Perfect Plan in Brief

If you ask me, we have two problems in our modern world. The first problem is the hard road traveled in our age by the migrants from country to city, the transformation in culture needed in rural, agricultural people come if they are to thrive in the city. The second problem is the culture war being conducted against ordinary middle-class commoners by the educated ruling class.

I have a two part Perfect Plan to solve this two part problem.

Part One of my Perfect Plan helps the migrants from country to city learn, first, how to cope with their new life in the city, and then learn to wive and thrive in the city culture and economy with the best of them and become city people.

How do we do that? Teach people the culture of The Road to the Middle Class, which means religion, education, mutual aid, and living under law. Wow. I wrote a book about that.

There is a lot to learn about how to become a bourgeois, a city person. You need to learn to trust other people; you need to learn how to serve your fellow humans with a useful skill and keep updating it; you need to learn to accept the verdict of the market with a good will. Above all you need to live and let live.

Part Two of my Perfect Plan is to institute a culture of tolerance among the People of the Creative Self, the artists and writers and activists that presently rule the the culture of  the world. Right now, artists and writers and activists are carefully taught that there is nothing worse than the responsible culture of the bourgeoisie unless it is the racist sexist homophobic culture of the white working class. 

The reason that our friends the People of the Creative Self need to learn tolerance is quite simple. Most of the commoners, the responsible city people in the world are not ready to become creative. Moreover, as in many things, many are called to be creative, but few are chosen. 

In the old days, the creative class felt themselves to be an embattled minority that had to defend each others' backs; but now the creative class has switched from defense to offense. Today the People of the Creative Self can swarm around anyone they don't like and get them fired from their job. They have the power, in other words, to dominate the public square.

This power, I suggest, is a Bad Thing, and unless we curb it -- as all power should be curbed -- with a new culture of tolerance among our creative and educated elite.

Perfect Plan Table of Contents

Perfect Plan - Table of Contents

My Perfect Plan to Make America Great Again

0. Perfect Plan in Brief

1. Communism Week: My Perfect Plan
Teach the workers the ways of the market, and teach creative people tolerance.

2. Tribe vs. City: Which Will Win?
Guess what! Tribalism is bad for business.

3. The Three Peoples Theory and Work
How each of the Three Peoples experiences work.

4. The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination
Keeping workers down, attacking middle class, wrecking education, retirement, health care, charity. 

5. The Politics of the Three Peoples
Obviously, they want different things from politics.

6. Real Critical Theory. How About a Critique of Leftism?
Let's do critical theory on the left using Three Peoples theory.

7. SOTU: Trump Celebrates Middle America
But not a word to the educated elite.

8. What Comes After Conservatism
Try to understand what each of the Three Peoples needs

9. Accepting the Fact of Exile in America's Jacobin Terror
We have to "develop an independent set of religious and social beliefs"

Accepting the Fact of Exile In America's Jacobin Terror

At American Greatness, Jared E. Peterson reminds us that the Democrats have gone full Jacobin. Or Leninist, or Stalinist or whatever.

Today’s Democrats condemn conservatives, traditionalists, and patriots in words chosen to promote hatred and intensify existing social divisions. Their opponents are not wrong for rationally stated reasons—they are dismissed as racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, climate deniers, “deplorables.”

Thus the 2020 election will be a contest like no other.

It will be a contest between those animated by loathing who pursue revolution, and those animated by affection who seek improvement. It will be a struggle for national survival against those who despise the nation and openly seek to replace both it and the descendants of its European founders and later immigrants.

For the Democrats, it is a battle against "whiteness." David Cole writes about an Amazon movie The Aeronauts based on the real-life story of a man who saved himself and in compadre from death in a balloon.

Above cloud level, at unprecedented heights, Coxwell, fighting to stay conscious, bravely climbed up the balloon’s rigging to release the blocked valve that was preventing descent. Oh, and he released it with his teeth while holding on for dear life with both hands.

In the movie, this death-defying heroism is done by a woman. I don't think so. Same with James Cameron's Avatar where the girl helicopter pilot joins the dissidents and uses her helicopter to hide the Avatar machines from the evil Marine general. Wouldn't have happened. Girls just don't do stuff like that. Instead, they insist on safe spaces, freedom from microaggression, and how they feel offended.

But the question is: what do we do about it? Beyond winning the 2020 election?

The Zman writes about the situation of the dissident. The natural resort of dissidents, at first, is to seek access to the institutions "to make their case." But what if that doesn't work, and that, as now, we conservative nationalist dissidents are all dismissed as racists etc. as above? In that case, the dissident is facing "exile" like the Puritans:

[The Puritans] began as reformers of the English church, but eventually ended up as exiles. They were not only exiled from the church, but from English society and eventually their country. As a result, Puritanism was able to develop into a fully formed and independent set of religious and social beliefs. Puritanism probably could not have survived if not for the exile of its adherents.

That is what is facing us "normals" or "deplorables" or "white supremacists." Or whatever. It will no longer do to live as the Outer Party to the Democrats' Inner Party, living by the grace and favor of the Inner Party deep state. We have to develop an "independent set of religious and social beliefs." And this set of beliefs must, at a minimum, put the current Jacobins of political correctness and identity politics on trial as enemies of all that is good and true.

Of course, this is what my whole life is about. I define the broad nature of the people in our society with my reductive Three Peoples theory, where I characterize our current educated ruling class as People of the Creative Self that have defined the ordinary bourgeois People of the Responsible Self as the enemy, the essential political "other." I define the Progressive world view as the Great Reaction, where socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, and identity politics is neo-tribalism. And I try to pull a solution together in my Perfect Plan.

My idea is that we all of us have something of serfs in our personality: we want someone to take care of us. So there will always be some sort of welfare state. Most of us, however, possess the bourgeois culture of responsibility, that we should each set our own course within the framework of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. So there must be a market economy that makes us all adjust to the price signals of the consumers.

The big problem is our creative class that believes in their miraculous role to effect the transformation of the world according to their vision of the anointed. Yes, perfectly understandable, but monstrously evil if it includes the utter demonization of the ordinary deplorable People of the Responsible Self.

And this is especially evil since the clear tendency of capitalism is to encourage and reward people for being responsible and cooperative.

Clearly, it is the nature of the People of the Creative Self to get into religious and cultish enthusiasms from time to time and want the utter transformation of society, right now, as did the Jacobins. Here in the United States they did it in the Sixties. It took Republicans winning four out of five presidential elections in a row to cure them of that, for a season in 1992. But Barack Obama triggered a new Reign of Terror and Virtue against the deplorables of the Responsible Self.

Despite all this, the fundamental datum of human existence is the necessity to return again and again to the basic task of wiving and thriving, putting the next generation on the ground and feeding it and keeping it alive until it leaves the nest. That is all the ordinary people of the earth ever wanted and all they ever will want.

It is up to us to teach our betters about this truth. Otherwise they will consume the earth in the terrible wrath of their genius and their conceit that they are the Chosen Ones that have come to lead us to the Promised Land.

What Comes After Conservatism?

I just whipped through Roger Scruton's latest, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition and I am here to tell you that conservatism is dead.

Scruton's short book leads us through the pre-history of conservatism, to the glory days of Adam Smith and Burke, that reflected and enhanced itself against the liberals like the American founders. Then he talks about the French and German contribution, from Hegel, Chateaubriand and de Maistre; the Hegel bit surprised me. Then we have the cultural conservatives like Arnold, Ruskin, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. Then we have the reaction to socialism, in Hayek, Oakeshott, and Burnham.

But what about "Conservatism Now" the final chapter? This is what leads me to say that it is all over with conservatism. Today's (actually yesterday's conservatives) are involved in a fight against political correctness and religious extremism, i.e., Islam. So we are talking about Orwell, Bauer, Buckley, Rand, Kirk, Huntington, and of course Scruton himself.

Yeah. What about it? What has conservatism done for you lately? The truth is that conservatism has become an Outer Party to the left's and the deep state's Inner Party. It is a decorative flourish to the power project of the evolved, educated class.

And so, chaps like you and I have to think about what comes next. And here is what I think. I need we need to mount an ideological movement that can achieve strategic concentration on the religious and cultural and political battlefront with simple pejoratives similar to those the left uses, as in racism! to attack people that don't like racial quotas, sexism! to attack people that don't believe that women should be specially privileged and/or driven out  into careers in their peak child-bearing years, homophobia!  to  attack people who want to privilege the marriage-and-children family, and xenophobia! to attack people that want to maintain and deepen the unique American culture and homeland.

And so, I think, we must start by concentrating our minds on the big questions that human society is designed to engage with, meaning the big questions that our current ruling class has utterly failed to address. The problem with the conservatives over the centuries, as revealed by Roger Scruton, is that the conservative line has always been a half-hearted critique, as in, oh well, we really don't think that the full-on worship of reason is so great. Or, we don't think the full-on bureaucratic-administrative state is the best of all possible worlds.

Meanwhile our liberal friends have been ruthlessly marginalizing us as people that don't care about the workers, that don't care about the blacks, that don't care about women, that don't care about gays. Thus the vile pejoratives  of racist, sexist, homophobes. Oh and don't forget about "hate" and xenophobia. Thus, anyone that disagrees with the Inner Party of the ruling class is cast out into Outer Slobbovia as worse than Hitler.

I say: Enough! So what next?

Obviously, "the best defense is a good offense." That means that it is time to stop whining and apologizing and start attacking.

OK. Great. But what are we attacking for?

Let's go back to first principles. The whole point of human society is to wive, thrive, and survive. There is nothing esoteric about this; we are talking about family and children, jobs and opportunity, and protection from existential peril. But people are not the all the same: that is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to illuminate.

What do the People of the Subordinate Self need? They need a religion and culture that steers them towards making it in the city. That means growing away from the subordinate feudal and slave culture of the agricultural world to the responsibility culture of the city. In other words the whole bourgeois ethos of Axial Age Religion, the bourgeois family, and the responsibility to develop and maintain marketable skills. You want to wive and thrive and survive in the city? Then get with the bourgeois responsibility ethos. You will notice that our present ruling class does not do that good a job at providing a society that leads the immigrants to the city towards these goals, and that must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their cruel and unjust treatment of the People of the Subordinate Self.

What do the People of the Responsible Self need? They need to understand that just following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law is not the whole of life; it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What if the world changes? And it will. People need to get a little creative;  otherwise when the world changes you are going to be out of luck. One of the great themes of the left is that when the feudal lords no longer needed soldiers, they just "hurled" the peasants off their estates; when the farmers started using threshing machines they no longer hired agricultural laborers that used to do the threshing by hand: too bad for them; and when the market changed the capitalists just laid off the workers that had built their corporations into world beaters. I argue that a responsible person does not rely on the boss to take care of him. He knows that it is up to him to change with the market.  You will notice that the current ruling class does not do too much to teach the average deplorable to renew their skills and change with the market, and that must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their cruel and thoughtless treatment of the People of the Responsible Self.

What do the People of the Creative Self need? They need to understand that there are other people in the world besides themselves and their need to amaze us all. Their current war on Axial Age religion, on the bourgeois family, and their monstrous taxation and regulation of ordinary work is the crime of the century, and the ruling class deserves to be thrown out for its monstrous crimes and injustices. And their current culture of "activism" that they are called to be the Saviors of the marginalized and the oppressed is a pompous self-congratulatory conceit that is all about the need of creative people for meaning and validation and has little to do with the needs of the marginalized and the oppressive. It is fine for creative people to experiment at the margin, but they should be experimenting on themselves and not on the People of the Subordinate and Responsible Self. In particular they should not be trying to mainstream their culture of sexual experimentation. The words of the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell still apply.

Her best-known remark, uttered upon hearing about a male homosexual relationship, was "My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses,"

But of course, today the whole point is not just to frighten, but to stampede the horses. You will notice that the current ruling class recklessly advances the class interest of the People of the Creative Self with no regard at all for the needs and inclinations of other people, and this must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their unjust promotion of their own class needs and their open war upon the needs of everyone else.

As you can see, I have thought out the whole campaign, its justification and its goals. All I need are the pejoratives. But I'm thinking about that; I'm thinking!

SOTU: Trump Celebrates Middle America

I understand the rage and the confusion that our liberal friends are feeling this morning. Last night President Trump gave a State of the Union speech that had absolutely no shout-outs to the liberal agenda. Nothing about protecting gays from Christian bakers; nothing about transgender bathrooms, nothing about the innocence of the Dreamers.

I agree with the liberals: what was advertised as a unifying speech was in fact a clever and cunning attempt to divide the American people.

Let us analyze the speech in the light of my reductive Three Peoples theory. Was there a word for People of the Creative Self, artists and writers and activists? No there was not. Was there a word for People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants and victims? No there was not.

Instead the whole speech from beginning to end was a riotous celebration of the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the laws.

If you are a well-born white liberal living in some urban ideopolis, Trump doesn't care about you. If you are a helpless illegal immigrant brought here as a child, Trump doesn't care about you. But if you are an ordinary middle-class American, with a job and a house and a family, then Trump absolutely loooves you.

Oh, and if you are a legal immigrant, that went through the process step by complicated step, then Trump is speaking to you.

Trump's love was made manifest in the call-outs to the human props in the gallery, the tradition that Ronald Reagan started in the 1980s. Everyone of his props, from the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans to the black parents of two girls killed by MS-13 to the couple that adopted the baby of a drug addict to the North Korean defector with the crutches, everyone of these people were and are ordinary middle-class people doing the right thing, and they were, of course, every color of the rainbow. There were no "activists" and no "victims." And, of course, Trump finished with his memorable celebration of the Capitol itself, which stands under a statue, standing atop the Dome, of Freedom.

Wow. I didn't know that. But now I do.

So what Trump was doing was encouraging more Americans to identify as good ordinary Americans doing the right thing, rather than identify as specials, whether special snowflakes or special activists or special victims, which is what you get night and day from the mainstream media and the Hollywood media.

So no wonder the usual suspects were flummoxed last night, and no wonder Joy Reid complained.

Church ... family ... police ... military ... the national anthem ... Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for. #SOTU

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 31, 2018

Well, exactly. The whole point of the Sixties and political correctness and identity politics is to marginalize and eventually eliminate the tropes and the culture of the middle-class nation state. The whole point of what Donald Trump is trying to do is re-valorize the middle-class culture that most non-elite Americans identify with and that "we" want lower-class Americans to aspire to.

And let us now mention my Perfect Plan, which is a set of marching orders for the Ruling Class, people like Joy Reid.

Part One of the Perfect Plan is for Joy Reid to help and encourage the lower-class to rise up into the middle class, on the notion that to live a happy life in a nation state of the exchange economy you need to get with the bourgeois culture or you are going to be miserable. In fact, of course, Joy Reid does the opposite.

Part Two of the Perfect Plan is for elitists like Joy Reid to act with compassion and understanding towards the ordinary middle class, like the folks that the president called out in the gallery. In fact, of course, Joy Reid sneers at people like that as evidenced by her tweet.

See what I mean? President Trump's speech was completely aligned with my Perfect Plan. Strategically he is trying to put the Joy Reids of the world on the back foot, by encouraging all Americans to identify as patriotic responsible middle class Americans, the People of the Responsible Self, and by giving to ordinary middle-class American identity and dignity and respect that the liberal elite is determined to deny it.

The liberal ruling-class strategy is designed to marginalize and demean the ordinary middle class, by celebrating the upper-class creative culture of artists, writers, and activists, and by celebrating the world of the victims. This was brought out by the Democratic response to the SOTU by Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA), who talked about marching and protesting in support of the Dreamers. And about transgenders.

Yeah. Marchin' and protestin'. Not a word about that in Trump's speech.

Here's my bottom line. Trump is obviously making a mega-play for the ordinary middle class, the people we saw in the gallery in the House chamber. Will he succeed in bringing the ordinary middle class, the "working families" that the Democrats talk about, into the Republican tent?

The answer is: We Don't Know. That's why we have elections.

Real Critical Theory: How About a Critique of Leftism

In a review of Jordan B. Peterson's interview with Cathy Newman on BBC Channel 4, Uri Harris makes a point that drove home with me.

We need a Critical Theory of leftism, he proposes, on the same principle as the left's Critical Theory of the bourgeoisie. Following Marx, the left has conducted a nearly two-century critique of capitalism's claim to universalism.

Critical Theory draws heavily on Karl Marx’s notion of ideology. Because the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, Marx suggested, they controlled the culture. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie. And importantly, people were unaware that this was the case. In other words, capitalism created a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who controlled society—were made to appear to be universal truths and values, when in fact they were not.

I think that this is an excellent point. It's all very well for the comfortable middle class to think that everyone should be like them, hard-working, responsible, assuming that the market economy that is so good to the bourgeoisie is also good for, e.g., the working class. The argument at the center of Marxism and now identity politics is that the market economy and "middle-class morality" is not good for the traditionally marginalized, and not good for creative types that want to live a live higher and better than mere responsibility and service. The market exploits the working class and constricts the creative class.

So I say, go for it, lefties. Critique capitalism and the middle class all you like.

But there is this. It turned out that the market economy, that Marx said would "immiserate" the working class, did nothing of the kind. The capitalistic economy, in the event, lifted all boats, and lifted the working class into the middle class. So maybe the claim of universal truth was not far off the mark. Nor was the market economy the enemy of traditionally marginalized groups. There is no doubt that white males have done best with the market economy; but everyone else has benefited too. If you wanted to keep blacks and women down you had to write laws to do so, because the market economy doesn't care who you are, it just cares what you can produce. And there is the bottom line to the market economy, the Great Enrichment. Per-capita income in the capitalist countries has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years.

But now let us do a bit of Critical Theory on the left. Let's call it Real Critical Theory, and let us rephrase Uri Harris's words quoted above.

Real Critical Theory turns Karl Marx’s notion of ideology on its head. The problem is no longer the ideological superstructure of the capitalistic productive forces, but the ideological structure of the educated ruling class that not surprisingly privileges the creative pursuits and the power project of the educated class, from the arts to sexual experimentation to identity politics, as the highest and best form of life. Because the educated class controls the arts, the media, and education, we propose that they unjustly control the culture and marginalize all voices that might oppose their agenda. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflects the class interests of the educated class. Increasingly, people are becoming profoundly aware that this is the case. In other words, progressivism creates a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who control the public square of ideas and approved thought—represent their selfish and unjust class interests as universal truths and values, when in fact they are not.

Of course my entire work and world view are intended as a critique of the left's world view and its selfish and unjust power project.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to show how the educated class, the People of the Creative Self, stand in relation to the other main experiential groups in society, the People of the Responsible Self, and the People of the Subordinate Self, and how their whole project is designed to oppress and exploit the People of the Responsible Self.

My critique of the left's activism culture is intended to show the bankruptcy of activism, always searching for a reason to apply political force and "peaceful protest" to a society that really does not enforce injustice and can be easily persuaded to reduce injustice by the ordinary political process of elections and legislation and a peaceful discussion of the issues.

My notion of "little darlings" is intended to publicize the dead end in store for those that are today's beneficiaries of progressive identity politics. Like the white working class, the educated ruling class may loove you today. But the day will come when the ruling class casts you aside, like wounded soldiers have ever been cast aside by armies on the march.

My "left's errors" is a catalog of the errors and the human misery that left-wing and progressive ideas have caused in the last 200 years. 

My Perfect Plan is a solution to the murrain of leftism, for it proposes solutions to the two main evils of leftism. Against the policy of encouraging pre-urban cultural norms in its little darlings -- first the working class and now women and minorities -- I propose that our society should encourage, by all kind and gentle means, the traditionally marginalized to acquire the middle class culture of individual responsibility that is the key to a productive and meaningful life in the exchange economy and the urban society. Against he left's culture war on the middle class I propose a culture of compassion and tolerance in the People of the Creative Self towards the People of the Responsible Self lately anathematized as "deplorables."

And failing all else, there is always my Communism Week, a blow by blow critique of the left and everything it stands for.

The big thing is this. You can criticize capitalism and the mean and narrow-minded bourgeoisie all you like. But the middle-class culture has produced the Great Enrichment, a 3,000 percent increase in real individual income in the last 200 years. The fact is that leftism, communism, socialism, progressivism has failed every time it was tried. Most tragically it was tried and it failed in Russia, in China, and in India, by educated elites that thought that Marx's ideas were the secret ingredient to the west's dominance. Over a hundred million human deaths later, each of these great nations has realized that the opposite is true. Communism, Marxism, socialism, progressivism is the fastest route to national ruin ever devised by a canting intellectual. Hello Venezuela.

The reason that capitalism has worked is this. It extends the truth of social cooperation one step further. In the old days, animals and humans learned that social cooperation is beneficial, indeed, necessary for successful life on Earth, because it reduces the incidence and crippling costs of violence. In both animal and human society this social cooperation was achieved by a status and hierarchy culture that reduced the incidence of costly and destructive violence substituting force with shows of force. But we moderns have discovered another dimension to social cooperation: private property and the price system. These remarkable inventions allow social cooperation to proceed without the cost and pain of hierarchy systems, but simply through the daily fluctuations of prices in the exchange economy that tell everyone what to do, and more particularly, what not to do. It is the most astonishing discovery ever.

And yet our educated ruling class wants to return to the good old days: a neo-tribalism with identity politics, and neo-feudalism with the welfare state.

What is wrong with these people that a Real Critical Theory that exposes their errors and self-satisfied assumptions won't set right?

The Politics of the Three Peoples

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I propose that humans come in three flavors. First there are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, that understand life as subordination to some lord or patron. Then there are the People of the Responsible Self that first emerged in the cities of the Fertile Crescent some 3,000 years ago. Cities require their inhabitants to be independent and responsible rather than waiting around for instructions, and so they are. Then we have the People of the Creative Self, that believe in creating something new in the world. I first developed this notion in "The Dance of the Three Peoples."

Obviously each of these three peoples have different ideas of politics.

Let us begin with the political agenda of the People of the Responsible Self. These people obviously want a minimal state that will provide a law-based framework for them to work and trade in the market economy. So the political program is what developed in the late 18th century during the rise of the bourgeoisie: constitutions, limited powers, defense of trading networks, sound money, government limited to defense and infrastructure and defense of property rights. But this political regime started to break up when the working class obtained political power after the industrial revolution; the working class did not experience themselves as responsible individuals but as a subordinate class of victims. They wanted education for their children, and social insurance for themselves, and they wanted somebody else to organize it for them.

The People of the Subordinate Self experience themselves as victims. They are looking to powerful leaders to protect them from the vicissitudes of the world, both natural and man-made. During the feudal era these people were serfs and peasants, living on land "owned" by some warrior lord. This lord protected his serfs from predators, but the price of this protection was that the lord got to predate on his serfs. In addition, the serfs were expected to serve in their lord's army. Between lord and serf there grew up a culture of expectation. The lord expected the serfs to loyally serve him, work his land, and fight his wars, and in return, with his "grace," he looked after his loyal retainers. It is obvious that this culture has been reborn in the western world in the neo-feudal welfare state, where the people expect benefits because of their status as supporters of their political liege lords. Rather than responsibly provide for their own welfare against a rainy day they submit to a system of welfare organized and administered by their betters.

The People of the Creative Self experience themselves as creators. They might be artist and writer creators; they might be business entrepreneurs creating a tech startup. Or they might be "activists" that want to create a just society through the process of "change" or revolution. These creators in their different realms all want to be the agent of change, with a world-changing book, a world-changing business, or a world-changing political system. 

There is nothing problematic in wanting to make a great movie; you can recruit tons of people willing to finance and work on it, and after it is finished the creative team will disband and coalesce again on another creative project. There is nothing problematic in wanting to creative a great business; the great business creators of the last 200 years have assembled teams of people to help them make great products. When the business was a success, the investors and employees shared in the success; when the business failed they used their experience and their skills to help them in a new venture. But political creativity is problematic. That's because government is force, politics is the art of division, and administrative system is domination. When you create a new political project, by election or revolution, your supporters expect to benefit forever, and rebel and mutiny if their checks fail to arrive. Plus, despite the vision of "change" in the service of justice, the fact is that there no such thing as justice, only injustice. So if your vision of change imagines anything more than the reduction of a few egregious injustices, you are probably changing old injustices for new ones.

So the great problem of the modern age is creative political elites thinking they can design and implement some perfect plan to change society from a state of injustice to a new regime of justice -- for the workers, for women, for minorities, etc. All the great creative political projects of the last century have been disasters: communism, which turns out to be a sort of holy war against the bourgeoisie; the welfare state, which is really a neo-feudalism with the creative class strutting around as modern squires and barons of the bureaucracy;  fascism, which is a desperate populism against the previous failure of the creative class to provide a stable and prosperous society; globalism, which is a kind of monarchical absolutism, with a global elite perpetuating itself in power like a high-class crime family.

You can see that there is no easy solution to the problem of the competing political agendas of the Three Peoples. The People of the Subordinate Self are condemned to disappointment, because they cannot live forever as the serfs, the "little darlings" of some lord. Eventually the lord will discard them. The People of the Responsible Self cannot have their minimal state, because the People of the Subordinate Self want more protection than the minimal state affords. And the People of the Creative Self desperately want a starring role for themselves, forgetting that almost all creative projects end in failure, which is a big problem when the lives of millions of people are at stake.

There is a solution, of course: it is my Perfect Plan. Part One is that we should encourage the People of the Subordinate Self to become responsible, and reward them when they do. Part Two is for the People of the Creative Self to practice compassion and tolerance when it comes to the People of the Responsible Self. 

OK, my Perfect Plan is not really a perfect plan. It is just a couple of really sensible ideas that could help us move forward without descending further into a brawl of all against all.

The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination

For a while now I've been writing that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." And the justification I would come up with that, once your rebellion against injustice succeeds and you wield the levers of political power, then you get to impose, by force, what your tormentors used to do to you. And you have the nerve to call it justice.

Imagine my shock and surprise when I found that the philosopher Schopenhauer agrees with me! He argues in The World as Will and Idea under §62 that right is merely the absence of a wrong.

[T]he concept of wrong is the original and positive, and the concept of right, which is opposed to it, is the derivative and negative; for we must keep to the concepts and not to the words.

So that's all right.

Thus energized, let us think a bit about the wrongs, the injustices forced upon us by our left-liberal ruling class in the name of justice.

The first two are obviously the negative and the derivative of my Perfect Plan.

The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture, instead of leading them to the Promised Land of middle-class responsibility, and this is unjust. This has obviously been really cool for liberals, because they have acted as the patrons and the champions of the working class and marginalized minorities, and reaped the political power of giving people free stuff. But it has not been so good for their clients: the working class that right now is dying of despair, and the blacks that are alienated from the rest of society and encouraged to be racists and maintain a separate culture from the rest of America.

The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class, especially with its experimental and creative intersectional sexual culture that it forces upon everyone, instead of allowing the middle class its own space for Christianity, marriage, family, and individual responsibility.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked education. Government compulsory K-12 education has worked well for the children of the educated and for the folks with lifetime tenure as employees and administrators of the government education system. But the government education system has always operated as the agent of the ruling class, implementing its latest power project. First it was to marginalize the Catholic Irish; then it was to prepare children to be good obedient factory and office workers. You could see that this agenda a rough kind of sense to it, making the children of the immigrants and the working class numerate and literate whether they liked it or not. But in recent years the education system has veered towards educating children as little liberals. The result has been utter mayhem in schools in minority-dominated inner cities. And that is to say nothing of higher education, with which liberals have made debt slaves out of university students.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care. Back in the day, ordinary people got health care from the "lodge doctor" at their mutual aid association: the Masons, the Elks, or their union. Young doctors just out of medical school would work almost for free serving the lodge members while they were starting their careers. But now health care is crony capitalized, as the health care professionals insist on their pound of flesh every time the politicians offer new free stuff to the voters.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement. The Social Security system is not a pension system, but an income transfer system that takes money from young workers with families and pays their well-to-do parents. It is generational injustice, where the beneficiaries get to determine how much the kids have to pay. And worst of all it denies workers without family wealth the chance to build wealth that can be then used partly as retirement income and partly as wealth to transfer to the kids.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity. Back in the old days, before the welfare state, the poor really were starving and dying. But in those days the only effective charity was voluntary charity from charitable women and organizations. Today the hunger problem has been solved, and welfare excuses the poor from work and marriage. This is a vile injustice, both on the welfare recipients that do not take responsibility for their own lives, and on the ordinary middle class people that pay for government officials to buy the votes of the poor with the middle-class's money.

Aside from these six injustices, I'd say that the Liberal Domination has been going swimmingly.

The Three Peoples Theory and Work

I was walking down the Yellow Brick Road reading a lecture on work by dear old lefty Herbert Marcuse entitled "The End of Utopia" and I had a thought.

My reductive Three Peoples theory does not directly address the question of human work, not yet. And that is wrong.

In his lecture, from Five Lectures, Marcuse looks forward to a time, after the revolution, when "alienated labor" will be a thing of the past, and liberation and happiness will reign. He makes a distinction between "the realm of freedom" and "the realm of necessity." True freedom can only exist in a world in which the question of necessity has been removed. He look to a "new theory of man" that posits

a freedom no longer based on and limited by scarcity and the necessity of alienated labor... the negation of the need for the struggle for existence... the negation of the need to earn one's living; the negation of the performance principle, of competition; the negation of the need for wasteful, ruinous productivity[.]

In a world freed from necessity, Marcuse sees a flowering of the "aesthetic," featuring "a convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play... a society in which even socially necessary labor can be organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men."

Now, I don't know how that plays to you, but I immediately thought: this is how a young twentysomething thinks, the sort of chap that lives in some trendy urban district and dresses in artistical black. This representative of the People of the Creative Self thinks of work as a creative endeavor. In response to a question from his grandfather in respect of his career plans, he might say that he "wants to do something creative." He thinks, in other words, exactly like Herbert Marcuse, without the Marxist jargon.

Now it is no surprise that some lefty artistical kid from the People of the Creative Self would believe in work as creative play, but I immediately thought: what about the rest of us?

Obviously, when we talk about the People of the Subordinate Self then we are talking about people that work because they have to: this is "alienated labor" in the full Marxian sense of the word. The lowest level of this approach to work is the slave who does not do a stitch of work unless directly ordered by his overseer with the encouragement of his cowskin whip.

But it is interesting to recognize that this is not the way that work works in the real world. Nobody is a complete subordinate slave. Even the lowliest worker has some responsibility. And the record of slave plantations is that the slave-owner prefers to give the slave a certain amount of responsibility, such as growing his own food, rather than bear the burden himself of ordering the slave's every movement and providing every need. The slave-owner might even rent the slave, e.g., Frederick Douglass, to somebody else. You can see that the same thing applies to serfdom. The serfs are not slaves; their lords do not direct their every move, and the self needs to figure out how to farm and make his own food for his own family.

The record of capitalist employers in the wake of the industrial revolution is that they want and prefer, more and more, responsible and flexible employees. They do not want drones that work like automatons on the assembly line; for one thing, such workin' stiffs tend to join unions. Wal-Mart, for instance,  encourages its employees to take on-line courses in the back room, and it rewards them for upping their game.

Of course there is an exception to this. The socialist state likes its people dumb and stupid and subordinate. It doesn't want responsible, independent citizens, but subordinate subjects that can be ordered around by socialist managers with a taste for power. Anyone else is a wrecker and a saboteur.

What about the People of the Responsible Self? How do they think about work? It is obvious. People of the Responsible Self recognize that work, their contribution to society, is what enables them to hold their heads up in the world. For them, it is a thing of pride to have marketable skills that enable them to live a decent and independent life, serving their fellow men and respected by their fellow humans.

Notice how this attitude towards work is not comprehended by the Marcuse approach to work. In his world you are either working under the knout, in "alienated labor," or you are living in sunlit uplands in a "convergence of work and play." This is why my Three Peoples theory is so superior to the Two Peoples narrative of the left that does not even rise to the sophistication of Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic. My theory, reductive as it is, understands the great human middle, and not just the two extremes.

Now we come to the question of work for the People of the Creative Self. Here, of course, work is not something you do because you have to in order to get bread on the table. It is not even something you do to hold your head up in the world as a respectable bourgeois that pulls his weight. Your work is a creative project, something that is new and original. This is an individualism different from the responsible individualism that is celebrated by economics and sneered at by the Fabians. It is, as Charles Taylor writes, "expressive individualism," that expresses the individuality of its person as a efflorescence, a flowering, rather than merely as a separate atom.

There is one little problem with the notion of work as a creative enterprise. It is that, as Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will and Idea, that the creative individual is one in a million.

[E]verything that is excellent is always a mere exception, one case in millions, and therefore, if it presents itself as a lasting work... exists in isolation, is preserved like a meteoric stone, sprung from an order of things different from that which prevails here. (p.335)

Think Michelangelo, think Einstein. But the People of the Creative Self want to believe that creativity can become routine and unexceptionable, as least for special people like themselves.

You can see that my Perfect Plan fits into all this. First, it wants to encourage all People of the Subordinate Self to take on something of the armor of light, and become as responsible as possible, each according to his ability. Secondly, it recognizes that in the arena of creativity many are called but few are chosen, and thus many would-be creatives cannot really expect to be much more than merely People of the Responsible Self with a certain flair not given to the ordinary deplorable. Perhaps all they can aspire to is to drive a Subaru rather than a Honda. It therefore behooves the creative to treat the People of the Responsible Self with respect and compassion, for there but for the Grace of the God of Creativity go I.

The other thing about work is that, without work, most people go to the bad. This is because, as Schopehnauer writes, most of our life is lived in trying to obtain the satisfaction of some desire. But once the desire is achieved, we are back to zero, either overcome with "ennui" because suddenly our life has no purpose, or seized by a new desire and the need to obtain satisfaction. Thus it is that we work all our lives towards the shining goal of "success" or "retirement" only to find that success doesn't solve anything and that life in retirement still needs a purpose. There is no land of freedom in which work and play converge in some kind of aesthetic experience and everything is "organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men."

So it is that most moralists and philosophers have recognized that life in this world is always going to be a vale of tears. Only in the Happy Land of eternity can Eternal Bliss be found. Anything else is to "immanentize the eschaton."

Tribe vs. City: Which Will Win?

Everybody seems to agree that it is going to come to a fight. The alt-right says that in a majority-minority nation, US whites will have to organize on the basis of race.

And the black law professor writing at the New York Times avers that his children really can't be friends with whites. The problem is President Trump.

His election and the year that has followed have fixed the awful thought in my mind too familiar to black Americans: “You can’t trust these people.”

This guy, it should be stressed, is an immigrant.

His message, of course is the basic message of identity politics, and of tribes down the ages. Trust stops at the border of the race, or the border of the class, or the border of the political party, or the border of blood kinship, or the borderlands policed by the marcher lords.

But there is another story, the story of the Great Enrichment over the last 200 years. It says you should trust anyone that is trustworthy. And the record of the last 200 years is that this formula is an astonishing formula for prosperity and peace. You go to work for a business, and the only thing that matters is: can you do the job. You join a church, and the only thing that matters is do you believe. You join a mutual-aid society -- now abolished by the administrative state -- and you imagine yourself the brother or sister of the other members in a community of trust and neighborliness.

In my view we a joined together in a vast experiment to see if the notion of trust beyond tribal boundaries can be made into the basis of human community.

I have said that the old notion of mistrust is natural and physical in an agricultural society, because the only asset of an agricultural society is its land, and the land of the tribe next door could just as well serve our tribe, with the current inhabitants enslaved or massacred. A little loot and plunder would benefit us, and the other guys don't matter, because they aren't our kindred. The Roman Empire did a good job on this looting and plundering line for centuries until it had expanded to the limit of useful land in its neighborhood.

But the basis of the current society is different. For us it makes no sense to plunder the neighboring factory, because every factory or business is a node in the prosperity-generating network, and every time you take out a node you reduce the network and you make everyone poorer.

When people come to the city they still live the culture of the country, and in their first years in the city they live in a ghetto of their fellow immigrants, as the Irish, the Italians, the Jews did in their first years in the United States, and as African Americans and Latinos do today. They understand that their life depends on standing together or falling apart separately.

And you can live like that for generations, in a neo-feudal society in your ghetto, or your 'hood, or your barrio. But you cannot thrive. Thriving means coming out of the 'hood and putting on the armor of the market economy, becoming a node in the trust network, finding a skill or an idea to offer to the world, surrendering to the price system, making the customer king, and trusting anyone that is trustworthy.

To the tribesman or the feudal peasant, this new culture is madness, and so it would be, if the world were still an agricultural world of good rich acres. But in the new world it doesn't matter what you think of the barbaric religious practices of the guy in the next city. It only matters that he is good for his promises.

But all this is still breathtakingly new.

On this notion it is not scandalous that liberals have championed identity politics, a reactionary, nostalgic appeal to people still mostly living in a pre-market economy culture. You would expect that the new era would not appear like a virgin birth from out of the old. You would expect stumbling and bumbling, and wars and rumors of wars, and race riots and class envy and intellectuals dressing up racism in the clothes of anti-racism as all the affirmative action and diversity and inclusion and intersectionality dudes do. What, you expect the world to turn on a dime, in one magical revolution, baby?

Nor should we expect our elites or our ruling class to understand the new world, and to act like wise men and women that grasp the meaning of the age. No ruling class down the ages has been wise or sensible. They have all made it up as they went along and devised ruling-class ideologies to justify their rule and promote their rulers into demi-gods, even as they stumble clueless from one disaster to the next.

But I think that despite the cluelessness of the elites, the internal logic of the new order will have its way in the end. That's because it is an astonishing self-ordering phenomenon, that bountifully rewards people that follow its way, and horribly punishes anyone that ignores it. That is how I interpret the follies of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. These  places were and/or are total disasters! Yet here is the dirty little secret that I will reveal to you elitists. You cannot swing your power around in this world unless you have a big healthy economy to back you up.

And the only way to have a healthy economy is to dial down the top-down administrative instincts of the ruling class and discourage the tribal looting of the political system, and calm down the racists and the sexists and the dividers -- because they are bad for business and they will get us all killed! If you do that and set up a good legal system and a moderate tax system then you will find that a hundred flowers will bloom and everyone will live happily and prosperously ever after.

Overarching all this detail stuff is the incandescent radiance of my reductive Three Peoples theory and my new Perfect Plan. They illuminate the world and help it all make sense. The Three Peoples theory shows how people move from the culture of workers and peasants as People of the Subordinate Self and become People of the Responsible Self, and the Perfect Plan is a prime directive to the ruling class to stop their silliness and their damaging promotion of class and race warfare and just focus on helping People of the Subordinate Self become good honest burgers as People of the Responsible Self.

This is not that hard!

Communism Week: My Perfect Plan

To round off Communism Week let's talk about what needs to be done.

We have seen that Marx, for all his knowledge of the classical economists, got his economics wrong, because the dichotomy between use value and exchange value was exploded in the marginal revolution, and because he was wrong that the market economy would subside into a steady state with all the profits and opportunities squeezed out of it.

We have seen that Marx's war on the bourgeoisie was foolish because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power. You want to help the poor, or the workers, or women or minorities? Sure, the bourgeoisie will grumble about it, but it will always listen to reason.

We have seen that socialism and fascism are best seen as nostalgic movements that want to return to a pre-industrial Garden of Eden, but that goes against the eternal truth that once you have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge you can never go back, not unless you forget what you have learned.

And we have seen that the nature of the market economy and its foundational uncertainty bears an uncanny resemblance to the uncertainties and probabilities at the center of modern physics where daily-life concepts cannot be used as a direct understanding of things in themselves.

So what do we do?

Thank you Senator, I am glad you asked that. As a help to policy professionals I have devised the following Perfect Plan to right the ship of state and steer it in the right direction.

In Part One of my Perfect Plan, I propose that the basic fact of our age is the world-wide migration of people from the country to the city. So the question is: how can we help the migrants learn, first, how to cope with their new life in the city, and then learn to wive and thrive in the city culture and economy with the best of them and become city people?

I have said that the French for city people is bourgeoisie, and that the left has declared war on the bourgeoisie. Obviously this is madness. Instead of enrolling the migrants to the city as soldiers in a war on the bourgeoisie, we should be sending the migrants to cultural appropriation boot camp so the migrants can steal the culture of the bourgeoisie root and branch and learn how to become the bourgeoisie.

We know what not to do. Don't teach the migrants that by joining a union they can stave off the sovereignty of the market. Don't entangle them in the nets of the welfare state which is bound to run out of other peoples' money. Don't subsidize failure and give people lifetime pensions for not working or not marrying. Don't poison them with identity politics and teach them to separate themselves from the majority culture and keep their pre-industrial culture.

So what to do? Teach people the culture of The Road to the Middle Class, which means religion, education, mutual aid, and living under law.

There is a lot to learn about how to become a stick-in-the-mud bourgeois. You need to learn to trust other people; you need to learn how to serve your fellow humans with a useful skill and keep updating it; you need to learn to accept the verdict of the market with a good will. Above all you need to live and let live.

Part Two of my Perfect Plan is even more sensible. It is to institute a culture of tolerance among the People of the Creative Self, the artists and writers and activists that presently rule the the culture of  the world. Right now, artists and writers and activists learn that there is nothing worse than the responsible culture of the bourgeoisie unless it is the racist sexist homophobic culture of the white working class. They learn that the stick-in-the-mud bourgeois is the very thing that is preventing the arc of history from bending towards justice.

Now I accept that the People of the Creative Self are the wonder of the age, that their creative culture is what differentiates us from the animals. But not all of us are ready, willing, and able to ascend the golden staircase to the ethereal heights of the creative culture. Moreover, as in many things, many are called to be creative, but few are chosen. What happens to those that would like to be creative but just can't quite make the grade? The answer is obvious. For those of us without the crown of laurels we must live as ordinary people that go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. And the Olympian gods that wear the laurel should understand that but for the grace of God they would be ordinary people going to work, obeying the law, and following the rules.

You would think that this notion of tolerance for other people would be a no-brainer, but it obviously isn't, not when a presidential candidate can go around telling her creative-class supporters that half the country is composed of racist sexist homophobic deplorables. But I get where this comes from. In the old days, the creative class felt themselves to be an embattled minority that had to defend each others' backs, although even back in those days there were actresses like Mrs. Patrick Campbell that advised creatives not to frighten the horses in the street. But that is no more. Today the People of the Creative Self can swarm around anyone they don't like and get them fired from their job. They have the power, in other words, to dominate the public square.

This power, I suggest, is a Bad Thing. The whole point of laws and tolerance and live-and-let-live is that it is not a good idea for anyone to so dominate the public square that they can deny it to other people. In fact this sort of power is only warranted in times of genuine emergency, when a nation or a people are threatened with an existential peril. The rest of the time we should all combine to name and shame those people who want to name and shame people that don't agree with them.

Imagine a world that does all it can to teach people how to adopt the culture of the city.

Imagine a world in which people do not try to seize political power so they can give the products of other peoples' work to their political supporters.

Imagine a world in which people did not hang on like grim death to jobs and wages and pensions that cannot be sustained.

Imagine a world in which the educated and cultural elite did not sneer at those less evolved and less fortunate than themselves.

Imagine a world that has escaped from the present deplorable situation still riddled with the exploded ideas of Marx and the Bolshevik Revolution and a naive faith in political power and has moved forward, with the aid of my Perfect Plan, into broad sunlit uplands.

It's easy if you try.

My Bill of Realities

Governments are instituted among men to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. But all good things tend to succumb to mission creep, and so it is that governments are now also expected to protect us against the enemies of free trade and immigration.

Here's a piece at Bloomberg about a couple devastated by NAFTA. Randall and Brenda Williams of Scottsdale, Kentucky worked at a plant making electric motors at A.O. Smith, each earning over $16 per hour until the factory closed and Smith started buying motors from Mexico. Today Randall works at a farm supply store and Brenda works at the high school cafeteria.

What do we do about folks like that? Well, we could help them. But how?

Let's be clear about one thing. You could repeal NAFTA and halt immigration but you still would not end the migration of manufacturing from the US to the low-wage areas of the world. We could slow it down. So we are still going to have Randall and Brenda Williamses. Because the folks working in those Third-World plants are right off the farm, and they think that the coolest thing in the world is getting to work indoors.

What could we do? We could reduce immigration; we could raise tariffs a bit. We could help workers laid off; we could help with relocation expenses.

But of course, as Barack Obama told a meeting of donors in 2008, most of the people laid off from some electric motor factory in the boondocks will try to hang on, bitter clingers, using welfare and disability, because they really can't imagine a life away from their old home town. By the way, there is no mention of the Williams' children in the article. I wonder what happened to them.

The best solution for the Williams couple would have been for A.O. Smith to cut their wages to the point where it wouldn't quite make economic sense for them to close the plant. But that is one thing that you cannot do in this world. Ever since the industrial revolution, workers have reacted to "cuts" with rage. So instead, employers just close uneconomic factories. Workers demand and get their "good jobs at good wages" and the union and the benefits until the day that the plant closes and the jobs are gone.

You can rail about NAFTA, about immigration, about greedy bankers, about uncaring CEOs outsourcing American jobs all you like. You can fiddle about at the margins with political promises and handouts to favored constituencies.  But in the end you have to deal with reality.

Reality #1. In the end, you have to mark your wage or your price to market.

Marxists like to talk a good line about "commodification," the idea that we now treat wages and prices as if they were real commodities, available for sale on the market. But, to coin a phrase, most of Marxism is "mystification" and their talk about commodification and reification is just that. Wages and prices are just another thing that we have abstracted out of the real world and understood with resort to theory. Just like gravity and quantum mechanics. Today we survive and thrive by constant adaption to the dictates of the market. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #2. Capitalism is the permanent revolution of "creative destruction."

In the Garden of Eden of the Marxists, people worked "for use" and were not subject to the vagaries of the exchange market. But that meant, of course, that a bad harvest meant that they starved. There was no "creative destruction" in the good old days. There was simply disease and starvation. The implacable conservatism of the peasant was witness to this. You kept doing things the same old way because otherwise you starved. But today we survive by constant adaption to the dictates of the market. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #3. You may not like capitalism but capitalism likes you.

In the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years under capitalism, per-capita income after inflation has risen from $1-3 per day to over $100 per day in the capitalist countries. There has been nothing like this before in history. Ever. And when a country adopts capitalism, like China in 1978 and India in the 1990s, per capita income immediately starts to rise. Fast. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #4. There is no free lunch.

If you are riding high, with a "good job at good wages" it does not mean that you are set for life. The whole point of capitalism, the way we got from $1-3 per day to $100 per day, is from constant economic revolution. In fact, if you are enjoying high wages you should think that you are vulnerable, because your high wages mean that people are thinking and working right now on some brilliant idea to economize on people like you. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #5. There is no such thing as "we are owed."

Don't think about what the world owes you. Think about what you can give to the world. That is the basic principle of economic life that goes back to Adam Smith and the invisible hand. Think about what you could do to serve the world, with a new service or a new product, or just your labor. Then you will find out if you have a good idea or not. If it turns out that your idea is not good enough, then the world is telling you that you should come up with a better idea. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Capitalism is a funny thing. It has buried humans in a cornucopia of wealth and health. But everyone hates it. I understand why. Capitalism and its price system amount to a constant cold shower of reality, and cold showers are good for other people, but a bit too bracing for ourselves.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part III: Elevator Story

We’ve spent the last couple of days talking about the conservative story. What is our Vision? What is our Mission? Now it’s time to define our elevator story.

Every enterprise needs an Elevator Story. It’s the spiel you give to someone in 30 seconds or less when they say: What do you do? Now that conservatives in their political instantiation in the Republican Party have been roundly defeated, we have to ask ourselves: What is our story? What’s the point of being a conservative?

If you’re going to tell a story then you should tell a story. You should start by setting the stage, define the essential conflict, point towards a resolution, and describe the happy outcome. So here goes.

Setting the Stage:
In America today, government is cruel, corrupt, unjust; and it just costs too much.

Isn’t this just about how conservatives feel? The current welfare state, in which the American people cough up for $900 billion of government pensions, $950 billion in government health care, $875 billion in government education, and $470 billion in government welfare, every year, is an abomination. Never mind the corrupt patronage system. There is the cruelty of a system that has destroyed the family in the underclass, the injustice of a system that screws the working poor and rewards the non-working poor. It. Is. Wrong.

The Conflict:
Liberals created this monster. Liberals believe that compulsory government programs are the way to help the poor and comfort the afflicted.
But they are wrong. Government is not compassion. Government is force. You cannot solve social problems by force.

This is the basic touch point between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe you can solve social problems with government programs. Conservatives believe that you must solve them person-to-person, face-to-face. That issues out of the meaning of the word compassion, literally, “suffering with.” Running a government program with tax dollars to help the poor isn’t “suffering with.”

The Resolution:
Society is not social force; it is social cooperation. That’s why we must reform the welfare state into the welfare society.
In the welfare society the American people, not liberal experts, will be in charge of their own health care, their children’s education, the comfort of the afflicted, and the decent provision of pensions.

Liberals believe in the welfare state; conservatives believe in the welfare society. That issues out of the basic conservative belief, initially voiced by Edmund Burke, that “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections.”

When you are thinking about politics it is best to take advantage of our better angels than to work against them. And we humans are, first of all, social animals that must live together rather than apart. So conservatives believe that “social problems” must be solved by people in their little platoons--family, neighbors, friends, associations, and charities--and not by bureaucrats. That's not easy, of course. It means that we can't just pay our taxes and complain about the government. We have to get involved and help people.

The Outcome:
With conservative reforms America will truly become that shining city on a hill, “still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.”

So there is our Elevator Story. The current situation is intolerable. Liberals are to blame. The solution is to get government out of the way and put people back in. And the future is glorious, just as Ronald Reagan promised.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part II: Mission Statement

Yesterday we triumphantly designed a Vision Statement to guide conservatives during our rebuilding process. Today, as promised, we are releasing a Mission Statement to the world.

As everyone knows, in the subculture of off-site team-building meetings, the Vision Statement is a gauzy, uplifting, inspirational definition of the goal of an organization. The Mission Statement is more down to earth. It answers the question: What are we trying to do today?

How hard can this be? The conservative Mission Statement is short and concise:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Yes, I know that there is the War on Terror, and in the week after the brutal massacre of the innocents in Mumbai, who can forget it for a moment? But actually, I don’t think that the War on Terror is the front-and-center thing that conservatives must do.

I believe that we can count on our liberal friends to do the right thing by the War on Terror. They just have one little problem. They don’t want Republicans to get all the glory. They want to fight the war in their own sophisticated, nuanced way. Republicans just don’t know how to do nuanced, they know.

But conservatives are called to reform the dreadful, cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state, or we are called for nothing at all.

Let us repeat the words of David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party:

There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.

In that statement, Cameraon (the lightweight?) encapsulates the whole thrust of conservative thinking. We all want to help the least amongst us. We want to comfort the afflicted. The question is: How? Shall we do it will rational, expert-driven bureaucratic programs from the cental government? Or shall we do it as individual people, joined into voluntary assocations, working together to help our fellow Americans?

Conservatives say that the rigid, compulsory, expert-led, bureaucratic way is not the way to help people. In fact, if you try to help people with government programs and bureaucracy, you get this:

Do you see the same thing that I am seeing? A little over one generation ago, about one in eight of the children of the uneducated were denied the basic human right to live with mother and father. But thirty years later four out of ten children of the uneducated were denied this right, and lived in a single-mother home.

Want to know how this happened? The welfare state did it. Liberals who drive the intellectual foundations of the welfare state and who manage the great bureaucracies of the welfare state did this.

And it is wrong.

That is why I say that the mission of the conservative movement is short and sweet:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Tomorrow: the Conservative Elev    ator Story.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part I: Vision Statement

Before we get to the specifics and the personalities of the glorious conservative future—will it be Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal—let’s do the due diligence. Let’s start with a Vision Statement.

Yes, I know, all that off-site team-building stuff is awfully trite, but it has a point. It forces you to think about: Who we are, and what do we want, and why?

So let’s start with a Vision Statement. Here it is:

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Alert readers will notice that we are covering the three sectors of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Well of course we are. What did you expect? We are talking about the Greater Separation of Powers between the economic sector, the political sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

So when we talk about an America where we “live and work together” we are evoking the system of voluntary cooperation under law that we call capitalism. But we are trying to evoke a little more than that, because the notion of free enterprise is too guy-like. We must include the girl side of voluntary cooperation, and that means the community of women working together, sharing and caring. In the guy side, we are battling all the other guys for market share. Competition instead of cooperation. But for the girls we want to think of cooperation before competition. So we fudge it.

When we talk about an America with “limited government” we are talking about an America where the government doesn’t get its fingers into every pie as it does today. It would be an America where four of the five biggest government programs would not be: government pensions, government healthcare, government education, and government welfare. Instead the two biggest programs would be defense against enemies foreign, and defense against enemies domestic. Look at usgovernmentspending.com to get a feel for what that might look like.

When we talk about an America “under God” we are talking about an America where the dominant belief system is transcendent. We mean that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not solvable by a secular religion of heaven on earth. Life is a mystery, and the meaning of life is not given to us. So we develop a faith in the value of life and the meaning of life, typically symbolized by the notion of God. “God” in this sense is a declaration of humility. We will not solve the meaning of life by reason, or experimentation. Of course that will not stop us from reasoning, or from experimenting to get a better understanding of life, the universe, and everything. But we understand that every time we advance human knowledge a step, the ultimate answer recedes a step. All we do is raise the stakes.

So there it is. Step One in rebuilding the conservative story.

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Next up: A new conservative Mission Statement.