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.

Politicians Don't Know Nothing About the Economy

President Biden this week is emitting some incredibly foolish things about inflation. Said he:

“They [Republicans] don’t want to solve inflation by lowering your costs,” Biden said at the White House. “They want to solve it by raising your taxes and lowering your income.”

He called inflation the nation's top economic challenge, blaming the twin challenges of a "once-in-a-century pandemic" and the war in Ukraine.

"I want every American to know that I’m taking inflation very seriously, and it’s my top domestic priority," Biden said.

 No doubt. Except that a wise leader would have been worrying about inflation a year ago; he wouldn't be playing catch-up and blaming the opposition a year later. 

In fact, of course, politicians are only interested in the economy if it's tanking and threatening their hold on power -- not to mention the supply of ready cash for distribution to their supporters.

There's no mystery about this, of course. Politicians, like tribal leaders down the ages, are there to defend the homeland against marauders. For that they need to commandeer all the resources of the community in the fight for life or death.

Other than that, the warrior leader is interested in co-opting possible rivals with gifts and manors. Or, for those rivals not amenable to gifts and manors, they are another enemy and must be defeated.

Now comes Steve Sailer wondering about the astonishing European imperialism starting in 1492. As he says:

European ships were showing up all over the world, trading, conquering, and spreading Eurasian diseases, building the wealth of Europe and depleting that of the rest of the world.

 Were they "depleting" the wealth of the rest of the world? Certainly they -- we -- destroyed the tribal cultures of the Americas. But with India and China they were trading. They traded with India so that they could avoid the taxes and add-ons from the overland Silk Road and the spice route, with principalities taking their cut all along the way. China? Something about the price of tea in China and those jolly clipper ships that sailed down the Roaring Forties round Cape Horn and back to Europe.

But the question is: how could the Brits come to dominate India and mess around with China? These two civilizations should have been able to handle any amount of pimply European nobodies and their ocean-going sailing ships.

Maybe, says Sailer, it was the Mongols who conquered pretty well everything from Eastern Europe to northern India to the whole of China.

Maybe the Mongols caused places they’d invaded to get more reactionary? Russia, Islam, China, and India all seemed to lose momentum at inventing new stuff after they got out from under the Mongols or subsequent Asian nomad invaders.

Or maybe the Europeans sailors and merchants were operating under a new kind of economic-financial culture that ran rings around the Asians. In their age they were a rising class of bourgeois merchants and nobody adventurers. In our day with have a rising class of the credentialed educated class.

It makes sense when you think about our august rulers and the clueless way they have handled COVID & Co.

I mean, if I were president I would have been scared to death that the money printing and free-stuff distribution would have messed up the economy something fierce. So I would have figured that unless I got the economy back to normal in six months flat I would be facing a wipe-out in my first midterms. I would have put the experts to work figuring out how and why the Morgenthaus and the Harry Dexter Whites got u out of World War II without an economic meltdown.

Instead we have had a year of pedal-to-the-metal spending and low interest rates. The Fed was saying, hey, the inflation is transitory -- whaat? after you had doubled the monetary base in two years? Not to mention increasing it by 8 times since the 2008 crash?

Can you spell Clue Less?

And now I read that the Fed is proposing to raise interest rates at 0.75% per increment. 

Hoo boy, that will be fun.

All I can say is that, for the "next regime" I want a government that has half a clue on the economy and letting ordinary people live their ordinary lives without having to deal with the consequences of political stupidity every few years.

Understanding the "Why" of the Current Crisis

Back in the day, writes Scott McKay at The American Spectator, we had a rough consensus. As in

the political consensus that has persisted for essentially all of our lives was established, to oversimplify the case, by William F. Buckley conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals. That consensus fueled an era marked by the welfare state, the regulatory state, the military-industrial complex, the education-media-political complex, and foreign adventurism for fun and profit particularly in the post–Cold War phase of the era.

But that consensus is dead: No more GOP Buckleyites, and no more Dem Moynihans. 

To guys like us, it seems like the left commands all the high ground. Sure, says McKay, but the left has a problem. Its crazy everything-is-oppression has led to the ridiculous moment in the Senate where a Supreme Court nominee dare not define "what is a woman."

McKay is an optimist. He writes that this moment will not tear the country apart, but rather prompt a political realignment, like Jefferson in 1800, Lincoln in 1860, and Roosevelt in 1932. In other words, Trumpism will win.

What? The Lincoln realignment did not tear the country apart? Ahem. 700,000 dead Americans might disagree with that.

Now I think that the Democrats have three problems.

1. Everything-is-oppression is a lie.
2. Politics-with-everything doesn't work.
3. Cancel culture is a sign that your agenda isn't working.

So let's unpack the three problems.

Everything-is-oppression I just read Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America where he recites the history of all the major ethnic groups in America. The key was not oppression, but the degree to which each ethnic group's culture was already adapted to individualistic life in the city -- before it hit the beaches.

The Germans already had a culture of responsibility. The Irish, Italians, and Blacks did not. Therein lies a tale. So when your politics is all about "we was robbed" instead of "how can we learn to thrive in the city" things ain't gonna go too well for you, because you have missed the point.

Politics-with-everything The problem with politics is Curtis Yarvin's maxim that "there is no politics without an enemy." He means that every political issue degrades into a battle against the enemy. Thus the everything-is-oppression agenda which is all about fighting the white oppressors. But human society is about social cooperation, and in the modern city, economic cooperation. If the other guy is an enemy, then that really limits the amount of social and economic cooperation.

Back in the day the New Deal coalition had a political solution with a government program for everything. The whole point of the Buckleyite GOP was to say, well, not exactly, and it got to enact some moderating economic policy in the late 1970s and 1980s. But in the 2010s the Obama people went back to government with everything, including universal health care. And, because blacks hadn't caught up with whites, they bumped up the government's racist policy of "diversity" into the Allies narrative of we Allies stand with the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Cancel culture When a political movement lurches into a Cancel culture where people can lose their job for having the wrong opinion, it is a sign that the movement isn't delivering on its agenda. This is actually true of every political movement that goes beyond fighting off the Huns or the Nazis or the Commies. Politics is about the enemy, it is about war. If war is not an appropriate means for achieving something then the political movement will fail, and in the last phase of the political movement's existence it will probably be doing a Reign of Terror like the French revolutionaries, a Great Purge like the Stalinists, or a Cancel Culture like the Wokies.

Earth to liberals! An ideological frenzy like Cancel Culture is a sign that your agenda isn't working, not because your opponents are monsters but because your ideas don't work!

The point of politics is to mobilize the tribe or the nation to fight against a frightful enemy. If the problem is anything less than that, then politics is probably not the appropriate means.

And that is not just because not every problem is an enemy. It is that politics cannot get out of the circle of defeat the enemy, loot his granaries, and distribute the loot to the supporters. Needless to say, this agenda is always a wealth-destroying process. If you look at any government program, or any election, you can always reduce it to the enemy, the plunder, and the goodies for the supporters.

Want an example? The education system under COVID. The agenda of the teachers is to protect themselves from the disease-ridden students. The teachers are not saying, we will risk our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to teach the next generation of kids the knowledge and skills they will need to navigate the world. Not at all. They are saying, we will not teach these grubby kids unless we are safe.

As Eric Hoffer wrote: "What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation." One upon a time, universal education was going to save the world. Now it is a racket for teachers to get paid. See more in my "Age of Liberal Grift."

Stay tunes for more exciting episodes of The Next Regime.

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?

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.

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.

Really, Nobody Knows Nothing

So, after all the threats and backing and filling Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) failed to change the filibuster and failed to get the Democrats' federalizing-of-elections bill through the Senate. Today there's a thumbsucker from Politico to explain that it's all Chuck's deep strategy.

His long arc of aligning Democrats for a bill designed to fight gerrymandering, expand early voting and make Election Day a federal holiday ended up persuading literally dozens of them to change the filibuster — despite previous vows in writing that they would do no such thing.

Which means what? Other than Democrats understand that if they don't change the rules they are toast?

Meanwhile down in California Gov. Newsom is pushing a new CalCare state gubmint health plan, and some wild ones in the state legislature are proposing to double state taxes! I wonder what the people that already have health insurance think of that?

The Zman says that it's the end of the line for the left. Their old ideas had basically burned out by the 1980s. The post-Cold War reboot with cultural Marxism and the woke is basically self-destructing in the current crisis.

Meanwhile there is an argument on the right at The New Criterion between "common-good" conservatism, that proposes to use government power more than the traditional conservatism of the Founders and Buckleyite conservatism. Who really founded conservatism? Hobbes, Locke, or Burke, or what? It sounds like it's the end of the line for the old conservatism and the old conservatives don't like it.

Yes. Where do we go next? Assuming it's not the Sixth Mass Extinction. (It really is curious how "it's the End of the World" has gone from wacko religious cultism that everyone who is anyone sneers at to received wisdom in all the best circles.)

Look, I have no idea what the Next Politics is going to be, but the big challenge for the Next Regime is going to be unwinding all the free-stuff programs of the present regime.

Unless the whole current system crashes and burns, so that people are not saying "you'd better not touch my Social Security / Medicare / Gubmint Pension" and instead are pleading for a political Savior to save something out of the wreck.

I wouldn't wish the latter on anyone, but I'm not sure that political change is possible until people get desperate.

See, what I experience right now is that the Democrats see pretty clearly that it's the end of the road for them. Otherwise why would they be trying to pass everything including the kitchen sink and changing the voting rules as well? There's a pretty obvious "tell" in all that: now or never.

Also, you tell me: do humans tend to believe in End of the World religious cults in normal times or when there are unusual social stresses rending the social fabric? Or do political regimes adopt End of the World rhetoric in the autumn of their rule as a last desperate effort to stay in the saddle?

Or, for that matter, why do people believe in Revolution? What is millennial hope, and where does it come from, in religious or in political terms? And, where is it going to?

Now do you understand why Candide said that now he had to go work in the garden. In the garden? Isn't that what Mr. Craven heard, and what brought him back home to Misselthwaite in The Secret Garden? Is there something deeply philosophical and meaningful about gardens, and maybe it's about time that Chuck Schumer did a bit of planting and digging in his garden. Since Spring is coming up, and all? 

You do have a garden, Chuck, right?

The Fire Next Time

With today's inflation numbers coming in with Drudge's flashing blue light -- remember that? -- I find myself saddened, having been a young man in the inflationary Seventies.

Aren't we humans supposed to learn from our mistakes?

And isn't the point of wise old men in human culture -- Biden, Pelosi, Schumer -- that they carry the memory of former times and stop the young firebrands from making the same deadly mistakes that they made in their youth?

But my reading of US politics since the dawn of the 1980s and its rling-class notion of Ronald Reagan as an "amiable dunce" is that our Democratic friends have exerted every effort NOT to learn the lessons of the Seventies and Arthur Laffer's  supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve that suggests that, at some point, when you increase tax rates you get less revenue. See "laffer curve debunked."

Well, they are going to learn their lesson this time, "good and hard." But so are the rest of us, and so are the ordinary Americans that don't know nothing about economics but vote their perceived interest, and the lower-class Americans who are the ones that will really be hammered by the economic chaos of the next few years.

And some eevil speculators, like the chappie that did The Big Short during the 2006-08 bear market, are going to make out like bandits.

Think of that liberals. Every time you do something really stupid, some eevil Wall Street guy cleans up. Mind you, sometimes the eevil speculator is George Soros and uses his ill-gotten gains to finance all your sacred activism! Yay!

But what is the lesson that the Next Regime needs to learn from the current debacle? I'd say there are two lessons.

First, the over / under politics of the last 170 years since it was codified by Marx is social poison. It is a false narrative to tell the lower classes that, by looting the middle class and the rich and getting entitlements in return, they will win the "struggle for justice." No they won't; they will just become the serfs and creatures of the new ruling class and will not be learning the skills to wive and thrive in the market economy.

Second, the administrative state of the last 120 years since it was imagined by the Fabians and the Progressives is a conceit of the educated class. Human society and the market economy are too complicated to be directed by an administrative elite of the educated and evolved.

Back in the day, when our Founding Fathers were codifying the structure of the United States they were conscious that they were doing something new and risky. How could they construct a government without a hereditary monarch and make it work? They studied all the authorities, ancient and modern, to answer the question. I'd say that the result of their studies was practically a miracle and a proof of God's existence.

But what should the Founders of the Next America know? I say that the answer is contained in the Greater Separation of Powers proposed by Michael Novak in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and in the fundamental limitations of political power laid out in my Four Laws.

The notion of the Greater Separation of Powers is that the three sectors of modern society -- political, economic, and moral/cultural -- should be separate. When politics meddles in the economy, and when businessmen meddle in government, the result is not good. When politics and religion get together the result is not good, especially for people believing in the wrong religion. Whenever all of the three sectors combine the result is really bad. And we have a name for a society in which all three are combined: Totalitarian.

My Four Laws are, of course, not mine. They are the ideas of far better men than I.

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

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

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

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

Well, maybe that fourth law really has been invented by me. Because when I Google Search it I just get entries on welfare reform until I put the law in quotes. And then all the responses are directly connected to me.

But do you see that the Four Laws are a direct attack on the politics and government of the last century or so -- and its conceits?

Socialism: how did that work out, Vlad and Joe and ZeDong and Fidel?

Administrative state: how is that working out, St. Anthony Fauci?

Regulation: Remember when we deregulated railways and airlines? Oh the huffing and puffing!

Gubmint programs: Yeah, you try reforming gubmint pensions and gubmint health care.

My hope and faith is that the architects of the next regime will be maybe half as wise as the American Founders of two centuries ago.

But don't get your hopes up. Not yet.

Idle Prognostications About the Next Regime

One thing about everything going wrong on Joey's watch is that it delegitimizes the whole regime and its sacred narratives, including:

Over/Under Political Formula. When the whole nation is getting whammed by big-time inflation, does it matter if you are black, white, or whatever?

Save the Planet. I get that every ruling class has to save us all from existential peril. But let's just wait until a real peril shows up. Humans aren't that good at predictin' and prophesyin' but we are real good at adapting when the chips are down.

World Hegemon. If you are not prepared to be a real Hegemon, what's the point of fiddling around in the Middle East -- or Europe for that matter? 

Politics as Royal Road to Justice. Politics is division and government is war plus loot and plunder. I'd call that the very definition of injustice, but your mileage may vary.

Entitlement State. If we all saved for our own old age that would save about $1.5 trillion in government pension spending, $1.7 trillion in government health care spending. If we sent our kids to the neighborhood micro school, we could save $1.2 trillion in government education spending. Numbers for 2019.

The thing is that it is impossible to change any of these elements in the current ruling class political formula. Because nobody agrees to give up their share of the loot and plunder until after the Taliban takes over and they are just trying to stay alive.

It is only at the point of regime change that the government can do anything serious. But, just in case we have regime change somebody has to think about what it would look like.

Middle Über Alles Political Formula. The new regime will exalt the ordinary All-American middle-class patriot over fashionable and conceited wokey elites and their neo-serf Little Darling vote-banks.

Death to Pirates. The new regime will feature a world-class pirate-hunting navy. Its purpose will be to make sure that no pirate ever tries to take over a merchant ship engaged in honest commerce.

Market Über Alles Economy. There will be no economic regulation and departure from the voluntary market system. Because all compulsion and regulation means a reduction in overall prosperity. The market means that each of us figures out something useful to do and offers that service on the open market. 

Education with Moms and Dads. No more government education. Instead early education will be run by moms at home schools and micro schools, and normal education through high school will be combined with Jobs for Kids. Yeah. Children will have jobs -- working for pay instead of for nothing at government child-custodial facilities -- and their employers will teach them the Three Rs and whatever else takes their fancy. Dads will be in charge of sports, hiking, hunting and fishing.

Saving for a Rainy Day. No more entitlements. Every worker will save for their own retirement -- and sickness, and end-of-life health care, and unemployment and starting their own business. People that fail to save will be forced to save by deductions from their paychecks.

Everybody Helps the Poor. Instead of shuffling the relief of the poor onto gubmint bureaucrats every American will be involved, from billionaires to teenage kids. Meanwhile, of course we will encourage the rebirth of fraternal organizations and mutual-aid societies that were once the glory of America.

The New Separation of Church and State. The new regime will enforce a separation of church and state, and by church will mean every organization or movement that advertises a moral narrative about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

You can see, of course, that this is pie-in-the-sky, because it abandons the eternal rule of politics and government, that it is a war for the survival of Our Community, and loot and plunder will be distributed after the glorious victory.

But I think that we are already in a new era where loot and plunder doesn't help anyone, not even the victors. And I think that the desperate all-out program of the Biden administration to go flat out on handouts to its supporters, to go flat out on systemic racism, and flat out on climate change is actually a sign that, in Kansas City, they've gone about as fur as they can go.

"Gammon:" The Latest Leftist Hate Pejorative

We all know that the worst thing in the world today is the racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacist next door. But maybe there is something worse.

See, in Britland today the educated-gentry lefties have invented a new pejorative: "Gammon."

What in the world is "gammon," you ask? I will tell you. Here is Brendan O'Neill at Spiked!

Mainly aimed at angry men of a certain age who are pro-Brexit and possibly a bit iffy about mass immigration, this fleshiest of epithets reduces people to lumps of meat. Pig meat, at that. It is the closest any side in our maddening culture war has got to likening human beings to animals.

Get it? Gammon is pig meat. Or, as the OED says "The ham or haunch of a swine." But it also means "the lashing of a bowsprit." And the game of backgammon. And in thieves' slang, to gain someone's attention while another is robbing him. And it also means "to talk (plausibly or persuasively)." Or, "to feign, pretend." Or "to stuff with ridiculous nonsense, to humbug, deceive, hoax."

When referring to working-class middle-aged white males that the educated graduate might encounter in a pub, the pejorative dramatizes the likelihood that the said "gammon" may get red in the face, like the actual pig-meat product available at your local butcher's. The pejorative was created back during the "Brexit Wars" about whether Britain should leave the European Union.

According to Brendan O'Neill, the pejorative is really a reflection of the confusion and disorientation that the graduate left experienced in Britain during and after the Brexit vote -- and indeed in the demolition of the "red wall" of working class Labour constituencies in the North of England in the 2019 British General Election.

It can't be that the policies of the educated gentry of the last century has created divisions and winners and losers, and indeed has victimized the very people that the left claims to represent.

I think that the current wokism, the cancel culture, the left-wing street thugs, the new pejoratives invented every day by our educated betters: all these things issue from the fact that the glorious certainties of the last century are crumbling.

And when the glorious certainties are crumbling the chaps who rode the wave -- we thought it would never end -- cannot believe what is happening.

It's not a problem for me, oh no. As a naive Kantian I believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves, that everything is a crude theory that papers over the cracks, and that one day there will be a minor earthquake and the cracks will reappear.

So I go through life wondering about what cherished assumption will get demolished tomorrow.

And I laugh at my lefty friends that think they have it all figured out. Not to their faces, of course.

And I hope that we can get to the next regime without too much of a butcher's bill.

But that's how politics and religion and science work. Part of it is an attempt to understand reality. Part of it is an attempt to convince ourselves that we have everything figured out and there is no need to change the benevolent and compassionate arrangements that so benefit us, the shimmering, glowing stars in the political firmament. And part of it is an attempt to imagine how much better left, the universe, and everything could be. If Only.

And part of it is a cowardly and base attempt to blame everything on some pathetic scapegoat. Like the "gammon" in the local pub.

Two Strikes Against the Ruling Class -- in One Day

Here is a piece right out of Mosca's The Ruling Class. In "Our Coddled Ruling Class and All the Pain They Can't Feel," Oliver Bateman and Malcom Kyeyune write that the problem is not that our elite is censoring us deplorables for deplorableness, but that it is insulating itself from the real world. And that is suicidal.

The true goal, rather unfortunately, is to instead insulate our failing elite in a hermetically sealed bubble, where only those who hold unthreatening, regime-affirming ideas are ever allowed to set foot.

For Mosca is quite clear on this: a good ruling class, while keeping a firm hand on the tiller, is also sensitive to the passions roiling the masses. And does something about it. On the remarkable assumption that the bitter clingers may actually have a real claim to their grievances.

Elites who have stopped listening to the pain signals from the body politic not only risk hurting or killing themselves in similarly gruesome ways, but they also threaten the very societies they supposedly rule over, and the countless lives of the human subjects they are committed to neglecting.

Actually, I suspect that the "ruling clique" does have a clue. But the broader ruling class wants nothing to do with the bitter clingers. And the ruling clique doesn't have the cojones to straighten the lower echelons out.

OK. That's Part One. Part Two is the same, only different. "How race politics liberated the elites" by Matthew Crawford is all about how the basic faith of the elite class that their societies are racist-sexist-homophobes but that they are different, because they acknowledge the evil of racism. And this liberates them from loyalty to their nation states into the rarefied air of the globalist elite. Crawford starts with the superrich and totally dissolute media clan in the HBO series Succession.

Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus... They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

These elite chappies have invented a moral hierarchy with themselves at the top. Because they have broken free of the Original Sin of racism-sexism-homophobia.

The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it.

This actually traps our ruling class masters in a glass cage, from which they cannot escape.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. 

Imagine that! Blacks have to be victimized, for ever and for ever, because otherwise we Übermenschen lose our super-status as educated lordlings way above the common ruck of humans.

Maybe that explains why Google has branded my "1584 Project" as dangerous and violent speech. For in that article I asked my readers to consider that black slaves were not unique. There were all kinds of slavery and semi-slavery back in the day, and the "waste population," the White Trash of Europe was right in the middle of it, as the agricultural era waned and the ruling class rural magnates "hurled" their "useless retainers" into vagabondage and beggary so they could strut their stuff as courtiers in the capital city.

But what do we do about it? I've got a series of posts under my topic of "pejoratives" where I argue that we must stop cringing under the accusation of "racist." Or fling it back in their face with the Hegelian notion that racism is the same as anti-racism, an unhealthy obsession with race. Etc.

But these two articles broaden and deepen my thought about all this.

In the first place, maybe we should stop worrying about what the rulers are censoring and just go on about our business, thinking and planning about what the next regime will look like, and stop worrying about the foolish and knavish actions of the bearded @jack and the Zuck.

In the second place, we really do need to stop apologizing, stop acceding to the crime of racism, to stop recognizing the elite as our betters, and utterly reject the pomposity of their claim to virtue.

Government is force, politics is power, cultural domination is about marginalizing the plebs. You ruling class think you are our moral superiors? Get a clue: all power corrupts, pal, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Got that, Mr. Moralist?

Ch4: But How Does a New Regime Come into Being?

Now that Curtis Yarvin is well into his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince I think I am ready to start making a critique.

And I think my basic problem is the idea that the Nihilist Prince could actually know what he is doing. As I understand Macchiavelli's The Prince I believe that his notion was to teach princes how to maintain and hold power: what worked and what didn't.

But Yarvin is going deeper. For instance in his Chapter 4 on Principles of the Next Regime he is getting into religious and cultural matters: should the new ruler be running a zoo for humans, a video game to let people get off on their natural aggression, or putting people to work doing satisfying work?

But this assumes an almost totalitarian concern for peoples' moral welfare as well as physical welfare.

And I would say that the lesson of the 20th century is that governments that get into the details of welfare, whether physical or cultural or moral, are setting themselves up for failure because the scale of the job is too big for a top-down social structure. The regime just doesn't have the bandwidth.

Yarvin writes about the "Cathedral" and its top-down structure of moral and cultural control:

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

But I think that, as with the physical medieval cathedrals, the ruling class builds the structure of the Cathedral after it has gained religious and cultural power. The Cathedral is the method of maintaining power.

But when putting together a new regime? What does anyone know, except that the old regime has to go?

And in the old regime, what does anyone in the Brain or the Voice know except that any new regime would be worse -- especially for the rulers and their supporters. For in the old regime, the Brain is not really thinking but only defending the orthodoxy, the correct opinion, of the existing regime.

And this is as it should be. Nobody goes out looking for new knowledge unless there is a problem, a glitch in the Matrix.

In normal times the ruling class and its Cathedral are unopposed. Everything is working as it should be: God is in His Heaven and the King is on his throne and the people prosper.

But if things seem to be going wrong: defeat in war, bad harvests, financial crises, mobs in the street; why, then people start to ask what is wrong and What Is To Be Done. But only a very few people.

Moreover, I suggest that the "very few people" are regarded by all sensible people as complete idiots, not really worth taking seriously. Why? Because for all sensible people everything is still working as it should. No glitch in the Matrix here, no sir.

But what if the Cathedral detects dangerous heresy and the Brain and the Voice and the Conversation swing into action to destroy it? 

I wonder. I wonder if, usually, the hierarchs and heretic hunters will really understand that, if there is a problem, it is probably not that the heretics are evil monsters, but that the apparent smooth surface of the glorious ruling class doctrine and its Cathedral and Cathedral spires are all an illusion. That there is, in fact, corruption and decay, and the foundations are undermined.

We see this is the current situation in the United States. Our ruling class and its educated Gentry cannot see that it is producing less than optimal results for great numbers of the people. That's because the whole job of the Cathedral is to demonstrate to the world that everything about the regime is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

So when the American Committees of Correspondence started talking to each other in the decade leading up to 1776 dear old King George and his courtiers didn't really take them seriously. And anyway, did the Committees really know what they wanted?

Or in the run-up to the French Revolution, did the chaps in the cafés at the Palais Royal really know what they wanted and why, and did Louis XVI's courtiers really have a firm grasp on the problem? Life was good under the old regime, according to Talleyrand:

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

Look at the current situation in the US. In the debate on September 29, 2020 candidate Joe Biden railed against the white supremacist Proud Boys but said that AntiFa was "just an idea." But President Trump said of the Proud Boys that basically there was nothing to see here, while AntiFa was a problem.

So the two main political parties can't agree on who the current "peaceful protesters" and/or rioters are, who is behind them, and how significant each group is. But each party agrees that the people in the streets identified with the Other party are clearly a menace.

So what is the solution to the problem of the Next Regime?

Well, I would say that it starts with religion, with people that find the current moral framework ill-adapted for the needs, the meaning of life for people like them. So they start bumbling around trying to create a new religion.

Then there is the broader cultural question of a general moral framework, in which, I would say, the great mass of educated and suburban women establish their expectations of each other and the men that protect them.

And then this cultural framework starts to influence the politics.

And the beginning of wisdom, I believe, is for the folks developing new religions and moral frameworks to recognize that different people need and respond to different religions and moral frameworks; there is no one size fits all.

And the beginning of wisdom in our current left-liberal Cathedral is to understand that its Religion of Creativity doesn't really work for the rest of society. In my reductive Three Peoples theory this means that the religion of the Creative People looks like evil to the Responsible People. And vice versa.

And if the Creative People keep ramming their religion down the throats of the Responsible People they are cruising for a bruising.

Just sayin'.

First Principles of Yarvin's Next Regime

After telling us all about the "System" and the "Cathedral" political philosopher Curtis Yarvin wants us to think about what the Next Regime is going to be all about.

Today, "In 2020, we are all nihilists." Because, whatever we have inherited from the 20th century, "almost none of us has any significant positive belief in it."

What does that mean? I suppose we can say that it means that almost everyone is extremely dissatisfied with the political status quo. Only, we all believe that it is the Other guy's fault.

But nihilism, for Yarvin, involves both detachment and absolutism. What on earth is that all about?

Detachment... means disengaging, detaching, withdrawing or resigning from every form of power, or ambition for power, influence or relevance, under the present regime. 

This is, if nothing else, practical, because it reduces the likelihood that the regime will come hunting for you. It has other fish to fry.

Absolutism... means thinking ex nihilo: from scratch, from first principles, not relative to any specific past or present reality.

OK. Fine. So what's that when it's at home? Well, it recognizes that, while anyone trying to develop new knowledge is standing on the shoulders of giants, we have to recognize that a lot of knowledge these days is baloney, and if we carelessly accept it, we will be standing on the shoulders of ogres instead. So we have to climb down and step back and reevaluate all the knowledge extant to determine what is good giant stock and what is useless ogre stock.

For instance, suppose we had to choose between "government of the people" and government for the people," what should we choose? Yarvin says government for the people is a necessity, while government of the people is a luxury.

Government for the people ideally means an overlord that makes the "justest laws and enforces them efficiently and impartially".

Government by the people could easily mean "chaos and anarchy, in which we are bullied, assaulted, extorted, beaten" by our crazy cousins.

Simply put, Yarvin is arguing that no-one has a moral right to political power. In fact the world is full of Hamlets, Prince of Denmark, that imagine that they are born to rule. Hello wokies!

Our modern system is based on the notion of vox populi, vox dei that the people are the voice of God. Only, of course it doesn't quite work that way in practice. Our real ruling principle is "the people are always right, if rightly educated." That way, of course, the powerful only have to deal with the teachers, rather than the people. And if the rulers have all the teachers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats on their side...

So what we have is an oligarchy, with the Cathedral of moral teachers defining orthodoxy and using Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance," "So we tolerate everyone, except the intolerant." That, of course was the argument of Herbert Marcuse in his doctrine of "repressive tolerance." Says Yarvin:

Popper’s advice is pure Machiavelli. Its message to any regime is: take and hold the levers which control public opinion, before someone else does.

And that is what our Wokie cancel cultists are all about. Fire the heretics before they do any more damage.

But what the "if rightly educated" hierarchs are really doing is handing out goodies to the people: the greatest good to the greatest number? Utilitarianism. Only, it ends up as luxury. It makes sense when we humans are scrabbling around for basic necessities, but not when we are, like the Crazy Rich Asians, engaged in an orgy of  name-brand luxury. Luxury, in the hands of Kevin Kwan, becomes a major motion picture joke.

A political system devoted to delivering luxury is not government for the people.

If we now examine the Latin tag Salus populi, suprema lex, or "the health of the people is the supreme law" we see we are dealing with the luxury problem. But it ain't that simple for "while the health of a body can be quantified, sort of, the health of a soul is a qualitative and aesthetic judgment."

OK, so if we have a government for the people that is truly devoted to the health of the people what would it look like?

Would it be like a zoo, with a worthy zookeeper devoted to the health of the people in it? Not really, because in a zoo, the lions are not really living as lions, dealing with "the real challenges of being a lion."

Would it be like a video game? Well, the experience of video games is that what gamers want is a game of total intensity, and that means "virtual worlds with only violence." That might be too much of a good thing. We could put individuals into video game pods, and harness their energy to do stuff in the real world. Or we could combine people into village pods.

But we still have a situation where the video game producer is directing traffic according to his own notion of what people should be doing.

Maybe we should reimagine the economy and throw away all the cheap plastic toys and put everyone to work making good old-fashioned wooden toys. That way people could once more become artisans rather than mere industrial labor. But that gets awfully close to Bastiat's notion of creating work for glaziers by breaking windows.

But that, it appears are Yarvin's three options to make human health, physical and spiritual, the purpose of government for the people: Put humans in a zoo; put them in a video game; put them to work making toys by hand.

But I would say that if this is the three possible modes of "absolutism" then Yarvin is missing the point, for he is assuming the one thing we do not know, and that is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." In every generation, in every era, we cobble together some religious and cultural and political answer to this eternal question, but we never get close to answering it.

And he seems to be imagining a closed system: that is what a zoo, or a video game, or a toy manufacturing program is all about.

And I would say that the truth of existence is that it is an open system. We men all thirst for challenge and adventure, which we used to get from defending the border, and more recently in global world wars. But there are alternatives, like exploration. We men had a grand old time between 1500 and 1900 exploring and colonizing the world. The 20th century has taught us that the exploration game is over. No doubt that is why tech billionaires are planning the exploration of the solar system.

And then there is the question of women. Oh yeah. Because the point of men defending the border is to provide a safe place for women to have babies, and the food-growing land to produce the food to feed the babies until they are full grown.

And in the last 200 years we have converted the energies of men from fighting on the border to fighting for market share, or fighting to supply the consumers with the best products. I think that the future of politics and governance and culture and religion and economy is to find something for men to fight about that, like fighting for market share, actually benefits mankind.

Women, as ever, will do exactly what they are carefully taught while simultaneously manipulating the world of men to supply them with the protection and the support they need to bear and nurture the future of humankind.

For me, I don't believe in going back to first principles. That is the error of the whole progressive project. As Yarvin says, each of us live by standing on the shoulders of giants, and hoping to avoid getting tangled up with ogres. The task before us is to tag the ogres and build upon what we already have been given by the giants.

We all start from where we are: in this age, this decade, this day, this moment. We never get to start over.

Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: The Uses of the "Political Formula"

Back in the day, smart Jewish kid and software guy Curtis Yarvin made something of a name for himself in a years-long blog odyssey as Mencius Moldbug.

What was Moldbug all about? Just trying to upend the conventional political wisdom. Nothing much.

Who is Yarvin? Let La Wik (as he called it in his Moldbug years) tell the story.

[Yarvin] is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist. He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.

Yeah! "Far-right!" Scary!

Yarvin proved his importance by getting canceled at a 2015 StrangeLoop software conference. In 2016, his invitation to the conference "resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two subconferences, and several sponsors." Note the use of the passive tense.

But now he is appearing on American Mind in a five part series called "The Clear Pill." I'm going to blog about it because that's the best way for me to understand what Yarvin is trying to say.

Yarvin starts by saying that the two turn-of-the-20th-century Italian political scientists Mosca and Pareto, "taught that all states are ruled by elites who subdue their subjects with illusions."

Mosca called these illusions “political formulas.” A political formula is any narrative element which makes [the subjects] prefer actions that objectively stabilize the regime. 

But you are above all that, right? You can see through all the formulas and know the real reality.

Actually not. We all live in a fake reality dome, and we don't know what reality is. All we can do is subject all political formulas to this analysis:

Here is one way to check out any idea you don’t want to believe: assume it’s true, then build a new reality around that axiom. Once you fail, you get to say: I can’t see how this could be true.

That's the Clear Pill. If you can't find a problem with a political formula, then OK. Go with it, for the time being.

But the ideal is to be neutral, to live outside all the narratives, In the perfect case:

You will not be of any use or any harm to any particular cause. You will feel neither political anger, nor political fear. You will neither cause trouble, nor get in trouble. This vacation from politics need not last the rest of your life. But it can.

Now, Yarvin says, our present regime is not like the Hitler/Stalin/Mao regime, "with one person or a small team unilaterally directing the entire state."

Let's call the Hitler-type regime a "one-story state. Everyone has to believe one narrative—one official history of the present." Or else.

But we live in a two-story state. It's really cunning.

When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”

Now maybe both stories are rubbish. Maybe the shared story in the middle is rubbish too. But because there is agreement on some things we humans are inclined to believe the shared story as true. "Stagecraft,"says Yarvin. And the benefit is that a two-story state can maintain itself with a lot less repression than the one-story state.

So how does power operate in our two-story state? According to Yarvin it has a "civic core" and a "political core." Nominally the political core is in charge, as in the voters electing the government. But actually the civic core in in control because it runs the story-making machine.

Public opinion does not direct the civic core; the civic core guides public opinion.

And the civic core is "the permanent civil service" plus "the press, academia, philanthropy, and so on."

If you weren't sure about that before you are now, what with the civic core, from the "deep state" to the MSM to lefty academia doing a 24-7 effort to bounce the peoples' choice, Donald Trump, from office.

And the civic core seems to manage to coordinate itself and its story without any actual Mr. Big in charge. How do they do it?

How does the political core work? Yarvin proposes a three people world, as I do. He calls the three classes: gentry, commoners, and clients.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Usually the gentry rules using the clients as its clients. "The natural conflict pits commoners against gentry plus clients." This is what I say, that the People of the Creative Self (gentry) combine with the People of the Subordinate Self (clients) against the People of the Responsible Self (commoners).

In a society like ours, the commoners are the majority, so it takes a fair bit of talent  -- and "Jedi mind tricks." -- to keep the commoners divided so the gentry can rule.  The trick is to keep the gentry united.

Everything can probably stay copacetic for the ruling gentry unless an outside "third story" comes along.

The most dangerous outside stories (a) are completely true, (b) aim at rogue gentry, and (c) exalt commoners and/or disparage clients. Any such narrative might be the political formula of the next regime. 

Now you see what President Trump is doing in his political rallies: he is "exalting commoners." Obviously chaps like me and Yarvin are interested in outside stories that would do exactly that. Because? Maybe because the gentry seems to be dissing us, people that actually read a book and write about it. And we don't like being dissed any more than black gangbangers in the 'hood.