Roe v. Wade as Bookends

 On the day that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s venture into discovering a constitutional right to abortion because penumbras and emanations, was reversed, let me begin by stating my postion on abortion.

I think that abortion sould be safe, legal, and shameful.

I think that, in general, if you got a baby started, father-to-be, then you got yourself a job for the next twenty years. Men should not be in the position of telling a woman to “get rid of it.”

I think that, in general, the criminal law is needed to keep rowdy men under control. Men sometimes need a punch in the solar-plexus to get straightened out. Or imprisoned for ten years or so until they get cured of their violent ways by anno domini.

But I think that, in general, the criminal law should not be ordering women around. If the word got around in female circles that abortion was shameful, if women were in the habit of agreeing with their friends: “I can’t believe she got an abortion,” then there would be a lot less abortions in this world.

It’s in the genes. Women believe what they have been carefully taught, what the other women believe, and that is just they way they are. Men, not so much.

So my objection to Roe v. Wade issues from my belief that very few things of a religious, moral, or cultural nature should be issuing from on high from an all-wise Supreme Court. And I believe that the law should not be an educated-class diktat. I believe that lawmaking should be a process very like what Jürgen Habarmas proposes. It should not be promulgated from on high, but worked out in the Lebenswelt, the “lifeworld” of people in a community working out agreement of community standards in the to-and-fro of conversation and communication.

And I believe in the notion of the states as “laboratories of democracy.” Guess what, it was a liberal justice of the Supreme Court that coined the phrase.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis was the first to popularize the phrase that states “are the laboratories of democracy.” Justice Brandeis in his dissent in the 1932 case of New State Ice Co v. Liebmann stated that: “a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned by the US Supreme Court, individual states can set their own laws with respect to abortion. Some liberal states will maintain the current effective law of abortion until live birth. Most, I expect, will develop laws that severely limit abortion after 12 or 15 weeks — just like they do in Europe. Some states may ban elective abortion completely. Maybe that is not such a good idea, because “back-alley abortions.” Still, I am sure that rich abortion enthusiasts are even now planning how to get the word out to any pregnant women on how to get an abortion.

But, I still think that abortion sould be safe, legal and shameful. I leave the Karens of the world to deal with the women without shame.

But now, let us deal with the Larger Question, the culture among our educated classes that they are called upon to decide all moral and cultural questions, and to enforce their decisions with politics and government. And you shut up, peasant.

The extreme case of this is, of course, Communism and its half-sister Socialism, and its bastard brother, the administrative state, in which the educated ruling class decides everything from on high, and there is no recourse, no appeal, no evaluation of the benefit of any diktat from on high. Not until the society collapses in ruin, as China at the end of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. And notice that China did not abandon economic communism until after the death of Mao ZeDong.

Thomas Sowell roundly demolishes top-down culture and politics in The Vision of the Anointed.

But the Science!

Did you know that the Science these days is coming to the idea that there is a mysterious “something” — well, let’s call it a Dark Force, to go with the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy — that scientists think may be driving the universe to create new things, whether new species, adaptations, cultural changes, whatever. In other words, when Charles Darwin talked about “evolution” he didn’t know the half of it. I am reading a book right now, The Self-creating Universe: the making of a World View by J.J. Clarke that calls this mysterious Dark Force “emergence.” And then honestly says that this “emergentism” describes the way the universe works, but does not explain it.

Let’s rehearse how this should work with abortion.

Up until, say 1900, aborting a fetus was extremely dangerous, because infection, and not surprisingly, human society took a very dim view of abortion. But, in the United States “medicinal abortion” did not become illegal until 1821 in Connecticut. (Which means what? That the women in the village decided?) So first, the rulers decided that abortion should be illegal. And then in 1973 they decided it should be legal. I wonder why.

I think that with the development of safe “medicinal abortion” we all need to sit down together and come to agreement on what we think is right and proper. And I thijnk that, in general, it should be women running the show.

And then the larger question of the educated rulers deciding everything “from on high” needs to be addressed, on everything from climate change to systemic racism.

Because if you believe that “equality never hurt anyone” dear rulers, it means that everyone should have a voice when moral, cultural, or economic decisions are made — even racist-sexist homophobe armed insurrectionist deplorables.

The Fatal Conceit of Every Ruler

Politics, according to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, is about the enemy. Any human community that experiences an enemy must rally together under a war leader to defeat the enemy. And a community at war must subordinate itself to its leader and fight as one to defeat the foe.

But when the enemy is defeated, what then? Then the leader comes up with all kinds of reasons why a top-down hierarchical system is still needed to save the community from chaos. And that is why just about every society we know about features a hierachical system with the war leader at the top, his lieutenants as his faithful followers, and the ordinary peasants at the bottom.

In fact, that is not the way that the world, or human society, works. We have realized, especially over the last 200 years, that human society is much more complicated than mere hierarchy, and that the horizontal interactions between humans are more important, both economically in trade and gift-giving, and socially, in the “lifeworld” where, according to Jürgen Habermas, it is not the single consciousness of the ruler that defines the world but all of us together, and we test and share our experience of the world in conversation with each other using the language we share.

And, from our market and social transactions and conversations, we leave behind a precipitate of agreement that becomes our culture and our understanding of the way things are.

Rulers are different. In his Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell writes about how our modern rulers believe and act as if they have a special relationship to the truth. They know, whereas ordinary commoners don’t. In Chapter 2: The Pattern, he relates how our current rulers have advanced policy in “The War on Poverty,” “Sex Education,” and “Criminal Justice.” In each case, the rulers declared a “Crisis,” declared a proposed “Solution,” ignored or explained away the negative “Results,” and came up with a “Response” that interpreted the failed “Results” as a need to redouble our efforts.

I experience “The Pattern” as the fundamental limitation of the political that I learned from Carl Schmitt. In politics, everything is about the enemy and defeating him. Obviously therefore, any setback, as in war, is interpreted as a need to redouble our efforts; otherwise we will be defeated and be driven before the enemy and hear the lamentation of our women. As I say, if a political leader admits he is wrong then it is time to resign. But no political leader is willing to do that!

We see this in the current situation of the Biden administration in June 2022. Basically, the Bidenoids made a grand strategic error in 2021 by going full bore on a trillion dollar handout and closing down oil exploration. But can President Biden address the nation and say “sorry, my bad?” Absolutely not. So he resorts to absurd complaints about Putin and oil companies not using their full refinery capacity, and ridiculous ideas about suspending the federal gasoline tax for 90 days.

But what if we are not in a war, or a “crisis?” Then, I would argue, we don’t need politics, but the normal human interaction and conversation that leads to agreement. Of course, down the ages, aside from court politics, people lower down the totem pole did exactly that. But in our modern era our rulers have developed the conceit that they can direct traffic from the court all the way down to the ordinary Joe and Jill at work and at home. I say that the results are in: top-down politics doesn’t work.

Another view is that of J.J. Clarke in The Self-creating Universe. His idea is that new things emerge out of the interaction between entities, from sub-atomic to living things to humans.

If this is true then all the conceit of our betters, from the welfare state to economic regulation to The Great Reset to ESG to the Green New Deal are bound to fail. That’s because they are not emergent, a coming together of different proposals and adaptations, but a top-down imposition of a single notion on everyone by some special person on top.

I suspect that this top-down culture is not just a folly our our present educated class but a failing of all political regimes, that issues out of the necessity of any war leader to coordinate his forces upon a single purpose, to defeat the enemy.

However, even in war, the Germans discovered in World War I, you need to push responsibility downwards as far as it can go, because the general in charge cannot comprehend everything that has to be done to attack and destroy the enemy. He can only propose the general outline of what has to be done, and that general outline is worked out and interpreted into more detailed orders as the instructions get retailed from army to division to regiment to company to platoon.

In life there is interaction, and give and take, and buying and selling, and giving and receiving, and conversation and disagreement and agreement. In politics there is only conflict, the war against the enemy.

I say that the next Big Thing in history is the emergence of rulers that know, as Susan Sowerby taught in The Secret Garden, that they don’t own the whole orange, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did.

Understanding Our Ruling Class

Ever since the French Revolution “we” have believed in a politics of Left and Right. Because the supporters of the French king in the National Assembly in 1789 sat to the right of the president and the opponents to his left.

Thus the Right came to be identified with the old order, with privilege, with feudal hierarchy, and the Left with reform, with ideas, and with the common man.

It is the saving faith of the Left that it stands for the worker, the oppressed, the victim, against the powers of privilege, of oppression, and stasis.

I I have been reading today a couple of pieces by the Zman proposing that the Old Order is ending, that the West is out of time.

The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born.

On the other hand, he writes at Taki’s, the West’s utter folly in Ukraine marks the end of Russia trying to be a part of Europe from the East and the end of the Global American Empire trying to be a part of Europe from the West.

A question that I have is: what on Earth does our ruling class think it is doing? Here’s a piece by Leighton Akira Woodhouse about the homeless scene in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in which the homeless demand for drugs leads to shoplifting and the whole thing run by an industry feeding money for drugs to the Mexican drug cartels.

Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly.

Then there are the “victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans.” Their pharmacies and grocery stores get shut down, etc.

And yet our rulers do nothing about the whole operation, from homeless to drugs to petty crime to criminal gangs. Their philosophy is that criminals are victims, that police are thugs, that accused criminals should be released with no bail and society doesn’t care about oppressed peoples.

I am in the middle of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed in which he notes that the rulers’ approach to problems doesn’t change and doesn’t respond to results on the ground.

War on Poverty. The idea back in the early Sixties was “to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves” and to effect a “decline in dependecy.” The record is that the War on Poverty has increased dependency, but our rulers have not changed their approach to poverty.

Sex Education. The idea back in the early Sixties was that sex education in the schools would help reduced venereal disease and pregnancies before marriage. In the event, STDs increased, pregancy outside marriage increased and marriage decreased. But our rulers have amped up the sex education to include celebration of LGBT.

Criminal Justice. In the Sixties the idea was promulgated from on high that the criminal justice system was primitive, vindictive, and a “deeply childish fear” without punishment crime “would run amok.” Why not turn jails into rehabilitation centers? In the event, crime, including murder, has increased, but fifty years later our rulers still think we are being too punitive, as in Soros prosecutors.

The point is that, despite the results of these policies being failures, our ruling class has not changed its approach to these issues over the past 50 years. If anything it has increased its commitment.

Now Sowell has a Five Point analysis of the ruling class’s approach to the world.

1. Social problems exist because people other than the rulers “lack the virtue or wisdom of the anointed.”

2. Social beliefs are “socially constructed” rather than an adaption to reality, so that problems should be solved by ruler rationality rather than “evolved traditions” or social adaptation.

3. When things go wrong it is intentional rather than “systemic.” Someone is to blame.

4. Great social dangers can only be averted by “imposition” of ruling class vision.

5. Opposition to the rulers issues not from a valid difference of opinion but from intellectual or moral faults in the lower orders.

What, you may ask, is wrong with these people? I think the answer is that, in politics, you can never be wrong. The whole point of politics is to lead the people to war against an enemy that threatens to annihilate us. If our gloroius leader fails to lead us to victory, he is outta here. So, he can never say: gee, fellas, I guess I screwed up that one.

The lesson, then, is that anything short of a war to the death against annihilation should not be a political issue, but assigned to other social institutions, from economic to social to religious.

But for our ruling class it’s too late for that.

So what do we do? I say that we work on a new narrative to replace the old narrative of our present ruling class, that the Zman says is “something not yet born.”

Only I think that its outline is pretty clear. The new narrative will say that the wisdom of the ages is in the semi-conscious evolution of the culture of the middling sort of person, that lives engaged in the sinews and the day-to-day social and economic relationships of society. As opposed to the vision from on high of our present educated evolved ruling class.

And I say that the day will come when the whole superstructure of our present ruling class, represented by the analysis of Thomas Sowell above, will come crashing down. Rather like the whole structure of late-feudal/absolute monarchy came crashing down in France in 1789.

Why did it come crashing down in 1789, and lost the Mandate of Heaven in that year of all years? Good question. But come crashing down it did.

Change: Billionaires Want to Change the World

Friedrich Hayek's last book was title The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. In it he labels as the "fatal conceit" the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

Now comes Karen Hunt at American Greatness in "Know your Enemy" like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jef Besos and others that think with a bit of technology they can change the world.

These elite firmly believe they are so smart, so wise, so all-important that they have the right—indeed the obligation for the good of the planet—to exploit everything and everyone, right down to the last pound of flesh and even our most private thoughts.

Funnily enough, they already did! Inadvertently, with their PC operating systems and their iPhones and their online buying. They changed the world by accident, and then, a billion or so dollars later decide they want to change it by design.

In A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles Thomas Sowell takes another tack. He says that our modern elites have two different visions. Some of them have a "constrained vision" that believes we don't know the half of it. The others have an "unconstrained vision" that believes we can remake the world using our logic and reason and science. Thus the Age of Reason.

In Sowell's narrative the father of the modern unconstrained vision was William Godwin with is 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. For Godwin it was a crime not to use all our logic and reason to make the world a juster place. We could say that the father of the constrained vision was Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this vision there is a lot more respect given to the unseen wisdom of habits and cultures and ways of life that develop unbidden in society.

The interesting thing to me is that today it is the conservative man in the street that talks about logic and reasonn and the lefty that talks about "lived experience." And yet the lefty is still trying to upend society with his "fundamental change" and the conservative that is still saying: Whoa Neddy.

And yet, the lefty still wants to redesign society. Because justice.

I suppose we should just be grateful for the Law of Unintended Consequences. La Wik has a history starting with John Locke -- who discussed the unintended consequences of interest rate regulation -- through Adam Smith, Engels, and Robert K. Merton. Today it is, of course, the commonsense of every conservative that every new liberal program is wrecked by unanticipated consequences of gubmint mucking around where it don't belong.

We see the weakness of the lefty approach to life right now in the utter disaster of the Biden administration that thought it was going to shut down oil exploration and fossil fuel electric generation and push electric cars and have a war in Ukraine and shovel money at its supporters and fight racism and transphobia and not think for a moment that everything would blow up in its face.

I wonder if the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world appreciate that they got their billions because they had an idea that worked, and that other people got a say. Because we wouldn't have Apple and Microsoft bestride the world if the world hadn't decided, one purchase at a time, to buy into their brilliant ideas. Nobody forced people to buy iPhones and Microsoft Windows back in the day.

I like to say that the difference here is the change created by Anybodies, where one in a million has an idea that changes the world, and the change created by Somebodies, where the ruling class and its stooges tells the world to change, or else.

The point is illustrated by the business startup culture. Lots of people come up with ideas that they are convinced will change the world and they try to put them into practice. But very few of them actually end up amazing the world.

There is no reason why the same should not apply to political and cultural ideas. Lots of people have great ideas for changing the world. But how do we decide which of them are any good?

When the Recession's on the Democrats' Watch

Dp you realize how rare it is for a recession to occur on the Democrats' watch?

2008: Great Recession was on President Bush's Watch. Cause: blowup of Dem cheap mortgage policy.

2000: Tech Bubble broke in 2000 but wasn't felt until 2001, on President Bush's watch. Cause: probably excess enthusiasm from tax rate cuts plus the easing of credit in the 1998 Russian bond default.

1990: Recession took place on President Bush I's watch. "Worst economy in last 50 years," said Candidate Clinton.

1980: Stagflation on President Carter's watch but recession on President Reagan's watch. Somebody had to curb 10-20 percent inflation.

1969: Recession on Nixon's watch. Hangover from LBJ's double wars: on poverty and Vietnam.

But I think we are staring at a recession that will be 100 percent on Biden's watch. And do you know what I think? I think that nobody in the Democratic Party has a clue about what to do. Because the Democratic Party agenda is always a new round of spending that they advertise as a boost the economy, but which really boosts Democratic constituencies and voters.

There has never been a time in my adult life where Democrats have authoried a policy that would curb the loot and plunder getting shoveled out to their supporters.

But the current economic nightmare has many authors:

1. President Trump jawboning the Fed not to raise interest rates in the fall of 2019.
2. The administrative state's lockdown policy response to COVID.
3. The Fed's print-money response to COVID.
4. The reluctance of the administrative state to end lockdowns and travel restrictions.
5. The Biden administration's belief that Obama didn't stimulate enough in 2009.
6. The Green New Deal policy of shutting down fossil fuel exploration and use.
7. The Fed's delay in returning to a post-COVID monetary policy.

Yeah. All in all, I'd say that the combination of all these economic errors is not going to be any fun.

But here's my point, going back to the list of recessions in my adult lifetime. In none of these recessions were the Democrats in charge while the thing was developing. In almost all cases, Republicans were the ones having to take the unpopular policy decisions needed to fight inflation or curb an excessive boom.

Obviously, President Biden is the last person you would choose to be president in such a time. Heres's a guy that sat around in the Senate for 50 years and never did anything serious in his life. Plus, his administration is staffed by a bunch of DEI appointments chosen for their race or gender or sexual orientation rather than for their competence in rallying an army on a stricken field.

It's easy to say that it serves them right. But, of course, it isn't the ruling class that suffers during inflation and recession. It's ordinary people, especially the lower class people I call Subordinates.

And it's easy to tell ordinary people that it serves them right for voting for Democrats. But our society basically teaches everyone that Democrats are the people that care about people like them; that's what Curtis Yarvin's Cathedral is all about. You have to be an ornery old cuss to break with The Narrative handed down from on high at the altar of the Cathedral.

But someone is going to have to come up with the ideas and the policies and the intestinal fortitude to lead us out of this mess with the least suffering for the American people. And I don't see that leader coming out of the Democratic Party.

Put it this way. If someone asked you to name the go-to guy in the Democratic Party that everyone regards as a safe hand on the economic tiller, what name would you come up with?

I rest my case.

Don't Do Anything Stupid, Rulers

Last week President Biden blamed Putin and Republicans for inflation.

President Biden on Tuesday blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine, corporate greed, the pandemic and the policies of “ultra-MAGA Republicans” for causing record-high inflation...

“It’s not because of spending,” Mr. Biden said when asked whether he is to blame for inflation. “I think our policies help, not hurt.”

OK. So how do you tell when a politician is lying? The answer is because his mouth is moving.

Plus, my little maxim: Why do politicians lie? Because we the voters insist upon it.

Now, I don't know if President Biden really thinks all those stupid things he is saying in his speeches. He is lying because if he didn't then the only thing to do would be to resign.

By the way, how are you Fact Checkers doing these days? Somehow I haven't heard much from you lately.

What I am starting to worry about is that, with everything going wrong, the Biden administration will do something stupid.

It looks like the Ukrainians are losing the war in the Donbas. Which means that Biden and the Europeans could do something stupid, so they don't look bad, and start World War III.  

It looks like the stock market and the economy are totally screwed, with inflation and recession occuring at the same time, even as the Fed is determined to raise interest rates. Which means that Biden might do something stupid so that he looks like he is "doing something."

It looks like we are having a meltdown on the crypto front, with Bitcoin down from $68,000 to $22,000, and I read that "One of the biggest lenders within the crypto market, Celsius Network, is struggling as the booming sector turns sour." Hey, Chairman Powell of the Fed, and all the Euro ships at sea. You do know that you guys are the "lenders of last resort," right?

It looks like the Democrats are going to get wiped out at the midterms in November. So what are they doing? Running J6 show trials and threatening to indict President Trump. That would really solve all our problems, right?

It looks like there is a bit of a cock-up on the China front, with:

China's High-Speed Rail Network is a Trillion Dollar sinkhole

The run on regional Chinese banks, plus people losing their down payments from Evergrande 

The CCP "order a few weeks back for top party officials to keep all their money in China." But what about nephews and nieces?

Suppose China had a real economic crisis, and invaded Taiwan to distract attention. Could the Biden administration avoid doing something stupid?

It looks like "minorities and women hardest hit" in the baby formula crisis. Imagine if Biden & Co. decided to nationalize baby formula to solve the crisis.

But really, what could go wrong?

Journo Tells Us Why Dems Screwed the Pooch on Inflation

At The Atlantic James Surowieki want us to know "How Did They Get Inflation So Wrong." And I must say, the Dem-operative-with-a-byline really helped me understand why the Biden guys made such a staggering mistake with their various stimuli and BBBs and whatever in 2021.

The reason that the Dems overcharged their winter 2021 stimulus package is that they were still smarting from the failure of the Obama stimulus back in 2009.

After the steep economic downturn over those two years, the U.S. economy grew at a very slow clip... And this happened even though... Democrats had passed a $787 billion stimulus plan, which at the time was the biggest such package ever enacted.

So, the Dems were determined not to make the same mistake twice. No Sir!

The lesson that policy makers drew from that experience was that if you wanted to get the economy moving and keep it moving, you needed to err on the side of going big.

Ah yes: "policy makers." Going Big.

Hey Dems! Here's a word to the wise. "Policy makers" don't know from nothing! And you have learned the wrong lesson from 2009. Here is my analysis of what went wrong.

First, it may very well be that there was no way to have a quick recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. The 2008 crash was a once-in-a-generation (we hope) disruption of the credit system. Rather like 1929. My guess is that you don't recover from that with a quick $787 stimulus bill. It takes longer than that for the various economic actors to recover from the hit they took in the Crash.

Second, I remember reading, in the conservative media, that the Obama stimulus failed to stimulate the economy because it was mostly handouts to Democrat special interests, notably the teachers. In other words, it wasn't designed to restart the economy but rather to hand out loot to Dem supporters. For instance, in FY2010 federal education spending jumped $50 billion from $90 billion to $140 billion. You think that education spending "stimulates the economy?" I gotta bridge... 

Third, don't forget the reason for the Crash of 2008. It was because of half a century of Dem-driven easy credit for home mortgages, principally by laundering mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and using the credit of the federal government to price mortgage interest rates. And then there were the Liar Loans, and low-down loans to blacks and Hispanics -- who got hammered by the Great Recession. The debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went from nothing in 1938 to about 50 percent of GDP at the peak in 2008. If you think of the regular federal debt at about 100 percent of GDP, this means that Fannie and Freddie represent another huge chunk of national debt. Only it's sorta off-the-books.

Fourth, the Crash was made into a real crash because Little Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, didn't do his job as "lender of last resort." He let Lehman Brothers go broke, whining that he didn't think he had the authority to bail them out. Ben, oh Ben.

My point is, Democratic office-holders, and aides and staffers, and "policy makers" and media scribes, you screwed up in 2021 because you failed to learn the real lessons of 2008. Not to mention the bigger lesson that you really don't want to be screwing around with the credit system because you don't understand it.

But that's OK. Chances are we'll have a Republican president and Congress in 2025 with a real mandate to fix things. Because you guys screwed up. Not because you are corrupt, although you certainly are that. But because you didn't go your homework.

And one of the ways a political person does their homework is by talking to the opposition. Funny thing about oppositions. They tend not to have a view of events that excuses the party in power from its mistakes and stupidites.

Philosophizing about the Next Regime

Everyone who isn't a deep-state liberal is thinking about how we ditch the present regime, which goes by the name of liberal democracy but is anything but.

Many of the alternative philosophies are efforts to imagine a new philosophy without thinking about the practical process of getting there. Zman criticizes libertarianism and also the revival of the Catholic idea of "integralism" for this. As he says:

Integralism is the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society. 

But what if the majority of people aren't Catholics? Then you don't have a chance of basing society on a Catholic basis. Then Zman goes on to critique the history of the Right in the 20th century, even the deification of the Founders and their Constitution. The Consitution was a political compromise by practical politicians, he writes, not a sacred truth.

But the Constitution was very much a thing of its time, representing the rising bourgeoisie against the old regime of feudal monarchy.

In fact, I would say that the politics of the last 500 years has always involved a rising class wanting to take its rightful place in the public square and its power.

Let us consider Henry VII in England as simply a feudal faction beating up on the old regime and taking power.

What did the Tudors achieve? Well, they spawned the Elizabethen era that we regard, even now, with a golden glow.

But a century and a half later the English Civil War definitely involved the rising middle class, its Puritan ideology, and its refusal to pay "ship money" for the king's foreign advantures.

What did the Puritans achieve? Well they got the Dutch to invade and they taught the Brits how to finance a Second Hundred Years War against the French and make a mighty British Empire.

And the French Revolution definitely involved a rising class of thinkers and middle class inspired by another ideological movement, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu.

What did the French Revolution achieve? Well, it led to the end of France as the top dog in Europe. Sorry about that.

And the 20th century's socialism and administrative state definitely involves a rising class of would-be educated supervisors of society and the economy and the culture inspired by Marx and Fabianism and the idea that evolved, educated people should supervise the chaotic injustice of industrial capitalism. And teach the Robber Barons, the malefactors of great wealth and the economic royalists a lesson.

What did the evolved educated class achieve? I'd say two world wars, monstrous regimes in Russia and China, and a program of domestic lootinug unparalleted in human history. What else to you call a state spending 35-50 percent of GDP this year and every year on government loot and plunder?

You would think, wouldn't you, that there would be people starting to get restless unde the boot of the evolved, educated class, and you would be right.

I'd say that this is a rising movement of the ordinary middle class. We only really understand this movement through the pejoratives of the current ruling class, as "populists" and "racists" and "white oppressors" and "gun nuts." But what they are is ordinary middle class people with ordinary middle-class lives and they want a society and social norms that value ordinary middle-class people and their ordinary lives of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

And I say that we have seen three presidencies in the US already that have represented these people: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. That is why all the right people have all agreed that Nixon was a monster, Reagan was an amiable dunce, and Trump was a Russian stooge. All agreed?

I say that the current woke-ism is actually a sign that the evolved, educated ruling class is in trouble. A ruling class that's firmly in the saddle doesn't have to resort to censorship and canceling and purging of heretics from the Cathedral of education and media. You only get reigns of terror and virtue and J6 Committee show trials when things are going wrong for the rulers. And they "cain't stand 'im" as a famous American philsopher once said.

But whatabout the Zman's concern for a ruling philosophy or political formula that the new regime will base its power upon?

Honestly, I don't know. But you know what I do think? I think that once the new regime is in place then all kinds of unconnected facts and people and ideas will come together in a new narrative. And it will all be obvious. And everyone will say that they saw it coming all along.

What Happens When We Don't Respect the Rulers

I am reading a gigantic history of the French Revolution, Citizens by Simon Schama, and right now I am in the middle of the events of 1789, just before the fall of the Bastille, where the Third Estate -- i.e. the middle class -- is testing its muscles against the other Estates of the Estates-General called by King Louis XVI to Do Something about gubmint revenue.

But I must admit I don't really get why the authority of the King has cratered, why the King can't just say Shut Up Peasants and make it stick like King Justin de Trudeau of Canada.

I suppose the reason is that, back in the 1780s everyone, from the princes of the realm down to the average lawyers, had read and learned and inwardly digested the essence of the Enlightenment -- chaps like Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot -- and therefore the medieval forms and processes of the French monarchy didn't have the authority to rule. Of course, maybe if they had a war to fight...

Now I am also reading a piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Epoch Times where he is going through the Come to Jesus moments of the last couple of years: "How the Pandemic Response Changed My Thinking" in several ways, as in

1. The Role of Information It's not enough to have information out there, as in the internet. People can still grab the wrong idea and screw things up, from politicians to experts to the people.
2. Trust in Big Tech Back in the day it seemed like Big Tech "had a libertarian ethos." Not any more, as Big Tech amplifies the regime narrative and "censorship and cancellation became the norm."
3. Administrative State Revealed The Administrative State Rules! "At times, it seemed like the legislatures and even the courts were utterly powerless or too cowardly to do anything."
4. The Issue of Inequality We have a "coercive social system that favored the professional class over the working class." Imagine having lockdowns during COVID if ordinary workers had a voice.Yeah, it's not the capitalists vs. the workers, but the credentialed vs. the workers.
5. The Mob Think mask-shaming, etc. It teaches us that tyranny is "about a whole-of-society takeover by a manufactured mania."

But, thinking back to the French Revolution, there obviously have to be several fractures in the body politic for "change" to occur.

Notice how our liberal friends use the rhetoric of revolution in their notion of "change" to refer to ordinary accumulation of power by the current ruling educated elite. We are not talking about that kind of "change," dear liberal friends. We are talking about anything that promotes helpless horror in the educated ruling class.

For instance, if this year we not only have Gov. DeSantis whacking Dis-en-ey for its wokiness by removing its special tax situation for Dis-en-ey World. I'm sure our liberal friends are in shock

And suppose the January 6 Committee hearings turn into a bust, and raise the wrong kind of questions, like just who were those people that seemed to encourage the crowd at the Capitol to enter the building but mysteriously have not spent the last year in the DC Gulag in solitary confinement? Could they have been FEDS? And just how many weapons were the "armed insurrectionists" wielding? As opposed to the chappie with a gun arrested early this morning close to the home of Justice Kavanaugh.

And suppose that Republicans win really, really big in November. Right now it seems that the conventional  wisdom is that they will gain about 30 seats to yield a 40 seat majority. But suppose they win 60 seats. Or, Gaia forbid, 80 seats like in 1938?

And suppose the inflation drags on and there's another housing crash. And a recession. On your watch, Joey.

And suppose American women all get to feeling that the government doesn't protect them?

And what if Elon Musk decides not to buy Twitter because bots?

Thing is: I really don't want everything to come unglued. Millions of people will suffer. And yet, usually there is no other way. Because there is no other way for the rulers to lose the Mandate of Heaven.

You'd think that wise rulers would know they were screwing up and have the decency to hand over the reins of power to someone else. But somehow they never do until it is too late. I wonder why.

Prediction: The J6 Committee Hearings Won't Move the Needle

Let us concede that the Watergate hearings of 1973 were a tactical masterstroke. They got rid of the monster populist Richard Nixon and all who sailed with him.

And then Democrats won the 1976 election, which would be a normal change election after two presidential terms with the other party in the White House.

Then the Democrats lost it in 1980 because stagflation (and actually probably because, a day late and a dollar short, the Fed was finally starting to fight inflation).

Stagflation. Gosh, that sounds familiar. I wonder why.

So tactically, the Dems won one in 1973. Strategically, it was a wash. And I would like to suggest that, maybe, if there hadn't been a Watergate hearings then Ronald Reagan would not have won in 1980. Just sayin'.

So, what exactly is the J6 Committee hearing all about? To blacken the Republican Party? To "get Trump?" To flush out all the lizards of the Trump administration? To stop the Proud Boys in their tracks? To win the next presidential election?

See, it would be one thing if Trump were still in office, and presiding over double-digit inflation, and, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, had completely messed up the COVID response. But you chaps got rid of him, by fair means or 2000 Mules foul, back in November 2020. So your Dem partisans got the red meat they wanted already. And GOP partisans are all energized by the Big Lie -- you know, the one about the 2020 election begin completely above board, nothing to see here and if you object you are an armed insurrectionist.

Oh, and this just in from The New York Times. "Fox News Doesn't Plan to Carry Jan. 6 Hearings Live." Waat? How Dare They!

And that's another thing to consider, Dem partisans. Back in 1973, all good people were shocked, shocked by the Watergate break in and coverup. And there was only one narrative available, on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS. Today, GOP voters don't believe a word they hear from MSNBC and CNN and The New York Times. And with the advent of cable and streaming, people just aren't watching the three networks any more. Not like they used to. They have important streaming series to binge on.

Thse other thing, which I am sure you strategic geniuses have all thought about, is that if you "get Trump" with the J6 Committee then you have cleared the path for Ron DeSantis in 2024. Are you really sure you want that, in preference to having DeSantis and Trump duke it out? Frankly, I'd say that you don't want DeSantis to be the GOP nominee in 2024. That guy seem to have a tactical and strategic sense that even Bismarck would respect.

And there is this. When gas prices have doubled in a year, I dare say that the average "punter" -- as the Brits say -- isn't that excercised about armed insurrectionists burning down the Capitol. He's worried about the cost of filling up his F-150 truck.

And I'd say that beating up the oppostion is not good politics. Not in the long term.

See.you in November, old chap.

When They Start to Cheat

When do people start to cheat, financially? Typically, not till they are going broke. When do they start cheating politically? When their perfect plan isn't working any more.

So when our Democratic friends spend half a billion dollars getting ballots to the ballot drop-off box, and when Michael Sussmann walks free but Peter Navarro gets put in chains. And when Democratic voters think that the Republican Party is no longer a party but a rebellion. And when the Census Bureau suddenly discovers a big mistake in the 2020 Census that just happens to benefit one party in several states...

Well, it all adds up, and it adds up to Democrats realizing that they are in a heap of trouble, going broke, politically. Of course, we are talking about politics here, and "there is no politics without an enemy." So, the trouble is not that Democrats have gone bat-sh*t crazy on climate and race and crime and spending, and realize: wow, we really screwed up. No, it's the other guys that did it: the climate deniers, the racist-sexist-homophobes, the gun lobby, and billionaires that don't pay taxes.

And it is fascinating for me to read about various Democratic individuals and groups that have literally No Idea how they got into such a mess.

You could say that it just shows the problem with totalitarianism. When you combine religion and politics it means that every political act is sanctioned by God (or your secular equivalent). So of course none of our political actions are wrong or evil or stupid. Because we are talking about God's or History's Truth here.

Anyway, the whole point of the Separation of Powers, and the separation of religion from politics, and the idea of an independent judiciary, and the idea that you really don't want a big government that spends 35 percent of GDP, and all the rest, is that: what if the government, the priesthood, the political judges, the economic czars get it wrong? How do you fix it?

That's the place America is at today. Our ruler are absolutely determined and convinced that the Big Problems are climate change, that requires a complete revolution in energy use, and Systemic Racism, that requires the complete politicizing of education and employment.

But what if they are wrong? What if transforming the energy economy is just as disastrous as Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which, it is estimated, 30 million Chinese died of starvation? When would we know enough to put a stop to it? How would we stop the political freight train in time?

What if fighting System Racism sets up a race war as the people on the losing end decide they are not going to take it any more?

I just get the feeling that none of the headline people -- or their aides and staffers -- have any idea other than defeating the enemy. That's what people in politics do. That is all they do. That's the only thing they know how to do.

If there's a glorious victory, then history is written by the victors, and it is all about how Washington or Lincoln or FDR or Obama saved the world. If there's a humiliating defeat, then the erstwhile leaders and their lieutenants of the ancien régime are the most evil monsters that ever were. And the history is written, again, by the victors, whoever they are. But whoever they are, they just saved the planet.

Economics 075 for Uncle Joey

President Joe Biden is pretty good at preposterous stories about his storied past. With the latest being that he almost went to the Naval Academy.

One thing I haven't yet heard from him was how he schooled Milton Friedman back in college when little Joey took Economics 101.

Today I am reading Veronique de Rugy on Biden & Co's "magical economics." It's a good line, because if you have half a brain you have to think: what was the BIden team thinking? Maybe they needed a dose of Economics 075 from yours truly. I call this Economics 075 to accord with the number of years I have been on Earth and how that experience has taught me a lesson or two.

Lesson One: Money, money, money. If you look at the time series of M2 money at St. Louis Fed's FRED database, you will see that M2 has gone from $15.5 trillion at the end of 2019 to $22 trillion on May 2, 2022. That is up 42 percent in less that 2 1/2 years. Can you spell inflation, Joey?

Lesson Two: Spend till you Bend. Federal spending in FY 2019 was $4.4 trillion. In FY 2022 it is budgeted at $5.8 trillion. That is up 32 percent in three years. You really think that increasing spending makes America more prosperous, instead of just shoveling money at Democratic voters? I gotta bridge, Joey.

Lesson Three: "Incredible Transition." President Joe Biden has represented the sharply higher fossil-fuel energy prices as part of an "incredible transition" to clean energy. Personally, based on my Four Laws, I believe that such a government-driven transformation of energy production and use is bound to end in disaster. Because, as Stalin and Mao and other lefties have demonstrated in double-blind experiments, Socialism Does Not Work. And nor does any top-down economic policy. The market economy, the social cooperation between producers and consumers, is a discovery process that changes direction every single hour of every single day. Top down ukases never work. They are useful only in wars, which always result in a staggering net loss of human welfare.

I believe that the social experiment of the last century, an experiment in the top-down supervision of humans by educated visionaries and expert administrators, is proving to be a great folly that has visited, in its worst aspects in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, unimaginable horrors and miseries. And in the case of the western democracies it has birthed a society of jolly good fun for educated folk but not so much fun for the ordinary middle class, and a definite downer for the lower class, where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

I think that the administration of Uncle Joey shows that the educated ruling class really has No Idea what a mess it has created, and that the worst is yet to come. It has No Idea that almost everything it proposes is most likely to Make Things Worse for ordinary people and crater the lives of the lower orders.

So my Three Point Plan for America and the world is:

First: get back to a money tied to gold or some other entity that can't be manipulated by government. Except during and after a war. Because post-war deflation is Not Good.

Second: reduce government spending to a maximum of 20 percent of GDP, with most "entitlement programs" replaced by genuine savings programs by and for individuals.

Third: Stop pretending that the ruling class has a clue about anything from climate to racism. Return to a society where law is not something manipulated by the Supreme Court and religion is not ruling-class woke ideology.

Is this Economics and this modest Three Point Progam too much to ask of our august rulers?

The Great Liberal Forgetting about Law

The whole point of law and the legal system, on my understanding, is that is replaces the old system, which was the Hatfield-McCoy system of revenge.

In the old system it was my kindred against your kindred, an eye for an eye. Revenge for a perceived hurt. And retribution.

Then there was the good old Saxon tradition of Wergild. La Wik.

[Wergild] was a precept in some archaic legal codes whereby a monetary value was established for a person's life, to be paid as a fine or as compensatory damages to the person's family if that person was killed or injured by another.

I suppose you could call the Wergild system "reparations." Has a familiar ring to it.

In other words, at some point the principle of revenge and retribution was formalized into an informal legal code. Progress, if you see what I mean.

The whole point of the legal system is to remove the temptation to go to war over a perceived wrong, because all parties can trust the legal system to be unbiased.

Now let's talk about US politics.

Back in the day, we were all taught to believe that the Nixon Watergate saga was the worst thing since the assassination of Julius Caesar by Brutus & Co.: "Speak, hands for me." And I admit, I drank the KoolAid back then.

But as Geoff Shephard writes at The American Spectator, it's a funny thing but all the Nixon conspirators that were tried in DC were convicted, while the chaps tried elsewhere were not.

Republicans don’t stand a chance of acquittal in a politicized case brought to court in D.C. This was clearly demonstrated almost 50 years ago in the Watergate prosecutions, where — with two notable exceptions — every case tried in D.C. resulted in a conviction and every case tried outside in an acquittal.

Now we have the words of the forewoman at the Sussmann trial, where lawyer Sussmann was accused of lying to the FBI about who was employing him.

After the verdict, the jury forewoman, who declined to give her name, spoke to the media. She said charges should never have been filed against Mr. Sussmann in the first place.

“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she said of the case. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.” 

 Bless Her Heart, as the ladies say down South.

But, as the DC juries on the J6 defendants have decided, mostly, you can't be too careful with "armed insurrectionists" getting waved into the Capitol by thoughtful police officers. There are, apparently, no bigger things than the horror of invading the sacred precincts of Congress to do a bit of site-seeing.

And by the way, just what were various FBI assets up to on January 6 in and around the Capitol? Inquiring minds would like to know.

The problem here is that our liberal friends, encouraged by their liberal law professors and their noble liberal activists -- not to mention a Supreme Court that believes that the law should follow the liberal world view -- have No Idea what the law is all about.

The point about law is that it is there to adjudicate disputes in a dispassionate fashion so that passionate partisans can't impose their partisan will on the rest of the nation. Because they are right and the enemy du jour is wrong.

The whole question of using the legal system to help your friends and beat up your enemies obviously came into sharp focus with the five year effort to Get Trump.

Not because Democratic partisans are fools and knaves, although they are. But because when the other guys reckon they can't get a fair deal in the legal system then they will eventually try to overturn the system.

And you really don't want that, dear liberal friends, because, in the wise words of an apochryphal Washington Post headline: "End of the World: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit."

You do care about women and minorities, right?

Shootings, Gun Control, Escaping Arrest

Is it the best of times, or the worst of times? Are mass shootings a verdict on everything from our gun culture to broken families to untreated mental illness? Or on the failure of the liberal welfare/administrative state? Would making guns illegal save lives? Are state patrol officers finding that a lot of drivers won't pull over for a traffic stop?

Are mass shootings a sign of the times, or are they notable because in our modern era, there just isn't as much homicide as in the good old days? Do we expect the government to make us safe, irregardless, whereas in the old days people died. For all kinds of reasons, at any age?

When liberals react to the latest shooting -- but not to the average weekend in Chicago -- are they trying to Do Something? Are they attacking The Enemy, white males? Or are they trying to show women that they, the liberals, are doing everything they can to protect them?

And how about this, from Steve Sailer:

Since January of this year, more than 900 drivers have failed to stop for a Washington State Patrol trooper trying to pull them over.

But this has nothing to do with recent legislation from the Democratic Washington State Legislature.

Strachan and others in law enforcement connect the increase in failures-to-yield to passage last year of House Bill 1054, a sweeping police tactics law that, among other things, barred high-speed pursuits except in very limited circumstances. The law was part of a package of police reforms majority Democrats passed in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other high-profile police killings — reforms aimed at addressing racial disproportionality in policing.

You know. I think that 97.2 percent of all politics is just virtue-signaling and posturing and conceit from the ruling class.

After all, courtiers don't wear silk breeches and silk stockings any more. How then are they going to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate their lofty specialness?

And then there is the larger point, that politics is all about the enemy, so if you are a politician you are nothing unless you are valiantly fighting the enemy. Any enemy.

The enemy can be a foreign enemy, the dastardly Putin. Or it can be a local enemy, the dastardly "gun lobby." Or it can be an existential enemy: climate change.

But "there is no politics without an enemy."

I have this crazy notion that we are in the Autumn of the Political Age, because we don't really have Huns and Mongols and Nazis to fight. We don't really have gangs and criminals to fight, except in lower class Democratic cities. And, really, there is nothing we can do about existential perils like climate change.

But a politician needs an enemy, like a drunk needs a pick-me-up.

How the Next Regime Dishes the Lefties

In the last weeks there have been a lot of "far-right" thinkers pondering about the failure of conservatism. Here's the Zman today up at Taki's. Conservatism is dead. So let's conduct an autopsy.

One reason we conduct autopsies is to better understand what to avoid in the future. The same is true of these debates going on within what is left of conservatism. This dustup between William Voegeli and Glenn Ellmers is a good example.

I did a piece criticizing Voegeli and Ellmers at Amerian Thinker.

One reason conservatism failed, I think, is that it was merely defending itself. But you have to go on offense, for "offense is the best defense."

Or, any politics must have an enemy. And what do you do with an enemy? You go out and defeat it.

This has been the strength of the left since Marx. There's always an enemy. First it was the capitalists and or the bourgeoisie. Then it was Southern racists. Now it is the ordinary white middle class, the white oppressors of which you've heard tell.

So I say that the new politics needs to be an expanding middle. The ordinary middle class are the good guys; the pointy-headed intellectuals and the "experts agree" and the wokey activists are the bad guys. In any politics we must decide who are our friends are and who is the enemy.

In the next regime, our friends are any people that come join us in celebrating the ordinary arc of human life, people who want to wive and thrive, get married have children, work a decent job, and leave a little for the next generation. We say to the lower class: you could be our friends, and we will look after you.

Our enemy is the Cathedral, the educated class that has spent the last 50 years making war on the middle class. They must be beaten, despoiled, and humiliated. And don't forget the lamentation of their women.

How do we beat them? I'd say it starts with demolishing the current education system. First, we replace the government K-12 system with vouchers, so parents send their kids to the school of their choice. Then we attack occupational licensing and credentialism. Then we demolish the universities. Universities used to be the place where the ruling class trained the priests for the state church. Today universities are the place where the ruling class teaches the kiddies to hate their country, hate their history, and hate the middle class.

Let's do the numbers on education. RIght now, total government spending on education is $1.3 trillion. Let's say that the population under 25 is 28 percent of 330 million. If we divvy up the $1.3 trillion that adds up to $14,000 in vouchers per kiddie. Wow, that's real money, especially if the moms in the neighborhood get together to create a group homeschool.

But whatabout the teachers, the professors, the administrators, the DEI specialists? What will happen to them? No problem. They will still have jobs. Providing they teach the kiddies what the parents want them to teach, because vouchers. Of course those educationists that are rabid lefties and LBGT groomers, well, they will have to change the cut of their jib. Maybe they could get jobs at McDonalds.

But whatabout science and research? Perfectly simple. We reward billionaires that fund research with medals and tax rebates.

But maybe we can save a bunch on education by implementing my plan of apprenticeships for everyone that isn't going to be a physicist or a philosopher. The whole point of apprenticeships is for young'uns to get paid for doing something useful while they are learning to be useful.

And whaddya know, there's an outfit called Praxis that's pushing apprenticeship as an alternative to college.

Whatabout dishing the credentialists, from lawyers to physicians? I would say that any organization that issues credentials has to accept unlimited liability for the errors of its credentialees. So law schools and state bar associations and medical schools and medical associations will be liable for the mistakes of the folks that they have declared to be ready for prime time.

Yep, I suspect that these special interests are not too interested in anything more scary than keeping the low-renters out of their sacred precincts.

Yes, but how do we know whether our doctor or lawyer -- or auto mechanic -- is competent? Hey, I know. How about a combination of liability insurance and a ratings system -- like eBay and Etsy and Amazon and TripAdvisor? You think?

Then there is climate change. With President Biden talking about high gas prices as an "incredible transition" and Democratic politicians all over the place putting bans on natural gas hookups for new construction, I'd say we are getting to a place where we can say that climatistas are the enemy of the ordinary middle class: enemies of affordable energy, enemies of personal transportation, enemies of a safe place to raise your children, enemies of comfort: indeed enemies of the ordinary middle class.

We say to the educated class: Go Away, or you will regret it.

Don't Forget, There Must Be an Enemy

It's always annoying when, after a shooting, our liberal friends all line up to blame guns, gun owners, the "gun lobby," and racists and whatever else moves.

Then there are the conspiracy theorists on our side who impute all kinds of sinister motives to our rulers. For instance, it turns out that FEDS were interacting with the Buffalo shooter.

It's easy to imput malevolence in our liberal friends, but I don't think so.  I think they are just stupid, and when you are stupid you naturally try to cover up your mistakes and blame the other guy -- who is, after all, the enemy.

The fact is that when something bad is happening, we expect our governments to protect us from the danger. That applies whether the something bad is a crazed shooter, a crazed Putin, a nasty outbreak of inflation, a failed harvest, or a shortage of infant formula.

Most of the time, our government can't help us.

Where do crazed shooters come from? Do they come from the availability of guns? From the absence of fathers in many homes? From various mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal? Do they come from the media's endless publicity of disasters, showing angry youngsters how to make a name from themselves? Do they come from the collapse of the authority of parents and neighbors over the past century? Is it a consequence of the overabundance of female teachers in the government schools?

And is the government's response ever serious, or just a need to be seen to Do Something?

If you accept my notion, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and from Curtis Yarvin that politics is all about the enemy, then you can see that government is always in a position where it must be seen to be Doing Something about the enemy du jour. Because if the government is going out and defeating the enemy, what's the point?

And if the government failed to defeat the enemy, then what's the use of government?

No. You are not allowed to think such thoughts!

I read Michael Barone today inverting the notion of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Today, he said, we have a situation where politics is the leisure of the theory class, that anyone who is anyone gets their status from some political appointment. And, I would say, any position in the vast universe of government and its satellite organizations is a lot easier to obtain than success in business. In fact, the theory class is almost all courtiers. That's why they are right on with all the hot issues from climate change to systemic racism. Courtiers are nothing if not followers of fashion. And not just in silk stockings.

Maybe we are starting to see the fundamental weakness of the welfare and administrative state. It's one thing when the government is just in charge of repeling boarders, keeping out the Huns and the Mongols. That's a pretty simple concept. But when you have expanded your mandate to include everything from pensions to health care and tasking the police with defending elementary schools then you have a bunch more things that could go wrong. And because we are talking about government things do go wrong. A lot.

But if something goes wrong it must be the politician's fault, right?

You can see why politicians have to be expert at blaming other people for their mistakes. They must do that or resign. And who wants to resign, Nancy Pelosi, age 80? 

The best people to blame are the supporters of the Outer Party. I mean: if they were decent people they would be members of the Inner Party and down with the ruling-class agenda, right?

I take another position. I say that anything the government does is bound to be a mess and a failure. That's illustrated by the Four Laws:

Socialism cannot work because prices.
Administration cannot work because bandwidth.
Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture."
Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

What does this mean? It means that top-down government only works for sending young men to their deaths in battle. Everything else is too complicated for a top-down hierarchy to succeed.

And then there are the Germans. They discovered in WWI that top-down didn't work in the military either. Authority had to be pushed as far down as possible. You didn't just march across No Mans Land with bagpipes playing. You snuck across, from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to be inconspicuous, and you had to rely on some corporal to make it work.

That's my line on government failure. What did you expect, cupcake?

Buffalo Massacre: Warning to Liberals

The liberal response to the Buffalo massacre -- a white guy killing 8 blacks and others at a supermarket -- is to blame "white supremacy and violent extremism." Well, of course President Biden would say that. That's the standard liberal line on all interracial conflict: The Other Guys Did It.

But I am here to say: No, liberals, You Did It. Your "allyship" politics, your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion politics, your blame-everything-on-the-whites politics. That's what did it.

Hello liberals. Here's a bit of Bible study for you.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." -- Hosea 8:7.

See, liberals, it is a bit cute to say that the perp subscribed to a "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory when not 20 years ago every Democrat was devouring The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book confidently predicted a Democratic majority in America courtesy of immigration plus the young, women, and the educated.

I would say that the difference between immigration as a deep dark replacement conspiracy and a noble and just policy to open America to immigrants is not that big.

And what is an ordinary young man struggling to take his place in the world supposed to think when Democrats oppose any attempt to limit immigration?

I mean, the whole point of labor unions is the limit competition from low-wage non-union scabs. So it was OK for union workers to restrict entry to their workplace, but not OK to restrict immigrant entry to America? Explain.

Now I notice that New York Governor Hochul is telling us that the shooting "was committed by a racist snake who came from under the rocks lifted up in 2016."

And Buffalo, NY

Mayor Byron Brown (D) argued that “False information, hateful information,” and “attempts to indoctrinate people in different forms of hate and violence on the Internet and on the airwaves of this nation should just absolutely be banned.”

Of course. Anyone that disbelieves the liberal narrative on race is a "racist snake" and there oughta be a law to silence the racist-sexist-homophobic practitioners of "false information" and "hateful information." 

 But, as I say following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy."

Anyone and everyone in politics is defending "us" against "them," the enemy. So of course the politicians are coming out and telling us the fear the enemy.

Used to be that the enemy was the bourgeoisie. Then the capitalists. Then the patriarchy. Then the Southern Jim Crow racists. Then the white supremacists. Then the white oppressors. Now the Ultra MAGAs.

But of course. There must be an enemy.

Let's analyze the problem with the notion of "allyship." La Wik.

"Allyship" is an English-language neologism used in contemporary social justice activism to describe efforts by members of a privileged in-group, to advance the interests of marginalized groups[.]

Further:

Its usage has grown especially common in political activism and organizational rhetoric since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the international George Floyd protests in May 2020[.]

But suppose that the "privileged in-group" that is practicing Allyship is not in fact advancing "the interests of marginalized groups" but in fact Making Thing Worse, in part by subordinating rising lower-class groups to the leadership of a "privileged in-group" that does not have their best interests at heart, and in part by enraging ordinary Commoners without any particular privilege who are stigmatized as "white oppressors."

The point is: how would we know? How would we know if the oppressed groups really are more oppressed that ordinary white working-class chumps? Experts and fact-checkers say that George Floyd did not die of fentanyl poisoning. But would the experts and fact-checkers have said that if George Floyd was white. Would they even have cared enough to publish an opinion?

See, in my view, the first thing that a wise ruling class does is recognize that, almost certainly, its power and its policy is creating injustice in the land. Not because the ruling class is evil, but because any government action from taxes to spending programs to regulation is almost bound to have unanticipated consequences that hurt ordinary people.

So if I were in the ruling class I would be saying: wow: there sure are a lot of conspiracy theories on immigration these days. I wonder why?

Instead, our current ruling class says that anyone that disagrees with them is a racist-sexist-homophobe and ought to be silenced for committing "disinformation" and "misinformation."

Sorry ruling class. This ain't gonna end well. Not for you, and probably not for America.

Mourning "Neoliberalism"

Did you know that

The neoliberal order that triumphed on a global scale in the Nineties and 2000s aspired to the free movement of goods, capital, people, and information throughout the world.

Apreed? I'd say: sorta. Gary Gerstle, the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, says that "international merchandise trade" peaked in 2008. Anyway, he says,

The Great Recession, and the widening disparity between rich and poor that followed, shattered the belief that a global world of free trade was bringing prosperity to all.

Yes yes. Quite so.

But now, what with COVID and Ukraine, it looks like things aren't going to get better.

Establishing outposts of free-market capitalism in countries such as Russia and China, it was hoped, would compel the regimes of those nations to liberalise: to institute the rule of law (if only to protect property and contracts), to embrace a free press and free elections, and maybe even to embrace democracy itself. Open markets, it was hoped, would produce open societies.

But now it looks like

Globalisation has strengthened authoritarianism and illiberalism, not weakened them. We may be moving into a world that is not open, flat or harmonious, but fractured and divided into rival geopolitical blocs: Russia at the centre of one, China, Europe, and America at the centre of the others. 

And so on. For there have been flaws in the regime of neoliberalism:

a toleration of too great a level of economic and social inequality; a reluctance to recognise and assist those who have suffered economically; and a flow of political power away from national legislatures and toward international organisations, private and public. 

All this educated-class conceit and piffle got me to thinking. What really went wrong with "neoliberalism?"

Honestly, I don't know. Partly because I'm not sure what neoliberalism is really supposed to be. Because "everyone" uses it as a punching bag. Who exactly are supposed to be the "neoliberals?" It ain't me; it ain't thee. Must be that fellow behind the tree.

Here's an idea. Neoliberalism has died of its internal contradictions. That's what we students -- but not followers -- of Marx would say.

On the one hand neoliberalism suffers from the conceit of its practitioners --whoever they are -- that they are noble disinterested lords of freedom and justice. On the contrary, I would say that, for the most part, the educated ruling class is merely just another ruling class that has developed a political formula that celebrates itself, bribes its supporters with other peoples' money, and then decides what is best for the rest of the world. Because it is special.

Bottom line is that it uses our money to pay off its supporters, whether they are global corporations, NGOs, lower class subordinates, or Lawfare activists.

So, while the neoliberal order has a magnificent opinion of its magnificence and the justice of its rule, the reality is that, as with all humans, it makes mistakes. It is tied by its need to service its supporters. It cannot admit when it makes a mistake.

And, of course, there is the little problem of my reductive Three Peoples theory that instructs us that different people want a different world. Creative people want a glorious stage on which to strut and fret and exhibit their creative magnificence. Ordinary Responsibles want a fairly predictable world in which to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules. Subordinates want a world in which they are taken care of in return for their loyalty to their overlords.

Lord only knows what happens next with Russia and China. I'd say, at least, that we were doing better under Trump who played diplomatic games with them, alternating carrots and sticks with respect to international trade and property rights and tariffs and whatnot, and keeping them on the back foot while not actually going to war. 

Hey, it seems to me that the current regime has provoked a war over Ukraine by goading Russia with threats of getting Ukraine into NATO. And today Ukraine might as well be in NATO anyway. The NATO powers are acting as though their job is to defend Ukraine from Russia. As if it were actually in NATO like Poland or Hungary.

If the neoliberal era was supposed to be the 1990s and 2000s, then maybe we can learn from the previous decade, when the US was led by Ronald Reagan and the UK was led by Margaret Thatcher. 

Of course anyone who was anyone sneered at Reagan and Thatcher: the Amiable Dunce and Thatcher the Snatcher. What they did, if you have forgotten, was fix the national economies of the US and the UK after the economic stupidity of the 1960s and the 1970s that had led, by the end of the 1970s, to "stagflation."

That set the stage for the so-called neoliberals to do -- well what, exactly? Mostly strut and fret their hour upon the stage and making pompous announcements and wasting the dividend from the 1980s.

And golly geewillikins, after the glorious two decades of neoliberalism, whatever it was, now we are back to stagflation. How come, geniuses?

I have an idea. Why don't you neoliberal geniuses just Go Away for a while. Come back in ten years when we in the basket of deplorables have fixed the leaks and repaired the engine and got the ship of state back on track.

Then the peoples of the US and the UK and the EU will probably let you come back and mess everything up again. Just for fun.

Liberal Democracy and the Enemy

The Zman has a couple of posts on the curious aggressiveness of "liberal democracy." 

In "Expansionist Ideology" he notes that everyone agrees that fascism is expansionary, but wow, it wasn't in Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal. Communism was explicitly expansionist, of course. We all know that too. He notes that

communism cannot exist without some new ground to conquer, while fascism is at least capable of operating within national boundaries as a good neighbor.

Whatabout "liberal democracies?" Well, everyone agrees that 

democracies do not go to war with one another... Liberal democracies are dragged into conflict by illiberal systems that only understand force.

Except that 

The United States, the epicenter of liberal democracy, has been at war for over a century. In fact, the reason for the past tense when speaking of fascism and communism is the United States conquered these two systems in the name of liberal democracy.

So what gives?

Fascism was a revolt against modernity. Communism was a revolt against the past. Liberal democracy is a revolt against nature, specifically the natural limits of the human animal.

So, after liberal democracy defeated fascism it went on to defeat communism. "Once communism was defeated, it declared war on the world."

What exactly is our beef with Russia over Ukraine? Good question. And with China over Taiwan? You tell me. So, the Zman says, liberal democracy is the worst.

The limited expansionism of fascism triggered a war in Europe then world war. The explicit expansionism of communism plunged the world into a forty year cold war. The hyper-violent, revolutionary expansionism of liberal democracy now promises something far worse.

He's got a point. 

In "The Violence of Democracy" the Zman reviews the history of democracy, from Athens and the Peloponnesian war to the French Revolution to the United States that was created in war and then had the War of 1812, the Civil War, then war with Spain, then Europe, then Communism, then the Muslims, and now a cold war -- possibly becoming hot -- with Russia.

And why would we be going to war with Russia, "an important part of the global supply chain for things like energy, food and raw materials." Or China, "the manufacturer of many Western goods?"

You tell me.

Of course, the answer is obvious. Curtis Yarvin: "there is no politics without an enemy." Our liberal friends believe that politics is the royal road to justice. But if Yarvin is right then politics, whether or not it is bending towards justice, is always a fight against an enemy.

If politics is a fight against an enemy, then it is always war. That is what it does.

Do you see the problem here? As I like to say, politics makes complete sense when humans are fighting over food-yielding land, in an age when food-yielding land is everything. But in our present industrial, or post-industrial, era when everything is for sale on the market, and can be resolved by buying and selling, and the best land for food is not necessarily a matter of life and death? Maybe we don't need politics.

Now I would say that if you look over the last century in the US, you get the feeling that our Democratic friends are always spoiling for a fight. And Republicans are not. No wars in the Republican 1920s. Winding down the Korean War in the 1950s. Winning the Cold War without a fight in the 1980s. Oh yes: Bush and Iraq. But then no new wars on Trump's watch. But Ukraine on Biden's watch.

And, of course, our liberal friends are always looking for a fight in domestic politics. With the current likelihood that the Supreme Court is going to send abortion back to the states, our liberal friends are rending their garments and threatening to end the filibuster, jam abortion through Congress, and expand the Supreme Court, and I know not what.

Which makes the Zman's point. If our liberal friends can't get their way, they will drive over the rules.so they can get what they want anyway. And a bunch of wags are noting that liberals are suddenly talking about "women's rights" and forget "birthing person;" "child" instead of "foetus." When you are angry you forget your artful circumlocutions.

I say that the Age of Politics, that I define as the era of the rule of the educated class, is in its autumn. We really don't need politics, because we have better ways of resolving our differences, as proposed by lefty Jürgen Habermas.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement. If the rational system of the Enlightenment and its instrumental reason is indeed strategic, a mechanical system that deals only in power and domination, it is only part of the truth. Humans also dwell in a lifeworld of shared cultural tradition. 

Notice that our liberal friends do not accept the idea of living in a "lifeworld of shared cultural tradition" and developing moral agreement with eevil racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacists. Because the Other are the enemy. The idea that liberals share a cultural tradition with the eevil racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacists is anathema to our liberal friends. They will define morality, and we will go along.

Now it is my belief that the ordinary American middle class is really not that into politics, unless jabbed with a stick. On my reductive Three Peoples theory, the middle class is a class of Responsibles that live by obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

An it is my belief that the rise of populist nationalism, here and elsewhere, is a response to the ordinary middle class being jabbed with a stick by the educated class, all over the world.

So, either the ordinary middle class, in nation after nation, will put an end to the Age of Politics run by our educated liberal friends, or we won't.

Stay tuned for next week's exciting episode.

California: Where the Logic of Over-Under Bites

Although I critique the over-under political formula of our educated ruling class as a bad thing, I also understand that it traps our liberal friends.

To do a bit of logic on you...

If you agree with the notion that "there is no politics without an enemy" it means that anyone in politics is necessarily battling with an enemy. In politics you strive to win the control of government, the apparatus of force, and the reason you do that is to be able to take the fight to the enemy.

In the old days of the feudal system, society was simply hierarchical. The warriors were the political leaders and the lower classes knew their place. The middling sorts were yeomen and small landholders or leaseholders. The lower orders were serfs and slaves. And political life was all about the enemies of the feudal lords.

But ever since Marx at the latest, the West has operated on a more combative political system, what I call an over-under political formula. Under this system the rulers pose as the saviors of the lower class against the oppression of the oppressor class. This oppressor class has variously been the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the patriarchs, the racists, and now "white oppressors."

The fly in the ointment is, of course, that these "oppressors" are not an overbearing political elite armed with all the powers of government, but ordinary private individuals, for the most part unorganized, just going about their ordinary lives.

So what happens after the over-under political formula has been in operation for a generation, or getting on for a century and more?

The answer, of course, is California, which is visibly hollowing out. The upper class of tech lords and Hollywood and government bureaucracy is doing very nicely thank you. The lower class is pacified with all kinds of benefits and privileges and exemptions from the law.

And the middle class is getting screwed to the wall. The American Spectator's Dov Fischer puts things fairly well.

It is not just Steven Greenhut writing one of his excellent columns about California nor a Tucker Carlson special about Los Angeles committing suicide. Rather, this is intense and hits everyone really close to home: people really are leaving California. And, yes, I will turn off the lights.

 Because, of course, the middle class can't change anything in California. The educated class is all in on green energy and systemic racism. The lower class is getting its bennies. And the middle class is stuck in the middle with eroding schools, sky-high energy, and sky-high housing prices.

So whaddya do? All you can do in alifornais up sticks and leave.

Incidentally, when I knew some Californians back in the 1970s and 1980s I could see all this developing. But I could also see that the people I knew just accepted this as the way things are. Of course we needed to preserve hill-slopes from development.Of course water was a problem and we needed to conserve it. Of course the coastline was fragile and we needed to protect it. And so on.

Sorry folks. What you get in California -- and anywhere else where you let the educated class off the leash -- is the agenda of the educated class and the rest of the world go hang. Because our educated class only knows what gets boiled up from the deep by the thousands of activist groups. And if things don't work out the solution is more activism. And you are a racist.

In California all you can do if the educated class oppresses you is to leave. In the rest of the US we are going to have to stop them. Because there's nowhere for us to go to.