Sen. Ron Johnson Pushes Back on "Racist." Sorta

Here's what Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the other day about not being afraid of the pro-Trump rioters in the January 6 Capitol riot:

Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned.

But notice how AP introduces his remarks:

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin denied Monday that he made racist comments last week when he said he wasn’t concerned about pro-Donald Trump insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol in January but would have been worried if they were Black Lives Matters protesters.

Notice the "tell?" They left out "antifa." Well well well: nobody here but us journalists at the AP.

Now I think that "denying" that you made racist comments is not enough. I think you need to strike back, and say something like:

"I've been playing political poker, man and boy, for 25 years. And my experience is that the guy that plays the race card is the real racist."

Then you go on and waffle some more.

"Go ahead. Call me a racist. I don't care. But what I want to know is when my Democratic friends and my friends in the Democrat media are going to stop playing the race card so we can get down to solving America's real problems instead of the ghosts of problems past." 

Here's what I think. I think that the politician that figures out how to trump the race card, or how to hit the racist screwball out of the ball-park has got a glorious future ahead of him.

But first he has to have the courage to risk it. Rather like President Trump, who got nominated in 2016 by showing that he had to courage to go up against the Blob.

Yet even Trump didn't have the courage to trump the race card.

But let me tell you, the guy that figures out how to do it, and emerges unscathed from the usual media feeding frenzy whenever there is race-card blood in the water, that guy is going to go places.

Quote Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." 

And so it goes until the DA indicts the race racketeers for racketeering. But it takes a while, because usually when there is a racket it only thrive because it gets protection from the local politicians.

Allyism, Republicans and Democrats

Yesterday I posted the results of a post-election poll. Republican voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Illegal immigration
Lack of support for the police
High taxes

Whereas Democratic voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Donald Trump's supporters
White nationalism
Systemic racism

You will notice that the concerns of Republican voters are not particularly blared through anyone's bullhorn. I wonder where they get their concerns? FoxNews? Qanon? Far-right websites? Donald Trump's secret decoder ring? Couldn't be from Twitter or from youTube or Facebook because eevil far-right ideas get censored on social media as fast as you can say @jack.

But it is not hard to figure where Democratic voters get their concerns. White nationalism and systemic racism are right now the obsession of the mainstream media and the educated gentry class that runs the media, the universities, the bureaucracy, the non-profits. If you lend half an ear to the gentry liberal class you will probably be persuaded that white supremacy and systemic racism are tearing the country apart.

Let us look at this through the lens of Allyism, understanding the America as "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Because pretty obviously, if you are an Ally, doing activism 24/7 on behalf of oppressed peoples, then it stands to reason that Donald Trump's supporters, white nationalism and systemic racism are the reasons why those oppressed people are oppressed. And they will go right on being oppressed until the power of Donald Trump's supporters are well and truly extinguished at a class on systemic racism where they work or go to school.

How systemic is racism? It's a good question. If a half-black man like Barack Obama could be elected president, how bad can things be? If a part black half Brahmin like Kamala Harris can be elected  vice-president, how bad can things be? If a black like Tim Scott can be elected United States Senator as a Republican from the former Confederate state of South Carolina, how racist can those Trump supporters be? If black church ladies are counting the ballots in cities like Philadelphia, how bad can things be? If just about every ad and commercial has "people of color" in it, how bad can things be? If just about every big corporation is a supporter of Black Lives Matter, how bad can things be? If anyone that utters the pejorative "n-word" gets utterly humiliated, how bad can things be?

Obviously, more research is needed. Not.

You know what I think.

I think that every ruling class needs one of two things, preferably both. It needs an existential peril to battle against. Climate change will do nicely. And it needs someone to blame when things go wrong. Yeah! Sytemic Racism! These issue, I argue, from the basic condition of ancient humans. 

First, it is the job of any ruling class to defend the borders of its realm -- although not so much these days since food-growing land is not as critical as it used to be. The enemy used to be the tribe next door. Then it was the barony next door, then the nation next door, then the Communist threat, then the Islamic threat, and now the threat of climate change. Notice how the threat keeps getting bigger. First a local problem with the chaps next door. Then the nation next door. Then the secular religion next door. Then the future of the planet itself! Wow! We are really getting into the big leagues these days.

Second, rulers need someone to blame when things go inexplicably wrong. Take your pick: the crabby older woman living just out of town; the neighbor woman that you are never gong to speak to again; the evil spirit in the tree that just fell on your house; the wrath of God that sent a hurricane and flooded the plain; "malefactors of great wealth;" big corporations. Or the systemic racists in a conspiracy on the Internet.

Our liberal friends have plumped for two threats on which to justify their rule. The first is the existential peril of climate change. The second is the evil of systemic racism. See, without the need to battle these two threats people might start to ask: "why do we need these guys?"

And, of course, the point isn't whether these are real threats and real evils. The only question is whether the rulers can persuade the ruled that their power is needed to fight the existential perils and evils.

I say that the reason that our ruling class has been upping the amplitude on its claims of peril and evil is because of its accumulated failures and its evident incompetence are raising the unmentionable question: what are these guys good for. Anything? Bueller?

Let's put our liberal friends to the test and inquire into its moral narrative of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Liberal allies have been fighting for almost two centuries to bring justice to the workers. And yet we read that the white working class is "dying of despair." How come? The ruling class has had all the money and all the power in the world to help the working class. If it is dying of despair then something is wrong. Maybe the whole program to help the workers was a mistake? Could the problem be white oppressors? Who would that be other than white educated gentry that style themselves as "allies?"

It was 50 years ago that the United States declared racial and sexual discrimination illegal and then set up racist "affirmative action" and quotas to help formerly marginalized peoples. If that hasn't solved the problem then maybe our rulers have been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the completely wrong thing to do is to give the rulers more power to track down and destroy the "white oppressors." Hey, maybe the problem is something else. Maybe it's aliens.

Or maybe the whole notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Or maybe the whole problem is the fault of liberals that have spent the last 200 years discouraging the immigrants from the city from acquiring middle-class culture and instead has encouraged them to become the serfs and slaves of the educated ruling class, relying on the rulers for benefits and set-asides instead of acquiring skills and culture that help them thrive in the city on their own.

As you know, I think what we are seeing is the self-destruction of the ruling elite of the last century, as a result of its false conceits, its accumulating errors, and its foul crimes.

Because the problem is that your average ruling class just can't bring itself to say: "sorry fellahs, we screwed up. Your turn now." Instead failing rulers always turn up the heat, and beat up the plebs and the peasants that dare to point out their conceits, their errors, and their crimes.

What a pity.

Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It

So you, Mr President and your Democratic friends have got rid of the awful Trump. So what comes next?

I'd say that the most important thing for your administration to do is to avoid the mistakes of the early Obama administration. There were two big ones.

First, there was the decision to make the "stimulus" all about loot and plunder for Democratic Party constituencies like public-school teachers instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Second, there was the push for Obamacare, all about making health care a totally centralized administrative system, instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Incidentally the financial crisis was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble caused by gubmint subsidy of home mortgages that encouraged Americans to buy houses on low down payments and 30-year fixed mortgages. This housing subsidy is the big reason why housing prices, to this day, are sky-high and very difficult for ordinary young middle-class Americans trying to buy a house for the first time.

I noticed that President Trump, in his farewell address, catalogued all the wonderful things he had done for ordinary Americans. But you, President Biden, have emphasized, after restarting the economy, climate change and systemic racism. And the stimulus bill you have proposed so far sounds just like another loot and plunder operation for the Democratic Party supporters.

Frankly, I believe that climate change and systemic racism are both catnip for the educated Gentry, and provide nothing for the vast majority of Americans.

I don't have much to say about climate change, although I think it is an instance of the Left's Conceit that it knows what is good for the rest of us. 

The decarbonizing plan is an utter folly that will visit enormous hardship on ordinary Americans. Cheap energy is, and will continue to be, the basis of a healthy economy that extends prosperity to all walks of life. I maintain, according to the notion of Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies, that there is only a climate problem if the climate changes too fast for plant and animal species to migrate with the climate. An example of dangerous climate change is cold weather on the farms of folks in the far North and the harvest fails and they all die -- as in Scotland in the 1690s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.

It's telling that the Scottish famine in 1690 was a tragedy while the Irish potato famine 150 years later was a scandal. The difference is that by 1840 we Westerners had the means to get food to a famine area. Today we have probably an order of magnitude more "means" to adapt to climate change.

Then there is systemic racism. One fine day, a brave politician is going to call an end to what I call the School of Hate. But I doubt if it will be you, Mr. President.

I get the liberal obsession with race. The civil rights movement was, for liberals, an ecstatic moment, a supernova of surpassing brightness that lighted up the moral universe. But once you have made discrimination by race illegal then, as my grandfather would have said, it's all over bar shouting. By placing the chains of race guilt upon ordinary white Americans for the last half century you have committed a moral crime that, to me, is morally equivalent to the Jim Crow laws that you fought to eliminate. But this moral crime is, to me, just one of the Left's Crimes.

It seems that our problems are insoluble. But, as Ike said, if you have a problem you can't solve, make it bigger.

I think that our Big Problem is that our educated ruling class operates according to a political formula that violates what I call the Four Laws of modern governance. I wonder if you have heard about them, Mr. President. I would recommend putting them on your desk, as President Truman had "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. Here they are:

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

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

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

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

Really, everything that our educated ruling class has attempted since the turn of the 20th century attempts to violate these laws. But breaking these laws is catnip for the ruling clique and the larger ruling class, because they all provide for the satisfactions of ruling class members: ambition, honor, and vanity. 

Now I think that the present violations of the Four Laws have gone "about as furr as it can go." Any more ordure piled on top of the mountain of legislation and regulation of the past century is going to seriously break the United States. But your party, Mr. President, wants to double down with Medicare for All, which violates all four laws, and your Green New Deal which will probably be mostly a regulatory scam and only violate the last three laws.

But that is just nuts and bolts.

To make the problem even bigger, I think it stems from the insularity of our ruling elite, that cannot imagine the notion of people not like the educated elite, and that these other people would choose to live a different life than the educated, and worship different gods. If you read about my Three Peoples notion, Mr. President, you will see how understanding the people of today as belonging to different worlds -- the world of the Creative, the Responsible, and the Subordinate -- immediately raises the question of how to make it possible for these very different kinds of people to live in the same society. Notably, the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" doctrine of Allyism lacks such a world view. It only sees the world in the black and white of allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Now I think that Allyism basically reduces to this: that the woke elite gets to buy the votes of the oppressed peoples with loot and plunder seized from the white oppressors. In other words it is a Viking world view masquerading as noble benevolence. It is the Big Problem with the left's Activism Culture. That is perhaps why my basic critique of your side, Mr. President, is called the Great Reaction, a lurch to the primitive:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

My prediction, Mr. President, is that by the third year of your presidency we will be seeing serious economic problems, and that your supporters will be looking around desperately for a reason, some fault of the big corporations or the lack of a proper minimum wage or the rampaging evil of systemic racism. And you will find yourself called upon to take drastic economic and political action that will only make things worse. For that is the way of the world, that the rulers and their supporters are the last to know there is a problem.

My diagnosis of our national problem is that it issues from a wrong turn by our educated elite. You and your supporters, Mr. President, interpret your culture of creativity in terms of creating a new society. Run by people like you.

But I say that the correct agenda of a culture of creativity is creating a new Me, and leaving society alone. You create a new Me in the Hero's journey into the unconscious, and if you survive the journey, you will come back much sadder and wiser. Only then will you be qualified to help other people. And you will probably die on the border between Order and Chaos as a Sacrificial Hero. I have written about this, Mr. President, in my writing on "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

The presidency of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to our present ruling class, that they are "not fit for purpose" as the Brits say. Unfortunately, it is clear that our ruling class has not gotten the message. Indeed, the only message it has had in the last four years was to deep six President Trump.

You will notice, Mr. President, that in the urge of your supporters to deep-six Donald Trump there is nothing that exhibits any concern for the American people, apart from the educated gentry of the ruling class and its clients the "oppressed peoples." This means that the American people are condemned to suffer in the next few years from the blindness and the myopia of your supporters.

It will not be a happy time.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

Toppling Statues: The Problem with Iconoclasm

Back in the day, "iconoclasm" -- the destruction of icons -- was considered a Bad Thing. But now that the progressive mob is pulling down statues of everyone from confederate generals to Saint Junípero Serra, it's all in a good cause.

Of course, I am completely opposed to the destruction of monuments. Hey, I was to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece last year. And do you know why it survived? Because they had an earthquake in 373 BC that buried the temple. Then the Roman Emperor Theodosius I had the temple destroyed in 390 AD in the name of Christianity. And so the temple lay buried under a village until the German and French archaeologists came along in the 19th century with the idea to dig it up.

The reason I don't like destroying monuments is because I am really interested in how ancient and not so ancient peoples thought and acted. Of course, they were dreadfully ignorant, darling, but what can you say?

Actually, they were all people of their time. And when we think about anyone in high politics -- and you'd have to be a Somebody to have a monument built to commemorate you -- he or she is probably pretty thoroughly flawed. I'm all in favor of Winston Churchill being commemorated, and I filed past his bier in Westminster Hall in 1965. But the guy was a piece of work, and I put him in the basket with all the dumb politicians of the 1930s from Chamberlain to Hitler to FDR. Hey, maybe it took two dreadful world wars to convince the Great and the Good that maybe world wars were not such a good thing.

But you know what? I want statues of everyone from Churchill to Hitler and Goebbels. So that little kiddies can go see them and be carefully taught what idiots people were back in the day.

See I don't think it helps to say that all the Confederates were evil. Yep, they were wedded to plantation slavery, as invented by the Venetians on Cyprus. And we now, from our great moral height, condemn slavery as the worst thing ever.

Worse than Soviet Bolshevism? Are you sure?

See, I don't think we ended slavery for moral reasons. I think we ended slavery because slavery doesn't pay. Not compared with free workers. Hey, even Adam Smith thought that.

See, I think that morality very often follows the market. Just saying. I mean, how difficult is it, when evaluating two things, one that benefits you and one that does not, to decide that the thing that benefits you is a Good Thing and the other thing is a Bad Thing?

But I get what the inconclasts are doing. Thay want to erase history so that the only thing that people are able to believe is their sacred orthodoxy. Because everything else has been canceled.

But that's OK. Because it focuses the minds of the racist sexist homophobes like me that love America as it is, warts and all.

And Wokies, let me tell you that you are the biggest wart on the flesh of America right now. By a mile. 

But that's OK, because you have clarified the issues rather thoughtfully. As Victor Davis Hanson said on FoxNews,

This election no longer is about Donald Trump's tweeting. It's not about Joe Biden's cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lock-down, the virus, the economy, foreign policy. It's an existential question, a Manichean choice, between whether you want civilization and you believe America doesn't have to be perfect to be good and we are not in this third century going to destroy all that people died for, or you feel that was is inherently flawed with a cancer and we have to use radiation and chemotherapy and kill the host to kill the cancer. And that's the choice we are looking at and I'm going to vote for civilization.

Know what I think? I think that President Trump should make short videos about the eminent Americans whose monuments were pulled down. And he should prepare a few words about each of the canceled monuments. Like General Grant. He could say:

Grant was a heavy drinker. He married a women in a family that had slaves. But then he took his slave down to the courthouse and freed him. And went on to lead the Union armies to win the war against slavery. Ulysses S Grant was a great American and a flawed American. But flawed Americans are all we have, and all we will ever have, to Make America Great Again.

When I walk around my neighborhood and look at the social-moralizing yard-signs, that started with #WeBelieve and then "Hate has no Home Here" and "Be the One" and now feature "Black Lives Matter" I think about the people that have put those signs up.

And what they are is educated Gentry, People of the Creative Self, that think themselves -- know themselves -- a cut above ordinary Commoners and People of the Responsible Self. And certainly higher and better than white nationalist deplorables. Because, you see, they advocate for the victims of oppression and and fight against systemic racism.

And yet they know literally nothing.

As I have been reading and writing for these many years, I have developed the conceit that I can figure out where the pre-digested political rhetoric I am hearing from other people comes from. Because, of course, most people don't read, don't think; they just pick up memes that they hear in the agora. Thus it ever was and thus it ever will be.

And what we should all hope for and work for is for the day when it is our ideas and rhetoric that ordinary people and journalists unthinkingly repeat.

Understanding the Power of "Fascism"

What exactly is fascism? It has been such a bugaboo for so long that a guy wants to know. Why should we be so terrified of it? Why should all good people want to cut it down the moment it appears? Why do the young lefty thugs of AntiFa choose anti-fascism as their escutcheon?

I read a piece about fascism at Quillette and I'm still not sure. Obviously, fascism as a monster was created by Stalin in the 1930s. Why, exactly? Because fascism was a rival to Communism? Because Stalin needed an enemy for his Bolsheviks and for other lefties to hate? No doubt, as Paul Gottfried has written, fascism is a

slur “hurled at anyone who holds what are now unpopular opinions.”

And, I suppose, anyone that wants to occupy the commanding heights of culture or politics tends to need a convenient lightning bolt to hurl at the despicables and the deplorables.

And, I suppose, after the glorious victory of 1945 both the ruling class of the US coalition and the Soviet Union found it convenient to have something "that must never happen again." Still, what exactly was it that we were supposed to fear?

Even in the 1940s, at a time when genuinely fascist dictatorships threatened to extinguish freedom over much of the world’s surface, George Orwell noted that misuse of the term had rendered it “entirely meaningless.” Decades later, American journalist Tom Wolfe would note the “morbid tendency” of his colleagues to apply the word to everything from Christian revivalist movements to hippies.

Maybe the meaning is just as Tom Wolfe described it in "The Land of the Rococo Marxists."

Anti-fascism, he wrote, “became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here… on the intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.”

Really, then, it is no different than the universal kill-shot, the accusation of racism. The whole point of calling someone a racist-sexist-homophobe is to shut them up, because there is no defense against it.

So the accusation of "fascism" or "Nazism" is just a ranging shot, because if you say a word in its favor then you are obviously in favor of killing Jews.

I suppose that is why I have developed my usual "across the grain" aphorism, where I say that

Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

For you can also say that "fascism is the idiocy that people grab for when the usual idiots have screwed up."

But really, I think that fascism is much more cunning than socialism or communism. Because fascism and Nazism exploit the obvious power of nationalism, the identification that ordinary Commoners have with the nation state. It is a powerful combination of the ancient and the modern.

The power of socialism as an idea is its lurch to the primitive. We all have programmed within us the yearning for the community of the kindred, where people are as one and are perfect social animals. And we all have the other primitive instincts, that if something goes wrong there is a fault at the bottom of it, either our own fault of the malevolence of another. And the solution is vengeance or the scapegoat of Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred.

But we humans have learned over the last 500 years to identify with the community of the nation. So when things go wrong we look to the leader of the nation to lead us back to safety. The lesson of World War I was that the workers of Germany, supporters of the Social Democratic Party, identified first as Germans before they identified as the class of proletarians.

And the lesson of World War II is that when Stalin wanted to rally the Russian people he did it by appealing to them as Russians and not as Communists. Hey, guess what: Stalin (and Bukharin) came up with the notion of "socialism in a single country" in 1924! According to La Wik.

So, when the rubber hits the road, even socialists need to rally the workers to the nation. Because that is what works.

Really "fascism" is just a pejorative that people with cultural power use to shut other people up. 

So, the only question is: how do we respond? And I would say that we should understand that all lefty 

heroes are really fascists, national socialists at heart.

So the way to respond is to say, if you are a man, "Whatabout Obama? Here was a progressive trying to bend the arc of history towards social justice in one country. Fascism, in all but name."

For "Obama" you can substitute any Democratic leader that seems appropriate, from FDR to Speaker Karen Pelosi (D-CA).

If you are a women, you say, "I can't believe you said that." And then you text your friend to complain.

Great Reaction: Vengeance in the 1400s

OK. I finally started reading the great classic by Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages. And it was because I picked up my unread copy of The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe by Pieter Spierenburg and saw references to Huizinga. Hmm, I thought; I should really read Huizinga first. So I got my unread copy of Autumn out and started to read.

The first chapter is all about how everyone was beating each other up with a culture of vengeance back in the 14th and 15th century, whether it was the kings and princes like Charles the Bold and Philip the Good and their ancestral wars or the city folk with their party colors. And then there was the intensity of life.

The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us... The great events of human life -- birth, marriage, death -- by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery.

Yes, and vengeance.

Whoever would write a history of the House of Burgundy would have to let the motif of revenge sound through their narrative like a pedal point... [B]lood revenge was the essential element that dominated the actions and fates of princes and countries...

The attachment to the prince was childish-impulsive in character; it was a direct feeling of fidelity and community... [and] blazed into reckless passions during feuds and strife.... [Thus] in purely feudal times, separate and isolated feuds can be seen everywhere, in which one cannot find any other economic motive than envy by one side of the wealth and possessions of the other... [and] not less importantly that of honor. 

Of course, I am stringing this out because of my belief in my notion of the Great Reaction, and how the left represents a return to the old culture -- slavery, feudal hierarchy, tribalism, vengeance, and a sort of Quixotic attachment to the knight-errantry of activism.

Of course, when I first set this up, or when it came to me out of nowhere at 2:00 o'clock in the morning, it was just a notion, just supported by a hunch. But really, when you observe progressive politics, what else can you say: "fidelity" to the progressive tribe. Vengeance and envy towards "the rich" and "the corporations" the stirring up of racial emotions. And, as I say, the notion that our modern politics is civil war by other means.

This appears to me in stark terms because one of the big themes that comes out of reading George Eliot's Adam Bede in the last week is the feeling of vengeance that Adam feels towards the young master Arthur Donnithorne, who has seduced the young girl that Adam hoped to marry, and how people like the Rev. Irwine talk Adam out of it, and how the saintly Dinah Morris by her example makes vengeance seem petty and unworthy.

For the question is: what changed? What changed between the tribal, feudal culture of the late Middle Ages and the rural Commoner culture of 1800 (viewed by George Eliot from sixty years later) where in people like Adam Bede and Dinah Morris their own personal behavior was more to be judged than the insults against them? And in people like the tenant farmer Poysers honor consists in having a spotless character in the community.

And what has changed today where the progressive left epitomizes all the qualities of the Autumn of the Middle Ages with its violent politics-with-everything and its partisan with-us-or-against-us ethos?

Well, I say that the old ways are never far below the surface. That is the point of concepts like Jung's archetypes, to remind us that our rational conscious mind is but a surface effect rippling on a vast depth of instinctive, coded behavior.

Now I do not assert that we moderns are more moral than the ancients -- or indeed our progressive pals. I think that the reason that slavery, feudalism, tribalism, and vengeance have retreated somewhat is because they do not pay when compared to the alternative, the market culture. For most all of us we can live a much better and more prosperous life by attaching to the culture of the market, which is founded on the notion of trust: trust all those that behave trustworthy towards you. And the untrustworthy? Don't deal with them; don't try to teach them a lesson; just stay away.

Now I believe that our progressive friends do not live so much in the market culture. They live much more in hierarchical, party organizations, from government education to government research to political activism. And as for the arts scene! So, for them, the old ways make more sense.

You are on the tenure track at a university? You size up the politics of your department: Whose side should you be on? Which senior academic should you support? What are the right opinions that will identify your party colors and help you get in with the in-crowd?

Wanna be an activist? So which monster of oppression are you going to attack and how are you going to publicize your activist campaign? In the progressive culture getting along with everyone is not the ideal. The ideal is to find a good enemy and attack! Oh, and, as Herod said to Emperor Claudius in Robert Graves' I, Claudius: Trust No One!

On this view, the strategy of the Commoner racist-sexist-homophobes should be to try to alter the payoffs in the culture of the educated gentry to reduce the payoffs of party loyalty and discipline. And to soften the feudal attractions of the welfare state by privatizing as much as possible.

Or not. The fact is that the world has not changed since the Middle Ages because some cunning strategist planned it all out in an OODA loop. Things changed because they changed, and nobody knows why.

School of Hate - Table of Contents

Leftism as a School of Hate

1. Rush Limbaugh Gets It
   
   
2. Leftism is a School of Hate
   First it taught workers to hate the bourgeoisie, then women to hate men. Etc.
   
   
3. First the Fear, Then the Hate
   First you teach your followers to fear "them" then when you've got the loot, hate
   
   
4. If You Call Someone a Racist You are a Hater
   
   
5. Our Elite's Crimes Against Humanity
   Its solutions for workers, blacks, women and LGBTs were the wrong solutions
   
   
6. Great Reaction: Vengeance in the 1400s
   How the feudal vengeance culture is very like our lefty activist culture
   
   
7. Understanding the Power of "Fascism"
   You call someone a fascist if you want to shut them up
   
   
8. Toppling Statues: The Problem with Iconoclasm
   
   
9. My "1584 Project"
   
   
10. Allyism, Republicans and Democrats
    
    
11. Sen. Ron Johnson Pushes Back on "Racist." Sorta
    
    
12. Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It
    
    
    

Our Elite's Crimes Against Humanity

What? Our noble elite and our creative Educated Gentry? Crimes against humanity? Isn't that putting it on a bit thick, old chap?

Not if you subscribe to my notion of the Great Reaction, that socialism is gussied-up slavery, the welfare state is gussied-up serfdom, and identity politics is gussied-up tribalism. Etc.

Not if you subscribe to my notion of "Little Darlings," that our modern ruling class cultivates client groups to increase its power and then dumps the Little Darlings when it is time to move on to a new, lusciously curved, younger and innocent Little Darling.

Whatabout women? Christopher deGroot has a long piece on how the feminists are making things worse for most women. And men too. Oh, things are pretty good at the top for Gentry women that can afford careers and marriage and children and cheap immigrant servants. But whatabout the rest of women, for, as he quotes G.K. Chesterton:

“Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

Wait! I thought that only approved Educated Gentry intellectuals had the right to opine on slavery!

But I think this is a very good way of approaching "issues." You should ask: "in what way is this better than slavery?" Or, alternatively, "in what way is this better than serfdom?"

Our Democratic friends on the presidential campaign trail are outdoing each other in various "Something for All" comprehensive and mandatory programs, from Medicare to College to Childcare.

So, in what way are these programs different than life in the good old agricultural estate, with the noble lord enserving his underling famers in exchange for free benefits? Or, if you prefer, the good old slave plantation and the good old slave driver with his cowskin whip.

See, I interpret the history of the last century or so in this way.

Part One: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the workers. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to balance what the Gentry thought about the helpless workers with what the workers thought about the workers and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the workers? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine what "we" wanted the workers to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that the Educated Gentry won the votes of the workers by offering them free stuff, and things were copacetic for a while as certain workers obtained above-market wages, and everyone's children got rough, tough education in the Three Rs from rough, tough schoolmarms in government schools. But in the end the workers all lost their high-paying manufacturing jobs and the schools became mere government child-custodial facilities doing useless fad-following.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that the workers were developing on their own, from unions (without special privileges) to mutual-aid societies to mechanics' institutes to the Christianity of the kind practiced by the hero and the heroine of George Eliot's Adam Bede.

Part Two: The Educated Gentry declared themselve the protectors and the liberators of women. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless women with what women -- high, middle, and low -- thought about their lives and also what the taxpayers thought about helping women? And did the feminist activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted women to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that Educated Gentry women set the agenda, and basically forcing the rest of womankind into their notion of what women needed. And what women needed, according to Gentry Women was to have fascinating careers just like the men in their lives. Er, did they ask their men about just how fascinating those careers were? No, I thought not. Then Educated Gentry women wanted all women to have access to abortion and divorce and the right to have sex without humiliation. Yep, it turned out that Gentry women in the workforce -- and the right to have their incomes counted when applying for a mortgage -- has made everything more expensive, so that, while it more or less works for Gentry women, it doesn't work very well for Commoner women. And let's not even think about lower class women where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Oh, and, girls, how great is it when the sexual revolution means that women are expected to "put out" in the immortal phrase of Tennessee Williams. And when women are expected by their lovers to "get rid" of the products of liberation? And when divorced women end up as cat ladies?

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that worshipped women and wives and mothers and put them on pedestals. Because, after all, "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. I think that we should have patted the Educated Gentry women for their conceits about career and "leaning in" and wanting to be in politics, First Woman President, etc. But whatabout Commoner women that want marriage and home and children? And whatabout lower-class women that just want a male provider, thank you very much? Gee, I wonder what they want?

Part Three: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the blacks -- and subsequently every imaginable oppressed group under the sun. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless blacks with what the blacks thought about themselves and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the blacks? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted the blacks to be in 100 years?

Well, we started out right, with a genuine civil rights movement that used non-violent protest to demand equality of rights. And we passed a Civil Rights Act and Sen Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) promised to eat the paper the bill was written on if it led to quotas. But, of course, in accordance with the divine law divined by longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, every political movement ends up as a business or a racket. And we have had quotas, timetables, diversity, inclusion, and flat out racism ever since.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been for Hubert Humphrey to spend the rest of his live advocating against quotas and timetables, and for the Supreme Court to retire all the activist groups that supported the civil rights movement. And I think that the right thing would have been not to have the welfare expansion under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and I think that blacks should have been encouraged to develop the responsible culture already flourishing in their black churches. Instead Educated Gentry activists have whipped up racism into a national crisis, decades after the passing of the laws that made government and corporate racism illegal.

And let's pass over in silence the question of Latinos and LGBTs, etc. Not to mention the nightmare of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Now Christopher DeGroot finishes up his piece worrying about single women electing more Democrats, and how stopping that

may be just as important as checking excessive immigration and trying to preserve what Peter Brimelow calls the Historic American Nation, each essential if there is to be an American right in the future.

But I don't think it is a question of "an American right." I think it is a question of forming a head of rebellion, civil or otherwise, against the monstrous and heedless Educated Gentry that, as they say, "literally knows nothing." Except the selfish status  and power games it plays within its Educated Gentry bubble and expects the rest of us to ooh and ahh over. Or regret it.

Look, as Bismarck said: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

And I would say that the emergence of Donald Trump as the champion of the Commoners is another proof of God's existence, and Bismarck's claim to wisdom.

All we need to do, as "an American right" or anything else, is march towards the sound of the guns. That is all any man, since the dawn of firearms, has needed to know.

If You Call Someone a Racist You are a Hater

America's Big Problem is what to do about people that play the race card, as in accusing anyone that dares to disagree with them of being a racist.

Let's face it; ordinary white Americans have been in a funk since the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed on July 2, 1964.

You would think that after this landmark declaration of equal rights that the race question would have been solved and everyone would have lived happily ever after.

You would be wrong because, according to my Maxims, "politics is division." There is absolutely no point for anyone in politics to let anyone live happily ever after, because then they won't listen to politicians and vote for the guy that promises to protect "us" from "them" and hand out loot after the victory.

So, anyone that disagreed with the liberal or lefty or Democratic talking point of the day was branded a racist. Right up to the present moment.

In this we can see the power of the modern educated ruling class. After all, there is not physical reason why people should be ashamed of being racist, i.e., preferring their own kind over all others. Moreover, the left teaches its Little Darlings to be outrageously proud of their race, their gender, and whatever defines them as different. Hey, pal. I call that racism.

In fact, people can be carefully taught to be ashamed of themselves. Like the poor bloody Germans after World War II who were taught by the Western Allies and the Soviets to be ashamed of themselves. So when David Cole would talk to Germans: 

The overwhelming majority of Germans I met dealt with the humiliation by apologizing, bowing, and prostrating themselves...  [T]hey’d literally start crying like children. “We’re a bad people! We did bad things! We deserve the scorn, we deserve the punishment. We owe the world an eternity of apologies.”

 Yes, well. These are the Germans that invented modern philosophy, modern physics, modern chemistry, the that jumped over the chasm of the impossibility of relativity and quantum mechanics. Then they lost a stupid war because they were governed by stupid idiots. Then they voted for a leader that promised to lead them to glory...

Hey, I've just been reading about the Brits during the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58. They got pretty rough with the riff-raff that murdered their women and children in places like Lucknow and Cawnpore. Maybe we should be teaching the Brits a lesson. How dare they avenge themselves on the prostrate Indian people!

Well, of course, we are, because our lefty friends have spent the last 100 years, after Lenin, telling us that western imperialism was the worst thing ever.

Actually, western imperialism was the long withdrawing roar of imperialism, because, in my opinion, after about 1750 with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Empire Did Not Pay. You see that with the Brits in India. On the one hand they acted like regular rulers always getting their knickers in a twist about the threat of the ruler next door. On the other hand they started worrying about building roads and railways and canals and education in India.

Well, western colonialism was not the worst thing ever. I'd say that the worst thing ever was probably something like Genghis Khan's thoughtful massacres of cities like Baghdad, Kiev, Samarkand, with everyone, male and female, killed and heaps of skulls, etc. Or Stalin's slave state. Or Mao's slave state.

But our lefty friends have been making hay out of western colonialism, and African slavery, and the subjection of women, and gays, and all the rest of the LGBT zoo.

And they won't stop until we tell them to put it where the sun don't shine, and back it up with a punch to the solar plexus.

My idea is that when anyone makes an accusation of racism the immediate call-back is:

Really. I guess you must be a hater.

And if someone accuses anyone of being a hater, the answer is:

Really. I guess you must be a racist.

Of course, "racist" should be changed out for "sexist" "heterophobe" or whatever, depending on the context.

The point is that you need to have this ready for immediate action, because most of us are nice polite people that don't have convenient insults ready to hand like our lefty pals.

But look. If we are going to push back against these chaps, who do, after all, condone the great crimes of the millennium, then we have to go out armed and dangerous.

And one thing our lefty friends don't expect is for us to have a verbal punch to the solar-plexus all ready to go.

Really, this is not that hard. The ordinary people of America and the world are good people that go about their business and when there is an emergency they all rush forward to help.

But we need to defend ourselves. And I think the accusation of "hate" just fits the bill.

Because accusing someone of being a racist in this post civil-rights act world is the nastiest, meanest, most hateful thing you can do.

Anyone that makes an accusation of racism/sexist/etc. is a hater.

Period. Full stop. 

Leftism: First the Fear, Then the Hate

About three weeks ago I had a brainwave about the left. It is a school of hate, I realized. But then, yesterday, I had another epiphany. It is this.

First the left teaches its clients to fear; then it teaches them to hate. This is a natural progression that is entirely consonant with the logic of leftist politics.

The whole arc of leftist politics is to identify a class of helpless victims, about to be demolished by some class of oppressors and exploiters, and to lead them to justice and safety.

Obviously, this class of victims will be people that are afraid. So the lefties will play upon their fear.

But what happens when the left has led their victims to victory, and won their victims by peaceful protest their own pot of gold from the modern state? Obviously, following the famous victory the time for fear is now over. But the left will not want to disband its merry band of activists and protesters. What? Surrender that hard won power and prestige? No, in Phase 2, the left switches to hate, and teaches its Little Darlings to hate the oppressors and exploiters it formerly feared.

As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, the movement becomes a racket.

So let us begin with Marx. After extolling the rise of the bourgeoisie, he exposes its soft underbelly, in The Communist Manifesto:

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

Slaves, they are, the proletarians, embittered slaves. And not just the workers, but the lower middle class, " the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants," they "sink gradually into the proletariat" immiserated by the monster of capitalism and the neo-feudal overclass, the bourgeoisie.

And so the workers got the vote. Why was this? Because the bourgeoisie was persuaded that it was right and just that the workers should get the vote, even though the middle class could see that the workers would not want the same things that they did. And the workers got free education, and labor unions, and then government pensions and health care. Again, the middle class didn't really like the welfare state; it wasn't going to help them, who already saved their money for pensions, and got health care, at the very least, through the local "lodge doctor."

But if the workers were getting what they wanted, what would be the point of voting for lefty politicians? That was when the left started teaching the workers to hate. The workers were part of the center-left coalition, and they had to be kept in a fever of hate against the bosses, who might at any time force the workers to "give back" their benefits. And so it went, until the left started to tire of the workers in about 1970.

With women, early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft argued for men to tender rights to women out of the goodness of their hearts, as an expression of goodwill of the males to the females of the middle class. But by the end of the 19th century, the tone of feminism turned darker. Mrs. Pankhurst spoke of the women's franchise not as "a right, but as a desperate necessity:" women as victims. Well, women did get the vote, and careers, and divorce, and abortion. And that's when they started to hate.

It cannot be an accident that all the vile hate of the modern feminists occurred after the great political milestones. How could that be? Because, once the political marginaliztion of women had been removed, the mobilization of women as feminists had to be conducted on a program of hate. It must follow from the logic of left-wing politics.

In the campaign for civil rights, the early narrative was clearly fear. Jim Crow could work his evil power on southern Negroes as the mood took him. And if the government didn't do its thing, a lynch mob from the local KKK lodge could make the point instead. Just look at how the police beat up civil-rights marchers in the great Selma march on Bloody Sunday, in which Alabama State Troopers clubbed and tear-gassed civil-rights marchers on the road from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Alabama!

But in fact the 1965 Selma marches proved that blacks were no longer helpless victims of Southern racism, because after Bloody Sunday, a subsequent march was protected by "1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals".

Thus it makes complete sense for a new generation of black leaders to realize that hate, not fear, should be the face of black America, and the age of Martin Luther King, Jr., gave way to Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton.

The point is that, when your peaceful protests are protected by the federal government it is time to put away fear. But what happens to the movement then? Perfectly simple, you substitute hate for fear, and the movement can go on from strength to strength!

Clearly, the movement for gay rights follows a similar arc. We begin with the terror of the New York City police attacking the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, in June 1969. So gays are taught to fear and we are taught that gays live in fear, of being "outed." But now that gay marriage is a fait accompli, courtesy of the US Supreme Court, the days of fear are over, and gay activists can deploy their hate without fear upon hateful Christian bakers.

There is one startling question about this century and a half of left-wing fear and hate. Was it necessary? These incessant campaigns against the bourgeoisie, against men, against whites, against straights: were they needed to get the rights the helpless victims demanded? For the fact is that, almost without exception they were achieved without a violent counterattack by the bourgeoisie, the men, the whites, the straights in question. Which suggests that maybe all the Sturm und Drang was purely for effect. It could all have been achieved by conversation and persuasion, not by the agency of activism and peaceful protest.

Who knows? But without the activism, the protests, the non-negotiable demands, what would have been the point?

We have now entered into a new phase in left-wing activism: the campaign of hate against the white working class.

As the need for activism continues, even though the rights of workers, women, blacks, and gays have been confirmed by the political system, there is still a need for an enemy, because without an enemy there is no need for politics. And so the left has coalesced upon a campaign of hate and fear on the men of the white working class. This is perhaps the terminal campaign of the longue durée of the left. Because the working hypothesis of the new campaign of hate is that all the Coalition of the Fringes -- the erstwhile marginalized and oppressed victims of what we now call the patriarchy and toxic masculinity and white supremacy -- should combine together in a campaign of activism and peaceful protest against white males.

Notice that this campaign cannot be against all white males because educated white males are down for the struggle; that is how they make their bones. No, it is the working class males that don't get to college on diversity and inclusion, that don't get the government jobs because of being a woman or minority, that don't get into STEM because they don't like school: these are the monsters that the left is now attacking as the far right, as white nationalists, as fascists.

Only thing is that the white working class are not civilized and successful middle class professionals that could be persuaded to give the workers a break, to give well-born women a leg up, to give the former slaves their dignity. And this is because, as I say, the middle class is not that interested in power, and not for reasons of virtue.  It is because in the middle class universe the magic bullet is not political power but, as Jordan Peterson points out, competence. If a middle-class person fails to get ahead, he does not blame the system; he blames himself. He understands that the economy ebbs and flows, that failure is a part of life, and that following failure you just have to get up and get going again.

Then there is the little problem that the white working class is not a privileged elite that has been keeping the people down since time immemorial. The white working class is the former Little Darling of the ruling class that has now been cast aside like an ageing mistress. So the white working class is not likely to gracefully concede as the targets of the left have done in former times.

In other words, the game has changed, and it may be that the courses in activism in the left's school of fear and hate no longer prepare activists for the future, but for the past.

For it seems to me that, while it was fair to characterize the left's politics up to now as a coalition of the powerful and the powerless against the middle class, today I think that it is better understood as a campaign of the powerful against the powerless. And I don't think that our lefty friends have a clue about that.

Leftism is a School of Hate

Mulling over the fake hate crime craze, I finally realized what it is all about. Hate.

Well, of course. But then in the middle of the night I realized what it is all about, why lefties are convinced that the world hates them.

It is because lefties teach their supporters to hate. Leftism is a school of hate. Let us begin at the beginning.

With Marx, the left began by teaching the working class to hate the middle class. That's because the middle class, the bourgeoisie, according to Marx, were the chaps responsible for exploiting the workers, just as the feudal lords had exploited the peasants. Because labor theory of value.

In fact in the textile revolution, followed by the steam revolution, the middle class gave the workers jobs; thus the landless laborers that were being thrown off the land because of mechanical threshing machines got to live. And when lefty activists demanded that the middle class give the workers the vote, son-of-the-middle-class Benjamin Disraeli was the prime minister that expanded the franchise. By the turn of the 20th century, in Britain, the working class was enjoying a modest, but robust prosperity. So how about that middle-class! Maybe they were willing to accommodate the just demands of the working class. So middle-class classists were willing to do this?

Then came feminism, and the left taught women to hate men. And marriage and babies. That's because men represented a patriarchy that had exploited and oppressed women since the dawn of time. So I suppose that when noble widows got to enjoy up to three dowers (income during widowhood) during the Middle Ages, and no attempt was  made by the patriarchs in the legal profession to deprive these women of their income that was often a substantial drain on the wealth and the political power of noble estates, somehow this was exploitation of women. On the fiction front there is the curious case of Helena, the heroine of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well first produced around 1600. This young woman seems to have agency, and bravely acts to win the hand of the noble -- but contemptible -- Bertram, the man who spurns her as the daughter of a middle-class apothecary far beneath him in status. How come the patriarchy put up with this?

But men were perfectly willing to give women the vote, and in due course no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. How come they allowed this, if they were sexists and fierce patriarchs determined to keep women down? So male sexists were willing to do this?

Then came civil rights, and the left taught blacks to hate whites. So the blacks were slaves. So was almost everyone, slave or serf, until the day before yesterday. So Jim Crow denied blacks civil rights in the South. So did Hitler and Stalin and Mao deny civil rights to everyone in their power. So does Maduro in Venezuela today. Why, President Maduro even detained lefty journalist Jorge Ramos and then deported him for asking him an impertinent question.

But whites in America were willing to be persuaded in the civil rights era that blacks should receive full civil rights in specific legislation that defined those rights. So white racists were willing to do this? And ever since they have put up with being stigmatized as racists without rioting in the streets?

Then came gay liberation, and the left taught gays to hate straights. Over the past generation, the supposed implacable homophobes have acquiesced to decriminalization of gay sex, permitting gays to openly live as gays, and seen the legalization of civil partnerships and gay marriage. And the homophobic straights put up with this?

Now we have the left teaching Muslims to hate the West, illegal aliens to hate borders, and millennials to hate carbon dioxide and the evil fossil-fuel industry that spews it into the air. Of course they are. Because leftism is the school of hate.

But why? I will tell you. It falls naturally out of my maxims, that politics is division and government is force.

If you believe that politics is a necessary evil, then politics and elections are minor events that stir the voters up for a season, and after the election the passions subside. Because no big deal.

But if you believe, with the left, that progressive politics is a saving truth, then the Other must be Evil for opposing you. You must mobilize your supporters as if for war: hey, it's a matter of life and death! How do you mobilize your supporters for war? You teach them to hate the enemy. That is what Orwell's Three Minute Hate was all about in 1984. That is what war propaganda is all about.

But why now?  Why all the hate now, hating white supremacists, toxic masculinity, gay bashers, Islamophobes and xenophobes? And why the fake hate crimes?

It is because to continue the revolution you must re-up the enthusiasm. And obviously, fifty years after the civil rights era, that gets to be harder to do. But if you are a good little girl learning all about toxic masculinity in Gender Studies, you need to find actual evidence of toxic masculinity, and, by hook or by crook, you do. If you are a good little boy learning all about racism in Race Studies class, you need  to find actual racists out there, and prompted by your teachers, you see red MAGA hats behind every tree.

The fact is that the left has been wrong all along. The middle class are not implacable exploiters, determined to keep the working class down. Nor are men determined to keep women down, or white  determined to keep blacks down, or gays in the closet. It is not that we are angels, but just that the middle class is not that interested in power, and therefore not that invested in hate.

So it is probably time to wind down all the lefty movements -- except the anti-borders movement and pro-Islam movement -- because workers got their rights, women got their abortions, blacks got their civil rights, and gays got their gay marriage.

Well, that's not how politics works, and especially lefty politics. The left taught the workers to hate the middle class. You think they are going to call off the hate? The left taught women to hate men. You think those man-haters are going to wash away their rage? The left taught blacks to hate whites. You think they are going to give away the black vote to Trump without a fight?

From the day that Marx declared war on the bourgeoisie, the left has been a school of hate. You think they are ever going to change?

Tell me why.

Don't Give Me That "Collective Action" Rubbish

I'm reading a thumb-sucker right now about Jürgen Habermas by a political science prof. -- so you don't have to.  It's called The recent work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, justice & modernity by Stephen K. White.

Habermas is interesting to me because he is a lefty trying to deal with the consequences of Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  These founders of the Frankfurt School writing during World War II had to face the fact that the Enlightenment hadn't resulted in unalloyed sweetness and light as advertised.  In fact, they admitted, Enlightenment and Reason were about power.  Man was interested in reason in order to dominate nature and other men.  So Habermas comes up with a dual-track idea.  There is reason, which is instrumental and strategic, egos using reason to get their way in the world.  And then there is communicative action or negotiation, which is about people interacting as social equals in a taken-for-granted lifeworld.

It doesn't take too long for Stephen K. White to start burbling lefty code words like "power" and "ideology" and "social change" and "collective action" and "collective goods."  I had to restrain myself from upchucking.  Because what do those words really mean when stripped of what we might call lefty "false consciousness?"  Let's parse these words for their real meaning, when deployed by lefties as weapons against conservatives.

Power.  Lefties are obsessed with the power of others, particularly the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie and the capitalists created a new form of power -- we might call it market power -- that began to compete with political power, and this seems to be an immense problem for lefties.  But the truth is that market power is a reciprocal thing.  You get market power by doing what the consumers want and doing it well.  When you stop doing that you lose your power, unless you have access to political power.  But lefties want to combat market power with political power.  You can see the problem with that in everything from the Soviet Union and Communist China to the stupidities of political power in Obamacare.

Ideology. Lefties understand that religion and ideas are critical sources of power.  As Andrew Breitbart said: "politics is downstream from culture."  But lefties don't want anyone to have power except themselves, and so lefties are obsessed with the idea that someone other than lefties might be influencing people.  That's why Marx invented the idea of ideology and "false consciousness," to make a scandal out of people other than lefties launching ideas into the world.  But the truth is that lefties spend their whole lives spouting ideology, and, to get back to Horkheimer and Adorno, lefty ideology is intended to dominate in a Habermasian strategic sense as strategic reason, rather than initiate a conversation.

Collective Action. This is a euphemism that is designed to obscure what is really going on.  When lefties talk about collective action they are talking about everything from a lefty street demonstration to the passage of a lefty legislative action.  In other words force or the threat of force.

Collective Goods. Another euphemism.  When lefties talk about collective goods they are talking about government programs that forcibly tax and/or regulate people to support some kind of one-size-fits-all government program.  It might be education, pensions, or healthcare.  But force is there, front and center, except that lefties don't want to draw attention to the force, or face the fact that their whole world view is about force.

Social Change. This means government-enforced change.  It means that social cooperation in some sphere of human intersubjective activity is to be replaced by government force in which the terms of interaction and cooperation will be replaced by administrative and bureaucratic rules with the force of law which cannot be changed by voluntary agreement between individuals.

We are getting to see all this operate in the miserable operations of the Obama administration.  The Obamis know what we need and they are determined to give it to us, whether we like it or not, from Obamacare that sweeps the whole health-care system under the detailed supervision of government to clean energy that substitutes the pipe dreams of environmental activists for the market.  As you can see, in the manipulations of the IRS, the National Labor Relations Board, the EPA, the politicizing of criminal cases like the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair, there is no attempt at creating a consensus or agreement.  Everything is about using government power to advance a liberal agenda and to intimidate opponents.  And the result is the opposite of justice.

The beautiful thing about the market system is that its power is limited.  It is certainly hegemonic, for it demands everyone to submit to its price signals or face the consequences.  But the market does not demand to own your soul.  It does not demand uniformity or loyalty oaths or acts of submission.  It just says: look, if you want to thrive in this world then you have to do things and make things that other people are willing to pay for.  Reduced to its essential, the market says that you have to think about other peoples' needs.

The great fact about our modern era is that there are lots of people, who think they represent the future, struggling with all their might to kill the market and replace it -- by turning back the clock to an age where everyone was utterly subordinated to the local lord.

Here we have our modern left, convinced it is utterly committed to erasing the patriarchy.  But what does it do?  In every action it is effectively trying to return society to a kind of neo-patriarchy where individuals are subordinated to some political boss: the politician, the bureaucrat the activist.  This brave new world of the political boss, if you ask me, is indistinguishable from the awful patriarchy of the pre-modern era when the dominant male ruled over all.

Who cares what the gender of the political boss is?  Domination is domination, and humans hate to be on the receiving end.

Rush Limbaugh Gets It

Right now the Republican Party is in one of its quadrennial cringes over its relevance and its outreach to minorities and women.  Republicans need to be more understanding about women's issues, about immigration, and about gay marriage.  But Rush Limbaugh pointed out yesterday that this outreach is a losing proposition. Because liberals will always come up with another issue to make conservatives and Republicans look like unfeeling monsters. Take gay marriage, he suggests.

What is it that's going on?  Well, same-sex marriage, homosexual marriage is just the latest way to portray Republicans as oppressors.  After they get same-sex marriage, it will be on to something else.  They always have to have a cause that is liberation related and it's the Republicans who are the oppressors.

Exactly.  Liberation from oppression is what leftist politics is all about.  It needs two things.  It needs a minority population suffering from oppression and it needs an unfeeling or hostile Republican Party or conservative movement to serve as the oppressors.

And if Republicans and conservatives think they will escape their troubles by conceding on the oppression causes du jour they are mistaken.  Democrats will always come up with a new one.

We need to understand the game.  There are two responses to the existential sorrows of the modern age.  One of them is the idea of freedom to break the chains of ruling class oppression.  It is the idea that responsible individuals, acting in the world, are the antidote to the injustice of government domination.

The other response is the idea of liberation from ruling class oppression.  It is the idea that an avant garde movement can liberate people from their chains and lead them to the Promised Land.  But have you noticed, says Rush, what leftist liberation leads to?

But have you ever noticed all of the left's solutions for more freedom always involve us giving to government more control over our lives.  We always end up expanding government.  We always end up giving up a little freedom in order to be liberated by the left. 

 I like to present the modern predicament as the battle between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Marginalized Self.  The Responsible Self is a chap who wants to live in responsible freedom, living free of government compulsion, but doing the right thing for himself and his family, his neighborhood, his city, his country.  The Marginalized Self is someone who is "owed" and oppressed.

You can see that the beauty of the Responsible Self is that it assumes that people can be trusted to do the right thing.  It doesn't require extraordinary government powers to right the wrongs of the world.

But the problems of the Marginalized Self can only be solved by big government.

When Republicans are playing defense on gay marriage, on immigration, on the "war on women" they are in retreat.  To turn things around Republicans need to be playing offense, on guns, on government corruption, on deficits, on taxes, on the war on the unborn, on government bullying from fatty foods to global warming to financial regulation.  In other words, Republicans need to be playing the game of the Responsible Self, not the game of the Marginalized Self.

The great injustice of the modern age is its ruthless discipline.  Your medieval serf, oppressed though he might be, could order his life as he chose.  But today we are all the abject subjects of industrial discipline, bureaucratic discipline, regulatory discipline, and subject to a thousand criminal laws of which we know next to nothing.

If freedom or liberation means anything, it surely must mean freedom and liberation from the whip of the disciplinary overseer, that lashes us to work in our subordinate jobs, that channels and directs us on the street and in the airport, and that taxes and regulates us to a fare thee well.

Maybe the People of the Responsible Self can get together with the People of the Marginalized Self to do something about the ruthless and oppressive discipline to which every person in this modern age is cruelly yoked.