Ferguson's "Great Degeneration" and How Things Are Getting Worse

I just picked up a copy of Niall Ferguson's 2012 book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. He says: Look, there are four things a society needs to get right. He calls them black boxes.

1. Democracy meaning the political black box.
2. Capitalism meaning the economic black box.
3. Rule of Law meaning the legal black box.
4. Civil Society meaning the social interaction black box.

Obviously there are ways in which each of these black boxes and work well and interact well with the other black boxes. And there are ways in which they degenerate and make things worse, both in their internal operations and in their interactions with the other black boxes.

Ferguson creates a beehive metaphor and uses it to analyze our present political situation.

In politics, Ferguson asks if we are creating too many dependent drones for the worker-bees to support. And in economics, Ferguson asks if we are creating problems when corporations play an active part in political life and governments distort the economy with subsidies, tariffs and regulation. In law he asks if the rule of law has not degenerated in the the rule of lawyers. In civil society he asks how a free society can flourish when its voluntary associations -- created for objectives other than profit -- are in decline.

So, he argues, we should be putting curbs on the ability of the political system to distribute loot and plunder, and in particular for the elder generation to loot the younger generation through explicit and implicit debt.

In the economy we should be limiting the power of regulation to encourage a house price bubble that leads to the Great Recession of 2008, where regulation and government supervision creates a more fragile system. Shouldn't regulation make a system more "anti-fragile" that "becomes stronger when subject to perturbation."

In law we should be encouraging a system that develops "low-cost enforcement of contracts." One measure of the health of the legal system is the length of time and the expense of setting up a new business. Ferguson prefers the Anglo-Saxon "common law" to the Continental "civil law." 

When it comes to civil society, Ferguson cites his experience in "clearing the beach" at his house on the coast of South Wales. When he moved in the beach was cluttered with rubbish, from plastic bottles and bags to beer and soft-drink cans. When he found that the local council would not help, he organized volunteers to clear the beach. After a couple of beach cleans the Lions Club got involved.

The Lions brought a level of organization and motivation that far exceeded my earlier improvised efforts. As a result of their involvement the shoreline was transformed.

Yeah. Maybe we should apply the civil-society model to all kinds of other things, from education to welfare.

Of course, everything that Niall Ferguson proposes is, to me, conventional wisdom -- my conventional wisdom: the sensible things we should be doing -- should always be doing -- at the political, economic, legal, and lifeworld level to regenerate the health of our society. And not just once, but all the time.

But our lefty friends want to do the opposite. And reading the book made me realize just how crazy things have gotten since 2012.

One of the things that Ferguson warns about is debt: that government debt is a generational charge on the young generation. Our lefty friends are heaping debt upon debt. One of the things he warns against is loading too much regulation that distributes political favors around and, like in mortgage finance, makes the economy more fragile. One of the things he warns against is the rule of the lawyers. But our lefty friends are all over the legal system trying to enforce changes that they cannot get by legislation and the political process. One of the vital parts of human society is the social lubrication of civil society organizations; the only thing our lefty friends understand are AstroTurf activist organizations.

In other words, if you accept Niall Ferguson's world view, you can't help feeling that everything our lefty friends are doing and want to do are making things worse.

And the reason for all this isn't mysterious. As the educated elite has enforced its political formula, of allies helping oppressed peoples against white oppressors, the ordinary middle-class commoners have staged an organic Great Rebellion that switched Congress to the Republicans and then elected Donald Trump as president.

For now, after herculean effort, the ruling class has rolled back the Rebels. But, as they said of the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and instead are doubling down on the agenda that Niall Ferguson judges is the cause of The Great Degeneration.

The purpose of politics and economics and law and civil society is to help the society of humans flourish and live in harmony. They are, in the notion of Jürgen Habermas, the Lebenswelt, the life-world in which humans communicate and develop moral agreement and resolve their differences.

Obviously, when the parties do the opposite, then that spells Trouble, right here is River City. And that, I think, is a shame.

It's Not a Good Idea for the Supreme Court to Legislate Morality

So here we are, with another Supreme Court nomination fight on our hands.

I was to dinner with the liberal neighbors last night and they were all sighing over the death of Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They had seen the documentary of her life, RBG, and were full of scenes like the moment in law school when the professor publicly made fun of her taking a place away from a guy.

For me, Ginsburg was a problem, because as a Good Little Girl of her feminist generation she thought that the job of the Supreme Court was and is to legislate liberal morality.

Of course, liberals high and low are horrified by the idea that Donald Trump might nominate a conservative Christian woman like Amy Coney Barrett. The Noive!

All I have to say, liberals, is that this is the wages of your strategy of legislating from the Supreme Court.

That is not what the law is all about. In the end, you will rue the day that you decided to start legislating your agenda through the administrative state and the law courts, but that time is not yet.

Now, some years ago I read The Story of Law by John Maxcy Zane. And the big takeaway for me was how much that the story of law has been about inheritance and commerce. In other words, when things go wrong with inheritance and with trade, that's when you have to call in the lawyers. It's amazing how complicated things can get. Why is this? Zane writes:

Nothing is more silly than to say that the law made private property. The fact is the exact opposite. Private property came to exist and it made the law. (p.147)

In other words, once humans began to treat some or all property as private, attached to an individual, then humans needed law to sort out conflicting claims about private property. 

That has made me skeptical, ever since, of the usefulness of law when it comes to morality.

Let us ventilate three ideas.

Politics and government are all about force. On what grounds can the state apply force to people? Because of violence? Because the state needs the money to pay for its wars?

Law is all about private property. What do you do when the heirs to railroad magnate -- and notorious robber baron -- Jay Gould start fighting over his $30 million fortune?

Religion is all about morality. What do you do about behavior you regard as immoral?

May I say that I regard this separation of powers as one of the most amazing achievements of humankind?

Let us investigate the question of abortion in this light of this separation of powers.

What do you do, for instance, about a woman who aborts her fetus? Immediately after conception? After the first trimester? Just before normal birth? Right after birth?

Now, I would say that a man that tells a woman carrying his child to "get rid of it" at any point is a cad. I take the moral position that if you have sex with a woman then your act is a commitment that says you would like her to have your child. Don't like my morality? Fine. I ain't forcing it on you.

But whatabout a woman who decides to abort her fetus?

In the first trimester? I'd call her flighty and foolish.

In the second trimester? I would call her very flighty and very foolish.

In the third trimester? I would call that flat out immoral.

At or immediately after birth? I would call that a crime.

See, I believe there is a difference between an immoral act, where all good women agree to name and shame and shun the immoral wench in question, and a criminal act, which implies an act of force, where police and criminal courts and hanging judges and gaolers are needed to take care of things.

But there is always a temptation, especially if you are a fervent believer or an ambitious elitist, to legislate morality, to treat questions of morality using the state institutions for dealing with human-on-human violence.

And that is the Big Problem of our times. Our liberal educated Gentry have abused their position as cultural arbiters, as what Curtis Yarvin calls the "Cathedral," to impose their morality on the rest of humanity.

See, even though I think that a woman that gets an abortion is flighty and foolish, and a man that encourages his partner to "get rid of it" is a cad, I still don't think that it should be a question of criminal procedure.

However, when a woman encompasses the death of her newborn baby, as George Eliot dramatizes in Adam Bede, where the abandoned mother Hetty Sorrel abandons her baby in a pile of leaves, well, that is something that requires the state to intervene. George Eliot makes it perfectly clear that Hetty Sorrel is both flighty and foolish. But she saves her from the gallows and sends her off to Australia. George Eliot was a sweetie.

Back in the day it seemed like a good idea to liberals to legislate Roe v. Wade from the bench and bring the US into the 20th century and legalize abortion like all modern societies in Europe. But did you know that the "modern societies in Europe" all pretty well ban abortions after the first trimester? Whereas in the US liberals are toying with OKing abortion "after birth?"

Then, of course, liberals legislated Affirmative Action and gay marriage and I know not what from the Supreme Court.

Problem is that what yesterday's Supreme Court decides last year can be reversed next year. So all your liberal Supreme Court decisions rest on a knife-edge, the partisan composition of the nine justices. So that is why all liberals go crazy whenever there is a vacancy on the court that takes place when a Republican is president. Because suddenly everything is at risk!

Let me tell you a story. Back in 1984 in Washington State, the religious right put Initiative 471 on the ballot to ban public funding of abortions. It went down, 53%-47%. And that decided the question of abortion in Washington State. Basically, we haven't  had a peep from the religious right since.

Do you see the difference of deciding this by a vote of the people and a vote of the educated elite? When the people decide, that is final. When the elite decides they end up having to enforce their decision with cancel culture. Why? Because they didn't take the trouble to persuade people. They just used their power as the educated elite to change the rules, and don't you dare object, peasant.

I don't know when our liberal friends will see the error of their ways. I would guess not for decades, not until there is a permanent Republican majority on the Court and a permanent Republican majority in the Congress.

What? Is that even conceivable? Well, it does according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. The evolving Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party of the ordinary middle class Responsibles, the Commoners. And our liberal friends have no idea, No Idea, that Commoners have a different view of the meaning of life, and have a right to have the government and its laws take account of that.

But, the bigger question would be for the government to get its cotton-picking hands off morality and let ordinary religious communities take care of the question of naming, shaming, and shunning the members of their community that violate their unwritten moral values.

Our Rulers: Are They Playing Us for Idiots, or are They Idiots?

When you are the poor helpless victims it is hard to decide if the rulers that are bearing down on you are cunning and ruthless or whether they are mindless thugs.

The Zman takes the latter position in a rather dense piece on "The Parable of the Lizard People." He says that a group using political "violence on behalf of their cause is assuming there is no other option." But then he says that the folks being targeted, the shop owners, by BLM and Antifa are supported by corporate sponsors to the point that there are practically mega-corporation commercials supporting the rioters -- who are, of course, sponsored by the ruling class regime. Thus the folks targeted by the rioting,

the people under attack in our world lack self-awareness. They think they are in charge and that the corporations and politicians will respond to market pressure. You can be sure most of them think they will have their revenge in November. They think “get woke, go broke” is a reflection of reality. A big part of the war being waged on them is a psyop to reinforce this false consciousness.

Well, it could be. But that assumes that the "powers that be" are competent and know what they are doing. And I don't think so. I think that powers that know what they are doing are very rare. They are people like Bismarck and Lord Salisbury that kept Europe in the late 19th century under control. They they died and the idiots, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Brit and French politicians, burned the whole place down through stupidity.

I just can't help feeling that our ruling class today is shot through with idiots. It now appears that the whole Trump Russia thing was an incompetent sh*t show from the start, with the fabled Steele dossier put together by a "sub-source" Russian drunkard that had worked at the Brookings Institution. Just so the Clinton campaign could spy on the Trump campaign. And then the whole post-election stuff, including Special Prosecutor Mueller and the inpeachment effort: come on Dems, you can do better than that.

Or take the AntiFa riots. It would have been cool to have some huge peaceful demonstrations after the death of George Floyd, to rally the black vote to the Democrats one last time. But the present riots by young white gentry: Please. And we clearly have all the Dem mayors frozen in place like deer in the headlights, because their political education is in the fraud of "activism" and "peaceful protest." Which have been, for 50 years since the end of the Civil Right Era, fake play-acting by the ruling class's kidz. If the rioters had been eevil "far-right" white supremacists the mayors would have known exactly what to do and they would have done it if AntiFa didn't do their work for them.

See, I think it was staggering stupidity by Hillary Clinton not to concede the election in 2016 and send everyone home.

See, I think it is staggering incompetence by Nancy Pelosi and the other House leaders to allow the radical left to set the agenda.

I think it is staggering incompetence by the Dem mayors not to snuff out the lefty riots.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the Soros-supported prosecutors to do things like harass the St. Louis couple that defended their historic home with firearms. That's the sort of thing that transmits in a second through every gun-nut in the nation.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the tech-lords to have allowed their woke censors to be censoring center-right content and for Google to practically disappear Breitbart from its search results. Actually I think it is stupid to be censoring far-right content as well.

I think it is staggering stupidity for Judge Sullivan and the Court of Appeals to be still harassing LTG Flynn. I mean really fellahs. The definition of injustice is a powerful government hounding a private citizen using the full extent of the law and its staggering expense.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy that read a few books and thinks he knows something.

Here's what I'm thinking about. I wonder how we get through all the trillion dollar deficits and Federal Reserve money printing without a nasty inflationary bubble and a worse nasty recession a couple years down the road.

Now that, to me, is a real problem.

When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once

I watched the Ken Loach movie Kes last night, because I'd read a piece arguing the child actor actually was viable. Usually, child actors are hopeless.

Kes is the name of Billy Casper's trained kestrel, that he took from its nest as a chick and trained up all by himself using a book on hawking he stole from the local used-books store.

Billy is a "hopeless case" kid whose Yorkshire mining village is a hopeless case in the 1960s as oil takes over the world from coal.

So Billy is a "hopeless case" going to a hopeless case gubmint school where the kids all sit around like zombies, living in a hopeless case gubmint "council house" in a village where the men all work in the gubmint coal mine, a hopeless case industry that you will remember blew up during the Margaret Thatcher years.

The school Billy attended and that is featured in the movie is a "comprehensive school" built in 1963 and demolished in 2011. Comprehensive schools were a hopeless idea of the Labour left that helped demolish the "grammar" schools that had provided a route up out of poverty for British youngsters since before the days of William Shakespeare, son of a glover that went to the grammar school in Stratford on Avon.

I say all this because it seems to me that the current cancel culture frenzy really comes down to the fact that the whole gubmint-program world that our liberal friends have created for our benefit is falling down around their ears. And they cain't stand it, as Lina Lamont would say.

Ken Loach is a lefty film director whose "socially critical directing style and socialist ideals," according to La Wik, "are evident in his film treatment of social issues". I suppose the idea back in 1969, when Kes came out, was to highlight the injustice suffered by the Working Class in the Tory years of the Fifties and early Sixties. Of course, today a Ken Loach would be directing movies showing how the white working class in the North of England were a bunch of racist-sexist-homophobe haters as proved by their recent shift to the Conservative Party in the latest "Get Brexit Done" election.

What struck me in Kes was the hopelessness of being on the receiving end of lefty politics and government. Back in the immediate post-WWII era the left was serving up gubmint education, gubmint housing and gubmit nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy. And the poor working class was on the hopeless receiving end of it all.

But whatabout Reform? Can't we reform all those well-intentioned programs and make them work? I doubt it. Because of the fourth of my Four Laws. It says

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

And you can see the truth of that in the current presidential election campaign here in the good old US and A. Our liberal friends are not proposing to reform education or housing or union-blighted industry. They are merely proposing new stuff, defunding police and ramping up racist DIE and going full bore on the Green New Deal.

And who is going to get screwed into hopelessness by the current lefty agenda? Why, almost certainly black voters. Defund the police? That'll really improve the safety of inner-city "communities." Kill school choice? That'll really brighten up the scene in inner-city schools. Green New Deal? That'll really help the workers that depend on trucks and diesel-powered equipment to do their construction and technician jobs.

You can read about this all the time: Stephen Greenhut writing about California's "absurdly high cost of living, driven by a host of progressive policies." Do you think our liberal friends have a clue about this?

Then there is the nearly two-century cultural effort to steer the subordinate class away from middle-class values. There's the absurd effort of the Smithsonian -- now taken down -- to identify middle-class values such as "rugged individualism... emphasis on scientific method... protestant work ethic" with "whiteness." Do these progressive nut-cases not understand that these "civilized" values are exactly what they say they are: the kind of values you need to wive and thrive in the city. "Civilized" means "citified" because the Latin "civis" means "citizen." Get it, wokies?

Actually it all makes me realize that I need a "Four Laws Explained" maxim. As in:

Four Laws: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). But socialism means More Jobs for Gentry.

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). But the administrative state means More Jobs for Gentry.

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). But regulatory agencies mean More Jobs for Gentry. 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill). But government programs mean More Jobs for Gentry.

Yeah. Who knew? Cui bono? I could go on.

Marxism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Universities mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Safe spaces means more jobs for Gentry. 

Think tanks mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Climate change means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic racism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic oppression means more jobs for Gentry.

I never would have guessed. Government, any government, means more jobs for the educated Gentry. So you know what side they are going to come down on any issue. Does it mean more jobs and more power for the educated Gentry?

Will There Be a Third Imperial Age?

We are at the end of the Second Imperial Age, dominated by European powers who determined that land "designated terra nullius (“no-one’s land”) could be taken" -- should be taken. Writes John Lloyd of "the Financial Times and co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford."

They did so in pursuit of precious metals and stones, for settlement and defence (of other lands already seized), for points of supply to their ships, in order to demonstrate their power, and [to Christianize the heathen.]

Actually, the imperial age started with the Portuguese and the Brits trading with India, because it was cheaper to run the new ocean-going sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope to India and back than pay for the camels and taxes of the overland route through Arabia etc. Indeed I had it confirmed from a guide in Jaisalmer, in the desert of western India a couple years ago, that the whole place went to the dogs once the Portuguese and the Brits appeared on the scene. Nobody needed their stinkin' camels and gorgeous havelis any more. So John Lloyd got it a bit wrong.

Yes, there was a lot of terra nullius argument where the humans in question were pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. But not in India and China.

Where India was concerned the Brits were forever dealing with the predatory robber lords just out of town of Calcutta or Madras. Like the Maratha Confederacy. Or the princes just up the road from Bombay in Pune, who were no doubt advised by the Brahmin ancestors of Seattle Brahmin politician Kshama Sawant.

The point is that the Brits weren't in India to loot and plunder it. They were there to trade.

But, of course, the Brit ruling class still lived in a feudal culture. So in due course you got Brit imperialists in India saying, up at the Royal Simla Club in the usual haze after tiffin, "Good Lord chaps, we've got to pacify Afghanistan before the Russkies get there."

It is my belief that the old order of loot and plunder is over. The reason is simple: wealth no longer adheres in land and "precious metals and stones," but in intangible capital, ideas and processes that create the stuff we buy in stores and the SUVs we take it home in. After World War II the Soviets looted and plundered eastern Germany of all its physical capital, factories and machines, and took the whole caboodle off to Russia. How did that turn out, Tovarich Brezhnev? Yeah. German per-capita GDP in 2018: $46, 241; Russia per-capita GDP: $11,289.

All we need is for our politicians and activists to catch up with us, and stop playing at chimp border warfare.

The point of empires is to send the Roman legionaries out for loot and plunder and bring the plunder and the slaves back to Rome and parade them through the streets in a Triumph. And it worked a treat for the Romans until the borders of the Roman Empire were so far from Rome that the old system didn't work any more, probably because the slaves all died on the journey back to Rome.

Now that the US is withdrawing from its post-WWII imperialism, John Lloyd writes, we may be at the dawn of a new imperial age dominated by China and Russia.

Russia’s authoritarianism and China’s totalitarianism (the second a harder version of the first), now allied, present a formidable front of two states dedicated to increasing their global power, in a fashion increasingly similar to the imperial strategies of Europe.

Now President-for-almost-life Putin is a former KGB guy, and President-for-life Xi is a Commie apparatchik. What the heck do they know about the modern world?

Most likely they are like the Brit chaps at the Club up in Simla in the 1830s worrying about Russkies after tiffin. Or they are like the idiots-all-round in the run-up to World War I. They only know politics and political power. They do not understand that wealth and power do not come from a big fat empire with ostrich-feather hats and impressive parade uniforms, or from regime-sponsored "activists" painting the streets with trite slogans. Or from gubmint programs that take from productive people to give to regime supporters.

But the problem is that, if you are a politician or an activist, the only thing you know is the game of political power. If the game of political power and empire is over, passé mon vieux, what does the poor wren do then, poor thing?

Well, that is what we are setting up the bleachers right now to find out. My feeling is that Russia and China are backing the wrong horse. I think that Russia and China are going to find out that the the whole world will combine against them. Because whether you are Vietnam or the Philippines or Australia or Japan or Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore, or the poor bloody Germans in Central Europe, you don't want to be under the thumb of some thug Commie bastard from Beijing or Moscow.

And, of course, now we don't care about Mid-East oil any more, because fracking. Yay frackers!

No, the Big Problem of the coming era is what to do with people that have a mania for social moralizing. See, I think that primitive men were all about defending the border -- or looting the neighbors -- and primitive women were all about naming and shaming and shunning that awful witch living alone just out of town.

I think that we have about pacified men and taught them to fight for market share instead of their share of slaves. But women? 

The problem is a bit like the problem with Harvard graduates: You can always tell a Harvard man; you just can't tell him anything.

The Crimes of the Wet-Noodle Manifesto Signers

Yesterday I sneered at the nice liberal signers of the Harper's Manifesto. But now I want to cut a bit deeper. And I echo Angelo Codevilla, who calls the current political regime a "Scamocracy in America." He refers to "the long-running race and poverty scam, the education scam, the environmentalist scam, the sex scam, the security scam, and now the pandemic scam".

All have been based on propositions touted as scientific truth by the most highly credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S government, enshrined by academia as science’s spokesmen, and fawned upon by the media working in concert to forbid any disagreement on the matter whatsoever. Yet virtually all their propositions have turned out to be false, and indeed have produced effects opposite to those claimed.

 Or, as I like to say, our ruling class has made things worse. Actually, I divide the "scams" of the ruling class into two categories, the Left's Crimes and the Left's Errors.

Under the Left's Crimes I adduce that:

1. The left led the workers into the wilderness
2. The left led women into the wilderness
3. The left led minorities and LGBT into the wilderness

The left separated all these folks away from full membership and allegiance to the nation state. And that is a crime because the nation state is the best thing going until the planet unites to battle the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

Under the Left's Errors I adduce that the following programs do not work. But nothing is done to reform them.

1. Social Security
2. Medicare
3. Medicaid
4. Public Schools
5. Welfare
6. Economic Regulation
7. Racial Preferences

There is a reason why nothing is done to reform them. It is that you cannot reform government programs, not until they collapse and run out of money.

But then I have written about "The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination,"

1. The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture
2. The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class
3. The liberal ruling class has wrecked education
4. The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care
5. The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement
6. The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity

Want some more? How about "The Left's Syllabus of Errors, Part One."

1. The French Revolution
2. The socialist communities, like New Harmony.
3. Marxian economics
4. Top-down administrative government
5. Interventions to favor the left's Little Darlings, from workers to women to minorities to LGBT
6. War on religion
7. War on the nation state
8. Support or large-scale migration
9. Climate change
10. Oh, and Postmodernism

The point, and I do have one, is that the problem with the left is its worship of political power, the faith that justice rides on the back of political power, wielded by the right people.

But humans are social animals; we thrive by reducing the amount of force, because force is destructive and expensive. That is the point of all social animals, to reduce force. And the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has demonstrated that we can transform the world without politics by letting nobodies define the future with technological and non-political innovation, penalizing people only for untrustworthiness and failure to contribute.

Meanwhile, here are the Four Stages of Marxist Takeover, from a KGB-trained Russian, Yuri Bezmenov:

1. Demoralization
2. Destabilization
3. Crisis
4. Normalization, with a "new normal."

The good thing is that you can stop the process anywhere you want.  And, it seems to me, that the Brinton Thesis, in Anatomy of Revolution, is that the Crisis is also the point where the Thermidorean Reaction takes over. Why? Because people cannot live forever in the white heat of a revolutionary Reign of Terror.

Most normal people want to live normal lives, working and wiving and thriving.

Hey, isn't it great that we have a Trump here in America and not a Kerensky, as the Russkies had in 1917. It's another proof of God's existence. Or, as Bismarck is supposed to have said: "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."

The Usual Suspects and Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto

Earlier this week, on July 7, 2020, the unwoke sector of the educated Gentry issued what I would call a Wet-Noodle Manifesto through the website of Harper's magazine. 

All the usual suspects have signed the manifesto: from Margaret Atwood, she of the clueless Handmaid's Tale; to Deirdre McCloskey, whose helpful Bourgeois Era books dissolved in the end into LGBT advocacy; to Gloria Steinem, she who needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle, but ended up marrying a rich guy.

And so on. The only signer that I half respect, as someone that mildly rows against the current, is John McWhorter.

The manifesto starts by praising the mostly peaceful protests following the death of a career criminal during his arrest  -- and makes no mention of riots and looting. This man allegedly passed a fake $20 bill and, if you believe the postmortem, was suffering from heart disease and various comorbidities and had high levels of the post-heroin drug fentanyl and other mind-altering drugs in his body.

Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

Let's translate that shall we?

Regime-sponsored rioters and looters have demanded we turn the clock back on sensible "broken-window" police reforms and further break the spirit and letter of the Civil Rights Acts of the Sixties with straight-up racist quotas and jobs for gentry.

 Then we get to Donald Trump:

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.

Just what planet are you usual suspects living on? I presume this is really saying that Donald Trump represents a threat to supra-nationalist educated gentry in "education, journalism, philanthropy... the arts" and global corporations. as in:

All across the world nationalists and populists are rising to political power, representing in general the ordinary middle-class commoners that get short shrift from the educated gentry in the ruling class that has plans to rise to glory on huge programs of political power from tackling climate change to continuing the failed program of international development. These populists are threatening jobs for gentry.

Listen, usual suspects. Donald Trump rose to power by beating more than ten other Republicans in a fair fight. Then he beat Hillary Clinton in the general election by concentrating on winning Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Rust Belt states are home to millions of people that have not done well in the last 50 years. Meanwhile the Obama administration was spying on Trump's campaign using the "intelligence community" and a faked up "dossier" provided to them by an agent of a foreign power.

Hey, remember when Nixon spied on the Democrats, using not the intelligence community but a few ex-cops and former IC guys?

Then, usual suspects in the ruling class have spent three years conducting an unprecedented campaign to destroy President Trump personally and politically. And you say it is President Trump "who represents a real threat to democracy."

I don't know what Kool-Aid you usual suspects are drinking, but the biggest lesson I ever learned about politics was from a Greek friend expatiating on the end of the dictatorial rule of the Greek colonels. What was needed, he said, was for the center-right to win the election and for the left to accept the result and then for the left to win the following election and for the right to accept the result. 

That, usual suspects, is the basic ground rule for "democracy." Do you understand what I mean? It means that when the other guys win the election, your candidate steps up and concedes, and says "we are all Americans" and we all revere the same Declaration of Independence, the same Constitution, and the same Founders.

But you chaps have contested the last two change elections, in 2000 and 2016, when your guys were voted out in a normal change election. That, usual suspects, is "a real threat to democracy."

But you will talk to a thousand usual-suspect gentry liberals before you will find one that understands such a basic notion.

I've been reading and commenting on Curtis Yarvin's work-in-progress Gray Mirror in recent days. He proposes that political action, for or against the regime, is meaningless, because the regime always wins. "Detachment" is what he recommends, doing something orthogonal to the power regime.

I've been worried that there is something missing in his analysis. And I am coming to think that the missing link is that he assumes that the ruling class is functional, knows what it is doing.

But what can you say about a ruling class whose usual suspects put out a Wet-Noodle Manifesto like the one they put out this week?

You say that they really don't have a clue. That they are like the ancien régime in France in the middle of the 18th century, fumbling and bumbling from one cock-up to another.

Then, you say, someone is going to knock over these Klueless Klots some day soon, and it might as well be us.

Then, of course, the educated gentry will have to get a real job.

What Do Voters Want?

Well. We know what the experts want: they want to issue orders. And we know what the activists want: they want revolution, baby. That is clear from the last three months.

But what do the voters want?

Ah yes, but which voters?

Here's Theodore Dalrymple proposing that the Wokies, of which we've heard tell, are disappointed would-be politicians.

I think it is true that life is much more difficult for young people now than it was when I was a young person. On the one hand they seem to have (and expect) limitless choice and on the other they are facing severe limitations on job opportunities...

The problem is that, back in the day, a university education gave you a pretty good entry ticket into the elite. Back when Calvin Coolidge went to Amherst around 1890 the college knew it was educating future leaders, and many of Coolidge's fellow students went on to high-flying careers.

Of course, we are still carefully taught that a university education is a ticket to ride. Only it isn't.

So maybe it's a good thing that we now teach "activism." Which I would translate as teaching the kiddies how to play-act at revolution, baby.

Of course, the kiddies are not really supposed to burn down the cities. But then the folks that thought all this activism stuff up are not that bright. It's all supposed to keep the deplorable middle class under control. And so it does, in theory.

And what do voters want?

Yes, whatabout blacks and Hispanics? David Catron writes that

The latest Quinnipiac poll, for example, indicates that only 82 percent of African-Americans support Biden — 6 points below the 88 percent Clinton garnered during her failed campaign.

Whatabout Hispanics?

In 2016, Clinton won 66 percent of the Hispanic vote and Trump won 29 percent. Recent polls show Biden ... Biden garner[ing] only 59 percent while Trump w[ins] 39 percent.

So, does the BLM thingy rally black support? And what does it do to Hispanic support?

See, my theory of politics, my reductive Three Peoples theory, says that at some point victim minority groups get into the middle class and then identify with the nation rather than their ethnic group. When President Trump calls the father of a black kid shot by the CHAZ/CHOPpers in Seattle he is saying to African Americans everywhere that they count as Americans. Without the hyphen.

I think that, maybe, blacks and Hispanics are starting to seriously enter the middle class in battalion strength. If they are, then they are going to start voting Republican. And think of themselves as Americans. Because the natural "fake tribe" of the middle class is the nation.

Of courses, then there are educated white women, the ones with the #WeBelieve yard-signs. They are down for the movement, as this piece by a woman having a Satisfying Emotional Experience about Blackness and "corporate racism" attests. Talk to a tech billionaire and dollars to donuts his wife is a liberal.

Oh yeah. Whatabout deplorable white men without advanced degrees? I can't imagine what those voters want.

What is the Current Moral Revolution All About?

Let us start with the Zman who argues that our liberal democracy, unlike the classical forms of monarchy, republicanism and tyranny, has no overall architecture.

There is no sacred text or body of philosophical work to provide authority. Like a school of fish, morality shifts on a dime and that new direction is assumed to be the general will and therefore the proper course. Morality in a liberal democracy is a riot with no real purpose, other than to feed the need of the people to feel they are the virtuous actor in the great drama of life.

Well, I think he is missing the point. Our liberal democracy used to be about fluffing the nest of the workers, and then the minorities. But if an evil policeman can snuff out the life of a poor helpless black, then what is the point of it? That is what I understand about the current moment. So everyone is all in a flutter.

John Gray, in Unherd, compares the current moment to late medieval flagellants. The Wokies know society is immoral, just like the flagellants. But they don't have a clue what to do about it, except to cancel anyone that disagrees with them. Then Gray goes off into the weeds talking about America's founding on the crimes of black slavery and the seizure of indigenous lands.

Let's go back to the Zman. Whaddya mean "there is no sacred text?" We have a century of lefty thought, from Marx to Marcuse, which is nothing if it is not a Bible of sacred texts. Only this Bible is staggeringly, mind-blowingly wrong about its analysis and its moral program. It accuses the capitalists and bourgeoisie of a program of oppression and hegemony that is flat wrong. The capitalists and the bourgeoisie are not that interested in political power. If you come to them complaining of some injustice they will likely listen to you and try to do something about it.

And the lefty solution to all problems is flat-out wrong. It always proposes some kind of top-down supervisory system to right all wrongs, run by people like them. When it could have suggested minor tweaks to encourage pro-social behavior.

For instance, instead of government education it could have proposed employer-supported schooling for the children of employees. Instead of government-run health care it could have beefed up the 19th century universe of mutual-aid societies.

Then, instead of forming its own churches to create communities of lefty belief it has infiltrated all the institutions of society, from government to corporations, and essentially forced its wokey secular religion on the whole of society.

I would say that all this has been a complete failure and thus the lefty adepts and advocates are beside themselves with rage, because the whole world was supposed to be perfect by now. And there are plenty of young kids perfectly happy to burn the place down if the police will only stand back and let them have at it.

Look at the last ten years.

How could our betters have screwed up the credit system and allowed a generational credit panic like 2008? I thought they were experts.

How could President Obama have screwed up the recovery with old and failed policies like free money for teachers, and cartelizing the health care system when what was needed was jobs, jobs, jobs.

How could the health care experts mis-predict the effect of the Wu Flu epidemic by an order of magnitude? What is the point of experts if they can't predict the future within an order of magnitude?

How could black men still be out-murdering white and brown young men by a factor of 8 times? What are experts and policy professionals for if not to solve social problems like over-representation in crime statistics?

The answer is obvious. Our betters are complete idiots whose world view has failed and who don't know what to do other than keep on keeping on, and making sure that they and theirs get all the top jobs, as of old.

So, the world is totally screwed up, and naturally the young'uns do what they have been carefully taught. They go out into the streets and make hand-lettered signs and peacefully protest as though they were helpless peasants from 1819 instead of educated scions of the middle class in 2020.

So, liberals, what exactly was the point of that "march through the institutions" and purging of everyone that disagreed with you? Because if you haven't created a perfect world by now I'd say that your world view and your shock troops occupying all the commanding heights of the institutions amounts to a big fat zero.

And there is nobody left in the "institutions" except mindless idiots like you. So who is going to repair them and reform them?

The "Nazis' favorite intellectual" Fritzi Nietzsche predicted it all. When God is Dead -- i.e., the progressive agenda has utterly failed -- then you get decadance, a dying of the old order. Hmm. Aren't we seeing that, with populist Trumps and Borises popping up all over as people lose faith in the old ways? And then we get to nihilism, with nobody believing in anything. Hmm. Wouldn't that exactly describe our AntiFa friends who certainly know how to bomb and burn, but don't have a constructive idea in their heads?

Let me be clear. The problem is not with the helpless victims, who are just responding to the perverse incentives set up by the clueless ruling class. The problem is not the Commoners, who just want to wive and thrive, obey the laws, go to work, and follow the rules.

The problem is our educated Gentry that just know that they are ordained to bend the arc of history towards justice. And if the last program to bend the arc of history didn't work, well, they have another one that is bound to work this time.

Well, I have an analysis of the present situation, a Vision of the Good Life that transcends the failed vision of the left. And it centers on the basic error of the lefty educated Gentry, that they are warrior heroes hacking their way through the unjust jungle towards a perfect world of equality and justice. Wrong! Real heroes are sacrificial heroes that sacrifice themselves on the border of Order and Chaos.

But I don't expect lefty idiots to have a clue what that means. Maybe it's time for you chaps to shut up and go read a book.

Reign of Terror Means the Revolution is Failing

One of the conventional wisdoms on the right these days is that the Conservative Establishment failed us. It failed to fight against the left. And now look where we are, with the left canceling everyone in sight, and Big Business keeping its powder dry by mouthing conventional platitudes about Black Lives Matter.

So argues Julie Kelly at American Greatness.

The argument of the Conservative Establishment, on the other hand, is that Trump's crazy chaos politics radicalized the left. But for Trump, we would all be getting along.

I think that both arguments are wrong. I believe that what we are experiencing is the classic case of a religious movement dealing with the impossible situation, that its faith is not moving mountains.

Do you realize the impossible place our lefty friends are in? The whole arc of leftism is that, with a new politics, we could create a heaven on earth, free of hunger, free of poverty, free of discrimination, free of oppression, free of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other -phobias in the dictionary.

They said that their labor laws would revolutionize the workplace. Oh yeah, how are the workers doing these days? Dying of despair? How come?

They said that their Civil Rights laws would transform race relations and lift African Americans up from centuries of slavery and Jim Crow oppression and segregation. Oh yeah, how are the blacks doing these days? Still getting killed by police for resisting arrest? How come?

They said that feminism would liberate women from the patriarchy of the ages. Oh yeah? Then how come women reported themselves happier in the 1950s than today?

When the revolution fails to deliver the promised Paradise, the revolutionaries do not just give up and go home. They redouble their efforts. And redouble them again.

Eventually we get the Reign of Terror, Great Purge, Cultural Revolution, Great Awokening.

And then comes Reaction.

That's the model proposed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. And I like it.

But why Reaction? Why don't the wokies keep on keeping on naming and shaming and canceling from now until forever, or until the last Deplorable Statue has been erased from history and the last "far-right" activist has been fired from his job and divorced by his wife?

Because, Crane Brinton writes, humans cannot live forever in the frenzy of white hot religion. Eventually we relapse back to normal life.

The classic Reaction is the end of the French Reign of Terror in July of 1794, the so-called Thermidorean Reaction when Robespierre was removed from office. And it led to the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of course, Bonaparte then led France through the disaster of the Napoleonic Wars from which France has never really recovered. Some people think that is a good thing.

But I think that, because the United States is a proof of God's existence, that we in America will get through the Reign of Wokeness without the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror.

And that is because the voters of the United States elected Donald Trump in 2016.

Yes, of course Conservatism Inc. is really resentful about Donald Trump. Hey, he's managed to do what they failed to do for 60 years, ever since William F. Buckley Jr. decided to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. Wouldn't you be angry?

Yes, of course the left is fit to be tied by Donald Trump. According to their arc of history, Donald Trump ought to be impossible. Yet here he is. 

And One Million people have signed up for his June 20th rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although the top Tulsa city health expert wants Trump to cancel the rally, because health.

Do you see why that would be? Why a million people might have signed up for Trump's rally in a stadium that holds 19,000? 

It's because the vast majority of people just want to live their "humdrum lives" -- immortalized by Lina Lamont. They don't want to bend the arc of history towards justice, or stand athwart history, or amaze their college classmates with a brilliant career, or get into activism, or even go to Mars with our tech billionaires. They just want to live and work and get married and have a family and live to enjoy their grandchildren.

And let it be said that this simple agenda has never been easy, down the ages, on account of the Four Horsemen representing pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In a way, it is appropriate that President Trump has been assailed non-stop by a series of harassments from the ruling class, starting with surveillance from the intelligence community, then an effort to take out his advisor LTG Flynn, then the Special Prosecutor investigation, then the impeachment effort, then the hyped-up WuFlu epidemic, and lately the faked-up riots over the death of a black career criminal in police custody.

Really, what president in our history could have stood up to all this abuse the way Trump has done?

Now I believe, following my research into Jungian psychology and his concept of "archetypes," that the proper role for the man who wishes to change history is the role of the Sacrificial Hero, one who probably perishes on the border between Order and Chaos trying to understand and stand for new ideas and knowledge despite the baying of the mob.

Donald Trump is, of course, an improbable candidate for Sacrificial Hero of the Year, since he is a proud and boastful egomaniac, thrice married, and I know not what.

And yet he has stood against the rage of the mob for nigh on four years, standing for Making America Great Again and promising to Drain the Swamp of the Deep State.

Will he succeed or will he go down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the wokey mob and the devious wranglings of the Deep State?

Nobody can tell, but I believe that he has changed history to this extent. He has redefined the Republican Party as the party of the ordinary American Commoner. As opposed to the Democratic Party that is clearly the party of the educated Gentry and its Clients.

In my view the only question is now how the left in its current Great Awokening will go down the tubes. Will it be at the hands of Donald Trump, as the Sixties went down the tubes with the two elections of Richard Nixon, or will it be at the hands of a future Reactionary that seizes the reins of power at the next Thermidorean moment?

You tell me.

Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery

Since we are all in the middle of being carefully taught to hate the 400 years of slavery and oppression suffered by African Americans, let us just review a curious tale of slavery, in the naval novel, The Privateersman, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Marryat, all you wokies will know because you are all so well-read, is the chap that invented the naval novel genre, that we now enjoy with Patrick O'Brien and a host of others. Marryat was an actual naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for all the heroes of O'Brien and the others.

In The Privateersman, our hero works for a shipowner in Liverpool -- a port that you scholars will know was a notorious slave port. The shipowner, father of the most perfect girl in the world, used to make lots of money in the slaving line, but now prefers the less abominable trade of privateering.

Privateering, all you scholars will know, was a second-tier thing in the Napoleonic Wars, where ship captains with "letters of marque" were licensed to prey on the King's enemies for loot and plunder.

Our hero is the captain on a couple of privateering voyages but then, partly influenced by the daughter, he tells his boss that he's not going to go a-privateering again.

One thing leads to another, and he goes down to West Africa and gets captured by West Africans and made a slave -- to the lovely concubine of a West African chief. But eventually the Brits come and free him.

Then he makes another trip to West Africa, this time to trade goods -- for gold dust and elephant tusks -- but one thing leads to another and his ship gets taken over by a villainous Portuguese who puts him in irons and exchanges the tusks for slaves. When the ship arrives in Brazil with its African slaves, our hero gets imprisoned and sent as a white slave for life to the Brazilian diamond mines.

Hmm. I wonder what Captain Marryat means by that.

One thing leads to another and our hero gets freed after a couple of years, and sets sail in a xebeque for North America, on the way home to Britain and the most perfect girl in the world. But the ship gets wrecked on the coast of North America and our hero gets captured by Indians and forced to marry an ugly old Indian squaw.

One thing leads to another and our hero escapes and presents himself at a small tobacco plantation in the wilderness run by a six-foot woman and two indentured servants, criminals branded on their hands, and forced to work as virtual slaves. She decides she wants to marry him and puts him in chains until he agrees. Well, but soon enough the Indians attack their log cabin and set fire to it. But our hero manages to escape in all the smoke.

One thing leads to another and our hero climbs on board a pirate ship, and is more or less forced to become a crew member because if he didn't agree to become a pirate the crew would kill him.

But one thing leads to another and the pirate ship gets captured by a Royal Navy ship, that just happens to be commanded by our hero´s younger brother. Everything ends happily ever after, including getting the most perfect girl in the world.

Now I don't know exactly what Captain Marryat was trying to say, but I'd guess that he was trying to make the point, in 1846, that there was a whole lot of slavery going on back in the day. And just about everyone was doing it, from Liverpool merchants to West African chiefs to Portuguese colonial regimes to native Americans to white women running tobacco farms in tidewater America. And anyone could be taken into slavery. For the rest of their natural life.

Now, I'm bound to admit that the slavery of African slaves on North American plantations was a particularly villainous kind of slavery, because the capitalist plantation owners made it pay, as capitalists are wont to do. Usually, slavery was a muddle, a sign of status, rather than profit, for you either were a slave or you owned slaves. Back in the day.

But soon enough lots of people, including many of the most perfect girls in the world, got to feeling that slavery wasn't really Christian. Even William Wilberforce, the son of a merchant in Hull, England, agreed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the Americans of 1860 decided to have a war over it.

Then one thing led to another and the socialists of the world decided to give slavery another try in the two biggest slave states in history. Guess which states I am talking about.

Then our progressive friends decided to go half way to slavery with neo-feudal welfare states in which about 40 percent of peoples' incomes are extracted from them by force for the ruling class to give out as free stuff to the supporters of the progressive regime.

I wonder what our progressive friends will come up with next. In the slavery and feudal line.

To Be Continued.

Insurrection in Seattle

Well, well, well. The AntiFas and wokies have taken over a six block area of wokey Capitol Hill in Seattle, the place where all the 20-somethings in artistical black live.

And the first thing that happens is they erect barricades. Otherwise known as a border wall. Imagine if Trump...

And the first thing their police force does is rough up a guy doing an unapproved "tag." Imagine if the Seattle Police Department...

Well. 

I called my Seattle city councilman this morning, axing what his 5-point Plan was to end the insurrection. I suggested to his voice mail, as an example of tough action, the Clinton-era attack on the Branch Davidian compound that, I believe, resulted in the whole compound of the religious cult being burned to the ground and several Branch Davidians and federales being killed. It all started when the Bureau of Tobacco and firearms came to get the guns of the cultists.

So. They came for their guns and the followers of David Koresh said, out of my cold dead hands. Thank goodness there wasn't a Republican president at the time or everyone would have thrown themselves on the ground wailing and gnashing their teeth at the end of "our democracy."

Since I'm a mere 5 miles from the center of insurrection, you might think I am concerned, and I am, of course, because you never know.

But maybe we need this, because, as Edmund Burke said, "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." Borders. No kidding. Police doing a bit of the rough stuff. No kidding.

This is the sort of thing that President Trump is rather good at addressing, and I dare say he will when he addresses the Republican National Convention and gets on the road again with his Trump rallies.

The point is that the educated left in this country are ignorant idiots. They, in the words of Ben Rhodes, literally know nothing.

Here they are returning the nation back to vigilante justice, justice by vengeance rather than bureaucratic law and order and police restrained by actual laws and rules.

Here they are returning to naming and shaming and shunning, as practiced down the ages by the women, and latterly in church communities and their "dis-fellowshipping." Oh and by the Kidz in Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Here they are, proposing to "defund the police" and spend the money on social programs. Oh please. Don't you idiots realize that the social programs are the problem?

The problem, dear liberals, is that you are trying to combine your religion, the religion of woke equality and justice, with the prosaic system of law and order, which tries not to take a position on the question of "the meaning of life" but merely to remove some of the primitive cultural practices like outgroup hate and vengeance with police and law courts.

The point about police and law is not that they are morally superior, but that they remove the older practices that we colloquially refer to as "the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The point about the separation of church and state is the idea to separate the search for meaning from the prosaic question of keeping the peace in the city.

And there's another question, that appears in black and white to me, as a profound sexist. A lot of the naming and shaming and canceling is being done by women. I believe this is because naming and shaming is part of the women's instinctive community culture, the way that women have interacted since the dawn of women living close to their mother-in-laws.

I am here to say that I don't think this women's cancel culture works in the so-called "public square" of the modern world.

Put it this way. Just as men have had to modify their instinctive male honor code from vengeance and the duel to merely insulting each other in public forums -- limited in places like the House of Commons and Congress by rules against insult -- so women need to civilize their culture of name and shame, of "I can't believe she said that" and getting the other women on your side against the neighborhood woman that offended you.

Right now our wokie women and the nice liberal ladies have No Idea that their Culture of Complaint is a problem. No Idea.

And I don't know how we are going to educate them and the SJW kidz educated in our lefty seminaries, except by the Burkean concept of the School of Example.

The whole purpose of knowledge, of course, is to limit, at least in part, the brutal lessons of the School of Example.

Meanwhile Long Live the Revolution of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone!

Gee, Why Would These Folks Be Rebelling, Liberals?

Yesterday I was bemoaning how politicians only know politics, and politics is always about loot and plunder: vote for me and you will get free stuff.

But then I read this Joel Kotkin piece in American Mind: "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass," and it nicely illustrates the problem.

I mean the problem of the "unanticipated consequences" of political loot and plunder.

Kotkin notes that the young are the particular victims of the current economic lockdown:

• "Many young people, including college graduates, are now often employed in these low-wage ['personal contact'] industries.
• "privileged...  radicals... putting into action the political indoctrination they imbibed in college and, increasingly, even earlier."
• "the end of a remarkable period which saw, first, the ascendency of the middle class and then, particularly after World War II, the steady improvement of conditions for the working class."
• "urban renaissance... at the cost of 'the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.΅
• "Particularly impacted, first by lockdowns and then by the riots, have been urban small business owners."
• "Particularly vulnerable are the two thirds between 25 and 32 who lack a 4-year college degree."
• "Yet even educated youth now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations"

And of course what these young people want is loot. As offered by Bernie Sanders and so forth.

Gosh! Now this couldn't be the fault of our ruling class, could it?

It couldn't be that college has become ridiculously expensive, powered by student loans that have absolutely no connection with marketable skills?

It couldn't be that a lot of kids are kept in school when maybe they could be doing better by working in apprenticeships at low wages building up skills.

It couldn't be that the importation of low-wage furriners has the double effect of pricing student-debt-loaded Americans out of the job market while providing serf labor for big business, because H1B-type workers cannot easily change jobs, like the agricultural serfs of old.

It couldn't be because of tons of occupational licensing that serves to prop up the old guys and keep out the young competitors.

It couldn't be because of the substantial taxation on labor with various payroll taxes that can add 30 percent to the lost of labor.

It couldn't be because of minimum-wage laws that prevent youngsters without connections from getting a start in the labor market (while rich kids get to do unpaid internships).

It couldn't be because of complicated zoning laws and the expensive development process that obviously privileges existing developers against new entrants.

It couldn't be because the whole education system is a government loot-and-plunder operation privileging government workers and resistant to change and reform.

It couldn't be because energy is getting more expensive as electric utilities are forced to load up on expensive and unreliable and subsidized "renewable"energy.

It couldn't be because the current welfare system discourages the two-parent family and encourages young lower-class women to have children without benefit of father, so that in the white underclass, at least, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

It couldn't be because liberals have been teaching the lower classes for over a century to believe in themselves as victims rather than get on the Road to the Middle Class and learn the ways and the skills of the city.

"Only by restoring broad upward mobility can we hope to maintain a healthy democratic society", writes Joel Kotkin.

But he really doesn't have a clue. The way to restore upward mobility is to prevent the established -- government union workers to licensed physicians to Social Security recipients -- from taxing and looting the youngsters.

And all the "it couldn't be"s that I have listed above, or almost all, derive from the left and its religious faith in the power of government programs to "bend the arc of history towards justice."

No! The great lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was always a surprise. Nobody saw it coming, not machine textiles, not steam power from coal, not oil from under the ground, not even Amazon and its on-line marketplace.

I mean. Who among us bought Amazon stock the day it went public in 1997 at $1.97 per share (in today's shares)? Today Amazon is at $2,618 per share. So, suppose you bought $5,000 of Amazon on a flyer in 1997? Today it would be worth $6.6 million.

But who among us ever imagined Amazon would end up like this? I certainly didn't. Hey, I bought books on Amazon, but never imagined what it could become, now with a fleet of 80 aircraft delivering goods!

But that's my point. The whole of the last 200 years of astonishing economic growth has been on the backs of the Amazon of the day, that nobody saw coming.

And that means that, Rule One is: nobody has a clue. 

Especially politicians. Especially activists. Especially journalists. Especially professors. Especially nice liberal ladies with social moralizing yard-signs out front.

Now. Who amongst us is going to go first and tell the liberal Emperor he has no clothes?

The Only Thing That Politics Knows is Loot and Plunder

Back in the riots of the 1960s and 1970s guess what the radicals demanded? Less money on police and more money on school lunches and social services.

So now what do the radicals want? To defund the police and spend the money of social services and minority communities.

What is going on here?

I will tell you. If you are in politics the only thing you know is loot and plunder. That is what politics is about and what it has always been about since the dawn of dawn raids.

So the politician cannot see further than selling the notion that the other guys are screwing us and now we are going to screw them back.

By the way, in the City of Seattle, for 2017, the last year with data from the Census Bureau, police cost $200 million out of a total $3.75 billion in spending. Guess what the biggest item is? It is $1.1 billion for "Fuel and Energy" which comes mainly from the municipal Seattle City Light. 

Hey, I know wokies! Why not privatize and sell off City Light! Think of the proceeds that you can spend on lefty wish lists! But of course, that would never occur to you.

Back in the Sixties, as now, the residents of the inner cities resented that the rich folks looked down on them.

This has been the story of big city politics since the middle of the 19th century. The Irish were looked down upon as "shanty Irish" until they made their way into the middle class as "lace-curtain Irish." Jews that started immigrating after the 1905 pogroms were considered dumb, until they started knocking on the doors of Harvard, and the gentlemen at Harvard decided that the pushy smart Jewish kids weren't gentlemanly enough. Italians were notorious gangsters, until they got into the middle class and Frank Rizzo became mayor of Philadelphia on a law-and-order platform.

When an ethnic group first arrives in the city it feels like the whole world is out to get it. But then, slowly, inch by inch, it claws its way into the middle class, getting education and skills and learning how to interface and live with the market economy, which doesn't care about your ethnicity, not much, as long as you are trustworthy and deliver.

But there is a way to slow this process down. You can give a group of workers monopoly privileges working in a labor union in a large corporation. Then they'll think it's their bargaining power that has given them prosperity, rather than their skills and the innovation of their employer. You can give them welfare and free lunches and funnel money to them through community activist groups. Then they'll think that political power is the name of the game. And, as happened after the Great Society, the men won't work much and the women won't marry much.

Wrong idea. What gets people to be accepted as ordinary citizens is that they submit to the city's market economy and learn how to wive and thrive according to its rules. Then they find that it doesn't matter who looks down on them. They got their job, they got their family, they got their savings, and they got their respect.

Now, my notion with the Great Reaction is that liberal and lefty politics is a lurch back to the primitive, replacing market trust with fear, law with vengeance, and so on.

And I believe that the left's encouragement of resentment and class politics is one of the great crimes of the age. Because the one thing to learn, when you get to the city, is to forget your tribal resentments and your fear of the tribe next door, but to plunge into the market culture of trust and service.

And I believe, with my Little Darlings theory, that leftist politics is all about leftist power, not about helping the downtrodden. Leftist politics is all about finding the latest oppressed group and enticing that group into political followership with the prospect of loot and plunder. Because lefties understand only political power; they are utterly ignorant of the settled science that shows how and why we live in the Great Enrichment that has raised real per-capita income by 30 times in the last two hundred years.

But, I always say, to make the cultural adjustment to the market economy culture is the hardest thing in the world to do, because humans are programmed to mistrust the tribe next door, because the tribe next door represents a competitor for their food growing territory. Who knew that the way to prosper was to offer your services on the open market and to trust anyone that acts trustworthy?

But alas for the folks in the looted areas, their businesses destroyed, their hopes dashed. Because the lesson of the Sixties Riot era is that the riot areas never come back. See Detroit and Newark.

Rod Rosenstein: What Did He Know...

So now, finally, they had former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on the carpet before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And,

“If you knew then what you know now, would you have signed the application?” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham asked Rosenstein during his testimony.

“No, I would not,” Rosenstein replied.

So that's all right. Good old Rod. Would never have signed a FISA warrant based on false information -- hey even information gotten from a questionable furriner like Steele. Thank goodness Christopher Steele wasn't a descendant of the notorious Lucy Steele of Sense and Sensibility!

But, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General, what in the world did you think you were doing approving a FISA warrant for surveillance on a US person involved in a presidential campaign?

Would you not, as an experienced and intelligent Justice Department official, and as a US person, smell a rat?

Would you not, as an experienced and intelligent Justice Department official, and as a US person, hear an alarm bell?

Would you not, as an experienced and intelligent Justice Department official, and as a US person, think to yourself: Whoa Neddy? Obtaining intelligence on the opposition campaign? Not cricket, old chap. Or baseball, pal.

But here is what I think was going on. You, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General, knew that the president, Barack Obama, was "interested" in the case. So you didn't call the guys that had originated the FISA warrant and grill them to within an inch of medium-rare. No. You just waved it through. Because.

Was it because you didn't want to risk the displeasure of the White House? 

Was it because you knew that if you failed to get with the program you would "never work in this town again?"

Was it because you feared that, according to Obama house rules, the penalty for not getting with the program might be even more harsh that never working in this town again?

Well, all that is speculation. Who knows what works in the mind of man, eh, Mr, Former Deputy Attorney General?

But this give me an excuse to bring up the matter that I regard as the most basic for any electoral democracy. That the most important thing is the alternation in office. That when one party has had the presidency for two terms the right thing to do is for the Out party to win, and for the In party to concede with a good grace.

That the best way to avoid riots in the streets is for each party to get its turn in office.

This was taught to me by my Greek friend as the Greek colonels of 1967-74 were giving up power and returning Greece to electoral democracy. What is needed, said my friend, was for the Center Right to win and for the left to concede the election. Then what was needed was for the Center Left to win the next election and for the right to concede the election.

The last two times that the Democrats lost a change election when they were in power, in 2000 and in 2016, they failed to concede with a good grace. I regard this as the most serious political problem of our era.

And you, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General, were right in the middle of the failure to concede. Indeed you were right in the middle of peculiar efforts to surveil the opposition party in the months before the election. For what purpose, may I ask?

Was it a purpose greater than the purpose of keeping a peaceable democracy where each party feels pretty confident that it will win or lose the next election in a fair fight?

Was it just a lack of judgement? Was it a case of pusillanimity? Was it a case of bad faith? Or was it a case of deliberate attempt to nobble the opposition?

Doesn't matter, really. The damage is done. And the chances are that the guilty will walk free.

But hey, Mr. Former Deputy Attorney General. I sure hope LTG Flynn gets his house back. That would be nice, don't you think?

But What Is Fascism, Really?

As with most things, our lefty friends have completely emptied the word "fascism" of meaning, except as a pejorative. (Boy, they certainly are the world champs when it comes to pejoratives!)

But what is fascism, really, and who is a fascist?

First of all, I would say that AntiFa is not fascist. Do you know why? Because up to now AntiFa has enjoyed a "nod nod, wink wink" relationship with the ruling class. AntiFa has been useful to the ruling class because AntiFa acts as its bully boys breaking up the peaceful assemblies of Commoners petitioning for a redress of grievances. When AntiFa intervenes, as in Charlottesville in 2017, the ruling class gets to blame the "white nationalists" for the violence. What's not to like?

But now Trump has blown the whistle on AntiFa. It will be interesting to see what comes of that.

Also, I would say that government control or partnership is not fascism. Nor is gubmint health care, nor the regulatory state, nor mass transit. Why? Because all those activities operate under the benevolent eye of the normal ruling class and benefit the usual suspects.

The point about Italy's fascists and Germany's Nazis is that they were genuine populist rebellions. And Mussolini and Hitler were nobodies. They both realized that class conflict as a basis of politics was a dead letter, or at least far inferior to the nation as a basis for politics. Boy, were they right!

But as they climbed to power the various interests climbed aboard the fascist train. And the various interests, from the old aristocracy to various advocates for free stuff, were able to persuade the fascists to hand out some of the free stuff to them.

The flaw at the heart of fascism and Nazism is the reversion to the old truth of the homeland being the source of food. Mussolini called it a spazio vitale or "vital space," and Hitler spoke of Lebensraum. Understandable, because up until the day before yesterday land was life, the food-growing land that fed its people.

It is normal, when things go wrong, to lurch back to the past for inspiration.

Except that in the industrial era, everything is for sale. You don't need your own food-growing land. Lebensraum needs to be reduced to a nostalgic dream, not an actual reality. Ships sail the world with grain, and really it is better to be making cars and computers than growing food. Unless there is a war!

And in the industrial era war, in the old way of loot and plunder and slaves that fed the Roman Empire, doesn't work. Because now wealth is "intangible capital" or the ideas and techniques of how to make a car or design a chip. If you roll over your neighbor state and kill all the men and rape all the women what have you got?

So in the fascist era after World War I you had the failure of the old regimes that killed off a generation of young men in a fruitless war, and failure to rebuild afterwards. Into that gap sprang the former corporals Mussolini and Hitler. Only their ideas were just as clueless as those of the discredited pre-war elites, and they in their turn led their peoples to disaster in yet another war.

The ruling class that inherited the developed world after World War II determined that fascism and Nazism and agressive nationalism should never rear their ugly heads again. But what political principle should they substitute in its place? Fortunately Stalin provided the answer. The rulers would be the Free World fighting against the Communist Menace.

But what should we do after the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union? The answer of the educated ruling class was globalism, in which the educated elite would administer the world. But there had to be some kind of domestic politics in the nation state before they were subsumed into supranational entities like the European Union. You can see that intersectional politics with all kinds of helpless minority classes would fit the bill, and provide the means of dividing and mobilizing voters at election time. Meanwhile the ruling class could rule, above the fray of the intersectional battlefield, while their woke battalions kept the plebs safely divided.

Is it fair to say that this ruling paradigm has reached its sell-by date? It had a point in the advocacy for the working class, except that its program actually imprisoned the working class in union jobs that looted corporations and killed them. And it had a point in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, outlawing discrimination by race. 

And then, in 2008, the US repaid the debt of slavery by electing an African American to be president. Been there, done that.

The problem with a top-down, activists-only politics, is that it misses the point of politics, which is not to afford lordly rulers and eager activists their chance to bend the arc of history towards justice -- as defined by them and their lackeys in the universities and media.

The purpose of politics is to afford the people a chance to choose the people that will rule over them and also to permit a discovery process by which the inevitable injustices of the world bubble out into the public square. For it makes sense that the rulers and their bribed apologists in the media, the deep state, and the universities are not going to be that sensitive to the unjust effects of their noble rule.

And in recent years there have been various failures and blindnesses in the ruling class and their bribed apologists, such as the Iraq War going beyond merely punishing the Afghans for allowing the 9/11 terrorists safe haven in Afghanistan, and the once-in-a-generation financial crash of 2008 caused by the mortages-for-deadbeats policy forced upon us by our rulers. Oh, and the underhanded Obamacare to inch us towards a government healthcare system.

So you would expect that in time political movements would emerge to give voice to injustices perceived by various subordinate groups in society. These movements might be sponsored by the ruling class or they might not.

Now it is my belief, on my Little Darlings notion, that today we have three groups, at least, suffering from the injustices forced upon them by a proud and foolish ruling class. We have the white working class, abandoned by the rulers in the 1960s, the blacks, led into the wilderness of government dependence and quotas, and women, led into the barren waste of careers far away from their natural instinct to bear children and run the neighborhood.

Of course, these groups know that something is wrong. But that is all. I don't think it is patronizing to say that people petitioning for a redress of grievances may not have a clue what the real problem is. And this is the more understandable when you remember that we are living in a world completely changed from the world inhabited by our ancestors even 500 years ago. So we are programmed for a world completely different from the one we inhabit.

Now there are two ways to present your grievances to the rulers. One is to form a spontaneous movement -- like the Tea Party that nobody saw coming. The other is to work under the ruling class in a ruling-class sponsored movement, like Black Lives Matter or the Women's March.

If you go the Tea Party route you will be called fascists and Nazis. Why? Because our rulers have learned to call any movement that they do not control "fascist." And they are right: Mussolini and Hitler led movements from below that were not sponsored by the rulers. Not good.

If you go the Black Lives Matter route then your movement will be subsumed into the ruling-class's agenda.

Either way, you may still end in disaster, because while it is easy to point to a problem it is not so easy to propose a good solution.

If the populist rebellion ends in disaster, then the fault is fascism and the latest incarnation of Hitler. If the ruling-class reform ends in disaster, well, they did their best, and the problem is white supremacists and toxic masculinity.

But if the populist rebellion is co-opted by a Trump, then what? Well, then the ruling class and their bribed apologists all combine to hobble the guy; that goes without saying.

But suppose the Trump guy actually has a good plan? Well, the jury is still out on that. Meanwhile, the safe thing to do is to call him a fascist. That way your women friends won't be murmuring behind your back: "I can't believe she..."

The Problem with Our Gentry Experts

The biggest scandal coming out of the Wu Flu epidemic is the Nursing Home Scandal. It appears that many states set as policy that COVID patients released from hospital should be transferred to nursing homes.

Now everybody is saying that this was cruel and heartless of Govs Cuomo in New York, Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania, and Karen Whitmer in Michigan. But they are wrong.

Back at the beginning of the Wu Flu epidemic crisis "experts agreed" that the big problem was that hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients. Why did they think that? It was because "scientists agreed" from their reading of epidemic models that there would be millions of COVID cases. 

President Trump responded to this judgement of "experts agree." He sent two US Navy hospital ships to the two biggest US cities, New York, and Los Angeles to help avoid, or at least reduce, the demand on hospital beds.

Only, it turned out, the computer models on which the "scientists agreed" were wrong. The demand on hospitals was about ten percent of the forecast.

But nobody thought to change the policy with regard to nursing homes, not until thousands of nursing home patients had been infected with the virus. So, it turns out, the overwhelming majority of COVID deaths in blue states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been elderly residents at nursing homes.

The problem is not that New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan had a cruel policy to send COVID patients to nursing homes to recuperate. The problem is that they failed to adapt their policy fast enough in light of the reality that hospitals were not going to be overwhelmed.

Now, I get the feeling, reading about the WuFlu thingy from day to day, that our lefty media seems to think that science and expertise is a "thing." Listen to the experts, they say, and wait to be told what to do.

But if you have read the books that I have read, you might think that knowledge and science and expertise are not Holy Writ, but a fudge. They are useful, but not divine.

See, what I have come to believe is that the Universe is way more complicated and hard to understand than we can imagine, or ever can imagine. Our knowledge and our science of which we moderns are do proud is but a paltry attempt to understand the daunting complexity of the reality. 

Moreover, we do not accumulate knowledge in a noble and sophisticated attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We create knowledge because we have a problem. Indeed, as F.S.C. Northrop wrote many moons ago, "knowledge begins with a problem." If there is no problem, there is no need for knowledge, and no need to leave off wiving and thriving and partying.

This means that the point of knowledge is simply that it is a way to take the data flooding in every moment and decide which data is important and which data should be a guide for action and what action is warranted, given the data and the interpretation based on knowledge and science.

The best understanding of this process is the OODA loop, a concept developed by a USAF pilot, Col, John Boyd.

When you are fighting a battle -- against another army or against a virus -- you are continuously going through a process of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And the faster and the better you can do it, the quicker you will defeat your foe -- or avoid defeat.

But our educated Gentry seems to think of knowledge and expertise as a static thing, a status thing -- better left to the experts. It is rather like the old days of computers. You would punch up your deck of cards and submit them to the computer operator, who would stick the deck in the card reader and return your results from the printer, all in good time, peasant.

And, of course, the folks in an expert bureaucracy are not in the game of action; they are in the game of status. They acquire their education and their degrees and their titles not because they want to solve problems but because they want status. We see this with the transgender Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine taking time out from the vital task of fighting Wu Flu to reprimand a media person for "misgendering" her.

First things first!

Or whatabout the current riots and looting in Minneapolis, in response to the death of a suspect under arrest. How come the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota didn't act in minutes to fill the streets with policemen and, if necessary, the National Guard, or failing that the NRA, with a show of force to stop the rioters?

I will tell you. It is because modern progressive politics is not about protecting people or taking action, it is about moral posturing.

And we moderns know better. We know that the way to get things done is through the market and its price signaling and its rewards for the guy that solves a problem, any problem, before the next guy. The market doesn't care what college you went to, what degree you got, what your title is, or what your race is. It just cares about what you have done for the consumer lately.

You can see that many of the Democratic politicians are really at sea in the current epidemic. They did not go into politics to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, again and again, but to sit upon a golden throne, make pronouncements, and receive the adulation of their courtiers.

I suppose this is true of all mature political and religious and cultural regimes. Everyone is completely engaged in the proper practice of the ritual, and has completely forgotten the problem that the ritual was invented to solve.

With the virtue of hindsight we can say of the Nursing Home Scandal that someone in the health bureaucracy below the exalted rank of Governor or Health Secretary needed to have the responsibility and authority to act on nursing homes.

Guess what. The Germans figured that out a century ago in the carnage of World War I. Given the chaos of battle and the fact that everyone was hunkered down in the trenches hey realized that they needed to push responsibility down as far as possible and empower junior officers and NCOs with the responsibility to act, based on their individual knowledge of developing local events. Thus Gen. Hans von Seeckt proclaimed his intention

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier. 

How many of your modern experts are completely"verantwortungsfreudig?"

And then there is the advice of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain at the turn of the 20th century, on the question of experts.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Lord Salisbury was notable for conducting foreign policy out of his back pocket and completely ignoring the foreign policy experts at the British Foreign Office.