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.

Hey Transgenders, Don't Frighten the Horses

Yesterday, June 29, 2021, the US Supreme Court voted not to review a transgender bathroom case in which a transgender high-school student (girl turned boy) had sued and won in federal court to be allowed to use the boys' bathroom. MSNBC :

Grimm’s right to use a boys bathroom was upheld in rulings by lower federal courts, which had ruled that he was protected by a federal law that bars school programs from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex.

No kidding!

But I would suggest to my liberal friends that this development runs afoul of two principles that, in my opinion, trump the holy writ of non-discrimination.

The first is the Mrs. Patrick Campbell principle. It is is said to be in answer to a young actress that complained to Mrs. Pat about two male actors being a bit too friendly with each other. Said Mrs. Pat:

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

I would say that the whole point of current LGBT politics and activism is precisely to frighten the horses in the street: and not in the sense of frightening them into stampeding, but to frighten them into shutting up or else they will lose their jobs. Which suggests one of my main maxims:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

In other words, when you have climbed into the ruling class power seat and you start to have the power to reverse decades, or centuries, or eons of injustice, I tell you that the people on the receiving end of your "justice" will experience it as "injustice."

The other important point is that gender specific bathrooms are not there in order to discriminate against transgenders. They are there to protect women from male harassment. Why in the world should we worry about that, you may ask? Because of Freud's famous remark (which I had thought was made by Oscar Wilde)

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

I say, Siggie, that you are asking the wrong question, you silly boy. It is not what women want, it is what women expect. And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

So, you LGBTs and liberals and wokies and judges and nice liberal ladies and all the ships at sea. With this bathroom thingy you are heading right into Trouble, with a capital T, right here in River City. Because biological women really don't like biological men in the women's bathroom. I mean that women really don't like men in the girls' bathroom!

You will notice that the LGBT activists chose a biological woman acting as a man in order to demand the right of transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice. Of course they did. Because when you want access to the other guys' bathroom you certainly don't want to go to the court system on behalf of a biological male wanting to use the girls bathroom. Whatever the civil-rights laws may say about discrimination, you wouldn't want to be persuading judges to permit biological males in the women's bathroom. Not yet. Not this week.

On this subject I am a true Leninist: The worse the better.

The fun thing about this is that, back in the day, liberals were bellowing from the rooftops about "legislating morality" and protecting women from the male gaze, and liberating women. Today, everything that liberals do amounts to legislating their morality and forcing it upon the rest of the world.

And also parading a battalion of fake victims before the world.

And this issue also attaches to my concept on women in the public square. The public square, according to German sociologist Georg Simmel, was created by men for men. So women coming into the public square a century ago could be expected to transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

What women in the public square do not like -- do not like -- is the idea of men coming into the women's bathroom. Because "women expect to be protected."

Just sayin'.

The End of Over/Under Politics

Back in the day, we didn't have over/under politics. Back in 12th century England, politics was all about squabbling nobles. In Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir there isn't a word about the middle class or the oppressed peoples. Politics is all about King Henry II of England and his Angevin Empire -- which included England and a good half of France. When he wasn't putting down rebellions among his feudatories he was playing political games with the King of France and quarreling with his sons.

And if he got really annoyed with one of his feudal retainers he would lay siege to his castle and destroy it and probably set fire to the town around it.

I guess if you were a poor person you just hung on and hoped that your lord would prosper -- and not tax you too heavily to finance his wars.

But then there was the Black Death and in its aftermath wages went up and the lower orders became a bit uppity what with Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1381 against the poll tax needed to finance the Hundred Years War.

And then came the nationalization of the armed forces and the development of agricultural "improvement" and the surplus peasants were sent packing.

Thus the first Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1497. And the first Poor Law in 1536, although the first big poor law was in 1597. Clearly, in this world, the poor have emerged into political consciousness: as a problem, rather than an opportunity.

So how do we get from the taken-for-granted hierarchy of the Middle Ages to the over-under political philosophy that is clearly in full bloom with rich kids Marx and Engels by 1850?

Well, more research is needed. But, to start with, in the 18th century, we have Rousseau. In The Discourse on Inequality he argues that mankind in the "state of nature" is driven by pity and self-preservation. Says SparkNotes:

Man in the state of nature has few needs, no idea of good and evil, and little contact with other humans. Nevertheless, he is happy.

But he has "perfectibility." And this drives him to respond to his environment, and live in groups, and develop reason and society. But this is not good, because

As men start to live in groups, pity and self-preservation are replaced by amour propre, which drives men to compare themselves to others, and to need to dominate others in order to be happy.

This leads to a dangerous instability between rich and poor, leading to war, that is solved by a trick where the rich entice the poor into a political society that merely "fixes the relations of dominance." And, of course, private property is the cornerstone of this dominance.

In The Social Contract "agreed upon by all citizens for their mutual preservation" Rousseau defines the "sovereign" as "the collective grouping of all citizens" that "expresses the general will that aims for the common good." It is in conflict with the actual "government to exercise executive power." And the "sovereign" and "government" are typically in conflict.

Then we have Babeuf, in the French Revolution. His "newspaper Le tribun du peuple (The Tribune of the People) was best known for its advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy and the abolition of private property."

But both Rousseau and Babeuf were commoners -- Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker; Babeuf the son of an officer who was working as a domestic servant at the beginning of the Revolution. 

Next we get Saint Simon, born an aristocrat, and another socialist theorist. But he recommended the rule of an "industrial class... [that] included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society such as businesspeople, managers, scientists and bankers, along with manual labourers, amongst others."

Honestly, I don't see how all this muddle gets to Marx and the brilliant idea that rich educated kids like him will lead the helpless workers to glorious revolution and heaven on Earth.

But, clearly, the logic of politics as war by other means leads Marx to invent a struggle of the poor helpless workers against the monstrous and evil capitalists and bourgeoisie, not because the capitalists and bourgeoisie are necessarily evil but because the logic of his over/under political system requires an enemy.

In fact, of course, the two centuries since the French Revolution and the century and a half since The Communist Manifesto have seen a Great Enrichment, an increase of 30 times in real per capita income in the western world. And we have had scientific experiments on whole populations that have conclusively demonstrated that the market economy delivers prosperity to ordinary people and poor people, and that the ideas of Marx lead to slavery and death camps and famine.

So I say that the current spasm of over/under politics, in the antiracism of Allyism, with allies advocating for "oppressed peoples" against "white oppressors" is more nonsense driven by the logic of over/under politics that requires the middling sort of people to be the enemy. That's because the logic of politics requires an enemy, and the logic of over/under politics requires that the enemy be the middle. Who else could it be?

I say there is a reason why over/under politics switched from Marx's over/under politics of class to the current over/under politics of race. The reason is that by, say 1970, the numbers weren't working, because the Great Enrichment had lifted too many helpless workers into the responsible middle class. So a new concept was required, of racial oppression and white guilt. "Anti Whiteness," if you will.

But what do we do about it?

I don't think that the answer is a conscious whiteness race movement. And my reason arises out of my reductive Three Peoples theory. In the Three Peoples theory it is easy to understand the logic of the left's over/under politics. The "over" class of rulers is the educated elite, the Cathedral of Curtis Yarvin's notion, and it wants to be important, wants to rule. But the ordinary responsible Commoners of the middle class don't want too much government rule, thank you very much, so the obvious thing for the overclass to do is to champion the "under" class, the Subordinate Clients, and hopefully get to direct traffic. This situation is obviously a class situation.

And I don't think that the middle middle people experience themselves as "white." That's because the logic of being middle class and doing middle-class things is that you work to serve the consumer and you associate with people that you can trust because they exhibit a record of trustworthy behavior; you obey the law, you go to work, and you follow the rules, and you don't really think about it. Notice how this middling trust culture differs from the overclass where you trust people with the right ideas and credentials and from the underclass where you associate with people of your race, or class, or language, or kindred.

And that is why I think that the future for the middle middle is a class identification of being middle class commoners rather than white people.

So I believe that the Great Rebellion of Commoners will not be defined by race but by class.

Yes, but whatabout the non-white members of the middle class? Won't they identify with their ethnic and religious origins rather than with whiteness?

No, I don't think they will, and the reason is war. In my view all groups and tribes and nations are defined by the war in which various disparate elements are drawn together and forged into a political (or military) army. This experience creates a new cultural community, a new identity, a new "band of brothers." If the "army" wins its war then it defines a new community, a new identity. In our time, the "band of brothers" creates a new nation. If it loses, of course, it disappears into the mists of time.

So my prophecy is that the facts of the situation today in which the ordinary middle class finds itself attacked by the Cathedral is radicalizing the middle class, and the experience of defending the middle-class identity, and the instinctive political strategy of the politicians representing the middle-class identity, is creating a new political identity and a new unity. And the disparate people that are coming together into this new identity will increasingly experience themselves as united into a nation of commoners rather than the previous identity they may have experienced.

I give you President Trump. Our lefty friends insisted that he was a racist sexist homophobe, because Charlottesville. But I'd say that President Trump has and does define himself as a leader of Americans, ordinary, patriotic, middle-class Americans. In other words, he defines himself exactly as you would expect a leader of ordinary middle-class American commoners rebelling against the rule of the educated overclass.

And I think the current instinctive panic of our Democratic friends, where they are trying to ram through their entire woke agenda in six months, demonstrates that, even if our Democratic friends don't consciously understand the rise of the Commoners, they just feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and the foundations of their world are shaking. So there is no time to be lost.

And they are right to be concerned. Because I prophesy that the Age of Domination of Over/Under Politics is coming to an end.

Is Forgiveness in Politics Ever Possible?

At American Greatness today Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. proposes in "Grievance and Forgiveness or Civil Strife" that the only way to end the current race war is for blacks to forgive whites for the crime of slavery and Jim Crow.

Really? Forgiveness? How often does that happen in the world of politics and love and war?

Then at Spiked! Frank Furedi deplores that "The culture war is real and it's getting worse" even while the left proposes that the whole idea of a culture war is a fantasy. But it makes sense that the left insists "there's nothing to see here; move right along."

Not being open about the existential nature of their crusade is integral to today’s cultural warriors against Enlightenment values. They prefer to convince the public that the culture war is a myth rather than admit that they are engaged in an ‘all or nothing’ struggle against some of society’s most important values and achievements.

This, a day after I commented on Gregory Clark at the end of his The Son Also Rises that maybe we still need some kind of gubmint effort to do something about inequality -- even though there has been precious little success on the 200-year gubmint war on unequality.

So, I am inspired to do my double Ike-Einstein act, and make the problem bigger, while making it as simple as possible but no simpler.

We must understand that men are only united when they are fighting an existential battle against annihilation. The rest of the time they are bickering among themselves. And the folks that are ginning up divisions and grievances and rage are generally classified by the cognoscenti as "politicians."

(Women are always bickering among themselves, only they won't admit it.)

Why is this? It is simple, really. The job of human males -- and it is their only job -- is to defend the homeland, the food-growing territory of the band from marauders. Alternatively, they can be pre-emptive and raid the neighboring band and kill the men and enslave the women and loot the village before the neighboring village does it to them.

You can see that in our own time, when food-growing land isn't a big deal -- as the twelve grain ships usually anchored off West Vancouver, BC waiting their turn to load up at the grain terminals mutely attest -- there is a problem. What are the men to do?

Well, they can fake it. OMG those bloody Nazis, Commies, Ay-rabs, whatever, if their taste is for foreign wars.

Or, OMG those bloody racists, bitter-clingers, deplorables, white supremacists, if their taste is for civil wars.

Finally, for the really cunning that just want to unite the people on the cheap without a foreign war or a civil war, there is the small minority as the enemy, OMG those Jews. Or overseas Chinese. Or Copts.

And because every man is really a pirate inside, the wise leader of his people will offer loot and plunder to his supporters.

You will notice that every election -- every election  -- comes down to the perfidious behavior of the "Other" and the rightful reward of loot and plunder to the voters of the winning side. That is why, for instance, Donald Trump offered tax cuts and tariffs to the voters of 2016 and today Joe Biden is offering trillions in loot and plunder which is partly "infrastructure" but mostly straight out grants to every liberal interest group imaginable.

But, of course, politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion and so it is usual for political movements and parties and ruling classes to dress up their naked war-plus-loot-and-plunder politics as a religious and moral war on evil to make sure that the evil get their just desserts and have to pay just reparations forever. Then, of course, there is no question about getting second thoughts about plundering the chaps next door. They are evil! They had it coming!

That is what the culture war is all about. It is a war against the middle America of responsible Americans, because the ruling class of the educated and evolved needs an enemy for their over-under politics of race and gender. And notice that nobody is proposing that we all just get together and work it out and forgive our enemies. The solution to the plague of white supremacy is for whites to confess their sins and take the knee.

But when will it ever end?

The lesson, I think, comes from the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The idea was that the various peoples should take their religion from the religion of their ruler; otherwise shut up or move to the German state with your religion. But this idea was not reached in rational and logical debate by enlightened and evolved philosophers. It was reached in the exhaustion and horror of a frightful war fought mainly over the German lands in which, it is said, 30 percent of the German people lost their lives.

The equivalent for the United States would be that the Civil War of 1861-65 resulted in 10 million dead instead of the advertised 700,000, or a civil war in our time that resulted in 100 million dead.

I would imagine that a civil war here that caused 100 million dead might cause the various culture warriors to cool their jets for a couple of years. But don't worry: they'd be back.

So yeah. Don't expect any forgiveness from blacks in the current row over Black Lives Matter and reparations. And don't expect any relief from the culture war. That's not how the world works.

The bigger question is whether we can figure out a way to domesticate our politics in the same way that we domesticated our men from piracy and dueling into organized sports.

There's gotta be a way. I just don't have a clue how to do it.

Transportation and the Lower Classes

For years I've been quoting the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to railways. My quote has been that "railways would encourage the poor to travel around needlessly."

Because there is nothing worse than ordinary people traveling around needlessly and distracting from the vital importance of important people traveling around importantly on important affairs of state.

But I could never find the original quote, and I worried that maybe I was imagining things. Now I understand why. Because in a piece by Will Lloyd at UnHerd.com about the decline and fall of the English eccentric there was mentioned a Col. Sibthorp who, as soon as railways were invented,

began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

Only, when I Googled the quote, I found Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw, and he writes something a bit different.

[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways -- 'the Steam Humbug' -- which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."

Hmm. It just shows how things can get all bollixed up. Bit of a cock-up on the quoting front.

The funny thing is that, today, the Col. Sibthorps and Dukes of Wellington worrying about "moral ruin to wholesale slaughter" are our liberal friends that want to keep the deplorables in high-speed trains and light rail and TGVs and not in their evil SUVs on the nation's highways where they are emitting CO2 and pitching the Earth into runaway global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind that the cities with mass transit -- along with women and minorities -- were hardest hit by the COVID epidemic.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the book North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, about the textile industry in the north of England in the 19th century, the climactic scene between hero Mr. Thornton and heroine Margaret Hale takes place in a house in London. But in the 2004 BBC TV serial they meet at a train station somewhere between London and Milton where their trains, going in opposite directions, have stopped. So, back in the day, Mrs. Gaskell never thought of a climactic train rendezvous. But in the modern BBC adaption brought to you by North London luvvies, what could be more romantic!

What appeared to be a horror back in the nineteenth century to the high and mighty seems like a walk in the park to today's haughty ruling class. And don't get me started on the eevils of unrestricted airplane travel! Why, I was to Denver last weekend and, let me tell you, the hoi-polloi are back to traveling around needlessly. The concourses are full, the planes are full, and the carbon emissions are outtasight.

Just wait till the cruise industry starts up again. The Horror!

Earth to liberals. Humans are a nomadic species. We like to go walkabout. You liberal swells "fly private" from one vitally important global conclave to another to plan your next "Reset." We lesser mortals fly the commercial airlines, because that's all we can afford. And the average deplorable drives his F-350 crew-cab truck.

Now go back to your regularly scheduled activism and don't let me hear from you again until next time.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what I think. I think that planes, trains, and automobiles are the best thing since sliced bread. There is nothing I like better than driving north on I-5 and looking at all the folk driving who-knows-where in their personal transportation, unless it is walking down an airport concourse looking at all the average folks waiting for their flight. As far as I am concerned there is a clear penumbra and emanation in the US Constitution that makes personal transportation a basic human right, and I like to see American citizens exercising that right.

And, frankly, I can't wait for the chance to fly to Mars. On vacation.

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.

Getting a Word In Against Liberal Cultural Hegemony

Should all journalists be college graduates, asks Kevin Mims in "Journalism's Ivory Towers"? Because back in the day they weren't. Not Mark Twain, for sure. Not even Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker who was born in a prospector's cabin in Colorado. But now, of course almost every journalist has a college degree. Some of them write sympathetically about the lower orders, but there's a fat chance that any of the lower orders will get to work at The New York Times.

Look out drivers, writes Eric Peters in "No More Camaros For You". In California they are regulating high-performance Chevy Camaros out of existence because they emit too much copper.

The fade-resistant, high-performance pads used in these models “emit” trace amounts of vaporized/powderized heavy metals such as copper and asbestos during braking.

And in five years "California law will require that all brake pads be zero emissions." It's a cunning way of forcing the move to electric cars, because electric cars use much more engine braking than internal combustion cars.

OK, then here is Tom Chivers on "The perils of liberals politicizing science."  Yes, of course we've got to take moral positions on bigots and racist-sexist-homophobes, he writes. But major science journals should not be endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Hey, we already know that nearly all scientists are Democrats!

Of course science is political: its findings have political implications; its practitioners have political beliefs. But its questions are fundamentally different from moral and political questions: What is real? vs What do we want? 

To which I say, yes, of course. Ruler gotta rule; gentry gotta pursue a life of "ambition, honor, and vanity." Case in point, Joe Biden's wife, who wants to be addressed as "Dr." even though she's not a medical doctor but a Doctor of Education. See, she is a true Gentry, interested in honorifics.

Yes. I get it. Gentry gotta gent. And that seems to involve a lot of virtue-signaling and rent-seeking. You know, as in my liberal neighbors putting out Black Lives Matter signs and buying subsidized electric cars.

No doubt nearly all journalists have college degrees these days. And no doubt nearly all college graduates these days have been carefully taught the moral ins-and-outs of critical race theory. But maybe, just maybe, a few journalists at elite prestige titles should tumble to the notion that not everybody thinks like them, not everybody wants what they want, not everybody has the same moral calculus as them, and that maybe people should be allowed to be different and have a different moral calculus, and that the elite should ease up a bit on sneaking its agenda in the back door by, e.g., mandating zero-emission brakes by 2025.

Here's a group I had never heard of, "Atheism+" that has a very clear moral agenda.

We are:
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

Well, I don't know that you chaps at Atheist+ do much critical and skeptical thinking, because the first thing is to decide, well, what do we do about people that don't believe in social justice, or feministm, or anti-racism, or don't want us to cast gay and bi and trans characters in all the movies, and don't want to enforce critical race theory on the world?

Yeah? What do we do about them? Send them to reeducation until they recant? Fire them from their jobs? Name, shame, and shun them? Imprison them? Exile them? Execute them? 

Do we force everyone to pay to support the Atheist+ agenda?

See, for me, it comes down to this. If you believe that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," then of course the only thing to do is to exile the oppressors to Outer Slobbovia.

But if you believe, like me, that there are three kinds of people in the world: Subordinates that just want to be told what to do; Responsibles that believe in an Axial Age god, and want to live as God directs; and Creatives that believe in creativity for everyone; then you think, OK. That Atheist+ agenda might be just great for Atheists, but whatabout people that disagree with the Atheist+ agenda? What is their place in the world?

And this brings be back to my basic line, about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." The reason that Douglas Adams rehearses this line in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is that he is making a joke about the fact that we don't know the meaning of life and all the rest of it. So we make it up.

What everyone has to do is to sign up to some faith tradition that says: "This is the meaning of life." Like the Atheist+ chappies. And then a satisfying moral calculus falls out naturally.

But supposing you Atheist+ chaps are wrong? Suppose that social justice results in concentration camps and millions of dead, like in the USSR and Maoist China? Suppose that women's rights end up with women not having children and that leads to the decline and collapse of civilization? Suppose that anti-racism ends up in irreconcilable conflict between woke liberals and bigoted deplorables and the breakup of the United States? Suppose that gays and transes are just mixed-up kids wanting out of the heavy-duty life of work and marriage and children? And suppose that Atheist+ chaps are deluded if they think that they are critical and skeptical thinkers? What then?

That, of course, is the moral basis for the notion of tolerance. Cromwell's Rule.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Only, of course, in reality, Cromwell was pretty well convinced that he was right, and that King Charles should be executed, if that is what it would take. Oh, and the Irish should be taught a lesson.

Yep, this is not that hard, and it is part of the reason for the separation between church and state, including the Church of Atheist+. 

But it is apparently way beyond the comprehension of our liberal friends.

The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry

One of my notions, coming out of my reductive Three Peoples theory, is that life for the People of the Creative Self is not easy.

Of course, I do not mean that their physical life is hard, but that the agenda of each person that desires to be creative is daunting.

We can show that by comparison with the others of the Three Peoples. If you are a Subordinate then all you have to do is suck up to your lord, and if things go wrong it is his fault. If you are a Responsible then all you have to do is follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. In both cases you go along to get along, presuming that is the way to survive and prosper.

But the essence of the life of the Creative person is to create something new. This is hard, very hard. We know, from the experience of artists and of people that start new businesses, that almost all creative endeavors fail.

What do humans do when facing failure? We tend to cheat. So if you are a Subordinate you probably steal from your lord or your employer. If you are a Responsible you don't always follow the rules or work as hard as you might.

Whatabout the Creatives? In this case, you might fake up some routine project as creative. Or you force your creativity on the rest of mankind.

In the fake department I like to use the example of LGBT. Everyone is interested in sex. So almost anyone can think up some lame way to be creative about sex. But the real program of sex is to bond with a person of the opposite sex and create children and a family and a home and stick to it through thick and thin. Anything else is really just faking it, taking the easy way out.

So a lot of what we call "creative" is not really creative at all, but people playing at being creative.

But then there is the other way, to force your creative project on the rest of mankind. Here's trivial example, how the educated class has mucked around with the regulation of automobiles: first it was gas mileage, then it was crash protection, then it was ethanol, then it was ASS, automated engine start/stop. But ethanol makes engines run hotter, which uses up old cars faster. 

Then you could be a health-science professional and order people around with creative ideas about how to fight epidemics.

Or you could be an environmental scientist and order people around with creative ideas about how to save the planet.

My point is that the regulation of cars and fuels, and the regulation of health care -- and the whole environmental game -- is all about the educated class having a creative project to work on. And it has to be backed by force, otherwise failed ideas would never get implemented or, if implemented, soon discarded. And then the educated gentry in question wouldn't feel creative.

To me, the whole project of the left suffers from this problem, going back at least to Marx. Hey, the fathers have been screwing things up since forever. So now we educated youth have a new idea, to end centuries of oppression and domination. And we demand the right to impose this idea on the rest of you, by force.

Put that way, it looks absurd. But it never occurs to the young sprouts full of rage.

Hey Uncle Joe! How yer doin', pal?

Now, it is my contention that most of the glorious moral and political advances of history are not glorious and moral at all, but just an adjustment responding to the fact that the old way just does not pay.

For instance, the change from sacrificing the first-born to sacrificing a goat. From sacrificing domestic animals to sacrificing the Son of God so the rest of us don't have to. Not moral; just practical.

Changing from the rule of the fathers and the conflict of the tribes to the state with its monopoly of violence, encoded in our time with police forces. Not a moral advance, just practical common sense.

Switching from slave labor and from serfdom to free labor. Not moral, but practical because free labor is more profitable to all concerned.

Emancipation of women. Not moral but practical because women aren't needed to birth lots of kids and spend their lives preparing and preserving food. They could do other things.

The next thing, I think, is the reduction of the administrative state and the rule of the educated gentry that makes them creative and important. Not because the administrative state is immoral and the educated gentry have a conflict of interest but because, first, the administrative state does not pay. And the educated gentry could be doing more productive things than ordering us all around in a pandemic. and sending their children to mostly peacefully protest about issues that were decided half a century ago.

But, but! What would the educated gentry do then, poor things?

Exactly, they would have to face up to the real challenge of all creative endeavor, that they are probably not creative enough, and not courageous and not persevering enough to get much beyond having a creative idea or two that they fail to develop and bring to fruition.

And then there is my bigger theory, that we are in the twilight of the political era, die Politischedämmerung, because, with our market economy and its trust culture, we really don't need much policing and administrating, except for the few people that haven't yet got with the program. And for them we need a few of Dickens' Inspector Buckets to tap their noses and straighten out the thugs and malingerers.

But whenever humans enter a new era we seem to have to go through a period of transition where some reactionary movement falls in love with the past and pushes the pedal to the metal trying to revive the old days. Like our lefty friends and their Great Reaction.

Like right now.

Liberal Oppression - Table of Contents

Liberal Oppression: The Liberal Hegemony

1. No, New Yorker, YOU are the American Tragedy
   
   
2. The Left's Conceit About "Resistance"
   
   
3. Exactly Who Calls Himself a White Supremacist?
   
   
4. Was It Really "Prestige" That Made Our Ruling Class Larger Than Life?
   
   
5. The Many Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony
   An indictment of socialism, big government and war on middle class and religion


6. Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 2
   An indictment of education and welfare and government pensions
   


7. Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 3
   An indictment of government housing programs and subsidies
   


8. Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 4
   An indictment of government programs for the homeless
   


9. The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry
   
   
10. Getting a Word In Against Liberal Cultural Hegemony
    
    
11. Showing the Ruling Class the Door
    
    
12. Understanding Gender Madness
    
    
13. Transportation and the Lower Classes
    
    
14. Is Forgiveness in Politics Ever Possible?
    
    
15. The End of Over/Under Politics
    
    
16. Hey Transgenders, Don't Frighten the Horses
    

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 4

I've set forth some of the oppressions that the liberal ruling class has committed, here, here and here.

We all know that any ruling class is bound to commit injustice, because as a well-known philosopher said: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. And who are the people empowered to commit injustice? You got it: the ruling class.

So it stands to reason that the ruling class in the West of the last 100 years and more, the educated class, will have committed injustice upon injustice, most likely in the implementation of its own vision of justice with the help of government force. 'Twas ever thus.

Previously I have discussed, starting here, its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, government pensions, and housing. Now let's look at:

The Homeless. The homeless began as an issue during the Reagan administration, no doubt as a way for liberals to do Activism. It was only to be expected that, in the aftermath of the cruel Reagan budget cuts -- courtesy of Budget Director David Stockman -- that there should be a tragic consequence. That consequence was "the homeless."

To put this in perspective, I suspect that after every major economic downturn there is a swelling in the ranks of people that got spat out of jobs and that never get their stuff back together again. The iconic example is the Skid Row bum that was the consequence of the Great Depression. The Reagan 1980s took place after the serious recession of 1980-81 when the Fed started wringing out the 1970s inflation. So you would expect a flux of men unmoored by the recession and cast upon the homeless shore. Now we have the aftermath of the Great Recession that started with the Crash of 2008. Obviously we should  have expected another wave of castaways landing on the beach.

The question is what to do about it. Should we have government programs to provide food and  shelter to the homeless, or should we leave it to the charities and the charitable?

In this sense, we should remember the 19th century approach to poverty. The ABCDEFG system was advocated by outfits like the New York Charity Organization Society, and advertised by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion in Chapter 6: The Seven Marks of Compassion thus:

1. Affliation: getting the poor back in touch with their families, i.e., people that can be persuaded they have an obligation to help a particular individual.
2. Bonding: charity volunteers were instructed to bond with their charity cases, and "maintain 'the greatest patience, the most decided firmness, and an inexhaustible kindness'" towards the people they helped.
3. Categorization: are applicants truly helpless?  Or are they "Needing Work Rather Than Relief," or "Unworthy, Not Entitled to Relief." Inquiring minds want to know.
4. Discernment: this is about smoking out the frauds and cheats.
5. Employment: as in "Labor is the life of society, and the beggar who will not work is a social cannibal feeding on that life."
6. Freedom: "the opportunity to work and worship without governmental restriction." Hello credentialism.
7. God: as in "True philanthropy must take into account spiritual as well as physical needs."

It is fairly obvious that the current bureaucratic response to homelessness does not use this wisdom of the ages. Today, we allow the homeless to violate laws against using public spaces as encampments, public intoxication, public begging, etc. And this is unjust.

This is just part of a larger problem that liberals and their clients are exempt from many laws, and this is unjust.

Of course, no problem handed to a government bureaucracy is ever solved, for it goes against the basic rule of bureaucracy, that it progressively does less and less, and eventually does nothing while collecting salaries and pensions. Indeed, to solve the problem would to be put the bureaucracy out of business, a prospect not to be endured. And this is unjust.

Here in Seattle we have had homeless programs for over a decade, and the problem has only gotten worse. In a way, you can't blame the politicians, who are merely responding to political activists whose meaning of life is bound up with finding oppressions and exploitations to protest against. Thus, opposition to homeless programs has only now emerged in response to the Seattle City Council enacting a "head tax" on medium to large businesses in Seattle in order to expand funding homeless programs that, in accordance with a law of bureaucratic nature, keep expanding.

Notice how my definition of government applies.

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

It really doesn't matter who those supporters are: activists, bureaucrats, welfare clients, entitlements recipients, contractors, investment firms. Everyone wants free money from the government. The only question is how to frame your wants into non-negotiable demands. Politicians are not fools; they can see that today's activists are tomorrow's supporters, and so every new entitlement and program creates a new activist group that will provide funds for reelection and fight like cats to keep its loot.

And this is unjust.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 3

I've set forth some of the oppressions that the liberal ruling class has committed, here and here. As I wrote,

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, and government pensions. Now let's look at:

Housing. All humans need shelter, but shelter is expensive, and so humans have expended extraordinary effort to obtain shelter. They have developed many ways in which to obtain shelter from the elements. One way is to live in the house of your liege lord. Another is to board in the house of a widow. Another is to rent a dwelling or a part of a dwelling from its owner, popularly called a "landlord." Finally, due to the modern western idea of private property in land, people can own a parcel of land and the dwelling that stands upon it.

It seems to be the ambition of very many people to "own" their own home. Even the socialists appreciate this, as George Bernard Shaw writes of the first Adam seizing the most fertile and favorable patch of land he can find. But there is a problem. The time of life at which humans need to obtain shelter, in young adulthood, is also a time when they are ill-equipped with the financial means to do so. Thus, in the Middle Ages in Britain, young people could not get married unless they could obtain resources from both families, either by right of inheritance or by dowry or both.

In our time, young people can live in the house of their liege lord, as in public housing. They can rent space from a landlord. They can buy a house by borrowing a down payment from their parents and by pledging the house as collateral for a loan, a home mortgage. The culture of widows operating boarding houses seems to have gone out of fashion.

Now, we know from the rather young social science called economics that there are two ways to distribute things of value. You can do it with the price system, which basically balances the prices, purchase-wise or rent-wise, of houses against the amount of money that buyers and renters are willing to bid. Or you can resolve the matter by force, with government or liege lords establishing prices and rents by force. Government also has the option of meddling with the price system with subsidies and interventions in the credit system: semi-force.

The ruling class of the last 100 years has made many interventions in the housing market. It has devalued the currency; it has instituted rent control; it has subsidized mortgage credit with government-subsidized loans; it has instituted building codes to prevent the construction of "jerry-built" houses and latterly to require expensive "environmentally friendly" features; it has limited housing construction in environmentally sensitive areas. All these government actions are actually or potentially unjust, and simply enact the agenda of the ruling class without regard to the welfare of the nation.

But let us unpack the subsidization of home mortgages. As usual, a program advertised as creating "affordable housing" has achieved the opposite.

Let us start before the Great Depression. In the United States, you could borrow money to buy a house. Typically you had to put down about 50 percent of the purchase price and get a 10 year mortgage.

Do you see what this means? It means that the price of houses had to balance with the fact of buyers that could only borrow 50 percent of the purchase price and put down 50 percent of the purchase price as a down payment. It means that prices would tend to be low, low, low. It would, of course, privilege young people who could borrow down payments from their parents.

But after the Great Depression the FDR administration created the Federal National Mortgage Association to provide a secondary market in mortgages. Perfectly harmless, except that, with the government's backing, FNMA could buy 30-year mortgages and sell them bundled to widows and orphans and pension funds.

Do you see what this means? It means that people are now able to bid more for houses, because 30-year mortgages mean lower monthly payments. This means that house prices will go up.

Is this a good thing? I don't think so.

After World War II the federal government enacted other housing programs, mortgage loans from the Federal Housing Administration with lower down-payments. And of course, the Veterans Administration created the zero-down VA loan for veterans. The result, you can see, is to raise housing prices because the government low-down-payment policies allow buyers to bid up prices for housing.

Is this a good idea?I don't think so.

In the 1970s the feminists discovered that the practice of banks to count only the income of the husband in qualifying home buyers for a loan was male chauvinism. And so lenders were now required to count the income of both partners to a housing loan. The result, you can see, was to raise housing prices because the non-chauvinist rule allowed buyers to bid up the price of houses by qualifying them for bigger loans.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

In the 1930s, after the creation of FNMA, the bureaucratic mindset invaded the home loan market and the regulators started grading neighborhoods for creditworthiness. You can see that this is an inevitable result of government intervention, because once you have government subsidies then you have an opportunity to scam the system and therefore you have to have regulations to stop the scam artists. Certain neighborhoods were "red-lined" and often enough these were black neighborhoods. So activism organizations like ACORN pushed to pass the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to stop redlining and increase the availability of mortgages to minority borrowers. Good idea, you may say. And I'll agree, up to a point.

But activism never stops with its victory. And so the war against redlining kept escalating, through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The federal government kept lowering the down-payment on mortgage loans and started requiring lenders and FNMA to increase the proportion of loans to people with lower credit scores. You can see that this kind of policy increases the number of people who can bid for houses and increases the amount they can bid with. So it tends to increase housing prices.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

You know what is coming next. By the 2000s the federal government was pressuring FNMA and Government National Mortgage Association to increase mortgages to "sub-prime" borrowers. And they were pushing 100 percent loans. What could go wrong? A couple of things. First of all, "liar loans." I can't imagine what that means. Also, because pension funds are often required to buy only the highest rated bonds, financial speculators figured out how to buy bundles of mortgages with high-risk loans and convert the high-risk bonds into lower-risk bonds with financial instruments called "derivatives."

Now for a quick lesson in finance, from Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market published in 1872 after a major financial panic. Bagehot argued that to avoid panics the credit system needed two things to work. First of all, loans must be properly collateralized, so that if the loan is liquidated the lender will recover his investment by acquiring the collateral for the loan. Secondly, the borrower must have the means to service the loan. If either of these notions are ignored then, in a financial downturn, people in the money market will be afraid to buy loans, because they will worry about the quality of the loans out there and the ability of borrowers to service their loans. This worry is called a "loss of confidence" and you will hear a lot about it during any bear market.

So in the glorious 2000s both of Bagehot's principles for a solid credit market were being grievously violated by the government's subsidizing and support of low down payment loans and sub-prime borrowers. Thus, in the 2006-08 bear market people in the credit market started to stay away from outfits like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers that had invested heavily in housing-related derivatives. Both financial houses failed.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

Now back in 1913 the US passed the Federal Reserve Act to provide the United States with a central bank so that the panic of 1907 could never happen again. It was unconscionable that the United States should have to rely on a "money trust" headed by private banker J.P. Morgan when threatened by a financial panic. It needed a "lender of last resort."

Only in the next two financial crashes the bureaucrat in charge of the Federal Reserve Board did not act as lender of last resort. In September 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, little Ben Bernanke said that he didn't have the legal power to act as lender of last resort and bail out Lehman Brothers. The Dow Industrials started losing 500 points a day, every day. Can you spell "loss of confidence?"

Is Ben Bernanke a coward and a poltroon? I think so.

You can see what this is all about. In its efforts to help would-be homeowners the government has raised housing prices, engineered at least one bone-shattering financial crash, and almost certainly made things worse.

There is a word for this sort of thing. Injustice.

More to come.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt.2

Yesterday we listed four instances of the cruel domination of leftist hegemony in Socialism, in Big Government, the War on Middle-Class Culture, and the War on Religion. But how much can you get through in a single blog post? So let us continue with:

Education. The notion of child education -- extending now into young adulthood -- is so universally accepted and celebrated that you wonder what humans did before universal childhood education paid for by taxes. Clearly, the whole point of education is for adults to get a hold of children's minds. That is what is behind the alleged Jesuit claim: "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

Charles Dickens famously represented the schools of his age as vile prisons of mental torture and physical abuse, for which the solution was... what, exactly?

The father of the "common school" in the United States, Horace Mann, predicted in the 1830s that the government school would reduce crime by 90 percent.

Well, we know how that worked out. In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida we discovered that, in order to reduce crime statistics, police and education bureaucrats determined, as recommended by the Obama administration, not to put criminal-suspect children into the criminal justice system. And then one day a kid shot up the school. Way to go, bureaucrats!

What we have, in modern government education, is the elite running a system to educate children according to their model of how children should be educated. But there is not the least effort to discover how the parents of the children want their children educated, least of all poor parents.

Or even a double-blind study to compare different models of education with outcomes by race, class, and gender.

So let me ask you: what do poor and minority parents want for their children? Frankly, I haven't a clue, except that I've heard tell that many charter schools are oversubscribed, and that many minority parents like the high-discipline KIPP academies.

Look, this is not surprising. The ruling class thinks of education from inside its liberal bubble as a preparation for a creative and well-connected life, culminating in college and a master's degree and entry into government-financed education and activism. Anything else is not that interesting to the rulers.

Plus, of course, since education is a government monopoly, it is almost impossible to change it. To implement an education system that would respond to changing times and to parents you would need a fee-paying market-based education system. But any idea like that terrifies people.

My model for education would be mothers in the neighborhood getting together to teach their kids the basics and an end to child labor laws. Yep, why not get Junior running  spreadsheets at age 7? However, I would draw the line at allowing children to operate power equipment. Some fun things must be reserved for adults. For the poor? Billionaire-financed KIPP academies. Most kids would quit school at 12 or 13 and become interns and apprentices. Anyone wanting to go to college would have to crawl over broken glass to get there. And no student debt, because that just encourages colleges to jack up fees and hire administrators.

That is the only way to end the injustice of liberal-dominated education.

Welfare. The current welfare system is a pension scheme to reward supporters of the government; both the actual welfare clients and the bureaucrats and vendors that benefit from the system. That is all.

Otherwise we would have to come to the uncomfortable notion that the whole idea of government welfare is to break up the families of the poor, make sure that the poor never rise up into the working class and get a job. And certainly never rise to compete with the middle class for jobs, housing, and good schools in the tonier suburbs.

In the good old days, welfare was run by charities and by mutual-aid associations. There was a strong notion that you only helped people that helped themselves. The charities had a ABCDEFG system. A is for Affliation: who is responsible for this person? EFG is Employment, Freedom, God.

Really, what else would you expect? Government is an armed minority, using taxes to reward its supporters. What does government care of decency, responsibility, self-respect? As long as the punters are voting for our guy the system is working. That's how a politician thinks.

But here is the real injustice. Imagine what happens to the welfare recipient in a place like Venezuela, presently going down the tubes. What is life like for the welfare classes in Venezuela right now? For some reason I read nothing in the media about that. The fact is that if you repose upon your government benefices you are remarkably ill-prepared for life when the government runs out of money. And it is when the government runs out of money, dear lefties, that people turn to the Man on the White Horse, the evil fascist.

Government pensions. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker (I think) observed that defined benefit pensions (that define the income from a pension) could not work because it is impossible to predict 30 years in advance how much an employee should pay in order to enjoy a defined pension at age 65. Anyone that organizes a defined-benefit pension is allocating the risk of providing the future pension to somebody in the future. For instance just this week it was announced that in Seattle, the city employee pension funds made a series of mistakes in investing their funds. So who takes the loss? The city employees? The managers of the pension funds? The insurance companies providing liability insurance to the pension fund managers? The taxpayers?

In fact, while corporations have abandoned the defined-benefit pension plan for "defined-contribution" plans in which the employer just puts funds into an employee pension account the government is still going strong with the defined-benefit plan, all the way from Social Security to the notorious California government employee pension fund, CalPERS, that is likely to cause the State of California to go bankrupt. Actually the defined-benefit pension plan is the perfect fit for politics because it offers glorious vistas of wealth -- way off in the future when other people will have to deal with the fallout.

Obviously defined-benefit pension plans are a monstrous injustice, what I call "generational injustice." They promise a wonderful cornucopia for people now, but require somebody in the future to cough up real cash in order to make good on the promises.

OK, that's enough for now. More in the future.

The Many Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

This is all in accordance with my doctrine that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

I mean merely this. If you are railing about justice, you are really complaining about the real or perceived injustice that you experience at the hands of the ruling class. But suppose that, as a result of your activism and peaceful protests that you actually acquire political power. I guarantee you that many people will experience your beneficial legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice as the very opposite, as injustice, straight up.

Now our liberal friends have been telling themselves for over a century that they are an insurgent movement from below that is nobly and sacrificially bending the arc of history towards justice by the use of political power, reversing the injustices of the ages.

I believe the opposite is true. I believe that the progressive movement, the left, has been a top-down tyranny, using the excuse of injustice to impose an unjust order upon the people of the western world, to replace the partial tyranny of feudalism and the apparent tyranny of industrialism with a quasi-military mobilization of society into an administrative hierarchy that is tyrannous, totalitarian, oppressive, exploitative, and ultimately ruinous.

The idea has been that the industrial era has introduced new and frightening monstrosities upon a hapless people, that the left are the chosen ones to fight these monsters and protect us all from their evil spawn. And the means appropriate is politics and government and administrative system.

Unfortunately, as I insist, government is force; politics is the art of unifying "Us" to fight against the dangerous "Them"; and system, administrative system, is domination. So you would expect that no good would come of the left's efforts.

Socialism, the ownership of the means of production and distribution in common. This notion is a nostalgic dream to return humans to the alleged community of the tribe, where nothing is owned and everything is shared. And indeed you can see the survival advantage of sharing food in the hunter-gatherer band. But in today's world of cities far from the production of food, socialism does not work because there is no survival advantage in sharing food with the neighbors. And there is the little problem that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. So what? Well, the purpose of prices is to tell people what to do next, in other words, change their behavior in accordance with the scarcity of goods and services. That is the point of the market economy: every moment people are adapting their contributions to the economy based upon their experience of prices. And the point of government is to prevent change, particularly the kind of change introduced at the point of a spear by rapers and pillagers. The problem with socialism is that when prices and individual ownership are forbidden then there is no way to adjust production in response to developing problems; the socialist managers at the top of the administrative hierarchy are not going to see developing problems until they have become disasters. So socialism at the scale of the nation state is not a survival advantage but a road to ruin. Hello Venezuela. But the big problem with socialism is that it can only operate by force. The natural thing for humans to do is to barter and trade, and then produce a little on the side, and then improve the product and then borrow from a neighbor and then expand production and then start selling to folks in the next village. All this is forbidden because it trespasses on the power of the government's socialist managers. And that is unjust.

The Neo-Slavery of Big Government. All across the west, governments spend about 30 to 50 percent of GDP. This means that about half of the economy is directed not by market forces but by government force. This is unjust, for it forces every individual to fund his master's political project, which is to tax the people to reward his supporters. In effect, people are forced to support a vast political project as the price of earning a living. But it gets worse. It is clear that every government is eager to invent new spending to reward new supporters, but every government quails before the prospect of ever reducing spending. Indeed the only way that government tend to reduce spending is through the trickery of inflation and devaluation of the currency. If slavery is unjust, then Big Government is unjust.

The War on Middle-Class Culture. It seems likely that the bourgeois culture, of companionate marriage, of the nuclear family with married parents living with their children, of distance from the extended family, is a recent phenomenon. It is founded on the notion of individual responsibility and it is hard, because young men move out from under their father's domination (and experience), and young women are free of the influence of their mother-in-law. It means, to a great extent, that young people starting out a family are on their own. It is obviously harder to make a success of this when government is getting you into debt for college and sequestering up to 50 percent of your income. More than that it is clear that the sexual revolution, that stigmatizes female modesty, and abortion, that empowers male sexual appetite, and non-binary genders, that makes a zoo out of sexuality, all combine to confuse and demoralize ordinary middle-class people. That is the whole idea of war, to confuse and disorient the adversary.

You can read that this war on the middle class is a Jewish conspiracy, or the natural program of the ruling class to make the people dependent. But I rather prefer the verdict of my Three Peoples theory. Our ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, believe in creativity à outrance. That's French for creativity to the max. So you get existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir advertising a life of creativity in everything, including sexuality. They seem to believe in complete personal reinvention without any credit for tradition or the way it used to be. The only problem is that if you try that you will probably ruin your life as, arguably, Sartre and Beauvoir ruined theirs. Indeed, the whole story of the universe is that it does not wipe the slate clean with every generation, but it builds upon itself. It may break out in a new direction, but almost always it will build on previous knowledge (encoded in DNA) and practice (encoded in culture). Anyway, it is cruel and unjust to make war upon a people's culture, whether the culture is hunter-gatherer or 20th century bourgeois.

The War on Religion. The reason that "God is Dead" is that the People of the Creative Self do not believe in the God of the People of the Responsible Self. They believe instead in... well I would say that the People of the Creative Self have not yet really found a new God, beyond the faith in their own creativity. But they know that the God of Christianity is sick and wrong. And bigoted, and superstitious, and racist and sexist and homophobic. So it must be driven out of the public square. And that is unjust. As I develop in my book The Road to the Middle Class, the Axial Age religions are an irreducible part of the journey from rural idiocy to urban competence. The point is made clearly by a minister from back in the days of the Great Awakening in the 1700s:

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

See what I mean? When people make the journey from countryside to cityscape they discover that they need a new religion.  And the religion they seem to choose is the local derivative of the Axial Age religions, with creator Gods that set  up an understandable world book-ended by divine law.

So when liberals make war on Christianity they are building roadblocks and barricades on the Road to the Middle Class. And that is unjust. But that is the way of the world. We humans are pretty good at figuring out what we want and need. But we are a lot less competent at figuring out what other people want and need. And that is the beginning of injustice.

OK. This is End of Part One. More to come.

Was It Really "Prestige" That Made Our Ruling Class Larger Than Life?

Today Richard Fernandez has a lovely piece about the end of "prestige," how the western colonial regimes used it to dazzle the natives -- right up until the Japanese kicked the Brits out of Singapore in 1942. The colonialists decided that the only way to rule their colonies was to appear magnificent and incorruptible, and so they developed ways of removing the undesirables that didn't quite measure up and might smudge the perfect escutcheon of white colonialist prestige. Fernandez proposes that the 1942 moment has arrived for the colonialists of our own day, the ruling class that rules so magnificently over the deplorables of the modern West.

It's a beautiful idea, and makes a lovely article, but I don't agree. The "prestige" of our ruling class was obtained by force and intimidation, as the whole Harveygate episode has proved. Up till now "don't get in a fight with a guy that buys his ink by the barrel" has been good advice. You didn't attack ruling-class notables because they had the power to banish you to Outer Slobbovia. And the ruling class had the power to take care of their own, like Sixties radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, high-class terrorists that never went to jail and today hold prestigious positions in the academic/foundation world. Ayers is the son of a utility executive, and Dohrn a daughter of the upper-middle class.

No, today's ruling class has maintained its prestige not by culling the chaps that didn't put on the right show but by memory-holing anyone that dared to challenge its prestige. That was why the waitress sandwich between Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd never had her day with Gloria Allred. That is why the women that accused Bill Clinton were harassed and demeaned. That is why the GOPe learned their lesson and learned to go along to get along as junior partners in the ruling class. It wasn't prestige that ruled over them; it was power.

Look at the presidency of Barack Obama. It had its share of scandals and mistakes, but at the end of it, President Obama looked back on a presidency remarkably free of scandals, knowing that the Democratic operatives with bylines at the New York Times and the Washington Post would scarcely disagree and say that Obamacare was and is a scandal, that the use of the IRS to harass Tea Party groups was a monstrous injustice, and that the president's Middle East policy was a disaster. Hey, better not disagree, else you're a racist.

My line is that all ruling-class power contains the seeds of its own destruction, because government is force and politics is division and system is domination, and so any ruling class, by its resort to government force to tax the population and reward its supporters, eventually cannot distract the populace from the accumulation of injustice with the brilliance of its regime propaganda.

Put it this way. If you tax 35 cents of every dollar, as we do, if you force everyone into one-size-fits-all programs of pensions, healthcare, and education, and if you regulate everything up the ying-yang, it cannot but be that great sections of the people are unjustly treated. You can persuade them for decades that all this is the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, but eventually more and more people will see through the charade. And then they will get angry.

This is what we are seeing, after all, with Harveygate. Lots of people kept silent after being treated like trash, because they knew what was good for them. But they were angry. And then one day the force shield retracted and Harvey Weinstein and every other power abuser was dead meat.

But our ruling class is in trouble for another reason. Eventually the prestige of handing out goodies to the bubbas begins to tarnish.

You do not do people any lasting good by making them into the "little darlings" of the regime. The white working class is dying of despair because for decades it was the little darling of the ruling class, coddled and given special rewards and benefits by legislative ukase, until it wasn't. Today women and minorities are the little darlings of the ruling class, and they have replaced the white working class as the special favorites of the ruling class. The problem for the white working class is that the special coddlings and rewards handed out to them by the ruling class allowed them to ease up and reduce their efforts to make it in the market economy; their little darling status allowed them to hide from the world in union jobs and lifetime employment. Until it didn't.

The same thing applies to women and minorities. All the diversity and inclusion means that right now the world is bending over backwards to make life easy for women and minorities in the public square. Until the world finds a new little darling to shower with love and kisses. Then all the special coddling and rewards will turn out to be a disadvantage to the former little darlings.

So the prestige of today's ruling class is breaking down, probably because it can't intimidate the way it used to, and it can't deliver like it used to.

The question is what comes next. The answer is simple. The little darlings of yore will be fighting to maintain their special privileges, and it won't be pretty. After all, the promise to Make America Great Again is really a thinly veiled promise to restore the white working class to its former glory. Only it won't happen, except if the white working class completes its move into the middle class and learns to go with the flow of the market economy. Meanwhile the new little darlings, women and minorities, will be scrabbling to keep their special status, and in the end they will fail, just like the white working class.

The solution to the problem of the little darlings is simple. Don't be a little darling. Don't accept the protection of some political sugar daddy; learn to make it on your own. Above all, you have to learn to change horses. Just like in the old days of coaches and horses, you have to change your horse at every stage if you want to get to your destination. Right now I have friends that used to be tech writers at Microsoft. Now they all seem to be turning up at Amazon. That is what it takes in the market economy. Jobs and corporations and skills come and go. You have to get with the program and make sure that you don't get left by the side of the road, cold and sick and hungry, with a horse that won't go. And the only way to do that is to take responsibility for your own life and never believe a politician.

It wasn't prestige that kept our ruling class in power; it was free stuff and intimidation. And now the free stuff and the intimidation aren't working like they used to. Which is a problem for all of us.