Who Will Vote Out the Dems? The Moms

Here's an interesting take on our currently "interesting times:" From Rep. Jerry Karl (R-AL):

“This is the factor that they’re missing, and that is the female vote,” he declared. “And this is Jerry’s opinion — the moms. This is what turned out in Virginia. That’s the reason we keep pointing at Virginia. This is going to happen again."

Because now the moms are going to the grocery store to buy food and running into the buzz-saw of 10 percent inflation. And they are going to the gas station to fill up the SUV and gas prices are up by a couple dollars a gallon. 

"Make it stop, Mr. President!"

I know. What did you expect, ladies, when you voted for the Democrats?

But we men really don't understand women, and what makes them tick.

But that's OK. I have been doing the studying for you.

And above all what makes women tick is the need for safety. Thus, women were on-board with the COVID lockdowns and mask mandates in a New York minute.

And that is why women are all in favor of most of the things that the welfare state delivers. It's not because women are greedy, but that women feel the need for all the support they can get. Just in case.

In the old days, all the support she could get was whatever support her husband could deliver. But in the new era all the support she can get is whatever stuff she can get from government, from education to health care to child support.

Unfortunately, of course, unlimited government help for women leads to inflation and disaster. And then women can't get the support they need.

Which is where we are right now, after two years of stupid government pedal-to-the-metal in the COVID response, compounded by the Ukraine idiocy.

Now, I listen to women; I really do. And women are really upset about the horrors in Ukraine. They are not thinking about whether it was a good idea ten years ago to muck about in Ukrainian politics, or whether it is a good idea to muck around with Vladimir Putin. They are not thinking: "Gee, I wonder what Hunter Biden and Burisma and the 'big guy' has to do with this." Or whether the US has any business mucking around in Europe. Or whether we should have troops in Germany seventy-five years after the end of World War II. They only think about the suffering of the women in Ukraine. They do worry a bit about nuclear war, of course.

Enough of inflation. How to understand women and CRT and transgenders in the schools?

My view is that, when you tell women that transgenders are horribly oppressed they will agree. Because kindness.

But when you demand that mothers have no rights in the matter of the transitioning of their children, or in the matter of non-binary sex education in schools, then you have crossed a line. Because safety.

Do you see the point? Women instinctively know they are supposed to be kind. But women instinctively want to keep their kids safe. Kids' safety comes first -- their kids'safety.

I realize that I need to update my maxims on politics and men and women. Up to now:

There is no politics without an enemy.

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

All very true. Let's add something like this:

For men, politics is defeating the enemy. For women, politics is protecting them from the enemy.

Am I right, or am I right?

Either way, I suspect, we are going to see a big shift in the women's vote this Fall.

Because women expect to be protected, and when the current protector can't or won't protect them, that's when they go get another protector.

But not, of course, among liberal educated women. They still believe everything in the #WeBelieve signs. But that is another story.

"Nothing is Working. Or Is It?"

In a piece on the disaster we call the Biden administration, Will Alexander wonders it it's really the disaster it seems.

For instance, in the Del Rio bridge disaster with 12,000 Haitians under the border bridge, the result was that the Biden administration shipped nearly all of them into the US. So, from the left's point of view, it's working. Another 12,000 potential Democrat voters migrated into the US.

And the GOP governors sent a message to the president asking for a "open and constructive dialogue regarding border enforcement". Like that's going to work. As Alexander writes:

We’re now dealing with anti-American, Trump-hating, political psychopaths who want to use race, COVID, climate change, and chaos to outlaw political differences using arbitrary policies that look to fundamentally destroy America as we know it.

OK. So which is it? A total disaster of the incompetents? Or a cunning plot by "political psychopaths"?

I'd say both. 

First, the big government welfare state doesn't work. It Makes Things Worse. There's a good piece by Orthodox rabbi Dov Fischer about how the Democrats have wrecked blacks. All in the name of helping them. 

Second, when your glorious plan of paradise isn't working out, and instead is littered with disaster, you don't give up. Not the French Jacobins, not the Russkie Bolsheviks, not the Maoist cultural revolutionaries. That's what the whole notion of a Reign of Terror and Virtue is about. It cannot be that our glorious vision was a fantasy! The problems must be the work of "saboteurs and wreckers." We must double down and fight through to the final victory

That is a way to understand the US history of the last 50 years. It cannot be that the Great Society programs were a disaster visited on the poor. It cannot be that Keynesian economics caused the inflation of the 1970s. It cannot be that "supply-side" economics caused the revival of the 1980s. It cannot be that ordinary Americans revolted against HillaryCare. It cannot be that the Tea Party was an organic revolt against Obama's big government orgy. It cannot be that Trump represents an ordinary middle-class revolt against the conceits and the failures of educated-class big government. No: there is "systemic racism" every way you look.

What is needed is to double-down on more government, with pitiless ideological domination and elimination of "hate" speech. That should do it!

The lesson, of course, is that all Reigns of Terror and Great Purges eventually end, and normal life resumes, sort of. But the butcher's bill!

By the way, both Putin and Xi have been selling the glories of Russian civilization and Chinese civilization lately. What's that all about? Are they, like Trump, extolling the virtues of the Russian nation and the Chinese nation? Any mean tweets from the Kremlin or the Gate of Heavenly Peace lately?

Or are they just realists, understanding that any people wants a history, a narrative that extols its past, and experiences itself as the culmination of its story, its narrative of How We Got Here. You know, like when Trump did a speech right in front of the US presidents engraved into the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Actually, I think the decisive moment will occur when women give up on the Democratic message. See, the whole point of the welfare state is that it "protects" us. And "women expect to be protected."

But what happens when things fall apart and women discover that the folk that promised to protect them have, in fact, abandoned them to the wolves?

The answer, spelled out in A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, is that they find new protectors. So the German women in May 1945 sought out Soviet officers to be their protectors. And many other German women became GI war brides. Of course they did.

When the women of America make this switch, there won't be trumpets and banners and glorious speeches. Things will suddenly change and nobody will really know why.

A trial run on this is the whole COVID vaccine thing. Right now American women all think that vaccination protects them and their loved ones. However, some women -- nurses -- close to the firing line seem to be telling us that vaccination is not what it is cracked up to be. I predict that some time in the next 12 months, American women will decide that the whole COVID response has not protected them. And so they will seek out new protectors.

Let's put it this way. President Trump campaigned in a manner that really appealed to men. Starting with his mental pugilistic antics at the 2016 Republican debates, he showed that he would "fight for you." But women hated his "mean tweets." They want to be told how our national leaders will protect us. There's a reason why Democrats tend to use memes like "our community" and "our democracy" that appeals to the woman's need for protection. But a lot of Americans hate their use of the racist-sexist-pejoratives. Did you know that "pejorative" comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "making things worse?"

One fine day, a Republican presidential candidate will discover how to appeal to the woman's need for protection.

Then, look out, Wokies.

Monoculture's Effect on Women

Over at National Review Carrie Gress writes about "Why Don’t We Tell Women What’s Making Them Miserable?" It's time to take a look at the mess of women's lives after feminism's "long march through American culture"as in:

Item: Women's mental health: "women are struggling: suicides, depression, substance abuse, and sexually transmitted infections have all increased dramatically over the last five decades."

Item: women at crisis-pregnancy centers live a life where they are "being trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on."

Item: "Rarely is the suggestion made that women have been sold a poisonous lifestyle and the behaviors implied in that lifestyle are what actually need to be changed." For college freshmen "Heavy doses of gender exploration and safe-sex practices, and heaps of contraceptives, are all part of the welcome at most U.S. college campuses."

Hey, writes Gress, whatabout the basics:

Don’t sleep around, don’t do drugs, don’t have abortions, stop blaming the patriarchy, find a purpose outside of yourself, cover up some of that skin, don’t overspend, and figure out what is truly good, not just what celebrities say. 

But, of course, you are not allowed to say that. Thanks to feminism, "a carefully constructed closed system has been created so that anything outside its boundaries is almost unthinkable. "

But more-satisfying ways to live do exist, ways where dignity is honored, health is truly valued, body parts aren’t ignored or rendered useless, and relationships — which are at the true heart of most women — aren’t fleeting or shallow, useful or convenient, but deep, abiding, and life-giving. If only we could find a way to tell this to every woman.

Yes, well. But this amounts to a few flabby suggestions. How about something a little stronger.

Where do we start?

First, I think we need to recognize that feminism is an unjust system imposed on all women -- and men -- by ruling-class women. Feminism is a fantasy of life imagined by ruling-class Gentry women who have no right to impose their religion and culture on lower-class women, both ordinary Commoner women and lower-class Client women. See my disquisition on Three Layers, etc.

Let me amplify this: the feminist culture that has been forced on all women is one of the great crimes of the age. Personally, I don't think feminism works for ruling-class Gentry women, but if ruling-class women want to screw up their lives: hey, that's their business. But when they impose their culture on lower-class women, that is unjust; it is domination and hegemony, and it is wrong.

But, I think that even feminists get miserable when they practice feminism. Case in point is Ms. Feminist herself, Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, in which she advertised the notion of the "independent woman." Never had kids with her beau Jean-Paul Sartre. But she hated that he cycled through each of his mistresses every week. And when they died, both the childless Sartre and childless Beauvoir had sorta "adopted" younger people to be their heirs. So, maybe they shoulda had kids together, instead of strutting around as liberated twerps.

And there is no such thing as the "independent woman." Why is that?

I capture this truth is my notion that starts with Sigmund Freud's question "What do women want?"

No Siggie, I say. It's not what women want, it's what they expect, and what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

The proof of this is that whores need pimps to protect them. Even though whores are "trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on" by their pimps it is still better to have a pimp to keep all that stuff down to a dull roar.

Feminists to do not need pimps to protect them because they are upper-class Gentry and nobody would dare lay a hand on a Gentry woman. In other words, Gentry women expect to be protected and they are protected. Because privilege.

The next step in understanding the problem is my disquisition on Women in the Public Square. I say that women do not relate to the public square which is a male thing where you engage in verbal fisticuffs with the other guys, and which women Do Not Like, Not At All. Women do not do public verbal fisticuffs; they have a one-on-one chat with a woman friend and say: "I can't believe she said that." And determine never to talk to the third woman again. But you can't do that in the public square.

So Gentry women are trying to destroy the public square, with "safetyism" and the war on "microaggressions." What they are really saying is that they don't want nuttin' to do with the public square.

So, even for Gentry women, the public square doesn't work.

Never mind about Gentry women. Whatabout Commoner women? Guess how Commoner women get to be protected? Oh yeah: by marriage!

I would say that Commoner women are not interested in strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage of a public life like Gentry women. They just want marriage and family and children. That means that they would like a safe world where sex and marriage is bound by fairly strict rules, so that they can be courted by potential husbands instead of being subjected to "relationships." And they are naturally "chaste." Apart from anything else, there is a practical reason why honor for women is "chastity." You get too many sex partners and you are likely to get your reproductive system wrecked by STDs. But Commoner women don't get that protection in the world run by feminists.

I say that the feminist domination and hegemony of Commoner women is a crime. And upper-class Gentry women have No Idea about this.

Whatabout lower-class women, the Subordinates, the Clients? Let us start by reciting the words of Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. He writes that in the lower class of whites the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. I think it is fair to say that this is true for BIPOCs, only more so.

Do you see what is glaring out of the "the men don't work much and the women don't marry much?" It is telling us that unless you yoke lower-class men to the children they sire, by marriage, then they aren't going to work to support the wife and the children. Not much. And, of course, if the woman ain't gonna get a man to marry the mother of his children well, there's always welfare. George Gilder wrote Visible Man about this back in 1995.

I don't think that feminists are the sole guilty party here. The whole welfare state is to blame, liberals. It's another crime of the age, that lower-class women can't expect the fathers of their children to marry them.

Do you see what is precipitating out of this, so that women can get their mental health back together?

For upper-class Gentry women they need a male protector to keep them safe from mental distress in the public square.

For middle-class Commoner women they need rules to govern courting and marriage. So that they are protected.

For lower-class Client women they need a real simple societal rule. Men have to marry the mother of their children.

And then everyone would live happily ever after.

Because I am a kindly sort of chap, I say that we wouldn't jail the feminists that have wrecked the life of women. But we would take them down a peg or two.

Hey Transgenders, Don't Frighten the Horses

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

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

No kidding!

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

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

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

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

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

Women expect to be protected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just sayin'.

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.

Biden's Two Front War: Climate Change and Systemic Racism

Everybody knows that fighting a two-front war is a Very Bad Thing. It was Germany's fate in both World War I and World War II. And it didn't go well.

Now, the Biden administration is proposing to fight both climate change and systemic racism. All at once.

Now, according to my theory, governments exist to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. So your average foreign war is all about protecting the people from the furriners. And your average civil war, or political campaign or witch-hunt, is about the domestic enemies and traitors and witches.

Of course most wars and most politics are ginned-up rubbish, because if you don't have a war you don't have a reason for all that taxing and spending and borrowing.

But still: only one war at a time, Senator.

For instance, after 9/11 we had unity in the United States for about a year because all Americans were united to Do Something about crazed Islamic terrorists. But after a while normal politics resumed and our Democratic friends went back to posting ReDefeat Bush bumper-stickers on their Subarus.

Good old FDR had a grand old time uniting Democrats against the dastardly Republicans from 1933 till 1939. Although, in fact, the scapegoat President Hoover was a pretty progressive Republican in favor of government solutions for most everything, just like FDR.

But then, when FDR wanted to get into World War II, suddenly we were all Americans, united to defeat the Japs and the Huns. Democrats, Republicans? We were all Americans.

Now, I am wondering if President Biden should be making a decision about which war he wants to fight. Does he want to save us from the nightmare of climate change and unite all Americans to fight that existential threat? Oh, how glorious that day will be when climate change has been arrested and our human community saved! Or does he want to hunt down and cancel all the racist-sexist-homophobes wherever they may be found? Oh, the wonders of an America purged of all the white oppressors by the noble allies!

Because if President Biden wants to fight both existential perils, then maybe he is Literally Hitler. Too dumb to avoid getting himself into a two-front war.

Of course, I realize the difficulty of the president's position. He is the leader of the party that includes a whole barrel full of different activist interests. Every educated woke person must be into activism, and the key is to find a new activist field for your very own. But when all these activisms all come to power... Well, it is the job of a wise leader to make wise decisions about which activist agenda to concentrate on.

(Yes, I know. If he were really wise he would tell all the activists to take their activisms and put 'em where the sun don't shine.)

Of course, it is a bit of a problem when the president is already well advanced into senile dementia, and is merely the creature of his activist staff. It becomes hard to make sensible, strategic, decisions that are good for the Democratic Party and good for the United States of America.

Actually, of course, I believe that the president is making a mammoth strategic error by not concentrating all his power on the post-COVID economic recovery. Never mind all the activist rubbish about climate change and systemic racism.

Now I am a retired guy and my IRAs are doin' fine thank you very much what with all the money printing and such.

But, just between you and me and don't tell your wokie neighbor who won't get it, I think that tens of millions of Americans have had their lives blitzed into oblivion by the COVID economic shutdowns. And it is going to take years to dig them out the the hole we have pitched them into.

Correction: In my belief many of the tens of millions of Americans will never recover from the hell that they were pitched into. Shades of the Great Depression and the Skid Rows that resulted. And, I believe, this fact will very likely transform American politics.

Yep. I reckon that President Biden is making a strategic error, and his court historians will have their work cut out for them if they expect to give him an honorable place in the history books.

The Future of Government: New and Exciting Enemies!

I've been cudgeling my brain over the past few weeks about the Biden administration's two big agenda items: Climate Change and Systemic Racism. What is really going on here?

And I now realize that it is quite simple.

Government has only two jobs: to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. But today there really are no foreign enemies. And, really, there are no internal enemies. Not like in the old days of bandits and robbers.

So what is government to do? It doesn't have anything to do any more. It should go out of business.

But that would never do, so it has to make it up. It has to make up external enemies and internal enemies, and wind us up into a frenzy of fear and loathing.

That is what climate change is all about: a monstrous external threat. OMG! Not even a foreign enemy: a global enemy. And not even a human enemy but the very planetary climate itself: Gaia, if you like. Really, it is genius. Why, our ruling class does not even have to march into harm's way. It merely has to hand out highly paid jobs to its educated gentry supporters all across the land, and hand out subsidies to its gentry voters for electric cars and solar panels on the roof. And of course all the gentry supporters are down with that. They believe! Oh Gaia, do they believe!

That is what systemic racism is all about: a monstrous internal threat. Imagine: right here in River City there are dark hordes of white supremacists and white oppressors, just waiting for the chance to descend upon traditionally marginalized peoples with their assault rifles and their patriarchy. But government is up to the challenge! It will conduct critical race theory training sessions throughout the land! It will teach the systemic racists a lesson they will never forget. Gentry supporters will have jobs, maybe millions of jobs to be teaching the deplorables and the white supremacists and the systemic racists a lesson. And, when they feel like a rest, they can erect another Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard.

When you think about it, you have to admit: it's brilliant. Strictly speaking we don't really need much government, because in the modern era things are so safe that we don't need no stinkin' government plodding around saving us from enemies foreign and domestic.

But now we have enemies that make the old enemies of the world look like pikers. The global threat of climate change makes all the old enemies, the Nazis, the Commies, the Islamic terrorists, look like nothing. It's not just those human enemies but something far bigger, far more threatening: the end of life on this Earth. Unless we act now.

The threat of systemic racism is just as bad. There is no telling what those shadowy white supremacists and conspiracy theorists might get up to next week. So we must declare war on them, re-educate them, purge them from the public square.

But what do we do about it? Honestly, I don't know. The whole setup is so brilliant, and so tempting for our educated ruling class that I don't think they will give up on it short of utter political annihilation.

In other words, we Commoners have to teach our educated betters that, if they don't climb down from their war on climate and their war on bitter clingers, we will strip them of all their powers and credentials and honors and pensions and make them go out and get a job, like the rest of humanity.

And we may -- just for the fun of it, not from malice -- put them on one-day suspensions from Twitter just to remind them that what goes around comes around.

Women in the Public Square: Pelosi and AOC

One of my ideas is that women do not understand and do not want to live in the public square. It comes from years of pondering Georg Simmel's dictum about the emergence of women into the public square.

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

But how do you square this with micro-aggressions and "safety culture?" You can't, unless you make the shameful jump to the notion that women do not get the public square that men have created, and do not like life in the public square.

The point about the public square is that it is a place where men can fight each other: not with swords but with words. And a beautiful thing it is: to transform the age-old culture of the fight to the verbal fight of the public square.

But women don't do this. When a woman has a beef with another woman she stops talking to her, probably forever. Women can do this because the vast majority of women are the absolute monarchs of their households. Anthony Trollope understands this in John Caldigate where he has all the women in complicated relations of not-talking-to-each-other.

I think this is the way to understand House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her animadversion to Donald Trump. She is just not willing to have any conversation with Donald Trump. Because? Probably because he insulted her a ways back. Insults: that's what men do to each other as they sort out their hierarchy. But women do not. 

So I regard the impeachments of Donald Trump as a kind of high school Mean Girls campaign. Except, of course, that the Mean Girls never think of themselves as mean, but as the most attractive and chaste and pure girls in school.

And AOC is a naive young woman that believes what she has been carefully taught, as I believe, almost all women do.

What neither of these women understand and what few women understand is what every man in the public square understands: It's All Bullshit!

Men can accept this because of a maxim of mine:

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

But, you see, if women are to expect to be protected they must go with the program, and that starts with believing and enacting society's main narrative.

So I believe that eventually women will depart the public square; they will realize they have much more power by acting from behind the scenes. The Duke of Wellington, you know, was frequently entertained by in the 1820s by Mrs. Arbuthnot.

How will it happen? Probably it will happen as upper-class women come to decide that careers are not what they are cracked up to be. And so it will come to be accepted, and then insisted, that women who really contribute to society do so as mothers to their children and advisors to their husbands. Oh, and they will be opposed to divorce. Did you know that the divorce rate for college-educated women is 25 percent?

And then middle-class women will copy the upper-class women, and the world will change.

My Predictions: Election Day 2020

Of course, as usual, the polls show that the Dems will just pull out a win in the presidential election today. But given that the polls are now based on a response rate of 6 percent to each call rather than 50 percent as in olden times, I suspect that the polls are not that reliable.

So we have to go with our gut.

My gut with respect to my gentry liberal neighborhood yard-signs. 

Way back in the aftermath of the 2016 election some feminist group created the #WeBelieve yardsign. You know what I am talking about:

In this house We Believe
Black Lives Matter
Love is Love
Women's Rights are Human Rights
Science is Real
...
Kindness is Everything

Here's an example

Wow! That must be a new one: "Not all cops are bad."

But the point is that clearly, there was a lot of enthusiasm out there in liberal land. Back then.

Then, of course there was the Death of George Floyd in May 2020 and pretty soon every liberal yard in North Seattle had a Black Lives Matter yardsign out front. Hey, you can buy them at the local hardware store!

So, a lot of liberal enthusiasm back then in May.

But there are not that many Biden/Harris signs out front. Just sayin'.

My gut with respect to "oppressed peoples" enthusiasm

Now, if our liberal masters are not that enthusiastic about Joe Biden, whatabout their Clients, the "oppressed peoples" of which we've heard tell? I haven't seen anything on the enthusiasm of blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. I suspect the lack of data points is telling us something.

My gut with respect to Trump voter enthusiasm

On the other hand we are seeing unprecedented enthusiasm for Trump among his natural supporters, the Commoners of these United States. We see remarkable turnouts at Trump Rallies, where Trump extemporizes to the delight of thousands of his fans. We see the incredible Trump Car Parades, that report incredible numbers, like 75,000 cars at a parade in Miami/Dade County; 75 mile-long parades. And of course the Outrage of the Century, the Trump Honor Guard for the Biden/Harris Bus. I may be wrong, but I have never heard of enthusiasm like this before in a US election.

And I believe that scientists agree that enthusiasm equals turnout.

My gut with respect to mail-in voting

Now I believe that, back in the spring, the Democrats all got together with their hive mind and decided that it would be really cool to convert the whole US to mail-in voting, because safety. And cheating. And, of course, within moments their bribed apologists in the media were echoing the New Wisdom.

But I wonder if this was really such a good idea. See, I believe that mail-in voting requires a degree of literacy that many "oppressed peoples" do not possess. And it is not just literacy, but a confidence and familiarity with handling paperwork that matters. So I suspect that mail-in voting will lead to a reduction in turnout among the lower orders.

My gut with respect to the Lockdown

Or the Lockdown. I wonder if the Shelter in Place mentality that Democrats have encouraged in their supporters -- and which women, in particular, have embraced -- is such a good idea when it comes to winning elections. Suppose that turnout in the highly locked-down Democratic states and cities is down? Oops!

I think that the whole purpose of elections and campaigns is to get your supporters all enthusiastic and get the opponents' supporters all pessimistic and sheltering in place. Hey guys!

My gut with respect to "suburban moms"

I don't know if the "suburban woman voter" thing is really a thing or not. But I would say that what trumps women saying Eeuww when reading about Donald Trump reciting how women let him feel them up is women reading about and watching "mostly peaceful protests" in major American cities. Because "women expect to be protected." Now, there are several women of my acquaintance who are not happy about riots in cities. And they have responded by voting for Trump and voting a straight Republican ticket. We will see if this extends outward to women in general.

My gut with respect to the "shy Trump voter."

Is it really such a good idea to have news items about conservatives getting censored and canceled on social media? Because I would say that what the ruling class -- any ruling class -- needs to know is what people are really thinking. They need their District Officers reporting when "the natives are restless." And people won't tell you what they are really thinking if they know all about people like them that have lost their jobs because of their political opinions.

Put it this way, liberals. Like Mayor Daley in 1960, you chaps need to know how many votes you need to manufacture in order to win the election. If there is a whole class of voters that won't talk to pollsters because they are afraid then you chaps won't know where to manufacture votes and how many might be needed. Is that smart? I don't think so. 

Looking at the bigger picture you need to know what everyone is thinking, so you can plan where to spend money and where to send the candidate.

And, of course, the "shy Trump voter" is not just shy, he is mad as hell and he is not going to take it any more. Maybe that's why I am reading this morning about polling stations with lines around the block. I just don't think that heavy turnout means a Biden win. But I could be wrong.

And if there are "shy Trump voters" whatabout "shy Trump students?" Suppose you are a non-political student at one of our select colleges. What do you think about the lefty student activists and the lefty professors that oppress you every day with their political obsessions. Do you join the parade? Do you give up? Do you count the days till graduation? Do you determine that you are never going to vote for a Democrat in your life? You tell me.

My gu with respect to the stock market today

The stock market indexes are up about two percent today. I wonder what they mean by that?

Bottom Line

I've written this again and again. The reason for the current lefty cancel culture is that lefties aren't winning any more. The halcyon days when lefties had FDR in the White House and supermajorities in both Houses of Congress are gone for ever. The glorious days when lefties could create Big New Programs are gone forever. That means that life is hard for the left. They can't just win automatically. And what do people tend to do when life gets too hard? Exactly. They cheat.

But you know what? People don't like it when other people cheat on them. In fact, they hate it.

Just sayin'.

Yes, Even the President is Expendable

One of the problems of today's public square is that its conventional wisdom takes for granted the feminine notion of protection.

Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates this in a piece about Trump. The president should not be cowering in basements or masked up to the nines.

It is leadership to go out and, with proper caution, to brave the contagion, on the theory Trump is indeed replaceable while cowering is inexcusable.

Yeah, guess what. There is an Amendment in the Constitution all about presidential succession. If Trump dies, the Vice President becomes president. President Trump is expendable.

That is what various characters opine about in Shakespeare. There is Worcester, in Henry IV Part One. Says he to King Henry IV,

It was myself, my brother and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.

 Then, of course there is the famous speech of the young Henry V at Harfleur:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;

In your average Napoleonic War novel, you run up against the "Forlorn Hope," the volunteers that swarm through the breach in the city walls of the enemy, facing almost certain death as they try to take the city by storm.

The basic fact about being a man is that you are expendable, and you are expected to risk your life as a leader of men or a follower, because Job One of a man is to demonstrate courage. Honor among men is about courage, the willingness to be expended.

But the basic fact of being a woman is that you carry the future within you. You need to stay alive, because it is women that bring forth the future. Thus for women, honor is chastity, doing the proper thing. You do the right thing and your kids survive.

In the old days, it was exclusively men that populated the public square, men that died for their country, men that operated in the culture of courage and fought anyone that dared to question their courage. And women operated exclusively in the domestic sphere, nurturing and "keeping the kids alive."

But when women came into the public square they brought their culture of safety with them. And as women have propagated into administrative positions throughout government and education they have transformed the culture from a culture of courage to a culture of safety.

This is how to understand the current concern about "microaggressions" and "safe spaces." It is the women's culture of safety modifying the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility."

That is why the world's response to the COVID epidemic has gone so solidly for lockdowns and masks. Because women expect to be protected; they instinctively "shelter in place."

But, of course, for every woman that gets to shelter in place, someone else has to boldly outdare the dangers of the time.

Now it is my contention that almost all women are incapable of understanding anything other than their culture of safety. I talked with a nice liberal lady with a gubmint job down the street here in liberal North Seattle, and she expressed how glad she was that our Democratic Governor Jay Inslee was insisting on a tight lockdown. She has #WeBelieve and Black Lives Matter yardsigns at her house. She seems to have no clue that there are millions of people suffering extreme disruption to their lives so that she can live in North Seattle safety behind her social-moralizing yardsigns. She has no clue about this.

And, of course, the whole feminist culture maintains the innocence and helplessness of women. We saw this with the covering for the rather unimpressive debate performance of Sen. Harris (D-CA). It's sexist to interrupt her. It's mansplaining to disagree with her. Of course, because women expect to be protected.

So much for Here Me Roar.

I think that we now know that the lockdowns were a mistake. The school closures were a mistake. we should have done everything possible to protect senior citizens and other vulnerable people, but everyone else should have gone about their business. To say, as Gov. Cuomo did, that "if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy” is rubbish. That is not how the world works. 

But it is how women's minds work. And the modern politician has to cater to women and their expectation of protection.

It will be interesting to see how President Trump's bravely outdaring the dangers of the time works for him in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign.

Do women voters conclude that he has been protecting them by getting COVID and recovering? Or do they decide that he has put them at risk?

Honestly, I don't know. All I can do is listen to the women I know and wait for their judgements.

Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020"

How can one begin to deal with the prophecies of Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020" just out at American Mind?

Where he says that, whether they intended it or not, America's ruling class has declared the Deplorables beyond the pale and therefore ordained a totalitarian future in which nobody will be allowed to dissent from the orthodoxy, or hold an opinion at odds with the orthodoxy, or hold a job if they they are not orthodox.

The point is that Donald Trump represents an inchoate rebellion against the supremacy of the ruling oligarchy:

More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Because, of course, to oppose the oligarchy's "monopoly access to truth and goodness" is the very definition of Satanic evil. And it must be stamped out, in every detail of its satanic systemic racism.

And, of course, once you get the whip in your hand, there is no end to it.

Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

Codevilla laughs at the pompous notion of the "resistance" to Trump's 2016 election by the ruling class. Yes, of course, the ruling class resisted; it is still resisting.

In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy.

And, let us be clear, this resistance of the general population is barely organized or led by anyone. It is inchoate, instinctive, organic.

The warrant for the ruling class oligarchy's power has always been its self-image as certified experts, as truth-telling scientists, its moral concern for "education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health." And of course, it moral stand against racial and sexual oppression.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power[.]

In other words, the oligarchs have wrecked education, demolished the poor, used environmentalism to oppress ordinary people, and used oppression narratives to oppress the deplorables. No wonder the deplorables are rising up.

As with Crane Brinton's notion in An Anatomy of Revolution, the need for totalitarian domination arises from just this failure, of political action failing to achieve its promises -- even producing "the ostensible objetctives' opposites." When your revolution fails to create the Promised Land, that's when you have the choice to admit your failure or double down.

But the ruling class has a problem. The mostly peaceful protesters of the Summer of 2020 have inadvertently made it clear that their real enemy in not Donald Trump but the whole race of deplorable Commoners.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. 

But, if Trump wins in 2020 and the Republicans maintain their position in Congress, what then?

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

So, the question is whether the oligarchy, the educated Gentry, decides on a truce with the deplorables, to let them go on being deplorable if they don't make too much trouble, or whether the oligarchy truckles to the "intersectional" extremists and goes for broke. Right now, I'd say that the Chucks and the Nancys are finding the AOCs and AntiFas a bit to hot to handle. So there is the temptation to loose them upon the American people as a whole.

And maybe it would work, for a while. But as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." What prompts people to form a head of rebellion is perceived injustice.

Oh, and there is one other thing, that women expect to be protected. If you don't protect them, dear oligarchs, then they will look for another protector.

And I suspect that our oligarchic rulers have no idea, literally No Idea, of the depth and breadth of the injustice they have loosed upon the land. Rulers seldom do, until the peasants with pitchforks show up at the door. 

History Lesson for Our Nance on "Stormtroopers"

You may have noticed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently accused President Trump of using "stormtroopers" when he dispatched federal police units to Portland, Oregon, to defend federal buildings in the Rose City.

Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti.

These are not the actions of a democratic republic.@DHSgov’s actions in Portland undermine its mission.

Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 18, 2020

Er, which kind of stormtroopers did you have in mind, Madam Speaker?

See, the Germans invented the notion of stormtroopers in World War I when they developed new tactics on the battlefield in France -- yes, they were way ahead of the Brits and the Frogs on that. These Sturmtruppen were specialist troops trained in infiltration tactics, particularly effective in the German offensives in the spring of 1918.

Was that the kind of stormtroopers you had in mind, Madam Speaker? Because those imperial German stormtroopers were soldiers in the army, rather than federal police dispatched to a city wracked with riot.

Then there were the Nazi stormtroopers in the 1920s. These stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, or storm department, were a paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party. La Wik:

Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

 Was that the kind of stormtroopers you had in mind, Madam Speaker? Because those Nazi stormtroopers were not government police but the street thugs of a political party. 

The Nazi stormtroopers, the Sturmabteiling, seem to have been rather like the present AntiFa that presently operates in the Rose City, Portland, Oregon, and other US cities. Conspiracy theorists like me assume that AntiFa operates with the nod and the wink of Democratic Party officials in liberal cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. 

I'm not aware, for instance, that the Republican Party, or Donald Trump personally, have any informal shock troops or street thugs to neutralize the AntiFa mostly peaceful protesters that are clearly tolerated by officeholders in various woke cities in the US.

I assume that what you were really trying to do, in your typically lazy fashion, was to create the impression that President Trump's attempt to prod Democratic civic officials into actually keeping the peace in our nation's cities was in fact a departure from legal norms, an illegal attempt to beat up peaceful protesters for justice and black lives. Literally Hitler, as they say.

Or worse, you were making a lame attempt to make it look as though you were down with the movement, tagging along with the Democratic Party's lurch to the left in order to stay relevant and not get tossed out by the radicals in the House after the 2020 election.

Of course, I understand that the reason why we have so many militarized federal government law-enforcement operatives is that  every sub-bureaucracy worth its salt wants to have its own SWAT team, to show that it belongs in the front rank of government. For, whatever the current rubbish being spouted by liberal activists, the truth is that government exists only to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. Everything else is either loot and plunder, handing out free stuff to supporters, or it is "legislating morality" as liberals used to say back in the day when the government had a tendency to do stuff that liberals didn't like.

Here's my advice to you Speaker Pelosi. At age 80, you really should not be in high political office. Speaker of the House is not an office for someone of your age. It's not as if there weren't dozens of Democratic House Representatives that could do the job. Since I don't know you, I don't know what combination of conceit and vanity have prompted you to remain as a House leader. But I do know that nothing becomes a leader so much as the way of departing his or her high office.

And you, Speaker Pelosi, have failed in this fundamental duty.

I Wonder What Women "Expect" on Currrent Mostly Peaceful Protest

It is a basic point of my philosophy that to ask, as Oscar Wilde did (or was it Sigmund Freud), "What Do Women Want," misses the point.

It is not What Women Want, but What Women Expect. If you don't instinctively know that you don't know nuttin'.

And what women expect, in particular, is they expect to be protected. If the men don't protect them then they will find other protectors. This is evoked most clearly in the book A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous. This Anonymous was actually a 30-year-old woman journalist, and she was writing about being a woman in Berlin in the two months from May to July 1945.

You may recall, or you may have read, that the Women in Berlin had a bit of a problem in May 1945. Their men were all imprisoned in POW cages all over Germany and they were left alone to face the occupying Russians.

So what did they do? They sought out the highest rank of Red Army officer suitable to their age and beauty to be their lover and protector. Of course they did.

One good thing they did. They put the teenaged girls in the attic during the two months that Berlin was under the martial law of the Red Army.

So I wonder what the women of Seattle and indeed all progressive cities all across America right now "expect" in regards to their protection.

See, I think that it is one thing to put out a Black Lives Matter yard sign outside your North Seattle house. It is another thing for Karen to realize that the police may not come to protect her if she is attacked by AntiFa thugs and she calls 911. Or if the local gang enforcer turns up at the door demanding money for the protection of home and hearth. That's what's been going down in the CHAZ/CHOP zone down in Capitol Hill in Seattle.

So I am keeping my ear to the ground, listening to the women as they complain to each other in the manifestation of the Women's Culture of Complaint. Are they saying to each other "I can't believe they let those protesters get away with trashing the whole neighborhood." Or, "I can't believe the way they let the homeless camp all over the city." Or what?

My point is that the Women's Gossip Network does not operate according to the progressive culture of mostly peaceful protest and intimidation. It operates in the one-on-one conversations of women in neighborhoods.

And all of a sudden, if you are a politician, you wake up in the morning to find that the universe changed. Because the organic consensus of the women's gossip network has changed social reality.

I wonder if this will play out in the election in November. I wonder if women will be saying one thing to their liberal friends, but another thing in the ballot box. I wonder if it is one thing to repeat after me Black Lives Matter but another thing to feel unprotected from rioters and looters.

Honestly, I don't know how this will turn out. 

I do believe this, that the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers are in a half panic because they need to stay one step ahead of the mob which really wants to kick them out and make the Democratic Party into a truly woke and truly progressive party at last. And the more that they veer left the more it means that the Republican Party will be the only party for ordinary Commoners that just want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

Government is Protection -- Contents

Government is Protection Against Enemies

1. 9/12 Plus 10

2. Millennials: Government Turns Everything into a War

3. Government's Job is To Protect

4. The Liberal Syllabus of Errors

5. My Bill of Realities

6. The Fundamental Reality of Our Times, Four Ways

7. "Make it like it was"

8. Election 2016: Is It All Over Bar Shouting?

9. President Obama's Divisiveness: What Does He Mean?

10. When Will Democrats Realize That Obama is Killing Them?

11. Trump Night: What You Are Not Allowed to Say

12. It is not "Good Government" Reforms that Wrecked the System

13. Used to be that Men were Fighters and Women were Lovers

14. How to Help an In-denial Liberal

15. Liberals Screw the Pooch on Navy SEAL

16. Maybe the Jihadis Will Help Us Kill Two Birds With One Stone

17. Trump's Paris Climate: Sound and Fury

18. How About Those Millennials!

19. No, Political Power Does Not Effect Beneficial Change

20. If Not Progress, Then What?

21. And Now the Aussies

22. What Do You Think Parades are For, Lefties?

23. Was Trump's "Go Back" Tweet a Blunder?

24. "You Idiot:" Of Course We Were, Are

25. The New York Times' Problem

26. The Left Led the Workers into a Wilderness

27. Cleaning Up Afer Hurricane Lefty

28. Ten Things the Educated Gentry Got Wrong

29. Liberalism Properly Understood

30. History Lesson for Our Nance on "Stormtroopers"

31. The Future of Government: New and Exciting Enemies!

Women in the Public Square in Brief

I think that the question of women in the public square is the big question of our time. I was alerted to this by German sociologist Georg Simmel.

Simmel recognized that 19th century technologies "made for less labor in the household." This caused unease among middle-class women, who now sought activity outside the home.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But what does that mean?

For me, the point of the male-created public square is to create a public space where the old male culture of revenge justice (an eye for an eye, a life for a life) is replaced by the culture of law and politics. In this culture revenge is reduced to the "wait until next time" of failure in politics and sports. Men still fight, but not in blood sports. Today, men have a Culture of Insult where men exchange insults in a playful way, rather than in a lethal way.

Thus, the shape of our political institutions reflect the age-old need to curb the power projects of men. As politics is civil war by other means, the whole point of politics is in fact to direct the male aggressive instinct into political wars rather than actual fighting wars. And then, since men tend to abuse the rules of any political system, there is a need for checks and balances to limit the harm that can be caused by men of overvaulting ambition. That is what the public square is all about.

Now, the previous culture of women was different. They got on in the old village culture with gossip, which is two women talking together about a third woman. And they penalized defaulters -- the woman that all the women agreed was a problem -- by naming and shaming, and in extreme cases, by ostracism.

I have an example of how the women's culture works, from Spirit and Flesh, a book about a fundamentalist church by liberal sociologist James M. Ault, Jr. In the fundamentalist church the men held all the formal offices, but the women ran the church through their husbands. Notice that this means the women never get into conflict or suffer a microaggression or leave their safe spaces, or venture into the public square. But they still run the place.

But feminism proposed the notion that women could and should live openly in the public square. In the mid 20th century, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex told us that the ideal was the "independent woman." She would live alone, work in a career, conduct sexual relationships as she pleased, and be subordinate to no male patriarch.

Only Simone was wrong. Women don't want male strutting careers, or casual sex, or exchange of insults in the public square. Women don't relate to the public square, not at all. But then, "what do women want," as Freud asked. They don't want, they expect. And what they expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

And thus women want nothing to do with the public square, which is a place where you go out unprotected, except by your wit and knowledge and ability to hold your own in a word fight. 

The public square is a relic of the duel, the fight between two men for dominance, only conducted today with words rather than fists. That is not how women live, or interact. As I say, women communicate one-on-one over coffee and in that conversation they do not disagree with each other, not at all. They talk about other women, as in "I can't believe she said/did that." The public square is not just a thing invented by men for men. It is inaccessible to women because they are women and their brains are wired differently.

In today's culture we see the woman's culture penetrating the workplace with notions like microaggressions and safe spaces. Back in the Sixties, colleges abandoned the "parietal" system in which colleges took over the supervision of adult children from parents. But now colleges are involved in all the minor questions of college life; This trend is all about women disliking direct confrontation and calling it a microaggression and wanting to control people indirectly. A safe space is the complete negation of the public square, where you have to stand up and "act like a man." What happens to the public square if you are not allowed to confront other ideas with your ideas and if you run for a safe space if you hear something that makes you feel bad? I don't know.

Nobody should doubt the emotional wear and tear that come from living a life in a male skin suit, doing that male swagger and male hierarchy thing while still being a woman inside that instinctively is programmed to live a completely different life, a life not of deeds and glory, but of feelings and emotional responses to life.

Irregardless, the whole question of women in the public square is only going to become more and more important. As women slowly decide that they don't really want to live in the bracing air of the public square and would rather rule the world through their husbands, as of old.

Women in the Public Square Table of Contents

What Would It Take To Wean Kids Off Socialism, Bernie?

It's no secret that the prime supporters of ageing "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders, winner in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, are young people.

Because?

Yeah, really. What in the world do rich white kids think they are doing?

There are many reasons offered to explain the support for socialism in the young:

• Socialist ideology is like a family: your share of the loot and your share of the work are determined by family relationships.
• What do you expect from the teachers at government child custodial facilities?
• Nearly all politicians and activists are in the game of selling more government loot. Where is the percentage for anyone active in politics to say: Hey, we need a lot less government force!
• Nearly all journalists are in the game of political push and shove. Who wants to read about price theory and regulatory capture?
• Nearly all academics are in the game of selling "with this weird trick we can tranform society." Just like the click-bait artists.
• Nearly everyone feels that, if they lost their job, where would they look fo help? The market?
• And anyway, whatabout Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and the rest? Exactly; rich kids, sons of businessmen. Why should our rich white kids be any different?

Plus, the world of universal wage labor and capitalist production is brand new. Five hundred years ago almost everyone in the world was a peasant, a serf or slave subordinate to some local lord. And that fake family, that would take care of you, maybe, was the inheritor of the extended family of the hunter-gatherer band.

So we are living in a totally new world, and it is not surprising that the most obvious cultural meme is what I call the Great Reaction, a retrospective ideology that instinctively lurches back to the old and familiar.

And even if we decided to teach the kiddies to love the market, which might work for boys that are coded for war and danger, whatabout the girls? We are teaching girls that they can be superheroes, but the most notable cultural development of recent years, I'd say, is the concern with "microaggressions" and "safe spaces," and that is girl stuff. Women are easily offended, and do not like to interact like men in the male Culture of Insult; and women do not like physical danger, not at all: they want to be safe and their loved ones too.

So I say that, probably for girls and young women, it's a hopeless cause. Women expect to be protected and always will.

But boys: Well, I think that boys should be chucked out of school at 13 and expected to take up apprenticeships -- or internships if you prefer -- and these apprenticeships should be away from home. And boys that want more school-learning should be forced to crawl over broken glass to get it. OK. I know this will never work for rich kids, because mothers. But for the rest it will generate rough, tough hombres with a Nietzschean tolerance for a good deal of "accidents and nonsense." And they will be the kind of men that don't want to be soft soy boys in their parents' basement. And they won't be Bernie Bros.

I also think that all government education should be transformed into parent-controlled vouchers, so that parents can choose their kids' education from a whole menu of options. Poor parents could choose KIPP schools to get their kids into the middle class. Or Rudolf Steiner schools for rich kids to make them into creative artists. Or home schools run by the neighborhood mothers. Or college prep schools to get kids into the fancy-pants selective colleges. Or other types of schools that I would never have thought of.

Hey, I know. Maybe the Bernie Bro phenomenon is the last gasp of socialism, because whatever comes next is going to be different.

What will that thing be? I have no idea, except that I suspect it will be derivative of the German Turn from Kant to Jung. But I am sure that it will make everyone from me to the local lefty absolutely outraged.

And why not?

Why should rich lefty white kids set the agenda for the nation? Whatabout diversity and inclusion? Whatabout if diversity turns out to be the rising generation of minority Commoners that want to be resourceful and independent and proud and not tied to liberal rich white kids?

Why can't the rest of us have fun?

Liberalism Properly Understood

I saw a reference to Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen, and bought the book. And I am glad I did. Not that I agree with Deneen, who accuses liberalism, both in its economic-libertarian and progressive-social versions of being an “anticulture” that destroys the culture of virtue and sense of place of the great cultural tradition from the Greeks to the start of the Enlightenment. Says he:

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that makes place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning.

Actually, I don’t agree. First, humans have always been in the business of conquering nature. More and more, we learn how even our furthest ancestor mucked about with the Earth. For instance, we have just experienced a moral panic about monster bush fires in Australia, supposedly proof of runaway climate change. Only, skeptics point out, aboriginal tribes have done controlled burning since time out of mind. And all animal breeding and horticulture is a flat out conquest of nature: what are domestic animals but our conquered slaves?

And as for time: certainly it is true that we now think of time as linear, and we used to think of it as cyclical. But we also have cyclical theories of dynasties, such as the progressive dynasty that seems to be showing its age right now and doesn't seem to have the chops to see off the populist rebellion.

Deneen also makes a lot about the sense of place, about humans being rooted in a single place, anchored to land and community. Except that people anchored to place were usually not virtuous souls giving back to the place what they took out of it, but serfs, that thrived so long as weather and the political ambitions of their lord allowed it. And humans are notoriously a nomadic species that wanders the Earth in search of it knows not what.

Like many cultural conservatives Deneen’s ideal is a culture of virtue.

The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance governed the souls of the citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be realized only in a city that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom.

The only thing, of course, is that all this good thinking was a kind of pious hope. The reality of Greek life was Peloponnesian wars. Followed by the rise of Alexander who conquered most of the known world. Not much virtue there, or a wise recognition of the sense of place and the obligations of community. Just flat out pursuit of power.

In other words, the ancient world through the Middle Ages may have had an ideal of virtue and looking after the Earth and cherishing community and the sense of place. But the Spartans were throwing kids off cliffs if they didn’t look like they were going to measure up to the Spartan ideal of masculinity. The Romans legions were conquering near and far and sending the booty and slaves back to Rome for a jolly old triumph. The feudal age was big on inter-lordly conflict with this lord teaching that lord a lesson. They recruited their armies with promise of loot and plunder.

Now I don’t know if you think of that sort of behavior as nurturing nature or conquering it. And as for a sense of place, well, you’d better have your armed knights and archers ready to defend it.

Let’s interpret that world in this way, as a Two Peoples world. There were the virtuous that had studied the classics or the Bible under worthy teachers and had succeeding in the endeavor of paideia, the education in virtue. But everyday life was superordinate and subordinate, with lords ruling it over their subordinates that looked to them from protection.

What Deneen doesn’t like is the advent of the age of creativity.

If you think of economic liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can learn how nature works and put it to work for us. Conquest of nature, no question. Or as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. But you know what? We also got the Great Enrichment with an increase in income of 30 times in 200 years. In Africa people are using cellphones for money transfers. How crazy is that? And is it despoiling the Earth? Yes, probably. Only, as the London Economist wrote about 20 years ago, once a country gets to about $10,000 per capita income per year it starts to care about cleaning up the environment. And worry, as we have taught teenagers to worry, about our resource use destroying the planet’s climate. Whatabout the crash of 2008 and unsustainable debt? Well, people that take out debt are anticipating future income; debt is particularly useful in trade where the final sale may be months after production. But there's a problem when the political sector uses mortgage debt to buy votes, for if people can service their debt and/or the collateral on a debt can't be liquidated -- as was direct policy due to the Community Reinvestment Act, then you got trouble, right here in River City.

If you think of progressive liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can free people from age-old hierarchy and subordination. We can create our own hierarchy and justice out of the incrustation of centuries. Is there a downside? Certainly. We can screw up and we have screwed up big time. And as plenty of critics have pointed out, the new world seems to be really good for educated elitists but not so good for lesser folk.

See I don’t believe that things were nobler and more virtuous and wise in the old days. People may have had a dream of virtue, but there wasn’t much around. Let us say that the Enlightenment with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and all started the rot. But what about Henry VIII who disarmed the nobles in his reign of 1509 to 1547? His nobles forthwith threw out a good bunch of their peasants because they were no use as potential soldiers. I don’t think that had anything to do with virtue and lordly noblesse oblige. It was a simple power play: Henry VIII on his nobles to keep them from causing trouble. And nobles looking out for Number One and deciding that they didn't need no stinkin' peasants any more if they weren't going to be used in their private armies.

Now, I agree that the problem with getting all creative, economically and socially, is that you certainly throw out a lot of babies with the bath water. Untrammeled creativity is indeed what Nietzsche described, free spirits going all out for a bit of Wille der Macht before breakfast.

The interesting thing to me is that after Nietzsche described and celebrated pedal-to-the-metal creativity, the dialectical opposition of creation and destruction, the folks that came after him dug up the old wisdom about creativity, that it must be implemented through the agency of the Sacrifical Hero who has been on his Hero’s Journey into his personal unconsciousness and its demons and come back sadder and wiser, ready to explore on the border between chaos and order. And give his life so that others may live.

But however high we may reach into the creative empyrean we are still humans, and many of us merely want to hang on to some powerful lord for his protection -- not to mention a bit of free stuff. A good proportion of middling folks aspire to responsibility and virtue, learning how to live a good life. But what happens if the world changes, but conquest or by invention? What do the sensible Hobbits of the world do then? The truth is that life is full of challenge and tragedy and learning the virtues is not enough. You also have to suck it in in the hard times and perhaps up sticks and leave your beloved home and journey to a new land.

There is no doubt that modern liberalism in all its facets is a hot mess. And there is no doubt that the economic titans with their constant chop and change cause ordinary people much heart ache. And the progressive wokerati and their secular religions have caused untold misery, and it some cases a return to slavery. The whole thing could yet end in utter failure and disaster just as the climate change enthusiasts insist.

Or we may muddle through.

What I say is that we, the educated, the wise, the evolved, the people that have had an education in paideia and the virtues, need to understand that our own agenda is not all there is. The world is not here just for creative geniuses and creative knuckleheads. Creative people are destroyers as well as creators. Nor is it just for people what want to hold on to the culture and the accumulated virtues built up over the past. You can’t hold onto the past: it can disappear in the twinkling of an eye. And if you just want to hang on in the retinue of some powerful lord or onto your well-paying union job and its guaranteed pension and shelter from the icy blast, be warned that the day will come when you are no longer of use to the lord's power project. You do have a backup plan ready? Right?

Liberalism is a hot mess. So is every creative project. The only problem with creativity is for the creative folks to insist, as they do all the time, that creativity is the only thing, and beat up the ordinary mortals that just want to wive and thrive and get kids on the ground.

But hey, nobody needs to figure that one out. The Trumps and the Brexits and the Borises are teaching the creative geniuses a lesson and all we have to do is sit back and watch.

These creative guys, liberals of the market and liberal of the wokerati are so brilliant that they didn't see it coming.

Imagine that!

Ten Things the Educated Gentry Got Wrong

Since everyone is doing lists over the New Year, I thought I would too.

My basic idea is that we are experiencing a changing of the guard, culturally and politically, because our Educated Gentry has spent the last century doing stupid things.

Legislation by Supreme Court. The way I see it, courts are great for cleaning up messes, in particular in the commercial world. Oh, and inheritances! That's why the merchant/commercial world developed the idea of resolving their disputes with judges. Then the nation state took over the courts, because of the reputation for probity, and the chance to use the law in its power projects.

But of course, politicians ruin everything. Now, in my view the point of elections and legislation is to demonstrate a social and political consensus, to tell people where the power lies today. You wanna change it? Then start persuading more people and have an election. Thus, for the Educated Gentry to use the courts to advance their class agenda is not a good idea, because it doesn't have to persuade people, just persuade the elite.

First, it's unjust. Second, it doesn't resolve anything. Third, it means you have to keep your hammerlock on the courts for ever and ever, amen. Thus, the Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade. Thus the Supreme Court decision of homosexual marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges. Thus the Supreme Court decisions on Affirmative Action. The problem is that when you legislate by Supreme Court ukase you have not won the people to your side. You have just created an injustice. And then you have to fight to the death to keep the Supreme Court reliably Gentry by "borking" the wrong kind of candidates.

Justice by Politics. The purpose of morality is to maintain a consensus about what human behavior is antisocial, and thus deplored by all good people. The purpose of politics is to protect the people from enemies foreign and domestic. In other words, politics is about life and death issues that threaten a human society; and morality is about the less critical stuff.

Back in the day, through the genius of the separation of church and state, our forefathers rather neatly separated these two zones of human social collision. Problem is that, since the Death of God to the more progressive Gentry, moral issues have tended to become questions of politics. The less violent methods of social control practiced by the community of women, such as naming, shaming, and shunning, have been shut down in favor of the methods used by men, the police power of incarceration and execution.

The reason I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, is that I believe that the modern habit of "legislating morality" is in fact almost always the legislation of injustice.

Government Pensions. I think that the only government pensions I approve of are for veterans of the armed forces. Especially veterans wounded in the nation's wars. Otherwise government pensions degenerate into pure loot and plunder. And the injustice of government pensions is that the old'uns like me outvote the young'uns and tax away their youth -- when they are marrying and having children -- to keeep the old'uns in clover. If we had a private pension system -- even if it featured compulsory saving -- then people would retire when they had acquired enough savings to create jobs for the young'uns that could support the old'uns.

Government Healthcare. Let's say that it is a Good Thing to make sure that old people and poor people have access to healthcare. Maybe it is also a Good Thing to force healthy people of working age to get health insurance. But provision for the poor and the aged doesn't need to be a government program. It could be provided by billionaires, by mutual-aid societies, by churches, by charities. And the problem with government healthcare is that you can't reform it, not without bribing tons of people. Put it this way: suppose Walmart was a government program. Do you think it would ever have come close to providing an abundance cheap stuff for Commoners and Clients?

Government Education. Let's say that it is a Good Thing for children to become literate and numerate. Then how would we do it, today? Would we really create a universal government program of child incarceration in government child-custodial facilities? Would we really ban all child labor? What really is the purpose of child education? We could say that, back in the day, it was a Good Thing to make the children of illiterates literate. But won't the literate mothers of children automatically make their children literate? And should we render up children unto Caesar so he can teach them regime ideology? I tell you what I think. I think that the neighborhood women should get together to teach the kiddies. And any women that didn't get with the program would be named and shamed and shunned.

Government-sponsored Racism. All societies all down the ages have been "racist" in that they have defined themselves by some real and/or imagined identity: of the kindred, the tribe, the principality, the nation. But obviously identity politics is a very sharp-edged weapon. You can whip up national identity into an agenda for world conquest. Or you can use differences in race and origin to divide people in a nation. And really, once a political entity goes beyond forbidding the government to discriminate on the basis of whatever, you are trafficing in racism. And Anti-racism is just as racist as Racism straight up. In other words, if you are using government to fight racism, you are spotlighting racial and identity differences, making people "notice."

Crisis Mongering. The only warrant for government power is existential peril. Thus, every ruling class is on the hunt for some peril, real or imagined, that gives it the warrant to take the nation to war and draft the young generation into the rank and file of the army. In our day these crises usually involve some kind of victim that "we" must save. Or it is the planet that we must save. The problem with all such noble efforts is the casualty list. Of course, in a real shooting war the casualties these days are likely to mount into the millions. But seemingly innocent efforts have their casualties: the childless cat-ladies of the feminist revolution; the fatherless black men of the civil-rights revolution; the underclass of the welfare state where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much; the folks that lost their jobs in the Great Recession so that deadbeats could own homes. And Lord knows what the butcher's bill of the fight against climate change will look like.

Jobs for Gentry. I understand the whole administrative state as one giant Jobs for Gentry program. See, life is uncertain. How does a scion of the Gentry get that good job doing something meaningful? I look at all the Deep Staters in the Get Trump game and I think: Jobs for Gentry. I look at all the Studies professors and I think: Jobs for Gentry. I look at the deep and wide world of activism and NGOs and think: Jobs for Gentry. Yeah! Whatabout the Commoners?

OK, that's only Eight. But I'll have more later, see if I don't!

Cleaning Up Afer Hurricane Lefty

After the destructive winds and flood tides of a great tropical storm comes the cleanup.

And that's what came to me in the early morning today as I thought about the century-long hurricane of the left. I got to thinking about it after reading a piece in American Mind by Jeremy Carl writing that ordinary America is now "culturally conquered territory," and it will take a "reconquista," like the Spanish reconquest of Spain from the Moors, to restore America.

Quoting Hunter Hearns, he writes of the liberal cultural hegemony,

Republicans have controlled the presidency for 32 out of the last 52 years, appointed 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices, and controlled much of Congress for the last 25 years as well. “For a party to be so remarkably successful politically while losing on practically every issue requires a deep rethinking of where things have gone wrong.”

There is a lot of woulda coulda shoulda like this going on in the scattered homes of Conservative-ville: the assumption that someone has failed. That Bill Buckley should have done better than make the Republican Party into an Outer Party to the Democrats' Inner Party. That the Bushes should not have been such squishes. That the neoconservatives ended up betraying us in the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq. That the billionaire libertarian globalists should not have hollowed out the manufacturing economy. Etc.

But I think all that kind of thought misses the point. It assumes that, e.g., government coulda woulda shoulda take enough precautions so that, when a hurricane shows up in Florida, that everything should already be hurricane-proof. And Someone Is To Blame if a few roofs blow off.

But when there is a hurricane or some other great storm, it really is not possible to take enough precautions so that there is no damage. You board up the windows, you encourage people to drive their SUVs inland, and then, after the storm, you go to work and clean up.

The basic problem we righties have on the "far-right" of which you've heard tell is that we don't really believe in politics. We think government is a necessary evil to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic, and beyond that it goes south pretty quickly.

Wanna protect seniors with retirement income? Well, pretty soon it takes over the budget, and one thing it does not do is save present income to provide the jobs for the kids that will be working when we geezers are retired. Wanna educate the kiddies? You end up with an education bureaucracy that is messing around with diversity and inclusion and bathrooms and pensions and not doing much about educating the kiddies. Wanna curb dangerous monopolies? Great, except scientists say that the regulated monopolies end up "capturing" the regulators.

And that is just the boring part of government. The truth is that, for many people, politics is their religion. They practice politics as part of a movement to save the world and give meaning to their lives.

We have a rather terrifying word to describe the combination of politics and religion. We call it "totalitarian." And there are 100 million graves in Russia and China that bear silent witness to the horror of this toxic combination.

To say that we woulda coulda shoulda stopped all this is to say that, when a new religious cult forms we should send wise men to talk the cultist out of it, before they become a problem.

Who really could have known that the minor kooks Marx and Engels with their shabby critique of classical economics would have spawned the Bolsheviks and the Maoists? Who was anticipating The Sixties and forecasting a sexual revolution and the sacrament of abortion?

And who forecasted the Woke Revolution of the present time? And who can keep track of the follies of progressives in government, proposing stupid de-carbonization, ridiculous regulation of the workplace, and the use of words as weapons in the pejorative search-and-destroy mission of canceling all the racist-sexist-homophobes?

The truth is that all we can do is batten down the hatches when the storm clouds threaten and hope we are still alive after it has spent its force so we can help the Cajun Navy rescue people and clean up afterwards.

The thing is that every successful religious and political enthusiasm ends up as a manifestation of my maxim: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." Every great political movement and every great religious movement leaves devastation in its wake. Or if you prefer, victims of injustice.

One of the things that our lefty friends are very good at is reminding us how the gales of economic change cause suffering and heartache: the closed manufacturing plants, the ruined lives, the hollowed-out cities. It's true; we can do more to help those whose boats have ended up holed and beached on the headland.

But when you have politics you have a war of words. When you have religion you have a battle between good and evil. And when you have government you have force.

So when a religious movement or a political movement or a combination totalitarian movement reaches hurricane strength, thousands, maybe millions of people are going to be flung around like matchsticks. That, in any language, is injustice. And injustice builds rage and pushback.

I don't think that people like me -- who, using Curtis Yarvin's language, are "gentry" that try to understand the point of view of "commoners" -- can expect to anticipate and head off the latest politico-religious enthusiasm from the left. But we can champion the right of "commoners" to live their modest lives in their own way without being drafted into the ideological army of the lefties.

And without being send to reeducation camp for failing to get with the left's program.

And the least we can do is help clean up after the storm has passed.