When a Protest is "Mostly Peaceful" Then Maybe Crowd Control is Needed

When I had a chat with my Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss a couple of weeks ago I was a little surprised by his invocation of the 1990 WTO riots in connection with police brutality in Seattle, especially considering that he would have been 13 at the time. I know know what it was all about, now that I have got into the CHAZ chapter in Andy Ngo's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Here's the quote:

Despite the ultraviolence of the Seattle riots, police were prohibited from using the best tool they had for crowd control: CS gas [tear gas].

That's because "Police Chief Carmen Best relented to political pressure from the Mayor's Office to ban the SPD from using [tear gas] despite its effectiveness."

I'd say that anyone with half a brain would recognize that the failure to deal firmly with Antifa has been a strategic mistake. But by concocting a story about Seattle Police Department brutality going back to 1990 my pal Dan Strauss gives himself permission to be a squish where crowd control is concerned.

Which leads to the whatabout issue with regards to Antifa vs. the January 6 riot. Which is the real problem? Antifa? The white supremacists? Or both? Or neither?

It's a "tell" isn't it, that the whole ruling class from Nancy Pelosi on down was genuinely shocked by the Capitol Hill riot on January 6: Build a Wall! Call out the National Guard! Notice that nobody really got hurt except rioter Ashli Babbitt. There was no bomb, like in the Capitol on March 6, 1970. Just a mob running through the Capitol building, taking selfies in the House chamber.

And yet, we learn, the Our Nance may have refused the offer of 10,000 troops from President Trump.

I have two questions. One is to understand what is really going on in the heads of chaps like Dan Strauss and Democrats in general with respect to lefty riots. Are they just lying, and going with the line that nothing to see here, just peaceful protests, because they want to destroy the GOP commoner voters? Somehow I can't believe that. I think that the problem is probably weakness, the "no enemies on the left" culture. The problem for a progressive politician is that he needs to be sympathetic to the protest/activist culture, because justice. If he is not as strong as the next lefty on the sacred right to "peaceful protest" then I suspect he can't have a career in Democratic politics.

Maybe it's just as simple as the existence of "oppressed peoples." First, there is systemic racism. Therefore we must protest against injustice. Therefore we can't be surprised if concerned activists sometimes cross a line; their hearts are in the right place.

And, clearly, both sides of the political conflict are fairly relaxed when their own side is in the streets, but terrified of the activists of the other side.

The other thing is the basic problem for all nationalistic Commoner Americans. When are our leaders going to figure out how to blow up the race card, and blow up the victim card, and blow up the "mostly peaceful protest" card?

I had a flash of intuition today reading two articles in Quilette about "suffering." You know, the suffering of a rough night on social media, and the paradox of increased "stress" in a time of physical plenty. The takeaway is that a good person cannot be indifferent to suffering; therefore we should do something about it.

The issue of suffering is also a big issue in Roger Scruton's Wagner's Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, i.e., redemption from suffering. There are all kinds of people suffering in Parsifal. But what do we do about it, Dick?

Obviously, while we are all called to ease suffering, there is a temptation for sufferers to take advantage of, or demand the compassion of others.

But that, of course, is exactly what our lefty friends tend to do. They demand that we redeem the sufferers, or we are racist-sexist-homophobes: What, they say? You don't care about other peoples' suffering?

Of course, we racist-sexist-homophobes might be tempted to say: after you, Alphonse. Let me see you do your Good Samaritan bit before you force me to contribute. And anyway, what is left of the redemptive aspect of relieving suffering when it is forced? No more Good Samaritan: just another taxpayer.

One of the points that Scruton brings out in his analysis of Parsifal is the cruelty of Titurel, forcing Amfortas to perform the Eucharist even though Amfortas suffers increased pain from his wound. Whaddya mean, forcing someone to redeem someone else's suffering at the cost of enormous pain? Who are you to insist, Titurel, old chap? Maybe that is what our liberal friends do, forcing America to succor their victim du jour no matter the cost to the ordinary Commoner forced to do the liberal's will.

Oh well. More research is needed.

Lefties, LGBTs, Liberals and Their Conceit

Radio host Dennis Prager has a list of questions to help you determine whether your Democratic friend is a liberal or a lefty. E.g.,

8. Is it racist to claim that Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the greatest music ever composed?

9. Is the national anthem racist?

The idea is that: if they unfriend you for asking the question they are a lefty; if they don't they are a liberal.

But I think that rather misunderstands the problem, as though political identity comes with various stands on the issues. It does, after a fashion. But first is the "fake tribe" you belong to, and whose flag you fly.

For instance, on my walk at the top of this hill at Palatine and 60th this morning I passed a gray-haired woman -- probably 70ish -- hauling her garbage can back to her yard. Her house proudly boasts a hand-made Black Lives Matter sign and is in the process of getting solar panels installed on the roof.

Now, is that woman -- who lives on the street with the best views -- a lefty? I doubt it. She is just virtue-signaling that she belongs to the Good People. I expect she has never had an original thought in her life. She just instinctively adheres to the notions and the ideas of her community, and that community is the community of gentry liberals. Right now, all across the land, good gentry liberals appalled by Trump and white supremacy have BLM and #WeBelieve and "Hate Has No Home Here" signs in their yards. 

I'm sure that if I had stopped her and asked why she had a racist sign in her yard she would be mortally offended. It would never have occurred to her that a Black Lives Matter sign means anything other than she is opposed to Racist Police Violence. If I had told here that the leaders of Black Lives Matter proudly identified themselves as "trained Marxists," she would be saying to her gentry friends later today "I can't believe he said that." Because it does not compute for her: it is crazy-cakes.

It is part of the educated gentry's conceit that they are the better people.

Meanwhile Ellie Gardey at The American Spectator writes that "Thirty Percent of Young Liberals Now Identify as LGBT." She offers two theories about this. One theory -- courtesy of the LGBT activists -- is that it represents the natural sexual identity of humans.

The opposite theory would be that LGBT identity is socially conditioned, and that over 30 percent of young liberals adopt gay or transgender identities at least in part because those identities are celebrated within young progressive communities. Young liberals today treat LGBT identity as a protected class, grant greater social status to those who are gay and transgender, and even devote an entire month of the year to parades and celebrations promoting LGBT identity. In such an environment, young people could be encouraged to form a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identity.

Yeah. I mean, if young people are carefully taught that to be gay is to be special, why wouldn't they go for it?

Well, you know how I would understand this. First, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, I would say that it makes sense that People of the Creative Self, who believe that the best life is a creative life, would certainly be open to creativity in sexuality, rather than the boring old marriage and children of the People of the Responsible Self.

I would also add the following possibility:

I believe that girls and women are instinctively (but not consciously) repelled by the humiliation that women have suffered from the sexual revolution. In my limited experience with women down the years, they like to be gently courted. And when they submit to your advances they imagine a relationship from now till eternity. That's a far cry from the campus "hookup" culture which assumes that everyone is ready for, or at least half-a-bottle of vodka away from, a one-night stand. Remember "Mattress Girl?" Her problem was that she didn't like being dumped by her German boy-friend. Indeed the "sexual harassment" thing is that women don't like being treated as a merely "sexual" object. Not by fellow college students, and not by Andrew Cuomo.

Remember LUG (Lesbian until graduation)? Makes complete sense to me. Why get tricked into the male game of notching conquests on the bed-post? Just check out of the dangerous -- and male -- game of sexual league tables until graduation. Hey, you "safetyists" ought to be able to see the sense in that!

See I argue backwards from my current position as a 74-year-old, that the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is grandchildren. Why? Because the alternative is oblivion, and who needs that? So, to get to grandchildren, you need children. And to get to children you need heterosexual sex. And unless you want seriously angry children you need those children to be conceived in marriage. As a Colorado philosopher once said:

Children want a mother and a father; their mother and their father.

In my view, the whole LGBT thing is one of the "left's conceits."

And there is another aspect of this, one that tends to get elided in the normal course of things. It is this. The creative life -- in sex, in career -- is not for everyone. Indeed, I would say it is only for seriously crazy people. That's because, in the creativity stakes, many are called but few are chosen. How many people get to have a successful business startup? How many people get to be a famous writer or artist?  That is why Jungians like Jordan B. Peterson talk about the Sacrificial Hero dying on the border between Order and Chaos. Creativity ain't for everyone. Even the successful creative person probably dies in the creative moment. Because you know what the other name is for a creative person? Exactly: Heretic; someone turning the existing orthodoxy -- that's Greek for correct opinion -- upside down. And most people hate the guy that turns everything upside down.

Someday soon, I believe, this whole lefty, LGBT, liberal thing is going to collapse like a burst balloon. And the reason will be that women will revolt against it. I don't know how or when. I think it is already starting, with the movement against "sexual harassment" and the rise of "safetyism." Women expect to be protected, and if you don't protect them they will find someone who will.

The Political Wages of COVID

Now that the COVID deaths and hospitalizations are trending down, and Joe Biden is safely in the White House and all the misinformation is being safely "curated" and Donald Trump is reduced to saying wait until next time, what next?

A good safe pair of hands like Victor Davis Hanson says that the Bidens will enjoy a couple years of stimulus growth through 2022 but then watch out.

Maybe. But I think that we are going to see the people that were wasted by the epidemic get really angry, starting this spring and summer.

• Whatabout all the small businessmen that lost their businesses?
• Whatabout the ordinary people that lost their jobs?
• Whatabout the people put on "furlough"?
• Whatbaout the people that have not being paying their mortgages and rent and now must pay the piper?
• Whatabout the "homeless" cast upon the waters as the Skid Row bums were nearly a century ago?
• Whatabout the women that find out that they weren't protected after all?
• Whatabout everybody except upper-class Gentry that are really struggling right now?

And whatabout millions of people deeply damaged that I haven't even listed here because I am too stupid to have thought about them?

Part of the problem is the foolishness of our ruling class, and its inability to think beyond the boundaries of its political world where everything is a question of division and accusation, and every solution is a question of dividing the loot and plunder among the supporters.

See, to make the economy recover after a financial crisis or an epidemic what you do is lower the costs of doing business, with lower marginal tax rates and reduction in regulation -- you know like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. What you do not do is hand out loot to your supporters, as FDR did in the 1930s and Barack Obama did in 2009 and Nancy Pelosi is doing now. Why? Because loot and plunder just impoverishes everyone -- yes, even the beneficiaries who learn the wrong lesson that the name of the game is to be first in line for the handouts.

I imagine that the major items in the fabled $1.9 trillion stimulus is handouts to teachers unions, Democrat-run states and localities, government employee unions, and well-connected corporations. It will be money that will not benefit Americans as a whole. Politely, this sort of governance is called "make-work." And it doesn't work. It didn't work after the Crash of 1929. It didn't work in the inflationary 1970s. It didn't work in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. And it won't work now. Our rulers Have No Idea.

And that is saying nothing about the bigger problems, the wasteland from a century of progressive and lefty dominance and hegemony with its conceits, its crimes, its errors. Of which our gentry rulers Have No Idea.

For some time I have been blogging variously on the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, the Left's Errors. But I can see that I need to boil it down into one itemized list, simply stated first as problem, and then as consequence.

Because I think that the accumulation of lefty detritus, multiplied by the COVID cock-up, is going to be the Big Thing in the next few years.

Allyism, Republicans and Democrats

Yesterday I posted the results of a post-election poll. Republican voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Illegal immigration
Lack of support for the police
High taxes

Whereas Democratic voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Donald Trump's supporters
White nationalism
Systemic racism

You will notice that the concerns of Republican voters are not particularly blared through anyone's bullhorn. I wonder where they get their concerns? FoxNews? Qanon? Far-right websites? Donald Trump's secret decoder ring? Couldn't be from Twitter or from youTube or Facebook because eevil far-right ideas get censored on social media as fast as you can say @jack.

But it is not hard to figure where Democratic voters get their concerns. White nationalism and systemic racism are right now the obsession of the mainstream media and the educated gentry class that runs the media, the universities, the bureaucracy, the non-profits. If you lend half an ear to the gentry liberal class you will probably be persuaded that white supremacy and systemic racism are tearing the country apart.

Let us look at this through the lens of Allyism, understanding the America as "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Because pretty obviously, if you are an Ally, doing activism 24/7 on behalf of oppressed peoples, then it stands to reason that Donald Trump's supporters, white nationalism and systemic racism are the reasons why those oppressed people are oppressed. And they will go right on being oppressed until the power of Donald Trump's supporters are well and truly extinguished at a class on systemic racism where they work or go to school.

How systemic is racism? It's a good question. If a half-black man like Barack Obama could be elected president, how bad can things be? If a part black half Brahmin like Kamala Harris can be elected  vice-president, how bad can things be? If a black like Tim Scott can be elected United States Senator as a Republican from the former Confederate state of South Carolina, how racist can those Trump supporters be? If black church ladies are counting the ballots in cities like Philadelphia, how bad can things be? If just about every ad and commercial has "people of color" in it, how bad can things be? If just about every big corporation is a supporter of Black Lives Matter, how bad can things be? If anyone that utters the pejorative "n-word" gets utterly humiliated, how bad can things be?

Obviously, more research is needed. Not.

You know what I think.

I think that every ruling class needs one of two things, preferably both. It needs an existential peril to battle against. Climate change will do nicely. And it needs someone to blame when things go wrong. Yeah! Sytemic Racism! These issue, I argue, from the basic condition of ancient humans. 

First, it is the job of any ruling class to defend the borders of its realm -- although not so much these days since food-growing land is not as critical as it used to be. The enemy used to be the tribe next door. Then it was the barony next door, then the nation next door, then the Communist threat, then the Islamic threat, and now the threat of climate change. Notice how the threat keeps getting bigger. First a local problem with the chaps next door. Then the nation next door. Then the secular religion next door. Then the future of the planet itself! Wow! We are really getting into the big leagues these days.

Second, rulers need someone to blame when things go inexplicably wrong. Take your pick: the crabby older woman living just out of town; the neighbor woman that you are never gong to speak to again; the evil spirit in the tree that just fell on your house; the wrath of God that sent a hurricane and flooded the plain; "malefactors of great wealth;" big corporations. Or the systemic racists in a conspiracy on the Internet.

Our liberal friends have plumped for two threats on which to justify their rule. The first is the existential peril of climate change. The second is the evil of systemic racism. See, without the need to battle these two threats people might start to ask: "why do we need these guys?"

And, of course, the point isn't whether these are real threats and real evils. The only question is whether the rulers can persuade the ruled that their power is needed to fight the existential perils and evils.

I say that the reason that our ruling class has been upping the amplitude on its claims of peril and evil is because of its accumulated failures and its evident incompetence are raising the unmentionable question: what are these guys good for. Anything? Bueller?

Let's put our liberal friends to the test and inquire into its moral narrative of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Liberal allies have been fighting for almost two centuries to bring justice to the workers. And yet we read that the white working class is "dying of despair." How come? The ruling class has had all the money and all the power in the world to help the working class. If it is dying of despair then something is wrong. Maybe the whole program to help the workers was a mistake? Could the problem be white oppressors? Who would that be other than white educated gentry that style themselves as "allies?"

It was 50 years ago that the United States declared racial and sexual discrimination illegal and then set up racist "affirmative action" and quotas to help formerly marginalized peoples. If that hasn't solved the problem then maybe our rulers have been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the completely wrong thing to do is to give the rulers more power to track down and destroy the "white oppressors." Hey, maybe the problem is something else. Maybe it's aliens.

Or maybe the whole notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Or maybe the whole problem is the fault of liberals that have spent the last 200 years discouraging the immigrants from the city from acquiring middle-class culture and instead has encouraged them to become the serfs and slaves of the educated ruling class, relying on the rulers for benefits and set-asides instead of acquiring skills and culture that help them thrive in the city on their own.

As you know, I think what we are seeing is the self-destruction of the ruling elite of the last century, as a result of its false conceits, its accumulating errors, and its foul crimes.

Because the problem is that your average ruling class just can't bring itself to say: "sorry fellahs, we screwed up. Your turn now." Instead failing rulers always turn up the heat, and beat up the plebs and the peasants that dare to point out their conceits, their errors, and their crimes.

What a pity.

Our Liberal Friends Won't Know What Hit Them

Let us interpret the last five years as a continuous desperate attempt by our liberal friends to Stop The World I Wanna Get Off.

Because Trump should not, could not have happened. Not unless the Ruskies did it. Not unless FoxNews and Newsmax and OAN flooded the highways and byways with conspiracy theories and misinformation. Not unless "hate."

It has been helpful to me that several years ago I abandoned my conventional understanding of the world through logic and reason and reality and facts and accepted the German Turn that we don't know what reality is. In "reality" we humans, like the rest of creation, are stumbling and bumbling along in our lives, doing the same-old same-old until, all of a sudden, we nearly get killed by something.

It could be a truck at an intersection that nearly ran us over. It could be a cold spell in Texas that shut down all the wind turbines. It could be an Orange Man Bad that got elected President of the United States. It could be a theory that space and time aren't absolute, but relative.

When an animal or a human gets blindsided it responds in one of four different ways.

1. Nothing to see here, move right along.
2. OMG It's the End of the World!
3. It's Evil Spirits (or racist-sexist-homophobes)
4. Wow, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I did a long post about this when I was reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. "Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like." As I interpret Peterson:

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

See the difference between a rat and a human? A human has the ability to ignore the new situation and just carry on in the old way. Or, of course, it can imagine that it can destroy the threat. Part of the reason for that is our conscious mind. We humans can construct a theory of the world consciously while your average rat cannot.

Now, I believe that our lefty friends have built up a whole world view on the idea that we can and should live in the good old way of pre-market culture. They have an imagined Garden of Eden in which everyone lives in equality and community, and everything is shared and equal, and everyone is benevolently advised by evolved, educated liberals. They experience living in the market system as living under the tyranny of the market. 

Thus Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origin of Capitalism argues that in the pre-capitalist world many rural humans lived in a world of "customary use rights... or the right to subsistence." But then along came capitalism and "market as an imperative:" Everyone had to surrender to the dictatorship of the market. Yes, but. In the pre-capitalist world everyone lived under the dictatorship of a feudal lord. If people were enjoying "customary use rights" it was because the feudal lord was too busy playing politics with the other feudal lords to exploit his lands -- and his peasants -- to the full.

Actually, I get it. Wouldn't it be loverly if we could escape the treadmill of the market and live in a simpler,  more companionable way? Yeah! Imagine there's no market, as the Beatles might have said. Thus the whole nostalgic culture of the left's Great Reaction, its yearning for a lost world of perfect community.

(Notice how Jordan B. Peterson deals with this fantasy with his "lobster" narrative. Animals don't live in equality; they live in hierarchies, and the reason for hierarchies is that they reduce the need for violence.)

All this is fine. Our liberal friends managed to make the Trump Effect go away by... Well, we are not allowed to say this, but mainly by skewing the system, by censorship in the media, by mail-in voting and I know not what.

But I think that the worst is yet to come. Sorry liberals.

Whatabout the anger of the small businessmen and women screwed by the COVID lockdowns? Whatabout the folk that have given up and gone homeless? Whatabout the folk that have stopped paying rent, and now have to face making up the arrears (estimated at $70 billion nationwide) or eviction? Whatabout the people on the receiving end of the current anti-white witch-hunt in our schools and corporations? Whatabout the rage of people confronting $4 a gallon gasoline? Whatabout the rage of people in blue states that find out that they have been screwed, and that the red states that reopened early made the right decision.

Let's set up the bleachers, because it's going to be quite a show.

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.

Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"

Way back in the 1990s Charles Murray was the second tier in Herrnstein and Murray on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

The point of any Bell Curve is that if you measure anything about humans in a human community, most people will cluster towards the average, with less and less people as you get away from the average. Thus, there are a ton of people with average intelligence, a few with above-average and below intelligence, and only one or two complete geniuses and one or two complete idiots.

Herrnstein and Murray "noticed" that humans are not all alike. In particular different "races" have different "bell curves" where intelligence is concerned. And, given that, as we now say, "experts agreed" that jobs in the modern economy were increasingly requiring cognitive skills rather than manual skills, that could result in a bit of a cock-up on the race front, because blacks present a bell curve on intelligence shifted quite a bit to the left -- i.e. lower -- when compared to whites.

La Wik: "Murray's work has been and remains highly controversial."

Er, no, Wikkie. His work is only controversial to liberals and lefties, because it drives a stake into the heart of their belief system, and they can't deal with that. Because safetyism.

You can see why liberals jumped all over The Bell Curve at the time. Their religion said that humans were equal, and that any inequalities between person and person and between black and white were due to discrimination. But if Herrnstein and Murray were right then we would never get to a perfect world where the racial breakdown of everyone from CEOs to garbage workers would match the racial percentages in the nation.

So Charles Murray had to be racist-racist-racist and sent to the academic equivalent of Outer Slobbovia.

Murray's response, ten years later in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, was to show that if you purged race out of his Bell Curve prophecy -- and racistly only racistly analyzed racist whites -- the argument about cognitive skills still applied. In today's America the white cognitive elite, with degrees and credentials and careers up the ying-yang, are doing fine. The white commoners in the middle are doing so-so, and the white underclass, the bottom 30 percent, are really sucking air: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The liberal response to Coming Apart was basically not to respond.

But you will notice that liberals today are basically conceding Murray's point. Today's liberals say that IQ tests are racist. And they say that whites do better in school and life because of "white privilege" or, failing that, because of "systemic racism." Rather than admit that, not surprisingly, people with different backgrounds, different origins, different genetic inheritances (i.e., race) have different capabilities, as common sense would suggest, they say that it's all a conspiracy of white males since the dawn of time.

So why do East Asians have the highest IQs in America? Huh? White privilege? Mandarin classism?

So now lefties are saying that teaching the classics of Greece and Rome is racist. And getting coverage in The New York Times. Mind you, I am all in favor of increasing the teaching of the classics of South and East Asia. We systemic racists might learn something from them.

Anyway, Charles Murray, now age 78, is publishing one last broadside, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It looks like he is taking the bull by the horns. Or double-shotting his guns, etc. From the blurb at Amazon:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

I.e., The Bell Curve, dummy.

You did know, didn't you, that East Asians have a higher average IQ than Jews have a higher average IQ than "whites" have a higher average IQ than "Blacks." But race is a social construct.

My theory is that average IQ is a measure of the time that a particular cultural group has been literate. And, of course, literacy parallels involvement in Axial Age religion and commerce. I suspect that East Asian elites -- mandarins -- and South Asian elites -- Brahmins -- have the longest experience of literacy. So they are the most intelligent. Not exactly rocket science.

Only, recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria apparently have higher IQs that native American Blacks. Could that be a benefit of Brit colonialism compared to All-American plantation slavery and Jim Crow and unionized public education? You tell me.

I tell you what I really think. I think that our liberal friends are half way into an intellectual collapse. They don't study history and philosophy and politics and economics any more, because if they did they would face irreconcilable differences with their lefty secular religion. Case in point, Jan Psaki challenging a reporter's question on the $15 an hour minimum wage. But the CBO says that increasing the minimum wage would cost up to 1.4 million jobs. This is not rocket science. But I'll bet that a whole generation of Democratic political activists have just steered away from ever dealing with the question. So that they literally know nothing.

The reason that elite scions went to college back in the day, and studied the classics, was because the ruling class wanted their young sprouts to know how the political power game was played back in the day. They figured the young'uns would learn something. When young scions of the ruling class don't learn all that hard stuff they remain ignorant of the nuts and bolts of ruling.

Here is something from Ben Stein about recently deceased George Schultz that I didn't know.

When he was secretary of State under the great Ronald Reagan, Eretz Israel was struggling with intense inflation. Secretary of State [Schultz] sent my father [Herb Stein], along with a super smart economist named Stanley Fischer, to Israel to help.

After many meetings with top Israeli officials, Pop and Dr. Fischer created a plan (kindly called the Stein Plan), to reestablish a new Israeli Shekel backed by the United States. The plan worked like a charm. Even now Israelis — thanks to Secretary Shultz — consider the Stein Plan salvation.

See what I mean? Those clueless lefties running Israel back then Literally Had No Clue about a functioning monetary policy. But the knowledge of How to Do It was right there, if only someone had opened an economic textbook. Only, if your entire leadership had been to activism school rather than economics school, well, then you need to send Herb Stein over there to teach 'em how to do it. You get the point.

And I suspect that the same is true about all the swamp creatures in the Biden administration. Only, the lefty geniuses that rule us would rather die than take advice from a conservative economist.

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.

Hey, Black Americans: Grow Up!

We just finished up a year in which the arrest of a black man, who was high on fentanyl and subsequently died, was the usual election-year pretext for a race-card play by the ruling class.

Wags like Steve Sailer are talking about the new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution:

That's the new Zeroth Amendment: "No Black man need submit to arrest unless He's damn well in the mood to be arrested."

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) August 29, 2020

Because what was really going on with George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, was that they were going to jail if the arrest succeeded.

For some reasons these police killings of black men with criminal records a yard long only get publicized in election years.

Since I get to walk past at least a dozen Black Lives Matter yard-signs up at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge every day, my unconscious mind has been pondering the whole question.

And I have come to realize that the whole race politics thing has nothing to do with blacks, or African Americans, or Blacks. It is all to do with the moral posturing of well-to-do whites.

Since the 18th century.

Back in the 18th century, was the anti-slavery movement, William Wilberforce, proprietor, responding to a slave rebellion? Were there Spartacuses all over leading the slaves in revolt? Er, no. La Wik:

Wilberforce was... the only son of Robert Wilberforce (1728–1768), a wealthy merchant[.]

The family fortune had been made by little Billy's grandfather in the Baltic trade. Our William, who became an evangelical Christian, was what we now call an "activist." Hey, it was no skin off his nose to advocate against the Atlantic slave trade!

Fast forward to 1850 and the United States. Was there a massive slave rebellion that prompted the ruling class to ease off on the slave front? Not at all. It was much more a moral crusade, with Ladies' Anti-Slavery Societies having Frederick Douglass in to talk about the evils of slavery.

Then as now, the ruling class had to have an "Other" to blame for all the sins of the world, and the South would fill the bill. So why not have a jolly old war and teach the South a lesson. After all, the young men of he North were expendable, as the young men of 1917 were expendable, and the young men of 1941. Not to mention the young men sent off to Vietnam to prop up the dominoes, and the young men sent to the Middle East in 2002 to prop up the Saudis.

Yes, but whatabout the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? The fact is that the ruling class was down for the struggle. Dr. King was supported by the Northern elite and nice Jewish boys went down to the South to register voters.

Dr. King based his non-violent movement on the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi. Which is a "tell."

I now realize, having read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, that the Brits decided pretty soon after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that they would be handing India over to the Indians. But not yet, old chap, because the natives weren't yet ready for self government. A real imperial empire wouldn't have given Gandhi the time of day. They would have arrested him and disappeared him, and nobody the wiser. Like the Chinese and the Uygurs.

But if the imperial empire is planning to hand India over to the Indians, why, then it makes sense to permit and even encourage a nationalist Indian movement. That way you have a new ruling class ready to take over when the time comes. As it did come after World War II. And it even makes sense to condone a whacko activist like Gandhi with his taste for young women.

If you condone a non-violent activist like Dr. King it yields all kinds of benefits, like the incident at the Edmund Pettus bridge and all those eevil Southern policemen beating up helpless peaceful protesters. OMG, I can't believe they did that! And all those liberal kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders -- with a book and a movie to follow! Weren't they special!

See, my line is that all this had nothing to do with blacks, and everything to do with liberal moral fluffing and preening. And when the votes in Congress were in on the civil rights acts, the northern liberals were almost completely Yea, the Republicans were majority Yea, and only the Southern Democrats voted Nay. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) , the Jewish libertarian Republican, voted Nay, because he thought the bill should just ban gubmint discrimination, and allow private citizens to discriminate to their hearts' content.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recently characterized himself "I am Spartacus." As if. Watch the movie, kiddo! Kirk Douglas, playing a real slave, not a Senator, gets crucified right at the gate of Rome. And, thanks to the movie director, Stanley Kubrick, and leftie scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, ol'Kirk gets to see his kid just before he expires on the cross. There is a line of slaves, crucified, going right down the Appian Way, or whatever. Just to make the point about who is boss in the Roman Empire.

In the American Empire, blacks kept a pretty low profile until after the passage of the civil rights acts. And I don't blame them. Why put yourself on the line when white liberals are going to do the heavy lifting for you? And then when blacks started rioting in 1965 and thereafter, they were helpless victims reacting to 500 years under the yoke. Pity that Detroit is still hollowed out 50 years later.

Looking back at the whole thing, going back to rich kid William Wilberforce, you gotta hand it to our liberal friends. What a ride! What glorious self-congratulation! What moral peacock feathers! What it is to dine out on your moral specialness for 200 years! And no end in sight!

But I have a question for blacks. Is this all there is to Life, the Universe, and Everything? To be the Little Darlings, the political playthings of the ruling class? To be riled up every even year? To get to do a bit of loot and plunder at Target once in a while? To get to be the First Black President just for showing up? To be the first woman black vice-president just for being a politician's moll? To sire 70 percent of your children outside of marriage? To have your young men committing half of the murders in the US?

Because back in the day there were magnificent American blacks. There was Frederick Douglass, who was sent to a slave breaker and broke the breaker! Who escaped, found his love and married her, and worked his way up to luncheon speaker, first hating America and then learning to love it. Or Booker T. Washington, who traveled half way across America, sleeping under the sidewalk, to get himself an education.

Here's the thing. For a young head full of mush it feels kinda cool for the ruling class to give you free dissing privileges. The white working class had it for a while: they could strike and carry on and bankrupt their employers, and who cared. But then the liberals tired of them and left them to die of despair in the most recent half century.

And now the ruling class has issued free rioting privileges to the white wokies of AntiFa. What fun!

I'd just like to say to my black friends: why not get your act together before your liberal masters tire of you?

Understanding Gender Madness

Guess what! The schientists at the New England Journal of Medicine are proposing that “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people.”

Well, that settles it. The worst thing in the world -- after systemic racism -- is harm experienced by "intersex and transgender people" from the bigotry of transphobes. To paraphrase Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), "if we reduce harm to just one intersex/transgender life..."

But what I want to know is: who is the boss here? I should have thought that the interests of ruling class bureaucrats and administrative Pooh Bahs would come before the interests of the woke radicals. And the more finely graded the data that our rulers have about us, the more wisely they can rule us. But what do I know? Perhaps this is a deeper thing than I can understand.

Maybe as the Biden administration sets forth on its glorious war on climate change and systemic racism, the honor of marching in the vanguard will properly be exchanged between the Imperial Guards Regiment of Administrators and Experts and the Battalion of Intersectional Activists of the Global Guards. These high-status guards regiments tend to be very touchy about the honor and vanity of protecting the monarch. I dare say that back in the day there were a lot of heated words exchanged between guardsmen of the various guards regiments about the size and the shape of their shakos and busbies and bearskins.

Now, I have explained the whole procedure of the left's critical theory stuff, about how it is really a mutton-headed misunderstanding of the whole German Turn in knowledge inaugurated by Kant's notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, driven mainly by a primitive yearning for the good old days of the Age of Politics. Not to mention the tremendous fun of rape-age and pillage in the good old days of the Vikings. I have categorized my critique of the left into the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, and the Left's Errors. And sometimes, when I'm all confused, I just categorize as Liberal Oppression.

One important thing not to be left out of this analysis is George Lakoff's analysis in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. See he says that we initially categorize the world using "basic-level" categories like "dog" and "table." We become expert at this by age 2. But then we get sophisticated, and understand that "dog" is a kind of "animal." But the further we get away from the basic level, the more questions arise, for instance when we are dealing with a form of life that seems to be part animal and part vegetable.

You can see how the gender bender thingy fits into this.  Boys and girls are "basic-level" categories. You know which is which by the time you are 2. But, as you learn more, you get to realize that boys and girls are alike in a lot more ways than they are different. I mean, when you get down to the X and Y chromosomes, you get the notion that the only different between men and women is that out of the total of 46 chromosomes, men have one that is different and that women don't have. Such a tiny difference!

And the point of the "basic-level" category is that it is just an appearance that we humans, from an early age, learn to differentiate. These basic level categories seem to be significant for us at a basic level. But maybe not. And if you are a creature with X-X chromosomes but experience yourself as a man, well, why not?

And how dare -- How Dare -- transphobic bigots suggest that such "intersex and transgender people" are living in a fantasy world!

Mind you, some people might object to the "allies" of "intersex and transgender people" making gender-binary people feel "unsafe." After all, don't believers in traditional morality have their rights too?

It's all very well to invoke Mrs. Patrick Campbell's rule of "do whatever you want but don't frighten the horses in the street." Unless, of course, you are a street urchin and the best fun in the world is frightening the horses in the street.

But the point of moral rules and science is ultimately the survival and thriving of the human race. I mean, the whole point of climate change politics is that, unless we act now! Well, something. And the whole point of traditional gender-binary and traditional morality is that it happens to be the way we get children on the ground and survive to the next generation.

So, if we are going to have carbon taxes and stop the production of fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030 and stigmatize skeptics as "climate deniers," because climate change, then maybe we should likewise apply force and name and shame and shun people that don't seem to be too serious about getting the next generation on the ground.

C'mon man! We don't know whether carbon pollution will lead to the end of civilization as we know it, but sure as heck-fire we know that if everyone became "intersex and transgender people" then humans would be outta here in less than a century.

Showing the Ruling Class the Door

I don't know whether Joe Biden won the election fair and square, or with the help of shenanigans. Either way, the present ruling class isn't going away, and doesn't have a clue that it has a problem.

OK, no ruling class ever does until it gets shown the door.

Case in point, the Dalton School flap in New York City, where the staff of the swank private school has issued a manifesto demanding total wokerama -- at a fancy-pants private school.

Case in point, the political frou-frah over the school system in swank Brookline, Mass., home of the credentialed and the expert.

Case in point, the move to Biden in white voting districts in the election. Trump did better in immigrant districts, worse in white, and especially white liberal, districts.

It all seems scandalous, but not really when you step back and think about it. The Gentry class is all in on the Woke religious movement, because it gives meaning to their lives to be "allies" helping "oppressed peoples" fight the "white oppressors." The Gentry class is all in on experts and credentials: as in ordering the American people around during the COVID epidemic.

Of course there's a move towards Trump among immigrants; any immigrant with half a brain understands that they are the rising class and that the established class isn't going to make things easy for them. If they aren't consumed with ethnic solidarity, like blacks, then they are going to be populists, voting for politicians that stand for ordinary people.

In an interview with American Greatness youTuber and podcaster Steve Turley says that, with regard to the populist movement, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Up to now, populism has emerged in a "lite" form in the various center-right parties which are a bit embarrassed about the great unwashed, as many Republican officeholders are today. Because, after all, politicians come from the Gentry class. But there will come a time when the center-right parties will become primarily populist. Only we ain't there yet.

Trouble is, in my opinion, we won't get there without the ruling class screwing up royally. That's because the populist masses are not really thinking about politics the way that the upper-class Gentry does. Commoners think about their ordinary lives and how to get a better job. Gentry think about how to change the world.

The upper-class Gentry is all-in on climate change. Why? Well mostly because everyone who is anyone is all in on climate change, darling. Now I believe that, never mind the science, that the economics is going to be disastrous. Of course it is, because it is a top-down quasi-socialist plan that really has no clue what all the unanticipated consequences of a lurch away from fossil fuels will be. Socialist, systemic plans are always disastrous, because the world is not a system, but an emergent phenomenon.

The upper-class Gentry is all in on Wokist racism and particularism, as the foolish Dalton School staff demonstrated to the world. Here's the thing. It may be a horrible moral problem that blacks still aren't wiving and thriving as they should, but to amp up the current racist critical-race-theory successor to the racist "affirmative action" programs is to divide America up. And it violates the basis of modern society, that the individual is the individual first and foremost, and not the member of a race or tribe.

The point is that the upper-class Gentry right now is perfectly happy with their culture and politics. They think they are the good people and they are going to make a better world with their wokism and their climate change and their expert-led programs and their activist-driven agendas that bring more and more of the economy under the supervision of credentialed bureaucratic experts.

Thus nothing will change their minds short of a massive crack-up.

And I am not talking about a crack-up that gets them to change their minds: no chance of that. I am talking about a crack-up that whacks the ordinary Commoner and seriously damages their lives. It might be the damage to lives and livelihoods from the climate change program. Or it might be a rapid increase in human rubble from any number of expert-led programs that provide honor and status to upper-class credentialed Gentry experts.

See, I get the feeling that the Biden administration appointees are all people that are thinking, OK, great, now we can get back to normal, after the stupidities of the Trump years. They have no idea that it is their agenda, the agenda that all good expert, credentialed people support, that is the problem.

Back in 2009 I wrote that this was not the right time to do a huge health-care bill. The only thing that mattered in the aftermath of the generational financial crisis of 2006-08 was the get the economy back on track.

I'd say the same today. This is not the time to do climate change and systemic racism. After the generational smashup to the economy, particularly to ordinary Commoners that can't "work at home," the number one issue is getting the economy back on track.

But do you think there is anyone in Bidenland that appreciates that? No, when they look at the situation, they say that this is our only chance to get our agenda going, to save the planet from global warming and save society from systemic racism. So, pedal to the metal.

In my view, the damage and suffering that this policy will impose on America will cause another Trump situation, and another Trump populist eruption.

But I am sure that our betters in the ruling class have no idea about that. Courtiers in the court of the absolute monarch never do.

The Eternal Temptation of the Ruling Class Scions

Back in the day the world was simple for rough tough young scions of the ruling class. They were warriors! Saving their countries from the neighboring savages! Or from the Goths, or the Huns, or the Mongols!

But when you get to the absolute monarchs, you get Henry VIII pictured in extravagantly expensive be-jeweled garments. You get Louis XIV in extravagantly expensive be-jeweled garments plus showing a nice bit of leg.

When you get to the nineteenth century you get the politician that really knows how to carry the House of Commons with him. If you are a Disraeli you are a dab hand at stealing the Liberal Party agenda and extending the franchise further than the Libs had dare propose.

In the twentieth century you get Lords of Creation like President Wilson getting the US into WWI to help teach the Kaiser a lesson. What a hero! Then we had President Roosevelt going him one better. First he was the champion of the common man with a magnificent New Deal that fundamentally transformed America for the better. And then he topped it off by dispatching the Nazis to the trash-can of history.

In other words. No matter what, there are would-be political Saviors all over the place that desperately need something, anything, so that they can strut their stuff and prove that they are the best thing since sliced bread.

In our day, one ruling class grift is Activism, proving yourself to be a True Ally to all the oppressed peoples out there. And boy, are you going to teach those systemic racist white oppressors a lesson!

Another ruling class grift is using the courts and the legal system to advance political goals that cannot be won by conventional political means, such as through legislative action: often called Lawfare.

For instance, this morning I got an email from a Nick Cady, of Cascade Wildlands, "Missing lynx: Advocates challenge Feds’ refusal to prepare recovery plan." The advocates are suing in federal court  "challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (the Service’s) decision to forgo recovery planning for threatened Canada lynx." Every young scion is trying to think up a scam like this.

Then there are a couple of WattsUpWithThat pieces: one is about a swamp plan to implement the Green New Deal "with No Legislation, No Rulemaking Process, Just a Sweetheart Consent Decree." Another is about the Massachusetts Attorney General's plan to use its attorneys to enforce the Paris climate treaty (which isn't a treaty in the US).

I have been trying to think up a meme to describe this approach to politics. And I get it. This is no different than the warrior leaders of old puffing their courage before their tribesmen. Or the absolute monarch fluffing their ermine robes before the courtiers that can't afford be-jeweled ermine. Or the 20th century politicians saving the world from Nazis and Commies. Or the activist chappies heroically saving the "threatened" lynx. Or the Al Gores and WEF chappies saving the world from climate change.

I already have a blog label "lefts errors" and a blog label "lefts crimes." I was thinking about "lefts cunning" but I don't know that the left is particularly cunning. Hey, I know! How about "lefts conceits," the conceit that rather dull and unremarkable scions of the ruling class are in fact heroes of the age. This would fit into the Curtis Yarvin notion of the gentry class's lust for "ambition, honor, and vanity."

The thing is that ruling classes since time began have been fluffing their feathers in search of "ambition, honor, and vanity." It's just that the means have changed over the centuries.

But, I'd say, whatever the century we are still talking about rather average men trying to sell themselves to the world as world conquerors. For the real work of the world, as George Eliot reminded us at the end of Middlemarch, has a lot to do with ordinary decent people who "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." 

 

An Indictment of the Ruling Class

Reading the tone of the reporting of the election aftermath it looks like the usual suspects want President Trump to give up on the rather evidently stolen election.

Let's concede that, in the recounts and the Trump lawsuits that our Democratic friends will be able to cover up the dead bodies enough to get through to January 20 and the inauguration of Joe Biden.

But let us rehearse the Chris Chantrill narrative of why you ain't seen nothin' yet.

First of all, the cheating. Normal humans only start to cheat when things are going unexpectedly wrong. It can't be true that my business is losing money! It can't be true that the voters think they are getting screwed by the ruling class! So, a little thumb on the scales ought to get us through the current unpleasantness.

Second, the "deplorable phenomenon." Of course, ruling classes have always thought that the people they ruled were yahoos. Else why would the rulers be the rulers and the ruled the ruled? But the truth is that rulers tend to "overdetermine" their virtues, which are, after all, not universal but only present in a few exceptional individuals in the ruling class. The rest of it is ruling-class conceit. And so almost everything that a ruling class does is a manifestation of its conceit and its disdain for the lower orders.

Third, "the natives are restless." One of the points that Gaetano Mosca makes in The Ruling Class is that a good ruling class is always sensitive to the tides and passions among the masses. It knows that one of its biggest jobs is to keep the people more-or-less content. One of the strengths of the British colonial system was its recognition that when "the natives are restless" then the imperial regime needed to pay attention. But our ruling class has declared war on the basket of deplorables, because racist-sexist-homophobe, and counts it a virtue to humble and humiliate the plebs.

Fourth, naked self-dealing. Of course, a ruling class has to take care of its own, but any sensible ruling class knows that there are limits. In particular there is the injunction of the British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell:

My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.

There are a whole bunch of issues on which the ruling class is indulging itself and making things a lot worse for the average Joe. As in

Issue	Ruling Class	Commoners
Climate change	Jobs for gentry	makes energy more expensive.
Environmentalism	Jobs for gentry	makes houses more expensive.
Feminism	Gentry women feel good	turns world upside down for commoner women
Sexual Revolution	Bit of fun in college	turns world upside down for commoner women
LGBT	Gentry gets creative about sex	er, what?
Mortgage subsidies	Increases value of gentry homes	makes housing less affordable.
Education	Inside track on private ed.	puts education in hands of teachers' unions.
Mass transit	OK for gentry neighborhoods	makes it harder for suburb-to-suburb commuting.
Building codes	Enforces gentry- style luxury	makes housing more expensive
Diversity	Jobs for gentry	disfavors white working class
Student loans	OK for professional class	makes college unaffordable

The consequence of all these issues is that the educated ruling class soars above all the problems, because of various advantages, but the ordinary schmuck is left holding the baby.

My feeling is that our ruling class has literally no idea how it oppresses and exploits the ordinary Commoner American. The main reason is that the ruling-class's belief system, its religion, declares that the current ruling class of the educated gentry is the best thing since sliced bread.

But I like to use the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral framework to show how deluded this is. First of all, just how oppressed are the blacks, Latinos, women, LGBTs supposed to be? Not very, I submit, because discrimination is illegal. And how oppressive are the white oppressors? Who are they, anyway? Since the whole educated class these days seems to be Democrats, down for the struggle, that leaves home builders, small business people, fundamentalist Christians, white males that drive trucks. And they are supposed to be powerful? And how noble are the "allies?" If you ask me, the allies are the people that have declared certain groups as oppressed, and other groups as oppressors, but they are the practically perfect people in every way with the power to make things right.

There's a famous saying, by Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life.

Yes. No doubt life is pretty sweet for our educated ruling class. But it ain't so sweet for many of the Commoners and even for the Clients of the ruling class. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Or maybe it does. 

The Accumulation of Liberal Follies

So, today President Trump's nominee for Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, is up before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And, as they say, it is another high-stakes nomination battle, because for liberals everything is hanging in the balance, including abortion and homosexual marriage.

Do you understand, liberals, why having the Supreme Court legislate from the bench is a very bad strategic idea, however cool it may seem from a tactical standpoint?

Do you see how it is rather a bad idea to impose your moral agenda with a Supreme Court majority and then find yourself desperate to maintain that majority by fair means or foul a generation down the road?

No, I didn't think you did.

My standard illustration of this is the Washington State initiative process. Back in the Eighties, if you can believe it, Washington State had a vocal religions right movement that put an initiative on the ballot to restrict abortions. The initiative went down to defeat, and abortion has not been heard from since then in Washington State. Because a vote of the people is dispositive.

It is telling that a cult of personality has grown up around the career of the departed Justice Ginsburg. Really? A cult of personality around a judge? It is telling because in the Anglo-American tradition a judge is a deadly boring crosser of "t"s and dotter of "i"s. Judgeology is about comparing two pieces of legislation and determining how to deal with the contradictions between them. Or about evaluating a piece of legislation in view of the dictates of the Constitution.

Of course, the educated elite always has an inside track in the judiciary. That is understood. But when the educated elite acting through the judiciary imposes its cultural will on the rest of the nation, that is not good.

The point is that when you want to change the law on abortion you need to persuade the nation. Now my belief is that there are two things to consider on abortion. The first is how far the criminal law should go. Is it OK to terminate the life of a newborn child? Nearly everyone will say No. Is it OK to take a drug in the first month of pregnancy to cause a spontaneous abortion? Nearly everyone will say OK.

But whatabout abortion as a moral question? I'd guess that a lot more people would be queasy about abortion as a moral question than as a criminal question.

That is why we have a separation of church and state. The state is all about what we will oppose with police and judges and jailers. The church is all about voluntary moral communities that say Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, but without the police and judges and jailers to back it up.

As a profound sexist I say that the criminal law is a boy thing: police with nightsticks, judges with the power to send you to jail, jails with doors clanging shut on your freedom. And I say that the moral law is a girl thing, with its naming and shaming and shunning, the "I can't believe she did that," or "Much as I hate to say it..." or "I can't even!" with which women dispose of each other in the community of women.

But I realize that we are a country mile away from my liberal neighbors having even a glimpse of a view of all this. They believe the liberal Zeitgeist and that's all. For them, RBG is a cult figure, because. And, of course, there is the perceived need of a professional woman to control her fertility. If you have a career, you plan your family to fit in with your career trajectory.

But whatabout non-professional women that don't feel the need to control their fertility, that would prefer a moral framework where everyone from husbands to society at large is morally and physically committed to raising every child conceived?

So, the moralization of the Supreme Court is just one in a growing avalanche of liberal errors, liberal conceits, liberal follies, the belief that you can actually plan society like a garden.

I believe that life is much more like cleaning up after mistakes, and that the sooner you realize you made a mistake, the better.

But in real life, as Anthony Trollope shows in his short novel Linda Tressel, the last thing people are willing to do is recognize they made a mistake. Especially when they have strong religious and/or ideological beliefs.

And when you push ahead with your religious or ideological agenda and damn the torpedoes, the only question becomes how big the butcher's bill will be.

Activism and a Meaningful LIfe

It's about five years since I started writing about "Activism Culture." One of the first posts was "If Every Young Liberal Longs to be an Activist, What About Conservatives?" That post started with a conversation I had with a woman friend who had quit her job and gone back to school. She was upgrading her skills because she had always wanted to get into "activism."

So here's another monument to "activism." It's an MSNBC producer, Ariana N. Pekary, who quit her job last month at MSNBC. She couldn't take it any more, because media has now become purely a race for ratings, and every moment of every program is evaluated according to how it "rates." Says she:

Through this pandemic and the surreal, alienating lockdown, I’ve witnessed many people question their lives and what they’re doing with their time on this planet.  I reckon I’m one of those people, looking for greater meaning and truth.

That, I am sure, is what my friend was looking for in "activism." And indeed, young people are all carefully taught in our schools and universities, that activism in behalf of traditionally marginalized people is the answer to the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

You can see the notion in the woke left's Three Layers understanding of society, courtesy of Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Allies, you wonder? Listen to this Portland stay-at-home mom, who objected to PTA money funding expensive African drumming classes for minority students at her kids' middle school.

This escalated to the point where they offered white ally trainings so that white parents could understand and learn their white privilege.

This view of society exactly matches the Activism Culture. Activists, on this understanding, are the "ällies" of "members of oppressed groups," And the meaning of life, or in Arian Pekary's words, "greater meaning and truth" issues from acts of allying with members of oppressed groups in political action.

Notice the essential ingredient in this Three Layer theory. It is the "white oppressors." Without the white oppressors the "allies" wouldn't have a reason to fight for the members of oppressed groups. So the whole thing depends upon there really being a category of "white oppressors."

In other words, for a woman who has always wanted to get into "activism" it doesn't make sense unless there truly is a darkling cloud of "white oppressors" out there on the horizon. That is why, of course, our liberal friends are always on about white supremacists and white nationalists and racist-sexist-homophobes and the radical right. Because there must be a Satan behind the clear and obvious oppression of traditionally marginalized groups.

Now, I think that "activism" of Activism Culture means two different things, depending on whether you are a man or a woman, and this issues out of the basic instincts of men as defenders and women as nurturers.

Thus, AntiFa is clearly a male effort, of black-clad street soldiers fighting for justice against the eevil right-wing fascists.

Thus my friend's efforts to help poor southern women register to vote is clearly an effort to be helpful and nurturing.

But what if the "members of oppressed groups" are not really very oppressed? What if the "white oppressors" are just ordinary white middle-class Commoners with no particular economic, cultural, or political power? What if the "allies" are conceited members of the educated Gentry "looking for greater meaning and truth" in the wrong places?

It's a good question. How would you know the answer?

I guess that this suggests the importance of the Jungian notion of the Sacrificial Hero archetype. If your "activism" leads to you being a national hero beloved by all MSNBC producers and executives because your activism builds TV ratings, I'd say that you are probably doing the wrong thing.

But if your "activism" merely illuminated the border between Order and Chaos and shines a little light on a darkling world and your activism doesn't lead to any publicity and the glare of the klieg lights. Well then, probably it is leading to "greater meaning and truth."

For never forget my two maxims about government and politics:

Government is force. 

Politics is division.

It means that whenever you do anything in politics and government, chances are you are making things worse. Because humans as social animals thrive from the reduction of force and the smoothing over of divisions.

Or, more simply, anyone getting into "activism" is playing with fire when it comes to a meaningful life. 

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Left's Conceits -- Contents

The Garden of the Left's Conceits

1. Chavez Will End in Tears
   
   
2. "Make Price Gouging Illegal"
   
   
3. Liberals are Different From You and Me...
   
   
4. Vanity of Vanities
   
   
5. The Three Liberal Conceits
   
   
6. Obama and the Liberal Bubble
   
   
7. Remember, The Left's God is Liberation
   
   
8. How's That Fundamental Transformation Doing?
   
   
9. The Shallow Conceit of the North London Luvvie
   
   
10. The Three Liberal Conceits
    
    
11. There is No Such Thing as "Peaceful Protest"
    
    
12. How Humans Can Cooperate Without Being Forced
    
    
13. Playing Out Obama's String
    
    
14. Fundamentalism and Denialism on the Left
    
    
15. What Our Ruling Class Gets Wrong
    
    
16. Think of Liberals as Trapped Rats
    
    
17. How to Turn Left Through Modernism and Postmodernism
    
    
18. President Obama's Divisiveness: What Does He Mean?
    
    
19. When Will Liberals Lose Control of their Identity Politics?
    
    
20. Everything the Left Believes is Wrong
    
    
21. The Left's Trifecta of Delusion, Incompetence, and Spite
    
    
22. The Left's Conceit About "Resistance"
    
    
23. Yes, Liberals, Critical Theory Applies to Your Ideas Too
    
    
24. On the Receiving End of the Ruling-Class's Cultural Narrative
    
    
25. The Dilemma of the Well-born Human
    
    
26. The Left's Practice of Politics
    
    
27. The New York Times' Problem
    
    
28. Activism and a Meaningful LIfe
    
    
29. The Accumulation of Liberal Follies
    
    
30. An Indictment of the Ruling Class
    
    
31. The Eternal Temptation of the Ruling Class Scions
    
    
32. Showing the Ruling Class the Door
    
    
33. Understanding Gender Madness
    
    
34. Hey, Black Americans: Grow Up!
    
    
35. Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"
    
    
36. Another Four Law. But What to Call It?
    
    
37. Our Liberal Friends Won't Know What Hit Them
    
    
38. Allyism, Republicans and Democrats
    
    
39. The Political Wages of COVID
    
    
40. Lefties, LGBTs, Liberals and Their Conceit
    
    
41. When a Protest is "Mostly Peaceful" Then Maybe Crowd Control is Needed
    
42. Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It