Philosophizing about the Next Regime

Everyone who isn't a deep-state liberal is thinking about how we ditch the present regime, which goes by the name of liberal democracy but is anything but.

Many of the alternative philosophies are efforts to imagine a new philosophy without thinking about the practical process of getting there. Zman criticizes libertarianism and also the revival of the Catholic idea of "integralism" for this. As he says:

Integralism is the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society. 

But what if the majority of people aren't Catholics? Then you don't have a chance of basing society on a Catholic basis. Then Zman goes on to critique the history of the Right in the 20th century, even the deification of the Founders and their Constitution. The Consitution was a political compromise by practical politicians, he writes, not a sacred truth.

But the Constitution was very much a thing of its time, representing the rising bourgeoisie against the old regime of feudal monarchy.

In fact, I would say that the politics of the last 500 years has always involved a rising class wanting to take its rightful place in the public square and its power.

Let us consider Henry VII in England as simply a feudal faction beating up on the old regime and taking power.

What did the Tudors achieve? Well, they spawned the Elizabethen era that we regard, even now, with a golden glow.

But a century and a half later the English Civil War definitely involved the rising middle class, its Puritan ideology, and its refusal to pay "ship money" for the king's foreign advantures.

What did the Puritans achieve? Well they got the Dutch to invade and they taught the Brits how to finance a Second Hundred Years War against the French and make a mighty British Empire.

And the French Revolution definitely involved a rising class of thinkers and middle class inspired by another ideological movement, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu.

What did the French Revolution achieve? Well, it led to the end of France as the top dog in Europe. Sorry about that.

And the 20th century's socialism and administrative state definitely involves a rising class of would-be educated supervisors of society and the economy and the culture inspired by Marx and Fabianism and the idea that evolved, educated people should supervise the chaotic injustice of industrial capitalism. And teach the Robber Barons, the malefactors of great wealth and the economic royalists a lesson.

What did the evolved educated class achieve? I'd say two world wars, monstrous regimes in Russia and China, and a program of domestic lootinug unparalleted in human history. What else to you call a state spending 35-50 percent of GDP this year and every year on government loot and plunder?

You would think, wouldn't you, that there would be people starting to get restless unde the boot of the evolved, educated class, and you would be right.

I'd say that this is a rising movement of the ordinary middle class. We only really understand this movement through the pejoratives of the current ruling class, as "populists" and "racists" and "white oppressors" and "gun nuts." But what they are is ordinary middle class people with ordinary middle-class lives and they want a society and social norms that value ordinary middle-class people and their ordinary lives of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

And I say that we have seen three presidencies in the US already that have represented these people: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. That is why all the right people have all agreed that Nixon was a monster, Reagan was an amiable dunce, and Trump was a Russian stooge. All agreed?

I say that the current woke-ism is actually a sign that the evolved, educated ruling class is in trouble. A ruling class that's firmly in the saddle doesn't have to resort to censorship and canceling and purging of heretics from the Cathedral of education and media. You only get reigns of terror and virtue and J6 Committee show trials when things are going wrong for the rulers. And they "cain't stand 'im" as a famous American philsopher once said.

But whatabout the Zman's concern for a ruling philosophy or political formula that the new regime will base its power upon?

Honestly, I don't know. But you know what I do think? I think that once the new regime is in place then all kinds of unconnected facts and people and ideas will come together in a new narrative. And it will all be obvious. And everyone will say that they saw it coming all along.

How the Next Regime Dishes the Lefties

In the last weeks there have been a lot of "far-right" thinkers pondering about the failure of conservatism. Here's the Zman today up at Taki's. Conservatism is dead. So let's conduct an autopsy.

One reason we conduct autopsies is to better understand what to avoid in the future. The same is true of these debates going on within what is left of conservatism. This dustup between William Voegeli and Glenn Ellmers is a good example.

I did a piece criticizing Voegeli and Ellmers at Amerian Thinker.

One reason conservatism failed, I think, is that it was merely defending itself. But you have to go on offense, for "offense is the best defense."

Or, any politics must have an enemy. And what do you do with an enemy? You go out and defeat it.

This has been the strength of the left since Marx. There's always an enemy. First it was the capitalists and or the bourgeoisie. Then it was Southern racists. Now it is the ordinary white middle class, the white oppressors of which you've heard tell.

So I say that the new politics needs to be an expanding middle. The ordinary middle class are the good guys; the pointy-headed intellectuals and the "experts agree" and the wokey activists are the bad guys. In any politics we must decide who are our friends are and who is the enemy.

In the next regime, our friends are any people that come join us in celebrating the ordinary arc of human life, people who want to wive and thrive, get married have children, work a decent job, and leave a little for the next generation. We say to the lower class: you could be our friends, and we will look after you.

Our enemy is the Cathedral, the educated class that has spent the last 50 years making war on the middle class. They must be beaten, despoiled, and humiliated. And don't forget the lamentation of their women.

How do we beat them? I'd say it starts with demolishing the current education system. First, we replace the government K-12 system with vouchers, so parents send their kids to the school of their choice. Then we attack occupational licensing and credentialism. Then we demolish the universities. Universities used to be the place where the ruling class trained the priests for the state church. Today universities are the place where the ruling class teaches the kiddies to hate their country, hate their history, and hate the middle class.

Let's do the numbers on education. RIght now, total government spending on education is $1.3 trillion. Let's say that the population under 25 is 28 percent of 330 million. If we divvy up the $1.3 trillion that adds up to $14,000 in vouchers per kiddie. Wow, that's real money, especially if the moms in the neighborhood get together to create a group homeschool.

But whatabout the teachers, the professors, the administrators, the DEI specialists? What will happen to them? No problem. They will still have jobs. Providing they teach the kiddies what the parents want them to teach, because vouchers. Of course those educationists that are rabid lefties and LBGT groomers, well, they will have to change the cut of their jib. Maybe they could get jobs at McDonalds.

But whatabout science and research? Perfectly simple. We reward billionaires that fund research with medals and tax rebates.

But maybe we can save a bunch on education by implementing my plan of apprenticeships for everyone that isn't going to be a physicist or a philosopher. The whole point of apprenticeships is for young'uns to get paid for doing something useful while they are learning to be useful.

And whaddya know, there's an outfit called Praxis that's pushing apprenticeship as an alternative to college.

Whatabout dishing the credentialists, from lawyers to physicians? I would say that any organization that issues credentials has to accept unlimited liability for the errors of its credentialees. So law schools and state bar associations and medical schools and medical associations will be liable for the mistakes of the folks that they have declared to be ready for prime time.

Yep, I suspect that these special interests are not too interested in anything more scary than keeping the low-renters out of their sacred precincts.

Yes, but how do we know whether our doctor or lawyer -- or auto mechanic -- is competent? Hey, I know. How about a combination of liability insurance and a ratings system -- like eBay and Etsy and Amazon and TripAdvisor? You think?

Then there is climate change. With President Biden talking about high gas prices as an "incredible transition" and Democratic politicians all over the place putting bans on natural gas hookups for new construction, I'd say we are getting to a place where we can say that climatistas are the enemy of the ordinary middle class: enemies of affordable energy, enemies of personal transportation, enemies of a safe place to raise your children, enemies of comfort: indeed enemies of the ordinary middle class.

We say to the educated class: Go Away, or you will regret it.

Tony Blair's Poltical Revolution in Britain: What Can We Yanks Learn From It?

Officially, the Brits sneer at Tony Blair, the guy that rescued Britain's Labour Party from left-wing lunacy. For a while. But Mick Hume reminds us, on the 25th anniversary of Blair's win in 1997, that Blair reordered Britain's approach to government.

New Labour firmly believed in changing how people lived their lives, and regulating human behaviour. It would be the central new role of government to discourage bad habits, interfering in everything from what we should eat and drink to what we were allowed to say and think.

Back in 1997 Hume was editor of LM Magazine (LM = Living Marxism) and his reaction to Blair's win was:

The Tony Blair Commandments: Thou Shalt Not smoke, drink or eat what you like; have a gun, a knife or a wild sex life; watch, read or download what you want; bring up your children as you see best; use what words, gestures or jokes you choose; or in any other way think for yourself.

In other words, Blair "accelerated a shift in power from elected to unelected and unaccountable institutions", administrative, regulatory, supervisory institutions that continually butt into our daily lives. And the Brit elite is just as eager to police the internet as our noble rulers here in the US.

Mick Hume, a lefty, finishes up with  a plea to "put personal freedom and popular democracy back at the heart of British politics." Doesn't sound all that different from Trumpism, that our President Biden just anathematized:

This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history. Recent American history.

Only, I'd say, as the president implies indirectly, the "MAGA crowd" isn't really an organization at all. It is the cultural-political aura around former President Trump. It is inchoate, organic, supported by ordinary middle class people and nobody in the ruling class really knows what to do about it.

It's interesting to note how Britain and the US tend to echo each other. In the Eighties we had Reagan and the Brits had Thatcher. Both were saying that the old economic regime wasn't working. In the Nineties we had Clinton and the Brits had Blair. Both were saying that the old working-class politics of the mid 20th century didn't play any more. And both proposed the rule of the educated class as wise counselors -- combining, I would say, political power and religious belief. In the 2010s we had Trump and they had Brexit, in which the ordinary middle class rebelled peacefully against its betters.

The simple thing to say is that both the US and UK are experiencing the Woke Meltdown. I think I saw a cartoon recently that showed Elon Musk as Dorothy throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West who is crying "I'm Melting."

But then what?

One thing that's important. I don't think that the "MAGA crowd," as extreme as it doubtless is, wants to burn the place down. And that might make the Great Rebellion relatively peaceful.

Liberal Democracy and the Enemy

The Zman has a couple of posts on the curious aggressiveness of "liberal democracy." 

In "Expansionist Ideology" he notes that everyone agrees that fascism is expansionary, but wow, it wasn't in Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal. Communism was explicitly expansionist, of course. We all know that too. He notes that

communism cannot exist without some new ground to conquer, while fascism is at least capable of operating within national boundaries as a good neighbor.

Whatabout "liberal democracies?" Well, everyone agrees that 

democracies do not go to war with one another... Liberal democracies are dragged into conflict by illiberal systems that only understand force.

Except that 

The United States, the epicenter of liberal democracy, has been at war for over a century. In fact, the reason for the past tense when speaking of fascism and communism is the United States conquered these two systems in the name of liberal democracy.

So what gives?

Fascism was a revolt against modernity. Communism was a revolt against the past. Liberal democracy is a revolt against nature, specifically the natural limits of the human animal.

So, after liberal democracy defeated fascism it went on to defeat communism. "Once communism was defeated, it declared war on the world."

What exactly is our beef with Russia over Ukraine? Good question. And with China over Taiwan? You tell me. So, the Zman says, liberal democracy is the worst.

The limited expansionism of fascism triggered a war in Europe then world war. The explicit expansionism of communism plunged the world into a forty year cold war. The hyper-violent, revolutionary expansionism of liberal democracy now promises something far worse.

He's got a point. 

In "The Violence of Democracy" the Zman reviews the history of democracy, from Athens and the Peloponnesian war to the French Revolution to the United States that was created in war and then had the War of 1812, the Civil War, then war with Spain, then Europe, then Communism, then the Muslims, and now a cold war -- possibly becoming hot -- with Russia.

And why would we be going to war with Russia, "an important part of the global supply chain for things like energy, food and raw materials." Or China, "the manufacturer of many Western goods?"

You tell me.

Of course, the answer is obvious. Curtis Yarvin: "there is no politics without an enemy." Our liberal friends believe that politics is the royal road to justice. But if Yarvin is right then politics, whether or not it is bending towards justice, is always a fight against an enemy.

If politics is a fight against an enemy, then it is always war. That is what it does.

Do you see the problem here? As I like to say, politics makes complete sense when humans are fighting over food-yielding land, in an age when food-yielding land is everything. But in our present industrial, or post-industrial, era when everything is for sale on the market, and can be resolved by buying and selling, and the best land for food is not necessarily a matter of life and death? Maybe we don't need politics.

Now I would say that if you look over the last century in the US, you get the feeling that our Democratic friends are always spoiling for a fight. And Republicans are not. No wars in the Republican 1920s. Winding down the Korean War in the 1950s. Winning the Cold War without a fight in the 1980s. Oh yes: Bush and Iraq. But then no new wars on Trump's watch. But Ukraine on Biden's watch.

And, of course, our liberal friends are always looking for a fight in domestic politics. With the current likelihood that the Supreme Court is going to send abortion back to the states, our liberal friends are rending their garments and threatening to end the filibuster, jam abortion through Congress, and expand the Supreme Court, and I know not what.

Which makes the Zman's point. If our liberal friends can't get their way, they will drive over the rules.so they can get what they want anyway. And a bunch of wags are noting that liberals are suddenly talking about "women's rights" and forget "birthing person;" "child" instead of "foetus." When you are angry you forget your artful circumlocutions.

I say that the Age of Politics, that I define as the era of the rule of the educated class, is in its autumn. We really don't need politics, because we have better ways of resolving our differences, as proposed by lefty Jürgen Habermas.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement. If the rational system of the Enlightenment and its instrumental reason is indeed strategic, a mechanical system that deals only in power and domination, it is only part of the truth. Humans also dwell in a lifeworld of shared cultural tradition. 

Notice that our liberal friends do not accept the idea of living in a "lifeworld of shared cultural tradition" and developing moral agreement with eevil racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacists. Because the Other are the enemy. The idea that liberals share a cultural tradition with the eevil racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacists is anathema to our liberal friends. They will define morality, and we will go along.

Now it is my belief that the ordinary American middle class is really not that into politics, unless jabbed with a stick. On my reductive Three Peoples theory, the middle class is a class of Responsibles that live by obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

An it is my belief that the rise of populist nationalism, here and elsewhere, is a response to the ordinary middle class being jabbed with a stick by the educated class, all over the world.

So, either the ordinary middle class, in nation after nation, will put an end to the Age of Politics run by our educated liberal friends, or we won't.

Stay tuned for next week's exciting episode.

Progressives: The Bill of Indictment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collapsing Three Layers into Two

If you want to understand humans as simply as possible, but no simpler, then, in my opinion and the opinion of Curtis Yarvin, you need to divide us into three parts. Three Layers, he calls it, with his Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Three Peoples, as I call it, with my Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

That is what you do when you want to survey the human landscape and understand your fellow men.

But if you are playing politics, then, as per Curtis Yarvin, there is no politics without an enemy. So you have to collapse the Three Layer view of human society into the Two Sides of a conflict: "us" and "them." Where "them" is the enemy.

Once you do that then you are embarking on one of four wars.

1. Fight against a small country for a quick win.
2. Fight against a large country for a world war.
3. Fight against a large minority for a civil war.
4. Fight against a small minority for a quick win.

And Grok.

But, there is one other thing to consider: the question of the small minority. You would think that small minorities would keep their heads down, hoping that nobody would notice them. But they don't. E.g., the Jews. 

In fact, small minorities tend to be intransigent, because they feel that they need to be on their guard all the time. Just in case a mob of the majority should come down the street and take them out. Also, they need to remind the majority that nobody better mess with them. Because.

So our modern small minorities like to pretend that, really, they are all powerful and that if you mess with them then you are asking for trouble. Thus the Jews have elevated "anti-Semitism" into the worst thing in the world and if you are guilty of anti-Semitism you will find that the whole world is against you, you bigot you. The same thing seems to apply with the blacks. Anti-black racism is the worst thing is the world and you'd better not be identified as a racist, you racist you.

Our liberal friends practice the "intransigent minority" gambit with their Activism Culture. And all of their activist groups have some sort of call-to-battle slogan. I noticed that the BMW next to me on the ferry crossing from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island had two mini bumper stickers on the back: "Black Lives Matter" and "Stop Asian Hate." Then I went into a nice liberal bookstore and it feels like all the books are playing the activism game, making a case for some helpless minority mired in injustice that only a wise, sensitive activist class can resolve. Yes. Activism is an upper-class, educated-class thing in the modern western world.

Why does the "intransigent minority" gambit work? I think it is because most people are not up for a war, they don't like to get into a pissing match, whether on the national front or on the international front. So, if an "intransigent minority" gets in your face, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class -- and the educated and the media and the universities -- you'd better watch out, pal. 

Thus, an "intransigent minority" often boxes above its weight, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class, because people know that getting targeted by an "intransigent minority" means trouble, right here in River City.

Notice how in the modern era our politics involves collapsing the Three Layers into two. Obviously Marxism did this, by collapsing the three layers of Bourgeoisie, Proletarians, and Communists into two: Communists and Proletarians on one side and the Bourgeoisie on the other.

In the case of the modern Allyship narrative, we have Allies, Oppressed Peoples, and White Oppressors. The Allies and Oppressed Peoples stick together so the White Oppressors are on their own.

It is, of course, a conceit of Marxism and Allyship that they represent the vast majority of the people -- rather than the minority interest of an "intransigent minority" with an appetite for political power. But that conceit provides the opportunity for us ordinary mortals. When it comes to the crunch, does the activist group really represent the vast majority of helpless victims, as their ideology pretends, or not?

I think that for the first half of the 20th century the educated elite and their clients really did represent the majority. But since the 1960s this majority has been whittling away, because the majority of the population, more and more, is the ordinary middle class.

I think that, again and again since the start of the 1970s we have seen a movement of the ordinary middle class erupt in politics. But up to now the educated ruling class has managed to abort each eruption.

At some point, in my judgement, the educated class will fail to abort a middle-class eruption. And then the regime will change.

After the American Empire

I've been seeing pieces that say, more or less, that if you don't hate Putin you're a traitor. Funny how the folks that were dancing toe-to-toe with Soviet Commies back in the day and saying that anyone that objected was a McCarthyite are now playing the Traitor Card.

Well, all I can say is, call me a traitor.

I think it is high time the US stopped trying to run the world and start to mind its own fences.

I'm sure that Vladimir Putin is a megalomanic. I suspect that Ukraine has become a puppet. Of someone. Because if Hunter Biden was trolling for million dollar bills in Ukraine with 50 percent for the "big guy" then I don't think we are talking about a sweet innocent virgin any more.

Look, it's only natural for a newcomer on the world scene to start throwing its weight around. As the US did in the Spanish American War in 1898. But, if you ask me it was pure imperialism.

But I fail to see the point of getting into World War I, President Wilson. Except that all the cool kids were dukin' it out in Europe. So, as any college president would do, the former president of Princeton decided he had to get in on the action. College presidents are so into cultural fashion, as we have seen in the last decade.

Then President Wilson decided that we needed a Carthaginian peace to teach Germany a lesson with the Versailles treaty that made the Germans into second-class citizens and set the stage for Literally Hitler. Thanks President Wilson. Only a college president could set up such a disaster.

So let's suppose we had to get into World War II. So that Hitler didn't conquer the world. Because we had screwed up in 1919. But would he have done so? What would have happened in his Russia campaign if the US hadn't been sending Russia lots of Dodge trucks for Solzhenitsyn to drive around in?

Anyway, after World War II we decided it was time to really teach the Germans a lesson so that they would never descend to aggressive nationalism again. Except that the occupying forces in Germany didn't have a clue how to run the place top-down, as Edward N. Peterson related in The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory. So by 1948 the occupiers just let the Germans take over their own country and ignite a Wirtschaftwunder. Anyway, we needed the Germans to help fight a Cold War against Stalin's Russia.

Anyway, no doubt we had to hold back Soviet Russia in the Cold War. I suppose, what with Europe absolutely devastated and all.

But I think, looking over the current Putin thing, that the Euros can handle this one on their own. I think the current situation is a great opportunity to say: hey, you guys are great, and you are closest to the action, so we'll trust you to do it right.

And then bug out of Europe and bring all the US troops home, and go to work on America. Of course, it will reduce the career opportunities for well-born young men to have careers in the foreign service. That might end up demoralizing the entire educated class.

Notice how nothing has changed. Today we have a new generation of the ruling class, and guess what: they have a top-down plan to rule America and Build Back Better towards a renewable future. Just like the ruling class had a top-down plan to run Germany in 1945.

Hey kids: Remember the Rules?

• Rule One: Don't invade Russia
• Rule Two: Don't invade China
• Rule Three: Don't do top-down

Oh yeah. Remember socialism? Top-down economic management by the experts? Treating people like Newtonian machines? And the New Deal? Top-down economic response to depression? And COVID? Top-down response to an infectious disease?

You know, you educated people, I am sure that you have read all the books and know that the current thing, the fashionable thing, is that mechanics and hierarchy and top-down management are so yesterday, darling. 

Today all the smart people know that the world works by "creative emergence." Something changes, maybe a butterfly in South America, and the whole world changes and we humans deal with it by adaption. Because the one thing we know that cannot work is a top-down program designed and managed by credentialed experts.

That's what I want for the next America. Creative Emergence. Adaption. Ordinary people running their ordinary lives, and credentialed experts keeping the heck out of the way.

Truckers are not Revolutionaries

My pal Curtis Yarvin is sneering at the Canadian truck parade as a failed revolution. And he has a point: if the truckers were trying to overthrow the Canadian government they were a pathetic zero. Successful revolutionaries look and act like The French Revolution's Saint Just and our own Lenin and Mao.

It is understandable that Yarvin would look at the truckers that way; his thing is "the next regime" and his ideal is a revolution where the present ruling class just walks out the door, accepting that its time is over.

But the truckers weren't trying to take over the government of Canada; they were just looking for some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. As the song goes. They were just saying, please stop messing with our lives and our jobs.

Hey, Canadian ruling class! How hard is that, to listen to the truckers and say, yes, you guys have a point? And then ignore them, as the ruling class generally does with jumped-up peasants? Or maybe concede some ridiculously small issue, patting the peasants on the back, and laughing to each other as the peasants  touch their forelocks before going back to the farm.

Anyway, now the whole thing is over, because all of a sudden on February 24, Prime Minister Trudeau announced the end of the emergency, just two days after the House of Commons voted in favor of a 30-day extension. Was the sudden change because the emergency was going to be defeated in the Canadian Senate? Or because Canadian banks were experiencing a run on accounts that could be frozen at any moment for any reason?

So I would say that the Canadian government made a ridiculous overreaction to the trucker protest. Hey, geniuses, you think that after two years of government ukases and mandates that the natives would be getting a bit restless? What? You never thought of that?

Remember back in the day when the Brit imperialists would report that "the natives are restless?" The point to understand is that the Brit imperial colonialists understood that they were governing a people that they didn't really understand. So when the natives got restless they understood "Houston we have a problem."

They did not spew out a paragraph of pejoratives, as Trudeau did, calling the truck protesters out for "antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia."

OK, let us understand, as economist Ludwig von Mises did when dealing with Austrian government officials in the 1910s to 1920s, that the vast majority of them are startlingly ignorant. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the trade of the politician is re-election. That he should do anything effective on the governing front is remarkable.

What Justin Trudeau is teaching us is that he really believes the political formula of today's educated class, that they are allies of the oppressed classes against white oppressors. And that the white oppressors are the enemy, and that the average white middle-class person is the enemy.

I suppose that it is a danger for any ruling class, that its functionaries actually come to believe the narrative and the lies that support it.

And the narrative of every ruling class is a farrago of lies, whether it is the feudal lords plundering their peasants, or the American revolutionaries that didn't want to pay for the French-Indian War, or the Progressives that gave us our administrative state and its entitlement programs and regulations, or the current woke elite that is desperately blaming the ordinary middle class for the failure of all the welfare-state programs from education to welfare, or the Trumpian nonsense about Making America Great Again.

What a wise ruling class understands is that over there in flyover land, the peasants see things differently than the rulers, and that this is normal. And a wise ruling class understands that everything it does takes monies away from A and gives it to B, and that A tends not to like that. This truth is inscribed in the First Amendment, which speaks about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The First Amendment, in its wisdom, understands that there will always be this group or that group that gets all riled up and reckons that "we was robbed" and wants to do something about it.

And yes, all assemblies, and demonstrations, and protests are really a show of strength, to communicate to the government that here is a bunch of people that are mad as hell and are not going to take it any more, to threaten, by their very presence and numbers, that they could turn the show of force into actual violence. But all such shows of force are better than an actual deployment of force.

And by the way, elections are another show of force, for when you win an election by getting the most votes, you are basically saying that we have the biggest army.

So I think that the Trudeau policy of actually representing the truckers as regime opponents is a strategic mistake. Just as I believe that the whole January 6 narrative of the Democrats is a strategic mistake.

Instead, I would recommend a National Committee to Review Cross-Border Trucking Regulations for our Canadian friends. And a National Commission to Investigate 2020 Election Irregularities for our Democratic friends.

I mean, there's nothing to worry about, right? The trucking regulations are as right as right could be, and a National Committee would soon confirm that. The 2020 presidential election was completely on the up-and-up, and an in-depth Commission would merely confirm it.

Exactly. So why are Canada's Liberals and US Democrats so touchy about all this? Surely, there is no possibility that where there is smoke there is fire?

I tell you, as I write this piece, I am thinking to myself: what is the problem with our ruling classes? How come they are so touchy? How come they are deploying pejoratives left, right and center?

Could it be that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark?

De-banking the Opposition

So, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has declared and state of emergency in which, maybe, the gubmint will have the power to seize the bank accounts and other financial instruments of armed insurrectionist trucker.s. Although the usual suspects don't mention that.

But then some wag posted a tweet that alleged that Gen. Washington, the armed North American insurrectionist of the 18th century, maintained an account at the Bank of England right throughout the Revolutionary War.

During the American War of Independence, General Washington had an account at the Bank of England. His monies were not seized. The belief at the time was the Govt could not seize private property absent due process and a judicial proceeding.

Tell #Canada

— Seth Barrett Tillman (@SethBTillman) February 16, 2022

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist of color, has been de-B-and-B'ed by Air BnB. 

Hey, you know what? My Argentinian friends tell me that back in the day, when Argentinians used to prefer to have US dollar-denominated accounts rather than Argentinian pesos, one day the government stepped in and converted their accounts from dollars to devalued  pesos, essentially taking away two-thirds of the value of their money. Yay Internet!

You know what I think. I think that it's time for Republicans to propose a new Civil Rights Law. It would go something like this:

No business or financial institution shall discriminate on the basis of armed insurrectionism, subject to penalties to be enacted by Congress.

This shouldn't be hard. I'd say that every institution that cancels an account should be forced -- subject to arrest and solitary confinement of the CEO -- to provide a link at which the former account holder can obtain a monthly payment of three-fourths of the outstanding credit balance at the time of cancellation. Until four months after the restoration of the account. Additional monies to be paid to the lawyer of the account-holder's choice. (Because Rule One: you have to deal in the lawyers.)

Justice for protesters! Right, lefties?

I mean. Back in the day, did the Weathermen have their accounts seized? Did the Communist Party of the United States have its accounts seized? Did black churches in the Jim Crow South have their bank accounts seized? Or what?

And there's this from Instapundit:

MORE TO COME: Doxxed Freedom Convoy Donor Forced to Close Her Restaurant After Threats. “Anyone who donated to the Freedom Convoy is now subject to partisan doxxing and potential threats or actual violence.”

Really, this can't be hard. Since the police aren't allowed to arrest "aspiring rappers" they have all the time in the world to go after lefty white oppressors who are doxxing their political opponents.

Why aren't the police pursuing these doxxers? Because they are the children of headline politicians? Because they are Activists of Color?  Or what?

I guess the only thing that will persuade our liberal friends about this is when liberal activists find themselves on the wrong end of it. Maybe the liberal fact-checker sites should be sanctioned for false fact-checks.

It all comes down to the eternal wisdom of Cpl. Jones in Dad's Army. Said he: "they don't like it up 'em." I have no idea what he meant by that, but I do know that our liberal friends are peculiar in their lack of strategic vision. They seem to be unable to understand that the weapons they deploy against their hated enemies could by turned against them.

Of course, I understand why this is so. When your ideas and your beliefs come direct to you from Gaia, they come to you direct from Gaia. And that is all you need to know.

Canadian Truckers and the Great Rebellion

I first crystallized on a narrative about the political suppression of ordinary Commoners back in November 2020. I wrote about how it all started when the Commoner-born Richard Nixon was cheated out of the White House with a stolen election in 1960.

My point is that the Commoners of America have been gradually coming to cultural and political consciousness in the last half century. Call it a Great Rebellion. And the educated ruling class keeps trying to sabotage this movement.

I don't want to suggest that the sabotage is scandalous. It is just natural that our present ruling class -- that practices an over - under political formula -- would find the middle-middle as a threat to its power, and the ruling class would be right. The rising tide of Commonerism is a threat to its power.

To me, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump were all elected by ordinary middle-class Commoners, the great middle-middle of America, to represent them and their ordinary needs as ordinary Americans.

And, I think it fair to say, our Gentry ruling class did its utmost to kick all three out of office, and succeeded with two of them. Hey, two out of three ain't bad.

Now with have the Canadian Truckers and their bouncy castles entering the fray.

Now, I don't want to say who is right and who is wrong in all this.

But I would suggest that the COVID activities of the ruling class have been felt most cruelly by the middle-middle, that is, by people that neither have laptop jobs that can be done by computer at home and with Zoom calls nor are people just getting a check, like retirees and the lower class that doesn't work much.

And, because nobody in the ruling class really knows anyone in the middle-middle, the rulers don't really have a feel for how all the scientific and beneficent COVID restrictions and regulations are hitting the middle-middle.

And thus, when the middle-middle objects, the Gentry ruling class is caught by surprise. Naturally, it experiences the resistance to its beneficent rules as an insult. And so the cry goes out: Does anyone know one of These People?

Of course, it is worse than that, because the over - under political formula of today's ruling class experiences the middle-middle as the enemy. That is the logic of its Allyship notion, that the rulers are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples fighting the White Oppressors.

What I am suggesting is that, because of the ruling-class political formula, any member of the ruling class would already be primed to regard people protesting its wise and thoughtful COVID regulations as the Enemy. 

Because that is how politics works. I notice when I walk in the neighborhood that all the dogs being taken for a walk are very interested in me. Except for one thing: if there is another dog around, the dogs in question are going to be much more interested in each other than in the humans.

But here is something that shocked me this morning. I was walking towards a dog and its owner, but in between us was a squirrel. And the dog paid no attention to the squirrel. Didn't that dog know that squirrels are the Enemy? Hey, maybe the dog was blind, because in my experience dogs have highly sensitive radar that picks up squirrels at one hundred paces.

So it is with politicians. Their radar is tuned to pick up Enemies, the enemies of their political formula.

And so, if you want to understand a politician, keep a sharp eye on him and see who or what pricks up his attention. Chances are that's the Enemy that he has sworn a blood oath to track down and demolish.

I don't know what will happen with the Great Rebellion of Commoners. Up to now our Gentry ruling class has done a pretty effective job of heading it off at the pass. But it does seem to me that its anti-Commoner campaign is getting a little more active of late.

And I wonder what Peter Turchin's "over-production of elites" will mean in the long run. I mean if the over-produced elite scions can't find a nice Stiltstocking job at the Circumlocution Office, maybe they will join the Resistance. 

Or maybe not. Because Darling, have you ever been inside the house of one of those Deplorables?

Wokeness Has Only Just Begun, Says Blogger

Thanks to the links at Powerline, I got to read this piece about Wokeness, by N.S. Lyons: "No, the Revolution isn't Over." Because:

1. Wokeness is a religion, a set of "metaphysical beliefs.
   
   
2. The "void of meaning hasn't been filled." There's nothing out there that can compete with Wokeness.
   
   
3. "Social atomization hasn't reversed." No communities, civic associations, "little platoons" to fill the gap.
   
   
4. "Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity." And Wokeness is a kind of desperate attempt to recover meaning.
   
   
5. The Information Revolution isn't done yet. Makes it easier to form mobs.
   
   
6. There is no authority that can "establish any kind of common metaphysical framework, common moral narrative, common vision of a properly ordered life, common norms, or even a common reality that most of society will respect, trust, follow, and collectively defend."
   
   
7. Political parties can't help because "All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist,"
   
   
8. Majorities don't matter because, per Taleb, the most intolerant minority rules.
   
   
9. "Personnel is policy" and don't expect the teachers and the HRs to back off their wokey agenda.
   
   
10. Wokies occupy all the institutional high ground.
    
    
11. "Long marches are long" and we haven't even started a counter-march.
    
    
12. "Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell." Well, yeah. Because they have been carefully taught.
    
    
13. "The youth are still coddled and mentally broken"
    
    
14. "Elite overproduction is still in overdrive"
    
    
15. "'Wokeness is still required by law." And that goes all the way back to the Civil Rights Laws.
    
    
16. "Money is still power... This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change)."
    
    
17. "The opposition is still only political." There is no "resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts," not yet.
    
    
18. "Partisanship is still getting worse" and a Trump election in 2024 might unleash an "outbreak of the Second Woke Crusade to extirpate all the Racist Forces of Evil from the nation once and for all."
    
    
19. "None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands." I.e. "The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on."
    
    
20. This is just like Mao's Cultural Revolution. The leaders using the woke young to beat up on their rivals. But, like the Cultural Revolution it may not end well for the rulers.

Yeah. Don't get too optimistic, especially if the GOP wins the midterms.

But Who Will Be the Ruling Class?

In the last week or so I have been blogging on the crisis of our time. And the basic problem is that we are in the Autumn of the Educated Ruling Class, because the program of the educated ruling class has failed. It failed for the working class, it has failed for blacks.

And, of course, it has ended up being unjust to the ordinary Commoner middle class, because its over - under political formula, that was intended originally to feature the fat-cat bourgeoisie as enemy, has ended up with the ordinary Commoner middle class as the enemy, because racist-sexist-homophobe.

I have been noting how we have had a succession of presidents - Nixon, Reagan, Trump -- who have really campaigned and governed as the leader of the Commoner middle class.

I have noted how, despite all this, the Republicans have no clue what they are doing. And it is true, as the Zman writes, that conservatism really doesn't have a clue.

The question is: who would be the ruling class in the Next Regime, assuming that the Next Regime is a regime that features what I call an expanding-middle political formula, that regards the ordinary Commoner middle class as "friends" and anyone that wants to beat up on the ordinary Commoner middle class as the "enemy." But, anyone that wants to ally with the ordinary middle class is welcome as a friend.

And I don't mean here the top-dog part of the ruling class, but the second-tier, that today is the entire educated and credentialed class that benefits from the administrative state: the bureaucrats in the government, the lower-order politicians, the teachers, professors, journalists: everyone that Curtis Yarvin calls The Cathedral. Down to the nice liberal ladies that have #WeBelieve yardsigns out front.

And the answer is: I don't know.

But there is an even bigger problem. It arises from a notion from economist Milton Friedman. He wrote that government is always running against the limits. It always spends as much as it can, and it taxes as much as it can. And, I would say, it borrows as much as it can.

The question is: can modern government be cut back so that it is spending not 35-40 percent of GDP but, say, 15 percent of GDP? I don't know, but I suspect that it can't be done, partly because politics is always about loot and plunder for the supporters, and also because "women expect to be protected."

All I can say is that I am going to think about this. I am sure that someone has already figured this out, and that the answer is obvious. But I haven't figured it out.

Who will be the rank-and-file of the new ruling class that governs in the interest of the ordinary Commoner middle class? I don't know.

After the Canadian Truckers

I imagine that the Canadian government will manage to dislodge and humiliate the Canadian truckers and use their media narrative power to marginalize the ordinary middle-class populists that have arisen to support them.

Pretty well what has happened here with the January 6 mostly peaceful protesters.

The fact is that political change is almost never peaceful. That's because the ruling class has too much going with the present correlation of forces to act sensibly when the rules change.

Prime Minister Trudeau exactly tells us the problem with his tweet:

Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.

As I blogged last week, this tweet (and most of the other tweets from Trudeau) are trumpeting the political formula of today's ruling class, that I have called today the "pejorative ruling class," meaning the ruling class that Makes Things Worse.

I say that we are living in the Autumn of the Pejorative Ruling Class, meaning that the political formula that has worked so well over the last century, of the educated/credentialed/academic ruling class allied with the lower class to beat up on the stuck-up bourgeoisie, is in its last stages.

It is failing for a number of reasons.

1. It does not really help the "oppressed classes," primarily because it does not do anything for the lower classes except feed them with free money.
   
   
2. It has tripled the size of government over the last century. This means that, in the US, at least 40 percent of GDP is seized by the government and handed out as loot and plunder. If you think that this benefits society as a whole, I gotta bridge...
   
   
3. It has created a huge credentialed elite that has been educated for bureaucratic and administrative supervision -- in numbers rather in excess of the actual demand for such workers.

As I wrote last week, the over-under political formula made a kind of ugly political sense a century ago, because the working class was big and the bourgeoisie was small; so the numbers favored the rule of the educated class.

But now the middle class is easily the biggest class, so it doesn't really make political sense to marginalize it as "bitter clingers," "deplorables," and racist-sexist-homophobes.

But, flipping through Prime Minister Trudeau Twitter feed, it is clear that pandering to the oppressed classes, of whatever color and gender, is what he does.

And that is what President Biden does.

On the right, we tend to call all this "far-left" and wokey and the rest of it. But I think that it is more accurate to say that these people are just ordinary educated people doing what they have been taught. They don't know any better.

And if you have been taught a political formula where you, the ruling class, are called by Gaia and Justice to fight the horrid evil white oppressors to stop the endless marginalization of the eternal oppressed peoples, then what Trudeau and Biden do makes complete sense. It creates meaningful lives for the Laptop class and it provides loot and plunder for their lower class supporters.

But it is incredibly annoying to ordinary middle class people that just want to live their lives by the rules, own a nice house in the suburbs and raise a family.

It is also incredibly confusing to the middle class to be regaled endlessly about racism and sexism and privilege. Because ordinary middle class people just get on with life, playing the cards that life has dealt them, and not feeling that they have been particularly privileged or advantaged by their lives or their parents' lives.

And, by the way, the ordinary white middle class is taught every day that any day now, the rules may change and they won't get the promotion or job they wanted because the DEI administrators are going to hire or promote someone not on experience or merit or results, but on race and gender.

I wonder what the ordinary middle class thinks about that. We really don't know because the ordinary middle class knows that the way to get into trouble in a New York minute is to complain about quotas / affirmative action / diversity / equity. So they button their lips. Unless they happen to be on the street in the middle of a Canadian trucker peaceful protest.

OK. Our present ruling class is clueless. At one point the mayor of Ottawa criticized the truckers and their supporters for turning the whole thing into a backyard barbecue.

I mean. Peaceful protest is deadly serious. Because justice. Because centuries of oppression. How Dare the truckers and their supporters have fun!

I think the important thing to know is that our rulers really don't know what to do. They know they are in trouble, but none of the usual Five Point Plans are going to make a blind bit of difference.

And in back of that is that there is really nothing for politics to do any more.

Because politics requires an enemy that we can go and fight and destroy, to make us safe. But really there is no enemy. Not any more. So that means there is nothing for politics to do.

So the ruling class makes it up. Oppressed classes and climate disaster. Unless we act now.

Lefties Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Well. President Biden goes to New York City and says the whole problem with violent crime is gun shops in other states.

The Justice Department is sending additional prosecutorial resources to help shut down what’s referred to, as you all know, the iron pipeline that funnels guns from shops in states like Georgia, crime scenes in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and so many other places[.]

'Cos you cain't buy a gun in New York City. No Sir. And people wouldn't be getting shot if only the "ghost guns" weren't sneaking into NYC by the back door.

Or, here's a lefty book that says that Ronald Reagan was a racist. No, no, no, writes Paul Kengor, a Reagan biographer: one of Reagan's best friends was black. No doubt, but Reagan was still a racist dog-whistler, don'tcha know.

Actually, the lefty has a point. The whole point of lefty race politics since the Civil Rights era is that ordinary middle-class whites have to pay. And if they object, they are racists. And if a politician arises that rallies the middle-class/working-class whites, he's a racist dog-whistler. That goes for Nixon, Reagan, Trump. And my liberal neighbors already hate Ron DeSantis.

On the other hand, here's the FBIs raiding an operation, Feeding Our Future, that appears to have been scamming the federal school lunch program in Minnesota to the tune of $244 million. Apparently, the head of Feeding our Future regards the whole thing as an attack on the Somali community.

Look. The way to understand all this is that the whole lefty program is on fire. It doesn't work. It never worked. That's because top-down government is good for only one thing: military conquest. And the point of the top-down thing in the military is to force the young men to sacrifice their lives without rebelling against the generals and nobles and kings that issue the orders.

If you are not conquering something and driving the men before you and listening to the lamentation of the women, then politics ain't working for you.

Because politics come down to fighting an enemy -- it could be Commies, Fascists, greedy bankers, far-right racists, dog-whistlers -- and then handing out loot to the supporters. And that is all. Everything else is window dressing.

Thus, people in receipt of loot and plunder are just sitting there, cashing checks and buying luxury items. Like the folks at Feeding Our Future. What they are not doing is contributing to the economy.

If they are not quite in the top tier, they are getting gubmint checks and doing some king of illegal grift on the side. I remember a comment in the Wall Street Journal after the welfare reform in the 1990s. Oh, said this black lady. We always worked, but under the old welfare rules we got the checks and worked off the books. Then there was the guy with a construction business that hired people off the books. When he went broke the state got involved, because it wanted its back taxes.

One of the off-the-books employees was claiming unemployment as he worked of the books, and another was claiming disability as he worked off the books.

No kidding. Why, that's racism straight up!

OK. Let's review all this.

President Biden and guns. Hey, Mr. President. If everyone is getting a check on the one hand, and doing some sort of a scam on the other, then the general illegality is going to mean that they aren't going to want the cops around too much. And that means that they will be doing their own law enforcement, gang to gang, gun to gun. And if the guns aren't avaiable at the gun shop on the corner then any aspiring rapper that won't stand for any dissing is going to get a gun from somewhere else.

Guess what. If the black community has developed a culture of gubmint checks and off-the-books side hustles, then they ain't gonna be getting ahead in the ordinary economy where you get a job and pay taxes and expect law enforcement to take care of the crooks. 

And all this is a consequence of liberal policy. Because when you enroll the lower class in all kinds of free money programs, then you create people whose whole lives are organized around how to qualify for the free money and how to scam the free-money programs with side hustles.

I'm here to say that I don't think it is a very good idea. Is that racist of me, dear liberal friends? Too bad. It's still your fault.

And when, after 70 years, Social Security is running out of money, that's liberals' fault.

When after 50 years, 70 percent of black kids are born out of wedlock, because, among other things, you can't get welfare if you are married, that's liberals' fault.

When the black-on-black murder rate is ten times the white murder rate, that's not because of guns from out of town. It is because lower-class gangs live by violence, and they always have. In Britland, which has strict gun control, there are still plenty of Muslim gangbangers that get access to guns. Supply and demand, don'tcha know.

But liberals will never admit they were wrong. People in politics never admit they were wrong. The only thing you do with people in politics is you show them the door. Time for a Change. Old chap.

Great Rebellion Reaches Canada

 So now the Great Rebellion has hit Canada, with the truckers staging a peaceful protest in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, on Parliament Hill.

Naturally, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has accused the peaceful protesters of being the worst people in the world:

Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.

Really, Mr Prime Minister? Really?

Translation: We, the allies -- educated, the evolved, the elite -- are fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors. 

By the way, the Allies narrative has three lies. 

First of all, who gets to say they are Allies? The educated ruling class, like any ruling class, is in politics for the power. The allies, if they are allies, are the lower class whose support the rulers buy with programs and entitlements. 

Second, the oppressed peoples are not really oppressed. They are the Little Darlings of the ruling class and, far from being oppressed, enjoy perquisites and privileges, as the mistresses of powerful men have enjoyed down the ages. 

Third,  the white oppressors are ordinary middle-class whites, with no particular skills, no particular privileges, and no particular interest in politics.

But you can see the point of the Allies narrative, particularly as expressed by Prime Minister Trudeau in his tweet. It communicates the political formula of today's ruling class. We enlightened rulers are the only thing between survival and utter annihilation for Jews, Muslims, blacks, and LGBTs. Hey, whatabout women, Justin, old pal? Ain't there no sexism in the world any more?

Put it this way: without the lie that the present educated ruling class does it all for the benefit of the oppressed, what would be the point of them? Other than the ruling class looks after its own? But hey, every ruling class does that.

In my view, the reason for the Canadian Trucker Rebellion -- and the Tea Party, and the Trump Train,  the Brexit Brits, and the French gilets jaunes -- is that the current ruling class of educated professionals rules without thinking about the impact its programs and policies will have upon ordinary middle-class people.

So, we have seen the notion during the current COVID experience that, for the Laptop class who can work anywhere as long as they have access to the internet, the maskings and lockdowns are a minor annoyance. But for people who have to attend to work at a workplace or in a public place, or interact with the administrative state, things are a lot different. As in really painful.

There is another point, and that is that the ruling class rules on the assumption that it knows what is best for the lower class, because Allies. Not that the rulers ever asked the lower classes, except to ask them if they wanted loot. And I say that the politics and programs instituted over the last century and more by the ruling class for the benefit of the lower class has Made Things Worse for the lower class.

Yes, of course the ruling class knows what is best for the ruling class and takes care to fluff its pillows of an evening.

And the ruling class can ignore the needs and the aspirations of the ordinary middle class, if that is its fancy. And it can demonize the middle class as the enemy. There is no politics without an enemy.

And the ruling class can indulge its fancy that it knows what is best for the lower class.

But what if the middle class just can't take being ignored and demonized any more?

And what if the old white working class is dying of despair?

And what if the lower class lives in unendurable chaos because of the conceited programs and entitlements designed and administered by the educated ruling class that in real life actually Make Things Worse for the lower class?

What if the ruling class runs the national debt up to 150 percent of GDP and there is no longer enough money to run all the entitlement programs and also to pay the high interest rates needed to fight inflation?

I'd say that the result of all that is what they used to call Trouble in the Balkans.

Enough of Enemies; Enough of Loot and Plunder!

The fact is that one of the instinctive roles of male humans is to defend the territory. Because the territory has food on it. Defending the territory and its food is a matter of life and death.

But, since the Industrial Revolution food is something humans buy with money. Therefore, access to or control of food-bearing territory is not a matter of life and death.

If we apply Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, we can see that it used to make complete sense. Friend is someone that shares the food-bearing territory and fights to defend it; enemy is someone threatening to take away our food-bearing territory.

So when, e.g., Frederick the Great of Brandenburg invaded Silesia in 1740 it was not about defending Brandenburg's food-growing territory but it was about increasing the area of food-growing territory over which Fred could rule and tax. It worked out well for Our Fred, and he was a decent flute player that liked to play music of an evening. Of course, it could be that he sent the wrong message to the future rulers of Germany.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

Then came Stalin. He starved the peasants of the Ukraine so he could buy industrial equipment from the West. Way to go, Joe.

Then came Adolf Hitler. He believed that Germany needed Lebensraum to grow food for its people. In the East. But Germany was an industrial nation that could buy its food as long as it wasn't in a world war.

Not a good idea, Adolf.

Now, of course, ever since World War II, our global elite has decided that nations and national leaders are literally Hitler, and it is their sacred duty to stop Literally Hitlers anywhere they rear their mustachioed heads.

But, our global leaders are still acting like male humans defending their territory. All across the world leaders during the late COVID emergency have been acting like male humans defending territory, issuing orders to the troops -- er, ordinary citizens -- to keep in line, to wear their uniform masks, get their vaccinations. Or else go to the brig. Just like the GIs in World War II.

And after the War on COVID our leaders are proposing to bravely lead us to Build Back Better with a whole raft of programs to dish benefits out to the people. And mobilize for the Next World War, the Green New Deal that will decarbonize the world before it's too late.

Needless to say, those that get on board with the new World War Green will be handsomely rewarded. Others will pay for their armed insurrection.

The thing that keeps bothering me is that, whether we are talking about hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon rain forest or the cult followers of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, proprietor, we are talking about the same thing.

First there is the enemy to be defeated before it's too late. And then there are the glorious perks to all the faithful friends and followers.

In other words, whenever politics is involved it is always about the enemy, and then always about rewarding the followers. Just like in the Amazon rain forest. Just like with feudal lords and their retainers. Just like the Soviet leaders and their nomenklatura. Just like western leaders and their loyal deep state.

But, you only need to mobilize against the enemy when your life depends on the continued possession of food-growing territory. If you are growing food to sell, if you are making stuff to sell, if you are doing anything in the modern economy, you don't need to defend your food-growing territory. What is more, it doesn't make any sense to invade a country and plunder its resources and sell its inhabitants into slavery. They will benefit you much more doing what they are already doing and selling it to you. That's because 80 percent of wealth in the modern economy is "intangible capital" which is a fancy way of saying the knowledge and skills of humans.

Do you understand what I am saying? I am saying that the modern state with its compulsions, its endless partisan squabbling, its gigantic loot and plunder operation -- that in the developed world means something from one third to one half of gross domestic product -- is an echo from the past, the past of primitive humans that lived and died on food-growing territory that they defended with their lives. That's why I call it the Great Reaction.

Loot and plunder? The last major loot and plunder operation that I know of was the looting and plundering of eastern Germany by the Soviet Union after World War II. How did that work out, Joe Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev?

See my point? If you are in the enemy plus loot and plunder game you ain't doing yourself a favor. Although of course, you do get to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentation of their women. If that's how you get your jollies.

The next Big Thing for humans is to get beyond the primitive culture of enemies and loot and plunder for the friends.

But I don't know how we get there.

Yes, But the Republicans Have Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Think, and Why Regarding the Political Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time will tell.

Facing Down the Religion of Leftism

One of the standard conservative narratives is that conservatives are influenced by reality and objective truth whereas lefties are simply religious believers that will say and do anything to advance their sacred cause.

Actually, I think that the ZMan puts out a straw-man when he writes that "bourgeois objectivism" is the problem,

the assumption that all social problems have a correct set of answers and the point of politics is to discover those solutions.

I think that is more the assumption of our educated ruling class, who themselves are bullied about by the lefty crazies.

So I would analyze our situation as this:

There are lefty crazies, who want to transform the world with politics elevated to a kind of religion.

There are Inner Party educated-class liberals, who believe themselves to be the only qualified people to direct the political affairs of the nation.

There are Outer Party conservatives that believe in ruling with a light touch, but truckle to the Inner Party Pooh Bahs.

All the above sectors belong to the ruling class of educated people, the Educated Gentry. There are two other sectors:

There are ordinary middle-class Americans that just want to live their lives, do their jobs, and live a decent life. I call these people Responsibles.

There are lower-class Americans that attach to lefties and or the educated ruling class because they are Subordinate people that need a lord to protect them.

Since the Outer Party conservatives do not have a religious priesthood directing their morality, they are rather less energized than the Inner Party and its lefty priesthood. It is this that demoralizes and annoys folks like the ZMan.

The only thing that can stop the coalition between lefties and their educated-class allies is a Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class. No doubt the Outer Party will adapt itself to become its leaders.

But I do not think that the Great Rebellion has a chance without the lefties and the Inner Party having first ruined the country and the lives of the ordinary middle class.

Yes, I know. You would think that the Biden administration has been chosen by God to do just that.

See, I think that it is natural and physical that stupid scions of the educated class would believe stupid things like the idea that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

And, unfortunately, over the past 200 years, the stupid scions of the educated class have been able to persuade the lower class that loot and plunder delivered by the government was the answer to their problems. It is only in the past 50 years that the social center of gravity has tended towards the middle, where the biggest sector of society has become the ordinary middle class, rather than the lower-class peasants or lower-class industrial workers.

I think the sign that the current lefty plus Inner Party sector is in trouble is precisely the culture war of the past couple of decades. A confident ascendant ruling and cultural class does not need to amp things up.

Indeed, a witch-hunt / reign of terror / great purge / cancel culture is a sign that things are going wrong for the believers, that the prophecy of the lefty prophets has failed, and that the progressive, or lefty, or liberal era has Made Things Worse. When the prophecy of your priests has failed, you do stupid stuff, like:

Defunding the police and letting criminal defendants go free.

Creating a crazy cult that the planet is going to burn, unless we go back to sun power and windmills.

Making a sacred cult out of abortion.

Enlarging an already over-large government entitlement state.

In fact, I believe we need a radically reduced state. Why? Because the modern economy rewards people that are trustworthy and punishes people who are untrustworthy. Thus, most people are "nudged" by the need to present themselves as trustworthy, and act in a trustworthy fashion. They don't need much supervision and ordering about.

We need police forces to repress those that refuse to be trustworthy, and we need navies to deal with pirates that might take a shine to a 200,000 ton container ship. That is all.

But what comes next? 

I don't know, but I suspect that the current system will need to collapse in hyperinflation and misery before we can get a majority of people to stand up against the lefty activists and the educated-class grifters.

Here's how I look at the history of the world so far.

First there was the Age of War. It made sense because land was the only thing that mattered. It paid to defend your land and you could increase your wealth by conquering your neighbor's land.

Then there was the Age of Politics. It made the Age of War look like a walk in the park, with monster wars about -- what exactly? And monster governments that oppressed and killed their own people -- for what exactly?

Now comes the Age of Trust. Trustworthy people will wive and thrive; untrustworthy people will struggle, unless and until they mend their ways.

Of course, we could give Elon Musk a gubmint contract to take all the untrustworthy people to Mars and let them figure it out there. Just as the Brits gave Sir Walter Raleigh a gubmint contract to take the "waste population" to the Americas. See "My 1584 Project."

But human life will always be a muddle. Sorry, make that "emergent phenomenon."

The Next Three Years...

Here's a fearless prediction. The next three years will be the most consequential, politically, in my lifetime. And probably yours.

Let's start with Point One, in a New Criterion piece by Conrad Black.

The United States was at a unique political crossroads when a man who had never served in any public office nor held a high military command, elected or unelected, astounded the country by winning the presidency—the only such candidate to do so, ever—on a campaign to reverse bipartisan agreed policy and to reorient or dismiss almost the entire community of senior government personnel.

Do you see the staggering implications of Donald Trump's achievement in 2016? "Never served in any public office." But he won the presidency.

Obviously, such an event means that something is wrong with the rulers of America. Because the voters don't do things like that in normal times. Andrew Jackson got elected president without serving in a previous political office. But he won the Battle of New Orleans. Abraham Lincoln became president at a time of national crisis. But he had served in the Illinois state legislature and the US House of Representatives. Franklin Roosevelt became president at the bottom of the Great Depression. But he had been state senator, assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York. Dwight Eisenhower never served in political office before being elected president. But he was the general that invaded Europe in World War II. Etcetera.

Then, after Donald Trump got elected the Democrats and the media hounded him every moment he was in office and beat him in 2020 under conditions that, while not exactly "stealing the election" certainly gave rise to understandable suspicion among his supporters. OK. So the combined efforts of the Democrats and the media and the Zuck bucks and the BLM/AntiFa riots and the "mean tweets" combined to defeat President Trump.

But obviously, that's all ancient history, what with the singular incompetence of President Biden, the absurd spending agenda of the Progressives, the rising inflation, the problems on the COVID vaccination front, the anti-CRT movement among parents of school children, and the recent off-off-year elections.

The reason I say that the next three years will be consequential is that I believe that our ruling class will make several efforts to head the organic movement of the Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class off at the pass.

I suspect there will be a number of ugly incidents in the next three years as the ruling class and Democrats and media and the NGO activism community get more and more desperate, as they see their power slipping away.

They may succeed, but my guess is that they won't. Why? Because I don't think they are very bright. And I don't think they are ruthless enough and courageous enough to behave like a Lenin or a Hitler.

And the basic problem is that the American people are going to be hurting economically for the next three years. We are going to have inflation, number one. Then the Fed is going to have to jack up interest rates, and that will hurt the housing market and all the people with mortgages and very little equity. Then there is going to be a recession, maybe before 2024. Ordinary Americans hate it when gas prices go up. They hate it when food prices go up. They are terrified when their mortgages go "under water." And when they lose their jobs...

So we are looking for a real wipeout for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. And then we are looking for the mother of all Time for a Change elections in 2024.

That's the overview. But in the details and the day-to-day events it's going to get ugly. You can see that with Democrats already blaming oil companies for the increase in gasoline prices. It looks to me as though oil production is having a problem returning to its 2019 high after the sharp drop in production at the beginning of he COVID crisis, and things will repair themselves soon. But you don't clamp down on pipeline construction and oil exploration before everything gets back to normal.

You see, a competent government, whatever its ideological framework, needs to keep the lights on, keep the oil flowing, keep people content in their homes, their jobs, their hopes. And, with its appetite for reelection, a new administration makes sure to take all the tough decisions right away so that in four years, when it is time for reelection, the economy looks great and Americans are optimistic about the future.

I would say that an administration that fails on these real simple responsibilities does not deserve the confidence of the voters and does not get it.

But you never know.