Abortion and the Three Peoples Theory

Do you notice anything about the clips of pro-choice demonstrators peacefully protesting about Roe v. Wade? To me the protesters all look like white girls from selective colleges. You don’t see any ordinary American commoner women. And you don’t see any welfare moms from the ’hood.

The point about abortion politics in the USA is that the pro-choice side is driven by educated women in the educated elite. And the pro-life side is driven by ordinary middle-class commoner moms.

I have actually experienced this face to face as I ate breakfast at a hotel just down the street from the US Supreme Court where the Dobbs appeal was being considered. It was December 2021, and the hotel was full of abortion protesters, for and against.

At one point I heard two pro-life women mixing it up with a pro-choice woman. The pro-life women were quoting Bible verses and the pro-choice woman was talking about “my spirits.”

Which is exactly what I would expect. And you know what? They agreed to disagree; nobody called in their mostly peaceful protesters to get in the faces of the other women at breakfast.

Now, I believe that we have abortion politics today because of the situation of educated class women, that I call People of the Creative Self in my reductive Three Peoples Theory.

Modern feminism proposes that women should not be merely wives and mothers, but should have careers, as men do. That’s all very well, but that means that women can’t get married and have children until they have completed their education and begun their career. It means that, for 10-15 years after puberty, an educated woman really can’t have children.

And yet, in today’s society she is expected to have sexual relationships during college and early career.

If I were an educated woman, and I had internalized the feminist culture that I had been carefully taught, and I knew that I wanted a college education and a career before starting a family and that I should aim to become an “independent woman” as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and that I was expected to “put out” — in the classic phrase of Blanche in A Streetcare Named Desire — I would want abortion as a backstop.

Without that, life would be too “stressful.”

But hey, ladies, what is so wrong with the common law tradition that criminalizes abortion at “quickening?”

Women who are People of the Responsible Self do not see the world the way that women in the educated class see it. For them, as ordinary commoners, maybe immersed in their Bible verses, life, the universe, everything, revolves around marriage, family, home, children. Paid work? Sure, but work is work. And it’s nice to earn money after the children are grown, and be around other women, and give back to the community.

For Responsible women marriage and children are at the center of life. So having sex with a man who isn’t committed to fathering your children is an abomination. Aborting a child you have conceived with the man you love? Unthinkable.

In other words, there is a great religious and cultural gulf between the project of life for a woman in the educated class and the project of life for a woman in the commoner class. What makes life meaningful for an educated class woman is her education and career. What makes life meaningful for a commoner woman is the family she created.

It is the beginning of wisdom in our ruling class to understand this, to accept it, and to allow America to be a place where both kinds of women can live their lives.

But whatabout the women who are People of the Subordinate Self? What is their relation to abortion?

Obviously, down the ages, poor women that had unwanted children usually abandoned them, either by exposure or by killing them. Many were left at churches: foundlings. Up to 40 percent of live births ended up as foundlings raised by the church at the local orphanage. And up to 90 percent of those died in the first year. See this piece at Quillette. It’s pretty obvious: if a mother can’t afford to keep the baby and a relative won’t take the baby, then mothers tended to abandon the baby and hope that someone would take the baby and raise it.

Today, of course, poor women get an abortion. Is that a good thing? Probably not. In any case, because of the “present orientation” of lower class life, poor mothers are going to make decisions at the last possible moment. So, if they don’t have abortions and they can’t afford or don’t want to raise the child, then society has to “do something” if we don’t want such children abandoned or withering away in orphanages.

So what do we do? How about going back to the common law, where abortion after 16-20 weeks was criminal, and abortion before then was shameful?

Hispanics Joining the Middle Class and GOP

Back in the day, you'll remember, the Democrats were going to own the future, The Emerging Democratic Majority, courtesy of Judis and Teixeira. It would be composed of the educated, women, the young, and minorities.

I have a different theory, my reductive Three Peoples theory, that says that the upper class of creatives and the credentialed tends to vote its interest with the Democrats, the middle class of responsibles that go to work and obey the law tends to vote Republican because its interest is a growing and stable economy, and the lower class of subordinates tends to vote Democrat because that's who is offering loot to the lower class.

If you walk around my überliberal neighborhood in north Seattle, the heartland of Rep. Pramila Jayapal's congressional district where she won 83 percent of the vote in 2020, you notice that there are a ton of Hispanic roofers and construction workers and yard-maintenance workers slaving away all day, every day. No blacks to be seen. OK, a couple.

In my racist-sexist-homophobic way, I interpret this to mean that Hispanics are working their way up into the middle class. And blacks are not.

Therefore I would say that we should expect Hispanics to be moving in the the Republican Party in battalion strength. But blacks, not so much.

Hey, I was writing about this eight years ago when the Republicans won Congress back from the Dems in Obama's second midterm. And what I said was that the Democrats were turning the Democratic Party into the Black Party. And that would alienate Hispanics and Asians (except for high-caste South Asians like Chair of the Progressive Caucus Jayapal). And there was this:

Hispanics think blacks are lazy. That's when they are not actually expelling blacks from their neighborhood.

Not to mention, I wrote, that liberals would not do themselves a favor with anti-police rhetoric. Because the middle class expects the police to protect them from lower class thugs, from the days of Dickens' Bill Sikes to today's gangbangers shooting into a crowd when they've been dissed. 

Now comes Andrew Abbott at AMAC writing about "The Vanishing Permanent Democratic Majority" and the "precipitous decline" in Biden support.

Nowhere is this clearer than with Hispanic Americans, who now disapprove of the job that Joe Biden is doing as President by a whopping 60%-26% margin.

And even black support is down from 85 percent to 63 percent.

The reason for this, of course, is that liberals have persuaded themselves that the Republican Party is a "white" party.

The belief among liberal elites is that the Republican Party exists explicitly to service and promote the policies and principles of “white America” and that, since the 1960s, the party has been rooted in white isolationism, nativism, and resentment of minorities. Thus, as the country becomes more diverse, the white Republican vote will gradually be destroyed via diversity, or so the theory goes.

As opposed to my theory that the Repuiblican Party is now the party of the ordinary middle class. Actully, I"d say that the Republican Party is the party of ordinary people whereas the Democratic Party is the party of "special people," special because of education, credentials, or victimhood.

And most of those victim are "fake" victims, dontcha know, from LGBT to corporate snowflakes to Muslims. They are either members of the ruling class in good standing or the pets, the Little Darlings, of the ruling class.

And, of course, if you are an ordinary middle class person you might get "resentment of minorities" that get the special care and feeding of the ruling class. But that would be wrong.

And let me tell you: if you have been noticed by the ruling class and declared to be a victim, and richly rewarded for voting Democrat, You Are Not A Victim, cupcake.

And then Trump. Liberals knew that Trump could never get minotiry votes. But he did, and then in 2020

Not only had Trump held onto his minority support, but he actually won a more significant share of black male and Hispanic voters than he did the first time. 

As I say, there is no mystery or conspiracy theory needed to explain this. The Republican Party is the party of the ordinary middle class. And it looks like Hispanics are rapidly ascending, by hard work and enterprise, into the middle class. Ergo, they are voting Republican.

 And, I suspect, Hispanics and to a lesser extent, blacks, are being royally screwed by the Biden inflation.

But don't tell Rep. Jayapal.

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.

Do the Dems Think Strategically?

Paul Gottfried thinks that the Dems are thinking strategically with their Green Energy and their open borders. Both policies are designed to grow the base of Democratic voters.

[T]he administration is successfully catering to its base. Biden is doing exactly what his voters want, and he and his handlers have no intention of changing course. There is also the possibility of processing the millions of illegal aliens Democrats have shepherded into the country to full citizenship.

Says he:

Biden’s party is always thinking ahead, particularly when it cheats and/or acts destructively. 

But is he right? After all, he writes, "Democrats are not necessarily holding a bad hand if they can pull in more independents to help bring their numbers back up."

Let's start with independents. The point about independents, I think, is that they are not that engaged with politics. So, if the Dems show them helpless immigrants being whipped at the border, they are appalled. If Dems do non-stop propaganda on green energy and how we are going to fry the world unless we act now, they have to agree.

But when independents note that there seem to be a lot of Hispanic roofers taking all the roofing jobs away from good old American workers, then they wonder. If gasoline prices start exploding then they are angry and afraid.

So, the ruling class gets to set the agenda and make its narrative the default narrative. But when things go wrong, it all falls apart.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and financier, who was Treasury Secretary in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. In the 1920s the Republicans were the ruling party. But when the Crash of 1929 hit, and the Republicans didn't manage to right the economy, for three straight years from 1929 to 1932, well then the American people voted for the other guys.

The GOP lost 53 seats in the House in the 1930 midterms and 100 seats in the 1932 presidential election. Thy deserved to lose. Reading about Andrew Mellon in David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life, it is clear that, for Mellon, the thousands of banks failing every year in 1930, 1931, 1932 were just the way things were. 

He and the GOP hadn't learned the lesson taught by Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that the central bank is the lender of last resort, and its job is to keep the credit system from crashing on the rocks. If there was one thing that the New Dealers got right it was to stop the bank failures and restore the credit system in 1933.

But the New Dealers screwed up just about everything else.

The GOP lost another 29 seats in the 1934 and 1936 elections. And then gained 81 seats in the 1938 midterms. So, in 1938, the media was still all-in on FDR and the New Deal, but the voters had had enough.

Did the New Dealers have a strategy to rule forever? They thought they had, with all their National Industrial Recovery Acts and Civilian Conservation Corps and so on, but they were wrong. Those glorious policies, that my liberal friends still recall with a warm nostalgic glow, didn't work. Of course, the Dems went on to win the biggest war in human history against the most evil enemy in human history: gold stars for that!

When you start losing, on the battlefield or in the economy, then the soldiers and/or the voters start to desert the colors. It doesn't matter what glorious narrative you have, or how many voters you are bringing over the border, or how much money Mark Zuckerberg is putting into election offices in Democrat districts, when things turn South then people start to pay attention and they start to lose faith in the narrative and in the current leaders.

Now, of course, people react to bad news in different ways. Using my Three Peoples theory, we can say that for Subordinates they start to lose faith when their lord isn't sending the checks regularly. We can say that the Responsibles start to lose faith when they cannot go about their business every day without being harassed by government regulations or crazy price increases. We can say that the Creatives get antsy when the glorious vision of the prophet -- say, to save the world from CO2 pollution -- starts to crumble.

Right now, I'd say that all three of the Three Peoples are experiencing distress. For the Subordinates, their checks aren't covering their bills; for the Responsibles, the crazy mandates and restrictions are screwing up their lives; for the Creatives the glitch in the Matrix on climate change is raising questions -- even though they haven't yet even begun to think of questioning the divine prophecy of the climate gods.

Politics needs an enemy, and I'd say that right now, most Americans think that their rulers are the enemy.

And my feeling is that the Democrats really don't know what to do, except keep on keeping on.

And I say that when people start to cheat, it is a "tell" that they know they are losing.

Reviewing and Extending Downstreamism

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture." But did you know that SciFi author  John C. Wright has said that "In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion."

But is there something beyond religion? I like to misquote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and talk about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

In other words, if you really believe in the importance of downstreamism, then you will agree that

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And if you don't agree with that obvious truth, there is no hope for you!

Now, I have been reading a book that reviews the whole of philosophy, religion, science, and spirituality in the last 200 years written by a Brit J.J. Clarke, The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview. It is telling us all about the post-materialist, post-mechanical worldview that issues from what I call the "German Turn" that begins with Kant. Clarke is talking about a worldview that he calls "emergentism,"

a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in fields such as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems[.]

In other words, the way the world works is that some nobody -- it could be a nobody plant -- tries something new, and, wonder of wonders, it works. And that successful change changes the world. Not because it was forced on the world, but because it worked, and people copied the new idea. Because it worked.

So the way the world works is creativity, people creating new things, animals creating new things, plants creating new things, from the bottom up, not from the top down.

So, things just evolve.

But Clarke is an academic, so when he gets to religion and spirituality, he thinks that God is dead so let's reinvent spirituality as a creative enterprise. The old religious culture was based on an eternalist presumption, it

locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world as we experience it through our sense.

The new worldview is what Clarke calls a naturalist presumption, it is

a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, its meaning on the natural world of which we humans are an integral part.

This includes both what we experience in the physical and living world and also the "world of inner sense," the mental world, and also culture and history.

But what Clarke tells us is that the old "eternalist presumption" is done, finished, because we educated advanced humans know that the old world of God and Sin and the promise of eternal life in Heaven has been replaced by the new world of emergentism and the naturalist presumption.

That is where I part ways with the noble professor.

Because not everyone lives in the world of the creative educated philosophy professor for whom God has died. And clearly, for Clarke, there is no reason to respect or make a cultural space for the old people that still live with the worldview of the eternalist perspective.

I say that for the ordinary middle class person the old eternalist presumption still works pretty well. You believe in God; you believe that if you live your life by the rules then you will go to Heaven. So, you live a life of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

But for the educated elite this old worldview is a superstition and verges on bigotry.

Actually, I believe, further, that for the lower class, a still earlier worldview applies. For the lower class there is no happy land of Heaven if you do the right thing. In the lower class, power is everything, and what you need to do is get with a powerful person, and shelter in his powerful shadow. The old Nordic and pagan and Greek and Roman gods seem to apply. The newer Christian God of sweetness and light seems to be a fantasy to the lower class person.

Now I say, starting at 3:00 am today, that for all levels of society, the following applies, using the downstream hierarchy.

Politics answers the question: who is my enemy?

Culture answer the question: who are we the people?

Religion answers the question: who is God?

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" answers the question: What's it all about, Alfie? 

Who is my enemy? For the serf it's the cruel master; for the Commoner it's the tribe or nation next door; for the educated creative it's the dumb white middle-class racist-sexist-homophobes whose religion is pure bigotry.

Who are we the people? For the serf it is the people enslaved and oppressed like me; for the Commoner it is the nation; for the educated creative it is the global community of educated and evolved people.

Who is God? For the serf God is the cruel master; for the Commoner it is the God who made Heaven and Earth and declared that it was good; for the educated creative the god is the creative thinker, artist, activist.

What's it all about? For the serf it is just to stay alive; for the Commoner it is to live a virtuous life and get to Heaven; for the educated creative it is to create something that changes the world.

To be continued.

The Current Racial Frenzy Will Abate, But...

 George Will has a piece out prophesying the end of the current race frenzy: "National conservatives and racial identitarians have a common enemy: Individualism." But our problems will not be solved with the race frenzy abatement, because the nationalist right is almost as bad as the racist left. Both the nationalist right and the racist left are united in a war against individualism. Individualism, is something new under the sun, he says, invoking Michael Oakeshott.

Modernity’s greatest achievement, which was the prerequisite for its subsequent achievements, was the invention of the individual. Oakeshott argued that, in the 14th and 15th centuries, conditions emerged that were “favorable to a very high degree of human individuality,” meaning “persons accustomed to making choices for themselves.”

And the conditions were particularly favorable in Italian cities.

Well, I can understand that Buckley-era conservatives like Will would look askance at Trump-era populist conservatism; it's centered on the identity and the economic interest of the very ordinary middle class American rather than the business-owning middle class of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

Indeed, in 2021, U.S. “national conservatives,” who are collectivists on the right, recoil against modernity in the name of communitarian values, strongly tinged with a nativist nationalism and with a trace of the European blood-and-soil right.

Really? I have a better idea, a higher idea, that floats above the decaying remnant of Buckleyism and the eternal lefty search for the transformative community that will lead directly to justice do not pass go.

It is this.

All politics is built around the friend-enemy distinction. The point in any politics is to define who is one of "us" and who is one of "them," the enemy that "we" might have to fight and kill.

Once the size of human community has expanded beyond the hunter-gatherer band of the kindred the big man and the politicians and the clerics have to come up with a new narrative that explains the new community. Enter the age of "tribalism." And I maintain that all tribalisms are fake tribalisms, a likely origin myth and  "story so far" that explains and exalts "our community" and unites the community with feeling of belonging together.

In particular, I suggest, almost all political identities are forged by the veteran soldiers in the army, the brothers in arms that founded the state that we descendants come to think of as having existed for all time.

What is "nativist nationalism?" It is, presumably the tribe of people in a contiguous nation state that are native to the place. As opposed to more recent arrivals who maybe don't yet identify as natives, but as an immigrant community that still identifies in part with its identity in the old country. It is not hard to understand that the natives of a country would be suspicious of more recent arrivals, and vice versa.

And it is not surprising that politicians and priests would take advantage of this.

Obviously, this is the story of politics in the United States at least since the Irish started arriving in the 1840s in consequence of the potato famine. Immigrant groups arrived in steamships from Europe and coalesced in immigrant "ghettos" for a generation or two. And soon after they arrived the local political machine started to organize them into its own personal vote bank. 

Obviously the left has invented a new form of tribalism based not on place but on class and race. To me, this is just another opportunistic "fake tribalism" that teaches a group of people to feel an identity that just happens to benefit the educated ruling class that wants to unite various lower-class groups into a political army to fight against the middle.

And this is the game of all political ruling classes, to conjure up some kind of "fake tribalism" to unify the people you want to unify into a political identity, and then lead them to war against some enemy, foreign or domestic.

It is telling that the current leftist politics based on race or the slightly less racist notion of "oppressed peoples" has arisen in a time when an appeal to workers as a class is not as politically useful as, say, back in the 1930s.

But whatabout nativist nationalism and race identitarians?

Well, I would say they they are both led by political leaders that experience themselves as creative individualists.

In other words, I would say that all "individualists" are upper class people that see themselves as transformative and creative leaders. On the conservative side these might be people that see themselves as intellectuals imagining a political framework of limited government, or business start-up entrepreneurs imagining how they are going to transform the business world, or lefty political activists imagining how they are going to bend the arc of history towards justice.

And so all this fits into my reductive Three Peoples theory, where the nativist nationalists are people in the Responsible middle class who identify with nation and the race identitarians are lower class Subordinates who identify with their non-American national origin or class or race rather than with the larger political community. And Individualists are all members of the Creative class imagining that they are doing a great thing.

But I could be wrong.

Facing Down the Religion of Leftism

One of the standard conservative narratives is that conservatives are influenced by reality and objective truth whereas lefties are simply religious believers that will say and do anything to advance their sacred cause.

Actually, I think that the ZMan puts out a straw-man when he writes that "bourgeois objectivism" is the problem,

the assumption that all social problems have a correct set of answers and the point of politics is to discover those solutions.

I think that is more the assumption of our educated ruling class, who themselves are bullied about by the lefty crazies.

So I would analyze our situation as this:

There are lefty crazies, who want to transform the world with politics elevated to a kind of religion.

There are Inner Party educated-class liberals, who believe themselves to be the only qualified people to direct the political affairs of the nation.

There are Outer Party conservatives that believe in ruling with a light touch, but truckle to the Inner Party Pooh Bahs.

All the above sectors belong to the ruling class of educated people, the Educated Gentry. There are two other sectors:

There are ordinary middle-class Americans that just want to live their lives, do their jobs, and live a decent life. I call these people Responsibles.

There are lower-class Americans that attach to lefties and or the educated ruling class because they are Subordinate people that need a lord to protect them.

Since the Outer Party conservatives do not have a religious priesthood directing their morality, they are rather less energized than the Inner Party and its lefty priesthood. It is this that demoralizes and annoys folks like the ZMan.

The only thing that can stop the coalition between lefties and their educated-class allies is a Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class. No doubt the Outer Party will adapt itself to become its leaders.

But I do not think that the Great Rebellion has a chance without the lefties and the Inner Party having first ruined the country and the lives of the ordinary middle class.

Yes, I know. You would think that the Biden administration has been chosen by God to do just that.

See, I think that it is natural and physical that stupid scions of the educated class would believe stupid things like the idea that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

And, unfortunately, over the past 200 years, the stupid scions of the educated class have been able to persuade the lower class that loot and plunder delivered by the government was the answer to their problems. It is only in the past 50 years that the social center of gravity has tended towards the middle, where the biggest sector of society has become the ordinary middle class, rather than the lower-class peasants or lower-class industrial workers.

I think the sign that the current lefty plus Inner Party sector is in trouble is precisely the culture war of the past couple of decades. A confident ascendant ruling and cultural class does not need to amp things up.

Indeed, a witch-hunt / reign of terror / great purge / cancel culture is a sign that things are going wrong for the believers, that the prophecy of the lefty prophets has failed, and that the progressive, or lefty, or liberal era has Made Things Worse. When the prophecy of your priests has failed, you do stupid stuff, like:

Defunding the police and letting criminal defendants go free.

Creating a crazy cult that the planet is going to burn, unless we go back to sun power and windmills.

Making a sacred cult out of abortion.

Enlarging an already over-large government entitlement state.

In fact, I believe we need a radically reduced state. Why? Because the modern economy rewards people that are trustworthy and punishes people who are untrustworthy. Thus, most people are "nudged" by the need to present themselves as trustworthy, and act in a trustworthy fashion. They don't need much supervision and ordering about.

We need police forces to repress those that refuse to be trustworthy, and we need navies to deal with pirates that might take a shine to a 200,000 ton container ship. That is all.

But what comes next? 

I don't know, but I suspect that the current system will need to collapse in hyperinflation and misery before we can get a majority of people to stand up against the lefty activists and the educated-class grifters.

Here's how I look at the history of the world so far.

First there was the Age of War. It made sense because land was the only thing that mattered. It paid to defend your land and you could increase your wealth by conquering your neighbor's land.

Then there was the Age of Politics. It made the Age of War look like a walk in the park, with monster wars about -- what exactly? And monster governments that oppressed and killed their own people -- for what exactly?

Now comes the Age of Trust. Trustworthy people will wive and thrive; untrustworthy people will struggle, unless and until they mend their ways.

Of course, we could give Elon Musk a gubmint contract to take all the untrustworthy people to Mars and let them figure it out there. Just as the Brits gave Sir Walter Raleigh a gubmint contract to take the "waste population" to the Americas. See "My 1584 Project."

But human life will always be a muddle. Sorry, make that "emergent phenomenon."

No! The State Can't Manage Anything

My guy Curtis Yarvin has a curious piece on the economics of John Ruskin, the Victorian writer. He was, like George Bernard Shaw and Vladimir Lenin, a socialist. So he thinks that it's the job of the government to make sure that everyone has a job and doesn't starve. In other words, the government has an interest in making sure that we all wive and thrive.

Hey, let's face it, says Yarvin,

Since the people are the property of the regime, the people are the assets of the regime. The regime’s incentive is therefore to maintain and improve this human capital.

But is this really how governments act in real life? I don't think so. I think that governments treat their people not as an asset to be carefully managed and tended but as an army to be used in the rulers' glorious fight to win the future. The fight may be a war against the country next door, or it may be to fight climate change. But a ruling class never thinks of itself as merely a night watchman, keeping the streets safe at night. On the contrary, the last thing it wants is for everyone to be nicely tucked up in bed at night. What would be the point?

Yarvin, in his notion of monarchy as the preferred mode of governance, has a point. A monarchy is more likely to treat its people as an asset to be nurtured than as subject people to be looted to reward his supporters.

But even a monarch is not to be trusted with the peoples' welfare. Because his No.1 priority is Number One: himself, the monarch, and his power project. And in his power project the people are just an asset to be exploited for the greater glory of the monarchy, not an asset to be husbanded and improved.

Whether you are talking about a medieval noble arguing with the neighboring nobles about who really inherits some vital dukedom, or nationalist leaders trying to get their nation a place in the sun or American presidents winning glorious world wars, or the present world leaders beating back the horror of climate change, the government is not interested in the wealth and the happiness of the people. It is thinking of the arc of history, whether it bends to national glory or global justice.

Look at the current situation in the United States. The last thing that the present government is thinking about is to "maintain and improve [its] human capital." Instead it is passionately engaged upon expanding the welfare state so that practically every need of its people is the responsibility of some government bureaucracy: so it is going to succeed where a century of bureaucratic administration has failed?

Then the government is passionately engaged upon a total transformation of the energy economy, because climate change. Does anyone really think that this will lead to anything but embarrassment and disaster?

The fact is that, other than making war, governments are absolutely clueless. They know nothing about how to manage the present, let alone prepare for the future.

And if there is one thing we know about the future is that we know nothing about the future. So, any government that makes commitments about the future, whether in workers' wages or workers' rights or workers' skills, it is going to mess it all up. The government cannot make guarantees about incomes or pensions or the future. Because the only thing we know about the future is that it will be a lot different from what we figured.

Yarvin quotes a long paragraph from Ruskin on the situation of domestic servants in a Victorian household, where he argues that the best work is done out of affection -- for the master, presumably.

And so it is, maybe. Until things go south. Guess what happens when things go south for the Victorian gentleman? He closes his house in "town" and sends his domestic servants on their way, with a "reference" attesting to their competence and good will. And when things go south in today's economy and the company can't afford to pay its wages? The company tries to lower wages and the workers probably go on strike. Like that's going to help!

I know. Let's analyze things for the point of view of my reductive Three Peoples theory: Subordinates, Responsibles, and Creatives.

If you are a Subordinate, then you just sit there in your wage-labor job, trusting that you will have that job in the future -- for the next forty years? Really? Remind me what happened to the unionized US auto workers.

If you are a Responsible then you work the best you can, but you know that nothing is forever, so you prepare for a change in the economic weather, figuring to keep your skills up to date, and switching jobs if it looks like the management at your employer is just coasting. But you know that, sooner or later, things will go south and you will have to make the best of it.

If you are a Creative, you will know that the future belongs to those that are creative and have a strategic mind, but even then chances are that most of your brilliant ideas won't work out. So you are always half-prepared to change direction and try something new.

The future belongs to those who...

Yes, what exactly? To those who believe? To those who show up? To those who prepare?

Or just to those who get lucky? Or a combination of the above?

I would say that the key is the spirit of 2 Corinthians, about "things seen" and "things unseen." Government and politics are things seen. But life and instinct and the social nature of humans and the human Lebenswelt are the unseen things that we usually don't "notice."

In my view the whole of the modern miracle of prosperity and science and the market economy are emergent phenomena about which we know a lot less than we imagine.

The only thing I am certain about is that government and politics are probably the best way to smash it all up.

The Eternal Temptation of Monoculture

At Quillette Keith E. Stanovich worries about the "Social Science Monoculture." The monoculture's latest wizard wheeze is "faith in science" questionnaires. Only trouble is that the way you score high on these tests is by parroting the liberal line on everything.

On about the same day over at UnHerd Tom Chivers reviews a book from a Harvard professor on trying to convince science deniers -- you know who they are -- that they are wrong in "How not to talk to a science denier."

Hey, maybe the only common thing about these science deniers is that they don't want to take their science from conceited puffed-up liberals.

But I want to know what is wrong with these liberals that they think that their saving faith is the only saving faith, indeed the only truth.

Actually, we know. It was all told to us years ago by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Despite all their talk about experiments and reason and logic, real scientists act like any other human group: they don't like people that rock the boat and don't go with the program. So, Kuhn writes, scientific revolutions only succeed when the old generation dies off. In other words, the old science is good enough for the old generation.

In a sense every science is a church of its current members. It has an orthodoxy that all sensible church members believe. And the members are not too kind with heresies and the heretics that advance them.

Of course, this monoculture can condense into a war strategy, such as "the long march through the institutions" that La Wik attributes to Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke (I thought it was Antonio Gramsci).

What ties all these world views together is the notion that "we" know the truth, the real meaning of "life, the universe and everything." And it is our sacred duty to preach that truth throughout the world and banish the Evil One from the face of the Earth.

No we don't!

If you remember, one of the Temptations of Christ was when Satan took "him up to an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." And the point is that all that power and all that glory counts for nothing, for less than nothing.

But in every human burns a fierce flame that, if only he or she had the power they could force the world to "get sorted." And everyone would live happily ever after.

No it won't!

Monocultures don't work!

Why? Because the way the world works is by adaptation, by fixing things that go wrong, because even "The best laid plans o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley." The world does not work by implementing a prophecy, just like the prophet imagined it.

So if you are an academic department and all the professors are lefty liberals and there is no room for a conservative, then your scholarship will shrivel into counting the number of victims on a pinhead.

If you are science researchers and anyone that disagrees with you is a "science denier" then the work you do is probably rubbish. Because even a science denier can probably point to a problem or two in your magnificent theory.

And when it comes to morality and politics, my reductive Three Peoples theory shows, as clearly as can be, that the different kinds of people in the world need, and naturally turn to, different religions and different politics. And if one group of people forces their religion and their politics on the rest of society, then they are going to Make Things Worse -- for the rest of the world and even for themselves.

It is telling that the two most obvious monocultures are those of a strict religion and of an army. What is telling is that in these strict hierarchical structures the folks at the tip of the spear are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the ultimate, inevitable victory. In other words, it is all about the agenda of the Chief Priest or the General-in-chief. And the job of the lesser mortals is to sacrifice themselves for the good of the order.

The whole point of our American system is precisely to break up all this: to limit government by dividing it into three branches; to limit moral hegemony by separation of church and state. And indeed to separate the political sector from the economic sector from the moral/cultural sector as envisaged by Michael Novak in what I call the Greater Separation of Powers.

Why? Because nobody knows the real, ultimate, God-spoken meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" and anyone that forces the rest of the world to bow to their vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will only build a pile of skulls, butcher's bill to follow.

It's fascinating that after a century of mammoth world wars and slave states, our best and brightest still don't get it.

Predicting the Future When the Universe Changes

The ZMan has an interesting take today on the similarity between today and the world before World War I.

This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The Commies, he writes, were the only people back then seriously trying to predict "what happens next."And they said that "the arc of history bent towards socialism."

I think that gives the Commies too much credit. Everyone understood that the industrial age was transforming the world. Everyone, back then, was eagerly proposing plans to improve the world through politics. It's just that the Commies had a full-blown religion that promised Heaven on Earth if only we followed the Prophet Marx's True Prophecy.

More likely, says the ZMan, everyone is reverting to type.

Russia, for example, has kept reverting back to being Russia, despite the changes in political economy. We see this quite clearly with China today, which is a high tech version of the Tang Dynasty. 

In our own age, we are experiencing that the technological revolution is changing everything, just as the industrial revolution changed everything in its time. "The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it." The Commies understood that the industrial order involved a huge movement of people and changed power relationships; "Similarly, technology has created new power relationships and set up a massive movement of people." 

For the ZMan, it is "the dissident subculture in which there is any serious thought about what is driving the ongoing crisis." 

The dissident knows that today is the result of the millions of decisions that have happened up to this moment on the timeline. A man is the sum of the mating choices of his ancestors and a people is the sum of all the choices that made the people.

But the future? "Nothing is inevitable other than the fact that people have always been wrong about the future."

That sets me to thinking, about what we humans are consistently wrong about. And I think that there are a couple things to seriously deal with.

1. Don't prophesy! The temptation of all religions is to try to prophesy the future. Don't do it! We humans are never going to wrap up the future in a comforting -- or a terrifying -- prophecy about what God or Gaia or the arc of history or climate change is going to do.
2. Be ready to adapt. The whole point of humans is that we are pretty good at adapting to whatever God or Nature or out boss throws at us. So let's keep those skills sharpened.
3. Help others to adapt. The problems of the last century, I feel, occur when political and religious leaders teach their followers that there is no need to adapt. The Commies teach their followers to follow them and they will smash the exploiters. Wrong! Teach the workers how to wive and thrive in the new world. The modern educated class teaches its followers to just sit there and they will take care of everything. Wrong! Everyone has to learn how to deal with the future and deal with its challenges.

When you think about it, the prophets are bound to be wrong. They might be telling us that God will provide, or that God will damn us to Hell unless we repent. But, it seems to me, both these approaches are trying to reduce fear by prophesying certainties. And there ain't no such thing.

For there is no way to know what the "unanticipated consequences" of our actions are going to be. We humans are always meddling with things without a clue about what we are meddling with. There is no way to figure out, in advance, what is going to happen when some butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil. Maybe nothing, maybe the end of the world. But we can respond to "unanticipated consequences" and try to mitigate them. I think that, on the whole, we are pretty good at that.

The other thing we can do is help other people adapt. That, I think is the great takeaway from the fraternal associations and mutual-aid societies of the 19th century. They developed a culture of helping and coping and getting on with life. I feel that the dominant movements arising out of the educated class have operated on the conceit that all we needed to do was to follow the leader, the political or intellectual leader, because He Knows!

And to reduce it to my reductive Three Peoples theory, the People of the Creative Self need to get out and set an example of creative adaption to the curve balls that the world throws at us, the People of the Responsible Self need to responsibly adapt within the framework of their culture of doing the right thing. And the People of he Subordinate Self need to up their game, because following along and looking to someone else to pull your irons out of the fire tends not to work when everything is changing. Because when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Nobody can predict the future. Not God, not prophets, not scientists, and not political leaders and bureaucrats. What we can do is adapt.

The End of Over/Under Politics

Back in the day, we didn't have over/under politics. Back in 12th century England, politics was all about squabbling nobles. In Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir there isn't a word about the middle class or the oppressed peoples. Politics is all about King Henry II of England and his Angevin Empire -- which included England and a good half of France. When he wasn't putting down rebellions among his feudatories he was playing political games with the King of France and quarreling with his sons.

And if he got really annoyed with one of his feudal retainers he would lay siege to his castle and destroy it and probably set fire to the town around it.

I guess if you were a poor person you just hung on and hoped that your lord would prosper -- and not tax you too heavily to finance his wars.

But then there was the Black Death and in its aftermath wages went up and the lower orders became a bit uppity what with Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1381 against the poll tax needed to finance the Hundred Years War.

And then came the nationalization of the armed forces and the development of agricultural "improvement" and the surplus peasants were sent packing.

Thus the first Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1497. And the first Poor Law in 1536, although the first big poor law was in 1597. Clearly, in this world, the poor have emerged into political consciousness: as a problem, rather than an opportunity.

So how do we get from the taken-for-granted hierarchy of the Middle Ages to the over-under political philosophy that is clearly in full bloom with rich kids Marx and Engels by 1850?

Well, more research is needed. But, to start with, in the 18th century, we have Rousseau. In The Discourse on Inequality he argues that mankind in the "state of nature" is driven by pity and self-preservation. Says SparkNotes:

Man in the state of nature has few needs, no idea of good and evil, and little contact with other humans. Nevertheless, he is happy.

But he has "perfectibility." And this drives him to respond to his environment, and live in groups, and develop reason and society. But this is not good, because

As men start to live in groups, pity and self-preservation are replaced by amour propre, which drives men to compare themselves to others, and to need to dominate others in order to be happy.

This leads to a dangerous instability between rich and poor, leading to war, that is solved by a trick where the rich entice the poor into a political society that merely "fixes the relations of dominance." And, of course, private property is the cornerstone of this dominance.

In The Social Contract "agreed upon by all citizens for their mutual preservation" Rousseau defines the "sovereign" as "the collective grouping of all citizens" that "expresses the general will that aims for the common good." It is in conflict with the actual "government to exercise executive power." And the "sovereign" and "government" are typically in conflict.

Then we have Babeuf, in the French Revolution. His "newspaper Le tribun du peuple (The Tribune of the People) was best known for its advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy and the abolition of private property."

But both Rousseau and Babeuf were commoners -- Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker; Babeuf the son of an officer who was working as a domestic servant at the beginning of the Revolution. 

Next we get Saint Simon, born an aristocrat, and another socialist theorist. But he recommended the rule of an "industrial class... [that] included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society such as businesspeople, managers, scientists and bankers, along with manual labourers, amongst others."

Honestly, I don't see how all this muddle gets to Marx and the brilliant idea that rich educated kids like him will lead the helpless workers to glorious revolution and heaven on Earth.

But, clearly, the logic of politics as war by other means leads Marx to invent a struggle of the poor helpless workers against the monstrous and evil capitalists and bourgeoisie, not because the capitalists and bourgeoisie are necessarily evil but because the logic of his over/under political system requires an enemy.

In fact, of course, the two centuries since the French Revolution and the century and a half since The Communist Manifesto have seen a Great Enrichment, an increase of 30 times in real per capita income in the western world. And we have had scientific experiments on whole populations that have conclusively demonstrated that the market economy delivers prosperity to ordinary people and poor people, and that the ideas of Marx lead to slavery and death camps and famine.

So I say that the current spasm of over/under politics, in the antiracism of Allyism, with allies advocating for "oppressed peoples" against "white oppressors" is more nonsense driven by the logic of over/under politics that requires the middling sort of people to be the enemy. That's because the logic of politics requires an enemy, and the logic of over/under politics requires that the enemy be the middle. Who else could it be?

I say there is a reason why over/under politics switched from Marx's over/under politics of class to the current over/under politics of race. The reason is that by, say 1970, the numbers weren't working, because the Great Enrichment had lifted too many helpless workers into the responsible middle class. So a new concept was required, of racial oppression and white guilt. "Anti Whiteness," if you will.

But what do we do about it?

I don't think that the answer is a conscious whiteness race movement. And my reason arises out of my reductive Three Peoples theory. In the Three Peoples theory it is easy to understand the logic of the left's over/under politics. The "over" class of rulers is the educated elite, the Cathedral of Curtis Yarvin's notion, and it wants to be important, wants to rule. But the ordinary responsible Commoners of the middle class don't want too much government rule, thank you very much, so the obvious thing for the overclass to do is to champion the "under" class, the Subordinate Clients, and hopefully get to direct traffic. This situation is obviously a class situation.

And I don't think that the middle middle people experience themselves as "white." That's because the logic of being middle class and doing middle-class things is that you work to serve the consumer and you associate with people that you can trust because they exhibit a record of trustworthy behavior; you obey the law, you go to work, and you follow the rules, and you don't really think about it. Notice how this middling trust culture differs from the overclass where you trust people with the right ideas and credentials and from the underclass where you associate with people of your race, or class, or language, or kindred.

And that is why I think that the future for the middle middle is a class identification of being middle class commoners rather than white people.

So I believe that the Great Rebellion of Commoners will not be defined by race but by class.

Yes, but whatabout the non-white members of the middle class? Won't they identify with their ethnic and religious origins rather than with whiteness?

No, I don't think they will, and the reason is war. In my view all groups and tribes and nations are defined by the war in which various disparate elements are drawn together and forged into a political (or military) army. This experience creates a new cultural community, a new identity, a new "band of brothers." If the "army" wins its war then it defines a new community, a new identity. In our time, the "band of brothers" creates a new nation. If it loses, of course, it disappears into the mists of time.

So my prophecy is that the facts of the situation today in which the ordinary middle class finds itself attacked by the Cathedral is radicalizing the middle class, and the experience of defending the middle-class identity, and the instinctive political strategy of the politicians representing the middle-class identity, is creating a new political identity and a new unity. And the disparate people that are coming together into this new identity will increasingly experience themselves as united into a nation of commoners rather than the previous identity they may have experienced.

I give you President Trump. Our lefty friends insisted that he was a racist sexist homophobe, because Charlottesville. But I'd say that President Trump has and does define himself as a leader of Americans, ordinary, patriotic, middle-class Americans. In other words, he defines himself exactly as you would expect a leader of ordinary middle-class American commoners rebelling against the rule of the educated overclass.

And I think the current instinctive panic of our Democratic friends, where they are trying to ram through their entire woke agenda in six months, demonstrates that, even if our Democratic friends don't consciously understand the rise of the Commoners, they just feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and the foundations of their world are shaking. So there is no time to be lost.

And they are right to be concerned. Because I prophesy that the Age of Domination of Over/Under Politics is coming to an end.

The "Four Americas" and My Three Peoples

As usual, during the night, I awoke to realize something. Thanks, unconscious, you're a real pal!

I thought to myself: how does the Four Americas of The Atlantic's George Packer and his "How America Fractured into Four Parts" match up with my reductive Three Peoples theory? 

I first noticed, yesterday, that Packer's view of America was a "View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club," another world, separate from the corridors of power trod by our rulers. But now it's time to Be Like Ike, and make the problem bigger.

Let's lay out the Four Americas, as described by George Packer:

Free America. That's the old Buckley conservatism, the anti-Communists, and the libertarians.

Smart America. That's the high-cognitive-skill folks with advanced degrees that work as salaried employees in tech, the professions, journalism and the arts.

Real America. These folk believe that the real heart of America is the "common people that work with their hands," a "country of white people."

Just America. Young "people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world... They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists."

Before I bring the hammer down, let's just rehearse my Three Peoples.

People of the Creative Self "These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary."

People of the Responsible Self "Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, 'deplorables,' these are people... that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law."

People of the Subordinate Self "Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, these are people that do not experience 'agency.'" They are somebody's subordinate.

Let us re-describe the Four Americas in their relationship to the ruling class and the ruling class's political formula of fighting systemic racism. And let's figure out how they fit in my reductive Three Peoples system.

Free America. These are the defeated foes of the ruling class that once hoped at least to sit at the table with the educated ruling class. Don't worry about they, they're done. They are, to me, People of the Creative Self.

Smart America. These are people that have thrived under the bureaucratic rule of the educated ruling class. They are good at education and taking exams and converting their skills into salaried positions approved by the rulers. They eagerly display BLM signs in front of their houses and deplatform people that peddle in "disinformation." They are, of course, People of the Creative Self.

Real America. These are people that don't have the intellectual chops, the cognitive skills to make it in Smart America. They are commoners that do the ordinary work of society: technicians rather than techies. Racist-sexist-homophobes, every one. The are, obviously, People of the Responsible Self, often in danger of falling into the world of the Subordinate Self.

Just America. These are people that have been screwed by the political and educational system set up by their liberal educated-class parents. They are almost all white, but don't talk about that. They are would-be People of the Creative Self only they'll never make it. So they think of themselves as helpless victims, "fake" People of the Subordinate Self.

Golly Geewillikins. Godfrey Daniels. Mother of Pearl.

First, this Fractured America is mostly an tableau of upper-class America, the People of the Creative Self. In other words it is the actual ruling class viewing the next class down as representing the whole of America. Almost everyone in the Four Americas -- except the dastardly "deplorables" -- is a member or would-be member of the creative class.

Second, there is no real mention for the underclass, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, the People of the Subordinate Self in my Three Peoples, except as a back-handed insults about "vodka in plastic cups" and "missing teeth from crystal meth." They sorta exist in Real America, in the lower section of Real America, in the 21st century collapse that "happened in the shadow of historic failures" like the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They get a fake entry as the wokey social-justice activists -- the "trained Marxists" of BLM -- but they don't really exist in George Packer's world. 

Third, you can see why Big Tech is down for the ruling class's program of beating up white deplorables. They are the fortunate sons of our educated ruling class, that happen to have the intellectual chops to thrive in the world that the educated class created over the last century. Why rock the boat?

Fourth, you can understand the lefty wokies and their rage. It's fiendish really. These young people, that have fake degrees in activism, that don't have the chops for the high-status salaried professions, are being drafted into the educated-class's activist army that is beating up ordinary Commoners because they are all systemic "white oppressors."

Here's what I think. 

The one vital need in every ruling class is to have a real understanding of the people that they rule. Otherwise that ruling class is not long for this world. If the rest of the ruling class thinks like George Packer, then they got a problem.

But really, it's not surprising that George Packer is dealing in fantasy and only thinking about people on the next step lower in the political and cultural hierarchy. For one thing, it is only those people that count, that are likely to mount a cultural or political challenge to our ruling class. Yep, no mention of the rising Hispanics, who are starting to vote Republican. No mention of the "oppressed peoples" of the underclass, the folks that have really taken it on the chin from the ruling class's race politics of the last half-century and the inflexible top-down culture of the administrative state. No mention of Asians, who are beginning to feel the whip of race-conscious government.

Could the omission of ordinary middle-class Hispanics and Asians from the Four Americas be a mistake? Or would it just complicate the agenda of the ruling class in the Biden years, so better not think about it?

Let's just say that if the clueless clots of Just America that "literally know nothing" -- in the words of Ben Rhodes -- ever got a clue, they might not continue as the useful idiots of the ruling class.

Might not, of course. I don't have much confidence in that. But you never know.

The Worse the Better

When Vladimir Lenin said: "the worse the better," he meant what Nikolay Chernyshevsky meant when he used the phrase in the middle of the 19th century

to indicate that the worse the social conditions became for the poor, the more inclined they would be to launch a revolution[.]

But Chernyshevsky got it from John Adams.

Let us borrow the phrase and use it in our own time. If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me that wants the American people to rise up against the unjust rule of the educated gentry class in a Great Rebellion then you understand that rebellion is impossible if the left is gently pursuing its march through the institutions.

What we need is something like the sudden lurch to teach critical race theory and LGBT in elementary schools. Because that is what it takes to get ordinary suburban moms angry enough to push back.

So when I read the American Spectator piece on "The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Education: Gender Redefinition and Self-Selection," I was actually encouraged. You cannot beat an ideology with no ideology. You need an citizenry aroused to action by a sudden realization that the kids are not all right.

Extreme ideologies are quickly taking root in U.S. K-12 public schools through new school policies, practices, and curriculums — with devastating effects on students. Unfortunately, Americans are mainly turning a blind eye instead of speaking up against political and social indoctrination that threatens our children’s education and the very fabric of our nation.

Actually, of course, the extreme ideologies have been working their way through the woodwork for decades. But now -- probably provoked by the Trump effect -- the ideologues are going for broke.

So this gives us racist-sexist-homophobes a chance to "take our schools back" from the education blob. 

The point is that all government institutions and programs naturally tend to go with the trends in ruling class culture. And right now the ruling class is captured by the radical racists of critical race theory and the radical LBGTs of transgender activism. Nothing remarkable, you understand. This is the sort of thing that happens to human communities. Call it the "herd effect." Ideologically committed leaders in the ruling class get a movement going, their followers in the ruling class go along, and all-of-a-sudden, "our kids" are being taught to hate their whiteness and adjust their personal pronouns.

This is all perfectly well understood by my reductive Three Peoples theory. The People of the Creative Self are always trying to reinvent themselves and come up with new things and try them out on the rest of society. If they do a business startup and see whether the consumers want their cool new product, or if they form a religious cult that organically grows in society, no harm done. But if they decide to force their idea on the rest of us by commandeering the government to force their ideas down our throats, then we have a problem right here in River City.

We racist-sexist-homophobes have been concerned for ages about the left's "long march through the institutions." La Wik credits Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke with the notion and a bunch of other lefties include Antonio Gramsci. The strategic brilliance of the notion is its slow and steady progress. If it doesn't provoke serious opposition then it just grows, year to year, until it takes over the world.

And there is the truth that the only people that get to work in the ideology business are the ruling class and the educated class. Nobody else has the authority and the reach to promote ideas throughout society.

So the only way that we racist-sexist-homophobes get a chance to push back again ruling-class ideologues is when the ideologues violate the Mr. Brooke maxim and go a "little too far." That is when ordinary people get angry and push back.

I got to see how that works yesterday watching the 2020 Russian movie Dear Comrades! It's about a strike in 1962 at the electric locomotive factory in Novocherkassk, near Rostov, a few miles northeast of the Black Sea. 

What was the problem? Why were the workers striking? It was simple. The Soviet government was increasing food prices and reducing worker wages, and people were frightened and angry. 

The movie is mainly focused on the minor Communist Party officials, in the city government and the KGB, and how they are basically powerless idiots in the monstrous Party hierarchy that descends upon the town to put down the worker rebellion.

The question for us is whether our Inner Party hierarchy here in the good old USA has the chops and the ruthlessness to put down the current populist rebellion just like the Soviets when they put down the Novocherkassk strike. Can they ram through their CRT and their LGBT ideology or will they provoke a rebellion that gets too hot to handle?

Obviously, We Don't Know. We don't know how much power our ruling class has; we don't know how ruthless they are prepared to be; we don't know what kind of pushback is possible.

Over at Taki's David Cole thinks that the MAGA movement is useless. Because, organic though it might be, it has no answer except "Trump!" It needs money and backing and a coherent ideology, he proposes.

Indeed. And just like the workers of Novocherkassk, no doubt our rulers will suppress any rebellious movement. Until the day that it doesn't, like 1989 in the Soviet Union. 

It's interesting that in Dear Comrades! the Soviet government chooses to put down the rebellion not with the army but with KGB sharpshooters firing on the mob from concealed locations high up in buildings that panics the mob into running for cover. And then hides the number of deaths. And makes everyone sign Sergeant Schultz statements that they know nothing. And then stages a dance festival in the town square where the rioters were killed.

In other words, the ruling class is usually afraid to display its ruthlessness in living color. It seems to need to preserve the fiction that it rules for the benefit of the people in the name of the people.

Just like our ruling class needs to assert that the stolen election is a Big Lie and the MAGA crowd of January 6 was an "armed insurrection," and that COVID did not originate in a Chinese lab. 

Oh, wait. Now, all of a sudden it is OK -- and not racist at all -- to say that COVID originated in a Chinese lab. And Twitter and Facebook and the mainstream media fact checkers will allow what was banned in early 2020. 

So that's all right. Boy, thank goodness we live in a free society.

But at least we know that our rulers are running scared.

"Wittgenstein's Vienna:" When a Ruling Class is Losing It

Do we care about Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, which is all about putting philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's life and work in the context of the fin de siècle Vienna in which he grew up?

Well, I do, for several reasons. First, I am interested in the decline and fall of a ruling class, and what it looks like. Second, I am interested in better understanding the context of Wittgenstein's philosophy and thought. Third, I am interested in the cultural clash between the feudal-era Hapsburgs, the 19th century Viennese bourgeoisie, and the creative class chappies from Karl Kraus the journalist, Adolf Loos the architect, Arnold Schönberg the composer and, of course, Ludwig Wittgenstein the rich-kid philosopher and dropout. Fourth, I want to believe that our current ruling class is as clueless and myopic as the ruling clique in Hapsburg Vienna.

Decline and Fall of a Ruling Class: The Habsburgs were perhaps the most successful ruling class in history. Habsburg Castle was built in 1020, and Habsburgs were heads of the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to 1740 and produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Galicia-Lodomeria. At the end of the 19th century the emperor Franz Joseph I ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Vienna. You can imagine that all the lefty rich kids chattering in the cafés of Vienna absolutely hated this tottering remnant of feudalism into the modern era.

The Habsburgs ruled on the basis of Hausmacht which translates as house-power, and I interpret as governing to preserve and protect the power of the House of Habsburg. That is to say, everything that Franz Joseph did was an act to keep the Habsburg thing going. And so it did, until the defeat in 1918. Hey, it worked, keeping the ancient family in power until World War I swept the old order away.

Philosophical Context: Philosophically, I am a Kantian: I believe that we humans cannot know "things-in-themselves," only "appearances." Put crudely, I think that we cannot know the real reality, whatever it is -- if it is. Between things-in-themselves and appearances are all the theories and assumptions and science and philosophy that flesh is heir to and that we have such a grand old time arguing about.

Now Wittgenstein grew up in the era when all the science that we now take for granted was being proposed and argued about. For instance, Heinrich Hertz  was developing a "model" theory of science and Ludwig Boltzmann was developing the idea of statistical mechanics that is now the core of quantum mechanics.

Then there was Ernst Mach who proposed to reduce "all knowledge to sensation;" so "the world is that sum total of what appears to the senses." 

Hertz in his Principles of Mechanics proposed a "model" theory of science, that tests of "a representation of mechanical phenomena are logical consistency, correspondence with empirical data, and simplicity or elegance of presentation." Wittgenstein used Principles in his university studies.

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics is too complicated to discuss here, except to note that Max Planck picked up on it.

In this way, one could eliminate finally all subjective references, to "sensations of warmth" and the like, which lingered on in Machian accounts of heat theory and replace them with rigorous mathematical descriptions.

Needless to say, Wittgenstein was a Hertzian and a Boltzmannian, not a Machian.

Cultural Clash: Let us propose the following clashing cultures: the feudal Habsburg monarchy, the various nationalities in the Habsburg empire, the rising bourgeoisie, the rising industrial workers, the Jews, the rising intelligentsia. The Habsburgs were trying to manage all this to stay in power; the nationalities were each agitating to advance their separate national interest; the bourgeoisie was creating wealth and prosperity in the new industrial era, and building ornate houses to reflect their satisfaction; the new working class was having problems because of a severe housing shortage in Vienna; the Jews were shooting into the stratosphere after centuries in the ghetto; the creative intelligentsia was fit to be tied by the insult of Habsburg power, the mindlessness of the rich bourgeoisie that thought that just copying the fashionable taste was the way to organize life, and the need to create the world anew.

Wittgenstein's family history is canonical. His father, Karl, rebelled against his father, wanting to get a technical education, which his father considered beneath his status as a "gentleman." So Karl want off to America, and went to technical school on his return.

Over the next twenty years the financial world of Vienna witnessed the meteoric rise of Karl Wittgenstein to the heights of business success. He had an extraordinary capacity for utilizing his technical knowledge to transform failing factories into booming and productive enterprises.

But this immensely creative man -- he took his violin everywhere and just about everyone in the family was a talented musician -- would not allow his children to go their own way, Elder brother Hans wanted to be a musician; dad said no, and eventually Hans committed suicide. "His second son, Rudi, committed suicide in similar circumstances[.]"

Karl Wittgenstein had all his kids educated at home by tutors. But this meant that Ludwig could not go to a Gymnasium, because he didn't know Greek. So he went to Realschule and then engineering school (like Einstein) where he read, learned, and inwardly digested The Principles of Mechanics of Heinrich Hertz.

And of course, there was the intellectual culture of chaps like Kraus, Loos, and Schönberg.

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Notice the compulsion to épater la bourgeoisie. And note how the young sprouts of Vienna represent an emerging creative class desperate to break out of their embarrassing bourgeois origins and streak across the sky as creative gods of creation.

Myopia of Our Ruling Class: Steve Sailer has a piece on "The Future of Floydism" where he ponders what on earth our ruling class thinks it is doing with the "the worship of the holy martyr George Floyd and his racial brethren." Hey, writes, Sailer, gun murders are up by 34.4% in the year After Floyd. And we don't know what proportion of the murderers were blacks. Not yet.

Unsurprisingly, nobody in The Establishment is stepping forward to forthrightly apologize and admit that, yeah, the bad people (like, say, me) were right: America’s biggest criminal justice problem is not police brutality, it’s black brutality.

But is it all a conspiracy to screw us all over, a Macchiavellian plot by the Ruling Class? Sailer thinks not.

As reassuring as it is to imagine that when disasters befall America they must be the work of an all-knowing conspiratorial deep state out to get you, it seems more likely that there is no Inner Party. Nobody knows how things really work because, like the courtiers in The Emperor’s New Clothes, anybody who expresses doubts about Floydism is, as Hans Christian Andersen said, “unfit for his office.” 

Maybe that's a good thing; maybe our ruling class doesn't have enough of a culture of Hausmacht to guide it in maintaining its power. Maybe its determination to get rid of Trump at all costs was not such a good idea. Maybe making liberal urbanist urban dwellers less safe will not end well for the rulers.

Of course, I would rather not have our ruling class exit stage left like the Habsburgs after losing a World War. That might not be too much fun. 

I have in mind that one day soon some Trump or DeSantis will get up and, like Cromwell tell our ruling class: 

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

And, like the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls they are, our ruling class will do just that. 

The People of the Creative Self

Most ordinary Americans do not raise their sights above the notion of ordinary life: following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. You might call it the agenda of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. 

But some people, as Charles Taylor writes, yearn for something higher, fuller -- you know -- creative. In his Sources of the Self Taylor calls this experience "expressive individualism." These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't just want to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. In their religion humans, not gods, are now become the creators of the world.

I call such people the People of the Creative Self.

It is important to understand how radically new and revolutionary this is.

Back in the old days humans understood that they lived under the sway of powerful gods and spirits that might, at any moment destroy them, just because. Then, in the Axial Age, humans invented new gods that created the world, announced a book of rules -- a Ten Commandments or a Hammurabi's Code -- and left humans to get on with it.

But now, with the marriage of science and technology, it seems that humans can create their own world, that with human intelligence and creativity and scientific knowledge we can fashion the world ourselves. we don't need a god to create the world and then set forth the rules; we can invent the future; we can set the rules. Gods need not apply.

But not everyone. It is clear, from the fact of oppressed peoples and other marginalized humans, that some people still experience the world as a chaotic place under the sway of malevolent forces. It is clear from the emergence of middle-class populism that there are a lot of people that just want to be told the rules so they can get on with it.

So the People of the Creative Self are a minority, but an influential minority, because they are the most educated, the most evolved. And, since their culture encourages them to create and imagine they naturally reinvent everything, from architecture to business to politics to sex. 

There is a tendency in creative people to imagine themselves as "free spirits" as opposed to the rest of mankind's "fettered spirits." As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, 

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Nietzsche doesn't like the "fettered spirit," especially because of its tendency to anathematize the "free spirit" and the "free spirit's" tendency "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." 

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

Thing is, of course, that any creative work, successful or unsuccessful, will cause what Joseph Schumpeter so famously called "creative destruction." Creative destruction means that people are going to get caught in the undertow. If you start a business with a brilliant new invention, then it is likely to put people out of work in other businesses. If you implement a brilliant political idea, it may change the world for the better and inaugurate a glorious era or peace and prosperity, or it may change the world for the worse and cause millions of deaths and ruin tens of millions of lives. Moreover, it is also true, for instance in business startups, that many are called but few are chosen. Most creative endeavors, whether in business or politics or the arts, end in failure.

As Nietzsche teaches, if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else. 

This truth has not yet penetrated to the heart of the People of the Creative Self. They are creative because they were raised to be creative. To them, a normal life is a creative life, full of interesting challenges and projects. Nobody has taught them that creativity is hard, and likely to fail. They tend to think of themselves as the beneficent Oz spreading goodness and light everywhere. They are concerned about the Precautionary Principle where fossil-fuel companies are concerned, but not with respect to their own creative plans.

But creative people run the world: get used to it.