just nuts and bolts.

To make the problem even bigger, I think it stems from the insularity of our ruling elite, that cannot imagine the notion of people not like the educated elite, and that these other people would choose to live a different life than the educated, and worship different gods. If you read about my Three Peoples notion, Mr. President, you will see how understanding the people of today as belonging to different worlds -- the world of the Creative, the Responsible, and the Subordinate -- immediately raises the question of how to make it possible for these very different kinds of people to live in the same society. Notably, the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" doctrine of Allyism lacks such a world view. It only sees the world in the black and white of allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Now I think that Allyism basically reduces to this: that the woke elite gets to buy the votes of the oppressed peoples with loot and plunder seized from the white oppressors. In other words it is a Viking world view masquerading as noble benevolence. It is the Big Problem with the left's Activism Culture. That is perhaps why my basic critique of your side, Mr. President, is called the Great Reaction, a lurch to the primitive:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

My prediction, Mr. President, is that by the third year of your presidency we will be seeing serious economic problems, and that your supporters will be looking around desperately for a reason, some fault of the big corporations or the lack of a proper minimum wage or the rampaging evil of systemic racism. And you will find yourself called upon to take drastic economic and political action that will only make things worse. For that is the way of the world, that the rulers and their supporters are the last to know there is a problem.

My diagnosis of our national problem is that it issues from a wrong turn by our educated elite. You and your supporters, Mr. President, interpret your culture of creativity in terms of creating a new society. Run by people like you.

But I say that the correct agenda of a culture of creativity is creating a new Me, and leaving society alone. You create a new Me in the Hero's journey into the unconscious, and if you survive the journey, you will come back much sadder and wiser. Only then will you be qualified to help other people. And you will probably die on the border between Order and Chaos as a Sacrificial Hero. I have written about this, Mr. President, in my writing on "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

The presidency of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to our present ruling class, that they are "not fit for purpose" as the Brits say. Unfortunately, it is clear that our ruling class has not gotten the message. Indeed, the only message it has had in the last four years was to deep six President Trump.

You will notice, Mr. President, that in the urge of your supporters to deep-six Donald Trump there is nothing that exhibits any concern for the American people, apart from the educated gentry of the ruling class and its clients the "oppressed peoples." This means that the American people are condemned to suffer in the next few years from the blindness and the myopia of your supporters.

It will not be a happy time.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault

One of the perennial complaints of guys like me is that our conservative and Republican leaders are wusses, that they always roll over for the Dems.

Like with the current stolen election. Like with cheap foreign labor for Big Tech. Like with climate change. Like with systemic racism. Like with the eternal entitlement programs.

I'm here to say It's Not Their Fault. Let me count the ways.

Ruling Class Argument -- There is a ruling class in America and elsewhere in the world and it's a kinda club. You wanna be a member? Well you better wear the right clothes, express the right opinions, support the right programs, or you can't advance to higher "degrees." Just like in the Masons. Right now the ruling class is the "educated class" that has been to all the right selective colleges. 

So, if you didn't go to the right college and express the wrong opinions you just aren't going to get ahead in the ruling class.

Cathedral Argument -- Curtis Yarvin argues that reality in the western world is defined by a Cathedral, a quasi-religious cultural establishment that defines what you think and feel.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And now, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Google's YouTube is establishing an Index of proscribed videos. You are not allowed to post videos suggesting that the election was stolen.

Truth is, all societies make it very difficult for visions of good and evil that compete with its Cathedral orthodoxy. Usually such visions are considered heresy.

There Must Be An Enemy Argument -- Since whenever, human communities have had to defend themselves from the Enemy. Now, you may think that, in this day and age, we are past all this, because chimps, for chimps survive by defending their food-growing territory in which the females and young can eat and grow, as argued by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. True, because now you can buy food, not grow it. But you think that the defense instinct, that goes all the way back to chimps and beyond, is going to wither away in the two centuries since possession of food-growing land hasn't mattered?

Actually, when the rulers don't have a foreign enemy to rally their people, they invent a domestic one. That's what our rulers' "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative is all about.

The whole point of this argument is to rally the males, because all males are instinctively defenders of the border. It goes with the male Culture of Courage/Insult.

Yes, right now, the enemies of the state are people like you.

All Good People Agree Argument -- If you are a good person everybody likes you; if you are a bad person then everybody hates you. If you are a good person you will go to Heaven; if you are a bad person you will go to Hell. If you are a good person you may be a saint; if you are a bad person you may be a witch.

And if you get on the wrong side of the good people you may find that you have become one of the bad people.

The whole point of this argument is to get all the women conforming to the ruling class narrative, for women must, for good reasons going all the way back to our chimp ancestors, get along as they live with each other every day preparing food and caring for the children. Women have a Culture of Conformity, which is enforced by the women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, right now all the bad people are people like you.

Failed Revolution Argument -- All religious and cultural and political movements eventually face a "failure of prophecy" moment. Because they are all confidently predicting a glorious future that almost certainly will not show up. The more cunning religious movements prophesy that Heaven and Paradise are the reward for a virtuous life after death. Our modern socialist and culture war religious doctrines prophesy Heaven on Earth.

What do lefty movements do when the promised Heaven on Earth doesn't arrive? They usually amp it up, to keep the sect together. In politics, the ideologists amp it up with a Reign or Terror or a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually the amp-up collapses, because, as Crane Brinton says in The Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live forever in a state of ideological fervor. Eventually we have to get back to wiving and thriving.

Yes, right now our Wokies are amping it up. Nobody knows when normal programming will resume.

Creative People Gotta Create Argument -- In my reductive Three Peoples theory I suggest that, for Responsibles, God made the Heaven and Earth and the job of humans is to responsibly wive and thrive on the Earth that God created. But I argue that Creatives are called to be gods, to create the world anew.

This means that for Creatives, if they are not creating, doing something new, bending the arc of history towards justice, advocating for traditionally marginalized people, imagining a new and better world, they are nobody.

Yes, right now if you are not creatively advocating for a better world, you are a nobody.

Stupid Ruling Class Argument -- A good ruling class knows that it must refresh its membership with talented people from the lower classes. A good ruling class creates a "political formula" that values all the people in the realm. A good ruling class keeps a weather eye on the passions and the obsessions of the "masses." A good ruling class knows that it is a minority, and that if the people ever got serious they could kick the rulers out in a New York minute.

A stupid ruling class knows that it knows best and it makes sure the plebs keep quiet. A stupid ruling class thinks that only members of the ruling class are smart, and that the lower classes are stupid. A stupid ruling class lives and entertains itself in the Capitol and doesn't get out much. A stupid ruling thinks that the ordinary people are too stupid ever to form a head of rebellion against their wise rule.

Yes, right now we probably have a fairly stupid ruling class.

Why to the Good Guys always lose? I would say that over the last 50 years we have had several political moments where our rulers could have altered their rule to accommodate various populist moments: The Silent Majority in the Nixon years, the Reagan Democrats in the Reagan years, the Ross Perot moment in 1992, the Republican Congress in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010, the Trump election in 2016. But they didn't.

The point is that, of course the Good Guys are going to lose, short of an actual rebellion and civil war, if the ruling class refuses to accommodate to their grievances. The rulers have the upper hand; that's why we call them rulers. And It's Not Their Fault if the rulers outmaneuver the suckers every time, using all the bolded arguments I have listed up above.

And so it goes. Until the day that it doesn't.