Changing the Societal Security Code

I'm listening to the mindless blow-by-blow CNN Paris feed at my daughter's house in California, and I'm thinking how clueless the liberal conventional-wisdom journalists are as they interact with their contacts in the security bureaucracy.

But yesterday I read the piece by Richard Fernandez titled "Security Code." Riffing off the female Charlie Hebdo staffer that punched in the security code to let the terrorists into the building he writes:

Do you think our elites won’t punch the door buttons to let the killers in to shoot us? They already have. They already have.

Soon enough, he writes, things will have to change. Our ruling class is clinging desperately to its religion, the religion of "multiculturalism, social deconstruction and redistribution". It is in too deep to "doubt the faith now." It must maintain "the innocence of Islamism as an article of faith", it must. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

So nothing can happen in the west until we "tear our politics apart" with our ruling class ripped from its comfortable kneelers in front of the altar of political correctness. In other words the cognitive dissonance for our ruling class has to get unbearable for them before we can deal with the Muslim menace.

Yesterday I wrote about the two lefty responses to the industrial revolution, the revolutionary response that organized the working class to defeat the bourgeoisie and the "little darling" response that mommied the working class with legislation and benefits. Our modern ruling class, it seems to me, is a coalition of both traditions. The "little darlings" of the liberals, who today are blacks, Hispanics, educated women and gays, are encouraged by the "activism" culture to think that they are bravely protesting and marching against the Man, when really they are little darlings of the liberals sucking at the teat of Mother government and indulged by their doting parents.

But the challenge of the industrial revolution is to take the hicks from the sticks and turn them into nice disciplined middle class citizens. No problem with the girls; you can take them straight from the farm and put them to work in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts or the iPhone sweatshops of China. But the boys are a different story. Usually they terrify the bourgeoisie for a generation and socialize themselves into menacing criminal gangs, like the Irish, the Italians, and the blacks in the US.

Really, when you think about it, leftist politics couldn't be better designed to delay and prolong the socialization into the responsible middle class of the young immigrants to the city. Up to now, that hasn't been a devastating problem because the immigrants assimilated into the middle class in spite of leftist politics.

But now we have the great global Muslim migration to the city and this time it may be that the leftist "little darling" politics of cultural Marxism is going to succeed in preventing assimilation of a good percentage of the Muslim immigrants.

Do you see what I am getting to? I am saying that up to now the internal contradictions of leftist politics were not enough to prevent the socialization of the immigrants into the middle class. But now it may be that the assimilation of the Muslim immigrants to the city will be halted and even reversed unless we neutralize leftist politics and violently suppress the pre-modern culture of Islam in western cities.

As Richard Fernandez suggests, we can't solve the problem of the rebellion against the culture of the city by the latest cohort of immigrants -- who happen to be Muslim -- unless we neutralize the poison of leftist politics that runs in the veins of our center-left ruling class.

So our ruling class has a choice. It can counter the Muslim threat before it gets replaced by an angry electorate. Or it can wait until after it gets replaced.

Either way, We the People are going to have to change the security code pretty soon.

Muddling Along with the Islam Question

What do we do about Islam? That's the question in all our minds after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris on January 7, 2015.

My short answer, frankly, is: Nothing.

That's because I don't think we are at a moment where we can gather the western world into a unified political, military, economic and ideological response.

It is clear that the Bush response after 9/11 didn't work. Sure, the US could throw Afghanistan into a mess, and remove the revolting Saddam Hussein from power. But then what?

On the other hand, we conservatives wring our hands over the center-left ruling class response. The one thing our ruling class knows is that fascism is the worst thing in the world and that the European people will turn into brownshirts and blackshirts the moment that "our" educated evolved backs are turned. So they are terrified by "islamophobia" and a return to the politics of 1935.

Maybe. But my take on the danger of fascism and right-wing extremism is that 20th century fascism was a response to the failure of the European ruling class.

All any ruling class needs to do is provide the political and economic basis for ordinary people to make a decent living. No wars, no inflations, no depressions. Failing that, it's Katy bar the door.

The trouble is that sensible economic policy and politics requires a ruling class that thinks less about its power and more about its service. And the record of history is that this is too much to ask of a ruling class, because people get into politics because they like to fight and they want to acquire power. So it gets into the most frightful messes. And then the people lose faith in their leadership and look for alternatives.

Let's back off and indulge in a Chris Chantrill tour d'horizon. That's French for the view from 30,000 feet.

We humans are in the latter stages of the greatest transformation that humans have ever seen. The people of the earth are giving up life as farmers and taking up life as city dwellers. People used to live on farms and mostly grow food for their own consumption. They also exchanged the fruits of their labor for products and services, but not much.

Today we live in cities and almost all our life is lived in the exchange economy where we exchange our labor for money, and money for everything in our lives from food and shelter to the myriad of consumer goods.

As is the way of revolutionary change, we were right in the middle of it before people woke up and said: What's going on here! Attitudes changed from the chap in 1688 who wrote that the new manufacturing could make us all ten times richer, to the revolutionaries of 1848 who said that the world was coming to an end because everyone would be immiserated to a bare existence by the pitiless actions of the market.

You could say that there have been three responses to the industrial revolution in the West. The first, what we might call the Protestant Ethic, is to adapt our lives and our culture to the demands of the new city exchange economy. We might call this the "get with the program" response. The second, the revolutionary response, is to damn the leaders of the exchange economy, the bourgeois bankers and industrialists, to hell for exploiting the workers and to fundamentally transform politics and economics to remove the devil in our midst. The third, the "little darling" response, is to treat the folks struggling to make it in the city as helpless children, and soften their lives with a government safety net and a welfare state.

My own response is contained in my ebook, The Road to the Middle Class. I argue that the best way to thrive in the city is to get evangelical Christianity and become a responsible individual, get an education, get involved in mutual aid associations, and learn how to live under law. But there is a problem with this approach. It lacks a leading role for the ruling class, and that is a very big deal.

Today's ruling class in the west is a mixture of would-be revolutionaries like President Obama that believe in "fundamental transformation" and would-be mommies that want to keep their "little darlings" safe in a patronage-clientage relation with the political elite. The problem is that both approaches are founded on the idea that it is not the new arrivals to the city that need to change; it is the "system."

So it was that for a century the ruling class babied the working class, giving their labor unions extraordinary monopoly powers so that they killed their host corporations, and instead of teaching the working class how to save against a rainy day and for retirement with the magic of compound interest bought their votes with government pensions paid for out of taxes, not out of saving and investment.

When the ruling class tired of the working class they found new victims and "little darlings:" blacks, Hispanics, well-born women and well-born gays.

The latest group to arrive in the city are the Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East, and naturally they are having a rough time adapting to the revolutionary difference between life in the country and life in the city. In a country like France with a full-blown welfare state it is very hard for the new immigrants to break into the urban economy. Government regulation of the labor market makes it extremely expensive to hire people, especially untutored, un-acculturated Muslims. So the Muslims fester in the banlieux of Paris on welfare and their assimilation and acculturation to the exchange economy of the city is hampered and delayed.

Life for immigrants to the city is extremely frustrating, and none more than young immigrant males. They typically form gangs and terrify the previous generations of immigrants to the city who now have figured out how to live and thrive in the city. In the end, they seem to get with the program.

In my view, the number one job of human society is the socialization of young males.

Ever since the dawn of agriculture we have tried to socialize young males away from their instincts, which is to conduct dawn raids on the neighboring village, and teach them to be disciplined and dependable workers and husbands. It was hard enough to do in the agricultural village; it's a bigger challenge in the city with its anonymity.

Now it is my recent assertion that the two gods of the modern era, freedom for the right and liberation for the left, are false idols. Let me tell you why. The fact is that, in the city exchange economy, there is no freedom; there cannot be. We cannot do what we want; we are all fettered, chained to the market system. We must toil day by day to serve our fellow citizens and there is no escape. Nor is there liberation; liberation in the city is a fantasy. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) inadvertently told us that when she said that Obamacare would let artists and writers quit their day jobs. (Oh yeah! You try it!) Wrong! The truth is that there is no liberation from the market economy. Oh sure, the market economy has poured a bounty of wealth into our laps. But that bounty comes at a price, and the price is that we are all "caged" into the exchange economy and there is no way out.

But what about the Muslim terrorists? The answer is simple. The modern economy cannot endure such a challenge to its regime of peaceful cooperation in the city. If the Muslim terrorists succeed they will destroy the city exchange economy, and we will see a collapse in the global economy that will make the collapses in the Little Ice Age look like a walk in the park.

There is only one way forward. The young Muslims attracted to the age old culture of the "dawn raid" must be socialized to the life of the city. They must be tamed, just like all the other young men that immigrated to the city before them.

Unfortunately, our ruling class, both its revolutionary adepts and its "little darling" adepts, aren't yet ready to see that. So things will have to get worse before they get better.

The Glamour of "Activism"

Ever since a friend told me last year that she'd always wanted to get into "activism," I've been thinking. What is it about "activism?" And why don't I like it?

I carried the question in my mind through the activism over the Ferguson shooting and the "rape culture" autumn and the Staten Island asphyxiation.

To say nothing of the social media butterflies at Islamic State.

Now comes Virginia Postrel, libertarian writer. I have a copy of The Future and Its Enemies but I never got around to reading it. But in 2004 Postrel co-wrote with Phil Patton and others Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture. Then she went solo in 2013 with The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. But wait, there's more. Back in 2013 Postrel wrote a piece for Time on "Glamour and Terror." And now she's written a piece for Bloomberg which gets right to the point: "The Glamour of Islamic State."

And now this morning we have the terrorist attack in Paris complete with glamorous AK-47s and rocket launchers.

But let's not be shrinking violets here. Let's not just talk about the glamour of a terrorist bloodbath. The attraction to "activism" among nice educated middle-class girls in college is the glamour. I think of Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain: "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."

Whaddya think I am, Lina? Dumb or somethin'?

That's the point. For all the promise of wonderful prosperous educated professional lives, it all comes down to hum-drum. Oh sure, some guy will get to be a Peter Thiel and some gal will get to be a Sheryl Sandberg. But for most of us, it's a life of hum-drum, working in the middle of some bureaucratic organization.

Glamour is the cheap way out of that. And today in the schools and the university they teach young skulls full of mush that the way to find meaning in your life is in activism.

Now, in reality, leading a group of marginalized people, as President Obama did for a season back in his twenties, is a rather dull and unrewarding experience. That's why the future president bagged the community activist stuff and sought the glamour of bigger game. He got into the swim of Chicago liberal politics and wafted aloft as everyone's Magic Negro.

But for most ordinary, dutiful, young middle-class kids, activism is a direct route to glamour. It is, as Tom Wolfe realized half a century ago, "radical chic." Think Che Guevara tee-shirts. That's what the stone-stupid Brunch Bunch think as they disrupt nice Manhattan liberals at their Sunday brunch. Yeah, don't worry; Michelle Malkin is on it. You can tell Brunch Bunch have all taken their Activism 101 class because they all spout the same stultifying non-negotiable demands rhetoric in their tweets that we've grown to know and love.

Of course, it makes complete sense that the over-under Democratic coalition should teach its "over" youth how to lead the "under" part of the coalition in "peaceful protests" and "marches." But if you are in the middle, a responsible individualist in the working class or the middle class, you may wonder how long this is going to go on.

The answer is simple. It will go on until we, the majority in the middle, put a stop to it.

Because the whole point of the culture of responsible individualism is that you don't reach for glamour and you don't worship it either. The ethos of responsible individualism is that you just think about what to do next to contribute to your world: at work, in the family, towards friends and neighbors.

Glamour has nothing to do with it.

We Humans are Subordinate Worms

In his three volume sociological epic, The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann of London's LSE introduces the notion of "caging."

Presumably this notion owes something to Max Weber's famous "iron cage." Mann uses the notion in discussing the rise of alluvial agriculture in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. His idea is that the agriculturalists doing alluvial agriculture were not able to get up and walk away from their rulers. They needed the political infrastructure that protected them and their agricultural surplus from raiders and the economic infrastructure of irrigation that gave them their bountiful harvest. So they were stuck.

In our day we like to talk about freedom from the hierarchical society of the agricultural age. But, really, how much freedom do we really enjoy? Are we not "caged" even more than the early agriculturalists, not to mention the feudal peasants that we like to marginalize.

At least the agriculturalists could live for months on their own. They had stored grain; they had domestic animals for milk and meat; they had varied skills to keep life going.

But we moderns are completely helpless. We depend on electricity for everything from heat to cooking; rare is the family that has a stack of wood out in back. We depend on supermarkets to deliver food to us every day; rare is the family that has stored any food against disaster. And we work for the Man, not as peasants did, at some distance from the local lord, but directly, every day, as a subordinate employee in a small business, a large corporation, or a monster government bureaucracy.

We talk a pretty good line about freedom, if we are conservatives and libertarians, and emancipation and liberation if we are liberals and lefties, but in practice we subordinate ourselves to the system, and we seem to like it.

I'm talking about "subordination" as defined by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. I've discussed Simmel and subordination here, here, and here.

Oh we complain about subordination. We grumble that "they" haven't fixed the pothole in our street, or that "they" have screwed up the economy. We complain about our lousy boss at work. But we are far too comfortable in our subordinate cage to actually do anything about it.

I like to talk and write about humans as social animals, as organisms that thrive through cooperation. But maybe that's mostly fantasy. The reality is that social animals are subordinate animals; they live by subordinating themselves to a ruler: the alpha male.  In humans this alpha male is the president, the village "big man," or the family patriarch. Or, more recently, the feminist scold.

So let's do a "reset." Let's stipulate that the conservative-libertarian idea of freedom is a pipe-dream; let's stipulate that the lefty ideas about solidarity and liberation are nonsense. In reality, people want to find a community to which they can subordinate themselves in security and comfort.

Then the question becomes: choose your poison. Do you want to subordinate yourself to the market system, to prices, to supervisors, to customers, to CEOs? Or do you want to subordinate yourself to politicians, bureaucrats, activists, and precinct captains?

Maybe, then, the point of politics is to regulate the terms of subordination. What rights has the market or your boss over you? And what rights does the politician, the expert, the activist have to tax your and push you around?

Not quite as exciting as freedom and liberation.

Liberals Really are the Best People, Says NYT

If you were planning the Sunday New York Times for the first Sunday in the New Year, what better than a piece from Richard Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class?

Richard Florida is a member of that elite corps of university professors that sat down and wrote a non-fiction bestseller. You can see why Florida has hit the jackpot. His thesis in Creative Class is that "millions of Americans are beginning to work and live" like artists and scientists, as creative people, members of the 38 million strong "Creative Class." These creative people are coming together in "ideopolises" like Washington DC, Raleigh-Durham, Boston, and Austin, where the Creative Class represents over 35% of the workforce.

This sort of talk is very seductive to liberals, because ever since the Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century, they have believed in the god of creativity rather than the God of Abraham. In my writing I talk about responsible individualism, which arises from trade and the exchange economy in the city. That is where the ordinary middle class live. But there is also expressive individualism, the cult of creativity, which really gets started in the 19th century. Here is how I describe the growth of the creative culture in "The Bonds of Faith."

Charles Taylor in A Secular Age sees these three narratives — Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Marxism — combining to form a “nova effect,” an explosion of secularity that began with “an exclusive alternative to Christian faith” in the 18th century.  The initial explosion was followed by diversification in the 19th century, extending to the Nietzschean break with the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit. Finally in the last 50 years the nova has exploded to reach beneath elites to whole societies and includes “a generalised culture of 'authenticity', or expressive individualism,” of doing your own thing.

And that is what educated twentysomethings think they are doing when they move to urban hot-spots and wear artistical black.

So the job of Richard Florida in last Sunday's New York Times is to tie creativity and blue states and all good things together, and show that the extractive economy of the red states is a kind of parasite on the creative output of the Creative Class in the blue states.

Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois, whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs.

But this is not good. According to Florida, the reddification of politics last November means that "America's prosperity is in jeopardy." The problem is that

Blue state knowledge economies are also extremely expensive to operate. Their innovative edge turns on a high-cost infrastructure of research universities and knowledge institutions — a portion of which demand public subsidy. Their size and density require expensive subway and transit systems to move people around. Blue state cities like New York and San Francisco are booming, but they are hampered by potholes and crumbling infrastructure, troubled public school systems, growing inequality and housing unaffordability, and entrenched poor populations, all of which mean higher public costs and higher tax burdens.

You see, blue states "are pioneering the new economic order that will determine our future — one that turns on innovation and knowledge rather than the raw production of goods." Meanwhile "red states spend less per capita on education, infrastructure and social welfare than their blue state counterparts" and are content to poach free stuff from the blue state knowledge economy.

The idea that the red states can enjoy the benefits provided by the blue states without helping to pay for them (and while poaching their industries with the promise of low taxes and regulations) is as irresponsible and destructive of our national future as it is hypocritical.

You can see that Richard Florida is a Gruberist. He believes that educated experts should design and implement administrative systems to deliver cities where we can incubate "innovation and knowledge." And the rest of us should be made to pay for it.

You could say that the opposite is true. You could say that the blue states represent the end stage of a one-size-fits-all industrialism that is presently crashing and burning, as in Detroit. You could say that in a world where you can deliver tablets to kids in a village in Ethiopia and have them figure out the ABC song in two weeks and how to hack the camera within six months that there is no need for expensive blue states with their expensive subsidized lifetime employment for professors and administrators. Because we are all creative now.

But that's not the future that Creative Class booster Richard Florida sees.

As long as the highly gerrymandered red states can keep on delivering the economic goods to their voters, concerted federal action on transportation, infrastructure, sustainability, education, a rational immigration policy and a strengthened social safety net will remain out of reach. These are investments that the future prosperity of the nation, in red states and blue states alike, requires.

It's comical really. Florida is telling us that the creative future, which I would interpret means relying on "emergence" and what George Gilder calls "surprise," depends on a bureaucratic system, the system of government programs to deliver transportation, infrastructure, and the rest of the liberal agenda.

Maybe he's right. But I doubt it. I suspect that we are far more likely to see a period of "creative destruction" in the blue states that a bureaucratic renaissance paid for by new taxes on the red states.

But you have to say: Richard Florida delivers what the educated lady readers of the New York Times want to read. Good for him.

There is No Such Thing as "Peaceful Protest"

Our liberal friends have a little problem. Their political strategy of leading the lower orders forces them to condone the normal political tactic of the lower orders: the street riot.

There is nothing shameful in this; humans have since the dawn of time settled their differences by war. But our liberal friends live under the conceit that they are different. They believe in peace and justice. Unlike the racists, sexists, homophobes, patriarchs and warmongers.

It is, of course, merely comical that racist agitators like Reverend Al Sharpton have reversed this political catchphrase about peace and justice into the direct threat of "no justice, no peace."

But politics in the modern era must deal with the idea that violence is scandalous. We moderns think that we ought to be able to settle our differences without violence. But many people that think this also think that politics is the way to create social peace.

In fact, the best way to understand politics is that it is civil war by other means. It is a couple of notches down from the violence of civil war, and as such deals in threats of violence rather than actual violence. The whole game of politics becomes a series of sham fights: the battle of elections; the battle of public opinion; the battle of legislation.

Sensible people understand that it is best to soft-pedal the confrontational aspects of politics. That is why sensible politicians declare peace and amity after an election: we are all Americans now, they say. That is why sensible politicians attempt only to pass legislation that can command a bipartisan majority. That way we can all attest to the fiction that "we all agree" that the government should spend money (forcibly removed from working Americans) to fund Social Security or Medicare.

But politics is always warped by the fact that the people that go into politics are people that like to fight. They like a good old political dust-up; they want to dominate and humiliate the other side. But they are hobbled by the fact that most people don't like the disturbance to social peace that politics creates. So they must lie about it.

That is why our lefty friends have created euphemisms for the street violence for which they hanker. What were once called riots became marches, then demonstrations, and now peaceful protest. What were once called political agitators are now called community organizers. It is all a lie. The whole point of all politics is to rally your side to fight for victory and demoralize the other side into giving up, preferably without a fight.

There is nothing remarkable in this. It is encoded in the military philosophy of the Chinese Sun Tzu. Rule One was that the best way to win a war was without a fight by persuading the other side to give up without a war.

That is the purpose of the "peaceful protest" or the demonstration. It is a show of force designed to persuade the government or other authority to give in to the "non-negotiable" demands of the protesters without a fight.

But the point is that the "peaceful protest" is still an act of war. It is designed to intimidate and to cause the government to change its policy.

Of course, in many ways the "peaceful protest" is more efficacious as a war strategy than actual violence. The resort to actual riots and destruction of property in the aftermath of the Ferguson shooting and the Staten Island death have demonstrated this. The riots and threats to police have tended to frighten people and cause them to look to the government and the police to protect them from looters and rioters. And the actual killing of two New York City policemen makes a mockery of the conceits of "peaceful protest" and reveal the aggressive political philosophy of social warfare that the pseudo-peaceful catchphrases are intended to conceal.

Conservatives recognize that all politics is war. We look past the shameful conceits of liberal politics to a post-welfare state society in which politics plays a much smaller role. We reject the idea, after two centuries in which the ordinary person has gone from a daily income of $3 to $100, that there remain fundamental inequalities and injustices that only government spending can redeem. We say that the incidence of force is way too high when government is spending (i.e., seizing) 35 percent of the national product to hand out to its supporters. We say that individuals, combined into voluntary associations, could and should be doing the heavy lifting of caring for and educating the poor. We say that the market does the best job of selecting the best products for the best price, policed by the developed law of commerce and fraud not prescriptive government regulations.

But today in 2015 it is clear, when you talk to ordinary people, that most of us believe that the heavy hand of force is necessary to secure justice for people in the day-to-day life of working and consuming. People do not seem to believe that good, diligent workers are highly prized by good, honest employers. They do not understand that every good, decent, producer of goods and services toils daily to deliver the best that money can buy to the consumer, knowing that anything less leads to failure and bankruptcy.

And worst of all, people do not seem to understand that the more power you give to government to smite its foes, the more power you give to government to control you, especially when the "other guys" get into power.

But let us start by calling things by their right names. There is no such thing as "peaceful protest." It conceals more than it reveals, and it is a recipe for social breakdown and strife.

The Dirty Secret About Privilege in America

Our liberal friends are full of the notion of privilege: male privilege, white privilege, check your privilege. It's so annoying.

But what can we do about it?

Let's start with the facts. In 2015, in the good old USA, there is only one kind of privilege. It is liberal privilege.

Now privilege, according to Google is:

a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

It says it all. The only special rights, advantages, or immunities granted in America today are those licensed and distributed by the liberal ruling class to themselves and to their little darlings.

Let's start with the Scalise case. Here we have a congressman who may or may not have spoken once to the white racist David Duke's organization twelve years ago as he was rustling up support for a tax cut in the Louisiana state legislature. For that monstrous racist act, apparently, he should be relieved of his position as Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.

Really? This chap spoke once to a racist organization, maybe, by accident, twelve years ago? What about President Obama, who attended the church of a racist black minister for years. Who receives the notorious black racist and race-baiter Reverend Al Sharpton in the Oval Office? Talk about special rights and immunities.

Then there's the UVA rape case. Here we have a whole liberal movement based upon a lie, that one in five college women experience sexual assault during their time in college. But now the Bureau of Justice Statistics has a study showing the rate is more like 0.03 in five. Meanwhile we have the federal government trying to ram down new procedures in universities that make a mockery of due process. And the president of the University of Virginia feels justified in shutting down the social activities of all fraternities and sororities on the strength of a clickbait article in Rolling Stone. There's privilege for you. Liberal college president takes extra-judicial action with no repercussion. Liberal students vandalize fraternity house with no repercussion. Various liberal activist groups propose ignoring the evidence in favor of the narrative. That's what I call a special advantage.

In America in 2015 if you are a non-liberal you'd better watch your mouth. And if you want to stage a "peaceful protest" you'd better get all your parade permits and insurance in order. If you are a liberal or a liberal little darling, then you can say and do anything you want. Because social justice.

Look, this isn't a perfect world. Maybe there are un-corrected cases of white privilege and male privilege out there. But let's not ignore the elephant in the room. It's liberal privilege. Liberals are America's ruling class and they take advantage of it every day in every way.

So if somebody tasks you with checking your privilege, tell them to check their liberal privilege first. And a month later when they've completed a rather long and onerous task, then agree to talk about the other tiny and inconsequential privileges that are still hiding in the odd corner in America.

We all know what is going on here. It started with Karl Marx in the 1840s. Oh no, he cried! The working class is being horribly exploited by the bourgeoisie. So we need a government with the power to take it to the bourgeoisie before it reduces the working class to "immiseration."

It's been the same on every issue from the left ever since. Oh no! There's exploitation, there's privilege, there's discrimination, there's injustice! So we must give the government more power.

And what kind of power does the left want government to have? Why it wants the power to discriminate, to declare war on someone and teach them a lesson.

What are you talking about liberals? The only privilege in America today is liberal privilege. The only problem in America today is liberals.

And why is that? It's because the only people with real political power in America today is liberals. And really, without political power backing you up, privilege is a dead letter.