Nobody Knows Nothing Except Cooperation

My whole life is about understanding the world in which we live: the world of the utterly unappreciated  social miracles like the "price system" and the "credit system" that are not really systems at all, but universes of humans cooperating together.



So here comes Kevin Williamson from National Review writing about the same thing.  He reminds us of Leonard Reed's great discovery: "Nobody knows how to make a pencil."  There are a few people, somewhere in this world, that know how to do bits of it.  But for the rest of us, all we need to know is how to use a pencil.

That is the paradox of social knowledge: Of course we know how to make a pencil, even though none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing their creation.

But if everyone can enjoy the use of a pencil or an iPhone, how come the Obama daughters go to a better school that the offspring of immigrants?

The reason for that is politics: not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not bad politics, but politics per se... The useful knowledge in any modern society is distributed rather than centralized... Markets work for the same reason that the Internet works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations... pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux. Market propositions are experimental propositions.

So when you have centralized systems -- of education, for example -- you get the Obama daughters getting a good education and the poor getting a lousy education.  Because that's how politics works, always and everywhere.



And then we come to the central truth, the one we do not want to confront.

 Conservatives like to say “Markets work,” as though that were an explanation of anything. What we really are saying is: “Failure works.” Corporations are mortal. Failure is not only an important part of the market process, it is the most important part of the market process.

Failure means that every corporation goes to die, because in the end it fails to adapt, fails to anticipate the market, fails to serve the consumer.  Want to find an immortal corporation?  Try politics and the US Postal Service, or Amtrak, or your local education monopoly.  They are not really immortal, but living in an half-dead zombie existence, not really producing wealth and prosperity but sucking the blood out of the living to continue a twilight existence.  Being already half-dead they do not grow or evolve.  They merely suck the life out of others.



We do not have a market system or a profit system or a price system or a credit system, for these human cooperations we insult with the notion of "system" are anything but.  They are organisms, joinings, adaptation, trust, good-will, and hard-learned lessons.



The hardest thing for everyone is to surrender to the challenge of constant change.  Everyone longs for a reprieve from change.  The disappointed liberal longs for the certainties of the 1950s when everyone had a lifetime job -- except they didn't.  The conservative longs for the halcyon days of the nuclear family -- except that it never was.  The academic longs to implement his intellectual system -- except that no system survives the first day of implementation.  But reality is much bigger than that.  It is a triumph of not of dominating system, or frantic competition, but cooperation.  Williamson again.

But what is remarkable about human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless cooperativeness. Competition is one of the ways in which we learn how best to cooperate with one another and thereby deal with the problem of complexity — it is a means to the end of social cooperation. Cooperation exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but human beings cooperate on a species-wide, planetary level, which is a relatively new development in our evolution, the consequences of which we have not yet fully appreciated. If you consider the relationship of the organism to its constituent organs, the relationship of the organ to its cells, or the relationship of the single cell to its organelles, it would not be an overstatement to say that the division of labor is the essence of life itself: Birds do it, bees do it, but human beings do it better. 

But Marx, as we recently complained, wrote that the division of labor was an inhuman and destructive alienation.  What is wrong with these people?

Liberals on Koch

Years and years ago the culture king Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics.  That was in the glory days when liberals knew they were going to inherit the earth.  Here is Hofstadter stating his thesis.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

He goes on write about fear of Illuminism, Freemasonry, the Jesuits, ending up with the paranoia of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.



Only, of course, there really were Communists in the State Department and they really were spying for the Soviet Union.



I like to say that, when people lose four presidential elections in a row, they start to get crazy, and they start to look for something under the bed.  That is what happened to the right in the late 1940s.  Also, of course, when things start to go wrong people are tempted to see the hand of Satan.



Things aren't going too well for liberals right now, and so they are inclined to look for the hand of Satan and hidden conspiracies.



Like the Koch Brothers, principal owners of Koch Industries, a private multinational corporation

involved in core industries such as the manufacturing, refining and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, ranching, finance, commodities trading, as well as other ventures and investments. The firm employs 50,000 people in the United States and another 20,000 in 59 other countries.

I don't know who first decided to gin the Kochs up as Principal Corporate Villains, but you can see the convenience of putting a human face on oil companies and conservative foundations.



Your average Exxon-Mobil is merely a public corporation led by faceless corporate bureaucrats.  The Koch brothers are libertarians that fund Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, have put a bit of money into climate skepticism, and also do things like fund a new science center at their New England prep school, Deerfield Academy.



Yes, the Koch brothers are libertarians not snaggle-toothed Christian conservatives.



Now the Koch brothers are thinking of buying the Tribune newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times that was once owned by the liberal Chandler family.  It turns out that the journalists at the Times are terrified.

The thought of the Koch brothers purchasing the Los Angeles Times so distressed staffers attending a recent in-house award ceremony that half of them raised their hands when asked if they would quit their jobs should the paper — which has come out of bankruptcy court and is very much for sale — fall into the two oil billionaires’ portfolio, the Huffington Post reported recently.

Oh please.



In my view liberals are shooting themselves in the foot by getting their knickers in a twist over the Koch brothers -- not to mention Christian conservatives, right-wing "hate groups" and corporate personhood.  It shows that liberals are worried.  And you don't want to let your enemy think that you are getting a case of the shivers.



If liberals had any sense they would be working night and day trying to figure out how to fix the mess in the economy and the train wreck that we call the welfare state.  If liberals could straighten that out it wouldn't matter what a couple of libertarian businessmen were doing or what the Christian conservatives were doing.  Liberals would be expanding their majority as Americans in their millions would come to experience the liberals as wise and sensible leaders.



But in fact the liberals are sitting in a circle complaining that the all-powerful Koch brothers aided by the wascally Wepublicans in Congress have spoiled the soup.  They have no ideas for jump-starting the economy except more government spending and more debt; they have no ideas for fixing the welfare state other than more of the same.  Oh and they think it would be a great idea to go back to the tax rates of the 1950s when everyone had a good job at good wages at a big corporation.



That's when people gravitate towards the paranoid style in American politics.  When they are flat out of ideas and flat out of get up and go.


I was talking to a liberal friend the other day.  She still thinks that Barack Obama is an intellectual.  And she is old enough to know that you cannot believe anything you read about presidents until people start to write the show-and-tell biographies long after the powerful have left the stage.



Really, the liberal obsession with the Koch brothers is the most encouraging political portent out there.  It shows that liberals have lost it.

The Theory of Willful Blindness

A while back I took a look at "Marx's Five Big Mistakes," five big things that Karl Marx got wrong.  I mean things like the immiseration of the working class, the alienation of workers by the division of labor, the labor theory of value, the idea that bureaucracy would wither away under socialism, and that people would abandon the division of labor under socialism.

But then I got to wondering about the willful blindness that keeps people even today believing in these discredited notions.  I mean this.  You have to be really determined not to see if you believe still in the immiseration of the working class.  Yet tons of people fall for it every time that some new technology wipes out some industry of neo-buggy-makers.  It's the end of the world, they say, and soon nobody will have jobs.  

Or the division of labor.  Even the career coach mavens, people like the crazed Penelope Trunk, tell us to forget being a generalist.  Specialize on something, something you will find by trial and error.  Deadly serious sociologists like Emile Durkheim write that the division of labor is a manifestation of the nature of humans as social animals.  In social setting some individuals specialize on one task and others specialize on another task.  That's why it makes sense for them to cooperate.  So how could this be alienating?

I've suggested, following Anthony Giddens, that Marx came up with his stuff because the generation of Germans in the 1840s was beside itself about the backwardness of Germany.  Here were France and Britain with modern governments and there was Germany stuck in the feudal past with its little states and its disunity.

It wasn't just Marx.  Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her 1984 book The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, suggests that the feeling of existential panic was widespread.  Things were changing so fast that people were convinced that disaster was just around the corner.

Obviously this sense of existential panic is a very human thing.  In our own time we have the panic over global warming.  Experience a trend in increasing temperature over a couple of decades and you'll get a ton of people panicking.  End of the world!

Now, the situation in England around 1800 is epitomized by the Rev. Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population first published in 1798, in which Malthus predicted that population would always outrun the resources available to sustain it.  Food increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically.  The poor were doomed.  At the time that Malthus published his first edition many people thought that Britain was losing population.  Then the Census of 1801 showed that population was increasing.  Who'd have thought it?

Actually it has turned out that Adam Smith was probably the best forecaster of those troubled times, according to Himmelfarb.

He made poverty remediable, not by interfering with the operation of natural laws but by the natural expansion of the economy that was the inevitable result of those laws.  Instead of pitting man against nature, labor against machine, class against class, worker against worker, he presumed an essential harmony of interests, in which everyone would benefit from the "natural progress of opulence."

That's what actually happened.  In 1800 the modern progress of opulence was just getting started, and still, it may be that you ain't seen nothing yet.

To Himmelfarb, it appears that a concern for the poor is a consequence of prosperity.  Alexis de Tocqueville went to England in the 1830s and was astonished both at the prosperity he encountered and also the numbers of the poor.  Himmelfarb writes of his opinion:

While "the English poor appear almost rich to the French poor; and the latter are so regarded by the Spanish poor," the number of paupers in each of these countries was in inverse relationship to the actual condition of the poor.

It's as though we experience things as worse the better they get.  And why not "do something" about the poor once you have the level of opulence to do it?

This is the real existential challenge for conservatives.  Elites are always going to panic over something or other.  It's what a ruling class does to justify its importance.  It panicked over the poor in 1800.  Over the working class in the 1840s.  Over the deserted farm in the 1930s.  Over global cooling in the 1970s.  Over "peak oil" in the 1990s.  Over global warming in the 2000s.

It's the job of conservatives to dampen these wild pendulum swings.  Because whatever the panic around the next corner, what in the world is going to improve things better than the natural human adaptability implemented in the price system and the credit system?  Certainly, it cannot possibly be another bureaucratic program run by the ruling class.

There's probably a deep reason why people are always so willfully blind.  It may be because every living thing must ignore most of the stimulus it receives through its five senses and only respond to things that are genuinely life-threatening.  So we are blind to most of the things in the world.

But the trick is to make sure that we aren't turning away from the one important stimulus that really is going to kill us.

And that's not easy to deal with.  It's probably why we humans are so diverse.  Some people respond one way to a crisis and some respond another way.  Chances are that one of us will be right, and the human experiment will continue.

The Greater Pigford Problem

Big Whoopee.  The New York Times has finally done a bit of investigating into the Pigford scandal, and found it a cesspit of corruption.



The original scandal was the the US Department of Agriculture had discriminated against some black farmers in the awarding of crop loans.  In 1999 the Clinton Administration agreed to pay $50,000 to each farmer that had been discriminated against in the period 1981 to 1996.  But it turned out that the cure was worse than the disease as tens of thousands of blacks signed up for free money.



Even Barack Obama got into the act, in 2007.

In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama pushed for allowing late claims to be processed and setting up another billion-dollar payoff fund, in what became known as Pigford II, setting off a free-for-all. As of February 2006, “over 97,000 people had filed claims under the consent decree or requests to file late claims.”

How many black farmers had been discriminated against?  One USDA administrator reckoned, in testimony to Congress: "about fifty."



The problem here is not merely corruption, or the use of race to beat up on people making accusations about corruption.  It is the bigger problem of retributive politics.  Let alone redistributive politics.



What good does it do to hand around free money to any politically favored group when the group as a whole is cratering in the larger economy?



Here we have President Obama, the First Black President.  You'd think he'd really concentrate on formulating policy and executing on it so that the lives of black people would really improve.



You'd think.



But the results are now coming in.  Blacks are doing worse than the average American in the Obama economy.  Much worse.  In January 2009 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent.  In March 2013 it was 7.6 percent.



For whites the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 7.1 percent.  Now it is 6.7 percent.





For blacks the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 12.7 percent.  Now it is 13.3 percent.

For black youth the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 34.8 percent.  Now it is 33.8 percent.

What we are seeing is same old same old.  From a president that promised to transform America.

You can check the numbers here.

So, what's the point of a First Black President if he can't do anything at the macroeconomic level for blacks?

Let's assume that the president really wants to help people of color.  Let's assume that he really wants to improve the lives, and especially the economic lives, of black people.

Given such a record of failure, you would have to assume that the president has pursued exactly the wrong policy to make life better for blacks.  Assuming that he honestly wants to do the right thing, you would have to assume that he doesn't have a clue what the right thing is.  Or worse, that the policy he thinks is the right thing is in fact tragically mistaken, and doesn't help blacks in the least.

In fact we had a curious confirmation of that last week when it turned out the sector that did best economically in the first two years of the Obama administration was the top 7 percent.

Why was that?  Well, the rich did well because their stocks rebounded from the 2008 crash while the home prices for the 93 percent didn't rebound.

Gee now, I wonder why?  Could it be that the average person was encouraged by the government to get way overleveraged by government programs that subsidized home mortgages?  And that the government subsidies led to a bubble in home prices?  And that the government in particular encouraged loans to sub-prime borrowers, particularly minorities?  And that minorities were hardest hit by the subsequent crash in home prices, because they had the least equity in their homes?

Do you think that maybe, after President Obama is gone and that racial minorities no longer have their racial pride to look after, that minority voters will respond to a political meme that declares the Democrats just don't have a clue what they are doing?

Because, really, the economic policy of the Democratic Party is really Pigford writ large.  Democrats believe that the way to help minorities is to find a racial scab and scratch it.  Find a racial wrong and pay reparations to the victims.

But the problem is that after the wrong has been righted and the reparations paid and the free stuff handed out to the Democratic Party supporters, the problem is still there.  

The victims have to get out and get a job.  How would they do that when the Democrats have been training them fo decades to believe in winning the political lottery as the meaning of life?

What End of Entitlement?

Now he tells us.  The age of entitlement is over; the promises are worthless.  That's the word from the Washington Post's sensible Robert Samuelson.

We had a grand vision. We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. We expected business cycles, economic insecurity, poverty, and racism to end. We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. For those who couldn't live life to its fullest (as a result of old age, disability, or bad luck), we expected a generous social safety net to guarantee decent lives. We blurred the distinction between progress and perfection.

There were four big assumptions at the heart of this, according to Samuelson: first, that we could control the business cycle; second, that we could enjoy lifetime jobs at big corporations; third, that improving productivity could pay for bigger government; and fourth, that lifestyle choices came free.



All wrong.  So now what do we do?



No answer, of course.



Let's put it this way.  There is no way we can avoid a crack-up, because people have been told, and believe, that all you need to do, as Samuelson quotes Bill Clinton, is "work hard and play by the rules, [and] you’ll have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams."



People interpret that to mean that all they have to do is sit on their butts, doing whatever they are doing, and they deserve to get supported by government.  The system will take care of them.



But life's not like that; it never has been.  The idea that hard work and following the rules is necessary and sufficient for the good life is a political chimera.  Yeah!  I put in my time.  I got my benefits coming.  I earned them.



It is not true that all we have to do is design and build a system, whether a corporate system at General Motors or a government system for Social Security and Medicare.  That's not how the world works.  And the neo-Marxists at the Frankfurt School understood that when they said that reason was domination.  Reason is always trying to impose a system on the world, whether it is a system to understand the world, a system to dominate the world, or a system to make the world go away.



You can't reduce the world to a system.  The world changes and adapts and surprises every moment.  To live in the world you have to be willing to change, adapt, and get surprised every moment.  If you don't submit to that then you are setting yourself up to be slapped upside the head.



Like right now.



So now we must start again.  We must wipe away the tears of disappointment, and cool the rage of ill-usage.  We must clear our minds and start to deal with the world as it is, not as we were taught.  Almost all religions call on their adherents to surrender to the world.  You can see why.  You can hope for salvation and for enlightenment, but first you have to live in the world as it is.



Now, of course, we already have remarkable adaptations that humans have developed to cope with the world as it is.  One of them is the family.  Another is the division of labor.  Another is the price system. Another is the credit system.  There is the tapestry of voluntary associations and civil society.  All of these are human social constructs that fall short of rigid system, but wonderfully facilitate human cooperation and sociability.



Think of it.  People care most for those nearest and dearest by blood.  So all societies down the ages have encouraged healthy families.  All except our modern progressives.  People prefer to become master of one rather than a jack of all trades.  But Marx said that the division of labor caused alienation of the worker from his species-essence.  The price system and the credit system are wonderful devices for channeling human labor into the ways that get people what they want and need.  So liberals do everything they can to attack the price system and subvert the credit system.  And civil society is much kinder and more compassionate to human needs and suffering than the force matrix of government.  So liberals destroyed the safety net of fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century.



Why don't we go there and embrace the social adaptations from family to civil society?  Because the serpent tempted me, and I did eat.  Everyone is a sucker for a shortcut; everyone is convinced of his own virtue and his own right to the good things of life.  Everyone likes a birthday gift, a cadeau, a regalo: free stuff.  Hey, we're owed, we're entitled.



Well, now the god of system has failed.  Now we have to pick up the pieces and start again.



The only question is whether we will suck it in or continue to squabble over the fast disappearing spoils of the administrative welfare state up to the very day that the last goodie, the last benefit, the last chunk of free stuff is gone.  Cue the Fram oil filter guy.



Nobody knows how it will all turn out.  But we can work, and we can hope.

The Age of the Scrounger

If you are a conservative or Republican, chances are that you are a member in good standing of the People of the Responsible Self.

Nothing remarkable here.  The Responsible Self was invented during the Axial Age, according to Robert Bellah.  The idea developed that humans were not simply the helpless chattels of the gods but individuals, responsible before God for their lives.  It's the difference between the world of the Iliad in which the Greek warriors win or lose battles according to the politics on Mount Olympus and the world of the Hebrew prophets in which the Jews are urgently advised to get themselves straight with God.

But what about the rank-and-file Democratic voter?  I've been cudgeling my brain for weeks on this, just like dear old Alger Hiss back in the glory days of liberalism.  The key thing about a Democratic voter in the administrative welfare state is that she is not responsible.  She is marginalized, oppressed: a victim, so how could she be blamed for anything?

But what is the word, the one word, for someone like that.  Indignant? Malingering? Childish? Shameless? A day or so I came up with "subordinate," but that doesn't quite do it, because subordinates can be loyal and devoted, and the person I am thinking about is someone that doesn't think of themselves as part of a team but as an ill-used wife.

Wait!  That's it.  We are talking about the People of the Ill-used Self.  She is someone just sitting there, expecting to be taken care of.  Because she has been so ill-used.  Meanwhile she is scrounging off society for whatever is out there going for free.

I am not proposing this lightly, but as part of a comprehensive world view.

You see, back in the old days, humans were all happy campers living a cooperative collective life in the agricultural village.  Life was hard, but the risks and the perils were shared in the primitive communism of e.g. the Russian mir.

OK, in reality it wasn't like that at all because at all times some peasants had a fairly strong title to the land they farmed and others were practically slaves.  But the average agricultural village did pay its taxes in common and did reapportion land periodically in accordance with family size.

Enter the "enclosure" movement.  Our lefty friends like to represent this as the murrain of 1760 to 1850 but it is clear that it started hundreds of years before, as landowners started to acquire exclusive rights to land that had previously been held in common.

What was enclosure all about?  I suspect it had to do with an evolution in agricultural technique so that fewer hands were needed to farm and produce the crops.  But the downside was that people who lived on the margins of a village found themselves unable to access the land they were used to and were thrown on the scrapheap.

You'd expect that people like that would feel ill-used.  And they would be reduced to the life of a scrounger.  The fabled working class and the proletariat were, of course, the people that were thrown off the land in the late 18th and early 19th century and ended up working in textile manufactories and coal mines.  They felt ill-used.  They were right.

Right about then a great social revolution occurred in which the old landed ruling class got replaced by a new ruling class.  People like Karl Marx maintained with great fanfare that the new ruling class was the bourgeoisie, but really, he got it wrong.  The new ruling class was the rising intelligentsia of the 18th century, the coffee-house crowd like Samuel Johnson in England and the Encyclopedists in France.  The new ruling class was a class of educated publicists.  I call them the People of the Creative Self, or the Romantic Self, or the Educated Self.

This new class saw its opportunity and it took it.  It put itself at the head of the great mass of the ill-used, and declared them to be the salt of the earth.

There is no doubt that the folks getting pitched out of the agricultural world during the industrial revolution had a pretty hard time, although just how hard is difficult to determine through the fog of special pleading.  After all, it was in 1800 in Britain that all of a sudden the children of the poor started doing better than their parents in a world of rising expectations.

But the new class turned the worthy People of the Ill-Used Self into the deracinated People of the Scrounger Self, as they transformed the natural fear and rage of a people dispossessed into the institutionalized scrounging of the dependents of the administrative welfare state.

And that is the world in which we live:  the Age of the Scrounger.

Bush's Legacy

As the good and the great attend the opening of President Bush's presidential library people are suddenly discovering that Bush wasn't so bad after all. No kidding!  You mean he wasn't a complete failure and extremist as we have all been ordered to believe?



I suppose that President Bush's biggest failure is that this decent and cooperative president didn't do enough to counter the Democratic campaign to make him into a crazed warmongering extremist.



Because the fact is that the overwhelming majority of his policies were mainstream and bipartisan.  He pushed No Child Left Behind, a centralization and federalization of education that Democrats had to love.  He passed the Medicare Part D drug bill, that had been a Democratic issue for years.



He pushed back on 9/11 to spank the mullahs in Afghanistan, and did regime change in Iraq, which you may recall was Clinton administration policy.  What he did not do was cut and run in 2006 when his Iraq policy was in ruins.



If we turn to the financial crisis, that wasn't about "fighting two wars on a credit card. "



Earth to Democrats: all wars are fought on a credit card.  Ever heard of the National Debt?  What is really bad is running the whole welfare state on a credit card.  As in trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.



No, the big problem was the easy credit policy that had obtained ever since the Plaza Accord of 1985 ended the hard money policy of the Paul Volker Fed and ended in the Fannie Freddie sub-prime mortgage orgy of the mid 2000s.  What should Bush have done about that?  Hard to say, because the rest of the political establishment was pushing cheap credit right up to the last minute, from Nancy Pelosi complaining about a "jobless recovery" in 2002 to Barney Frank calling for another roll of the Fannie dice in 2004 as the Bushies pushed for reform.



Many conservatives fault Bush for not being conservative enough.  They forget that the country wasn't in a mood for conservatism when Bush ran.  That's why he called himself a "compassionate conservative."  People were all jazzed about the federal budget surplus in 1998 and were ready to loosen the budget strings a little.  So Bush went with the consensus.  After 9/11 Bush felt that he should work on unifying the country for a long twilight war against Islamic extremism, and didn't want to create division.  That's what he meant with his line that he was a uniter not a divider.  Pity that Democrats had other ideas.



The fact is that Bush was a mainstream president, pushing a little to the right, and that is what the nation wanted at the time.  What it needed is something else.



What the nation needs is to get off the death-ride of the administrative welfare state.  What conservatives need to do is persuade the American people that the conservative prescription of limited government and unlimited civil society is a good thing that will both be good for them as individuals and families and good for the nation as a whole.



The problem is liberals.  They own the culture, and they will demonize anything that conservatives propose to "do something" about the mess we are in.  They are the ruling class and that's what ruling classes do.



When we talk about a "pre-revolutionary" situation we mean a situation in which the authority of the ruling class is coming into question.  It means that ordinary people are beginning to question whether the ruling class knows what it is doing.



Think France in the decades coming up to 1789.  The old ruling class of the monarchy and the Church and the nobility went from disaster to disaster and people started to coalesce under the leadership of a new class of thinkers and publicists.  It was the "new class" that is still today the ruling class in the West.



Nothing can change until the present ruling class has staggered from disaster to disaster for a decade or so and had lost its "mandate of heaven."  Then we shall see.



By then, of course, President George W. Bush will be remembered practically as a saint.