What Middle-Class Economics Really Looks Like

President Obama introduced a new catchphrase in his 2015 State of the Union speech: Middle Class Economics. As he put it:

[M]iddle class economics is -- the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Then he sharpened his definition.

[M]iddle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change.

What does that mean? The president says it means government subsidized child care, government mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage.

Of course these benefits have nothing to do with any kind of economics. They are simple government welfare state benefits, and the idea is to attract the votes of women and low-paid workers.

Nothing wrong with that. If women and workers want to subject themselves to the feudal mercies of the Great Lord Obama, that is their choice.

The telling point is that President Obama feels he has to cover the ugly reality of his class-warfare authoritarian welfare state in the clothing of the middle class. He's not just handing out loot to his faithful voters; he's upholding middle class values. He's not just appealing to the narrow interest of low-income voters; he's upholding justice for all. The Democrats have been doing this for a while, ever since they stopped openly pitching for the working-class vote. It tells us that they think they are batting on a sticky wicket.

The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger charmingly calls the president's policy "Obama's Peter Pan Economics."

In Mr. O’s world, tax revenue is sort of like Tinker Bell’s pixie dust. You just scoop up another handful and spread it wherever you want. As he said Saturday: Middle-class economics “means making it easier to afford childcare, college, paid leave, health care, a home, and retirement.”

 Henninger is right. Middle-Class Economics is a fairy tale. Here's how.

Government doesn't make childcare more affordable; it strangles it in regulations and certifications and makes it more expensive. Government doesn't make college more affordable; its subsidies have encouraged colleges to jack up tuition into the stratosphere so students can't any more work their way through college. Government doesn't make paid leave more affordable; it just forces workers to work for lower wages while their employers bank their vacation pay for them. Government doesn't make health care more affordable; it makes it impossible to afford unless the government is paying for you -- and that's assuming that the government covers the procedures you need. Government doesn't make homes more affordable. It doesn't make a home more affordable. It just crashed the housing market with its "affordable housing" policies and the people hardest hit were the blacks and Hispanics the very people that the policy was supposed to help. Government doesn't make retirement more affordable; it just sequesters middle-class savings and spends the money on buying votes for 30 years.

Hey GOP candidates for 2016! Here's the germ of a stump speech!

OK. Let's get back to first principles. On my view, government is force, and what governments do is distribute loot to their supporters. No loot, no supporters. The purpose of election campaigns and State of the Union speeches is to dangle the promise of loot before potential supporters, and entice them to vote for you.

But real middle-class economics and real middle-class culture is opposed to this. It imagines that it has evolved beyond the child-like complaint of "it's not fair", the wail of the people of the subordinate self. The middle class believes in responsible individualism. It says "tell me the rules, and I will follow the rules, go to work, pay my taxes, and obey the laws." And I will take responsibility for contributing my share to society. I will take responsibility for childcare, meaning that I will work to care for and raise my children. I will take responsibility for college, meaning that I will save for my childrens' education. I will take responsibility for paid leave, meaning that I will work to save money so I can take time off for a vacation, for sickness, for family emergencies. I will take responsibility for health care, meaning that I will select a health insurance plan that meets my particular needs and protects my assets. I will take responsibility for buying a home, meaning that I will save up money for a mortgage and buy a house that I can afford and that won't wipe me out if there is a recession. I will take responsibility for retirement, meaning that I will save money on my own time in my own way, and when I've saved enough (government mismanagement of the economy notwithstanding) I will retire.

That's what middle class economics really means. It means that people of the responsible self surrender themselves to the mercies of the market in the faith that by working and saving and doing useful things for other people, and constantly improving their skills,  they will wive and thrive in a world of constant change. The point of responsible individualism is that it is the taking on of responsibility that makes life meaningful. Otherwise you are just a peasant or a serf.

All the middle class needs is a government that keeps its cotton-picking hands off the levers of economic intervention, and do simple things like defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic, provide a sound currency, provide a job market free from credentialism and a business environment where you can start a business in one day with one form.

That would be real middle-class economics.

Free Stuff, Public and Private

We all know about government "free stuff". It's what governments do; they keep their supporters on-side with free stuff. What could go wrong? The answer is: Greece and Argentina. At some point, governments tend to run out of other peoples' money to give away. What do they do? Generally, they lie, cheat and steal some more, through devaluation of the currency and seizure of bank accounts.

Then they return to their profligate ways. That's because the one thing that brings people out into the streets is when their government pension is cut. I am talking about government pension in general: any government benefit, from an actual pension to subsidized health care or subsidies for green energy.

If governments dangle free stuff in front of their supporters, it must be because it works, and it must be because getting something for nothing is hard-hired into the human psyche.

So what about evil corporations?  What do they do on the free-stuff front? The simple answer is: a lot. Corporations provide free TV programs that are paid for by advertisers. They publish newspapers that are partly or wholly financed by advertisers. Supermarkets have weekly specials. And airlines have their frequent flier programs.

Here's a story about corporate free stuff. Lady Marjorie and I plan to take a trip to Australia later this year, so my daughter offered us the use of four free upgrade coupons that her husband had racked up as a very-frequent flier. We made the reservations in coach and gave my daughter the confirmation number so she could access our reservation and upgrade it to business class using her husband's coupons. Only, it turned out that the coupons were only valid for certain economy fares. For our low-low fare there would be a fee!

So businesses are strategic about their free stuff. They want to service their customers and feed their appetite for free stuff. But there is still the need to make a profit. The free giveaways areneeded as sweeteners to get the customer to feel good about the corporation. But there is a limit.

You can see what is going on when you remember that the corporations call their free stuff "loyalty programs." They are playing the role of the lord of the manor handing out little presents to the peasants on the annual fete for the renters, rather like the fictional fete given by Squire Donnithorne to the people of Hayslope in Adam Bede.

Governments do the same thing for their supporters. The regular payment of free stuff to the voters is supposed to ensure their loyalty at election time.

But you can see that the whole thing needs to be carefully managed. You need to manage expectations carefully, because people get really annoyed when the squire suddenly decides to cut back on the parties because he's had to pay the young squire's "debts of honor."

For corporations there is the feedback from the constant need to turn a profit. Not enough free stuff, and the customers go buy elsewhere. Too much free stuff and the corporation goes broke.

For governments the same applies, only governments can go on much longer borrowing money than corporations can. This means that it always pays for a politician to offer free stuff now and worry about national bankruptcy later.

Politicians can always blame the greedy banker for their mistakes. Corporations, not so much.

Meg and Rodrigo: I Would You Would Accept of Grace and Love

Of course I get the point, Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret. Your op-ed "Occupy the syllabus" in The Daily Californian was designed as a performance in the politics of "taking offense." It is a model of its kind, almost perfectly constructed and executed. The outrage, the injustice, the offense! That two such as you, multiracial differently gendered students should be subjected to non-stop recitations about dead white males without balancing narratives from non-whites: it is insupportable.

So you call for an "occupation of syllabi." So you wish to oppose the violence of western civilization with a new violence. You want to forcibly replace the old oppressive syllabi with a new liberated  syllabus. That means, of course, that you will have blood on your hands, because government is force, and politics is civil war by other means. And when politics wins its war of the streets it imposes its will. By force. It must be so, because government is force.

I'm sure that you have never thought beyond the idea of "peaceful protest". I've noticed, over the years, that my lefty friends seem more and more to gravitate towards euphemisms in their discourse that rather elide the irreducibly violent nature of all "activism" and politics.

Thus "street riot" becomes "demonstration" becomes "peaceful protest." But it is still a show of force.

If you really believe that your grievances are so deep that violence is the only recourse, then go ahead: occupy the syllabi. Name and shame; conduct your campaign of intimidation and domination. Impose your ideology and stamp out all the evil patriarchs and neo-colonialists. We will meet at the barricades.

But if you think that the solution to our problems can be achieved short of bloody violence, then I beg you to accept of grace and love, and stop before you cross the Rubicon into the wilderness of mirrors that is the world of left-wing activism beyond the windows of the university hot-house. Start to talk to people outside the walls of your cramped left-wing seminary.

I admit that for you, Meg, it is probably too late. You seem to be deep in the secular religion of gender, and probably confirmed in the faith. But you, Rodrigo, appear from Google to be an artist more than an activist. For you it is not too late.

One thing disturbed me in the list of dead white males that you recited in your manifesto of offense, apart from the omission of Immanuel Kant. You didn't mention the social theorists Horkheimer and Adorno. They represent, for me, a point of inflection in left-wing thought. They proposed, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the problem of domination starts with reason and enlightenment, for what does woman want from reason but to dominate nature and other women?

Has it occurred to you that you want to dominate the culture at Berkeley and impose your ideas upon it, just as white males dominated the world from about 1500 until now?

From Horkeimer and Adorno we get to the left-wing sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. He realizes that all social systems, governmental and economics, are dominatory. It all ends in one person or a group of people imposing their way on others. The only way to get out of this, in Habermas' mind, is to enter into genuine discourse where two or more people are genuinely trying to understand the other's point of view and try to come to a common understanding.

Have you seen the research on this? It says that if you put a bunch of Americans into ta room to solve a problem -- without politicians -- they will do so, usually in a way that gives everyone a piece of the solution. But you are already politicians; so it wouldn't do any good to put you guys into the room. You have already learned the tricks and the games of politicians, and how to manipulate other people into serving a political movement rather than acting as free and cooperative citizens.

I am afraid I do not understand how your agenda of the occupation of syllabi can be achieved by cooperation and non-violence. I can only hear the crack of the overseer's cowskin whip and feel the cold frown of the reeducation camp's commandant. For me, you are replacing one evil with another. I do not call that liberation; I do not call it emancipation. I call it revanchism, back to the totalitarianisms of the 20th century.

I want to close with this recent thought from a Chinese man.  Where does it come from? You could look it up.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

How far is each of you from beginning to be able to understand what that Chinese man was talking about? You'd certainly need to learn a lot more about the world than the pearls of wisdom cast from a brief introductory course in Classical Social Theory. 

What Women Want: To Talk It Over

Back in the dim mists of time some wag asked: "What do women want?" More formally, the German sociologist George Simmel predicted that in the 20th century women would begin to impress their views upon the culture. As I wrote back in 2008:

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

But what is a more feminine sensibility? I think we are now clearly finding out.

And what is it that we are now finding out? It is that women like to talk things over. In fact they demand to talk things over. You see it in the therapy culture. You see it in conservative women; you see it in liberal women.

You can see how it operates with liberals. The whole "rape culture" panic seems to be structured around a system for a college woman that hs had an unpleasant sexual experience to talk about it with a university bureaucrat. From my perusal of the literature, it appears that college girls that have been dumped want the opportunity to tell their dumper how badly he has treated them. And they like the idea of having a college bureaucrat, with whom they have discussed the whole matter, there by their side to impress upon the crude male dumper how mean and cruel he has been.

But the same thing applies with conservatives. Here is National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez writing about young women suffering crisis pregnancies. It's all about making sure that a woman never feels alone, that she always has someone to talk to.

Anne Koehl, a nurse who runs the Women’s Care Center in Fort Wayne, Ind., told me during a recent visit how when a woman seeking an abortion walks through the doors of her clinic, she listens and lets the woman make clear her needs, and she works to meet them. That’s her agenda — “the woman’s agenda.” It means loving the woman, letting her know she’s there to offer help, whether that help is diapers or mentoring — whatever she needs to make life go on.

This is obviously a world away from the male approach, which could probably be characterized by the bark of the drill instructor: "Get with the program, Jenkins!" To women, this is marvellous, as it was to the mother that described to me her amazement at the eagerness with which her son and his team-mates adapted to the discipline meted out by his Little League coach.

The great challenge to men in this modern age is that our male culture is not a culture of talk, it is a culture of action. We are facing the challenge that the more that women emerge into the public square the more they will change institutions from an action orientation to a discussion orientation.

No doubt there are many situations in this life that need discussion. There are others that need action. The challenge for our society is to let women dominate those areas that need discussion and for men to dominate those areas that need action.

No doubt, in the end, men and women will work all this out sensibly and instinctively, self-selecting into areas that suit their particular sensibilities.

Just don't look for any sense coming out of the political arena.

The Shrinking Middle Class: What To Do?

Liberal Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post is delighted. Finally, after 35 years of inaction -- since the Reagan recession of 1980-82 -- someone is doing something about the hole in the middle class. Here's the problem:

A gap between productivity gains and average family income — which didn’t exist in the three decades following World War II — opened in the 1970s and has only widened since.

After 30 years of inaction here comes President Obama with a solution.

This time, he had a concrete proposal to diminish the shift from income derived from work to income derived from investment — by raising the tax on capital gains and using the income to provide a tax credit to help working parents pay for child care. 

I guess what makes me dispirited about an opinion like this is the thought that Mr. Meyerson really believes it. By taking away money from capitalists and giving it away in a tax credit  he thinks we are really going to be able to boost middle class incomes. Where has he been?

Does he not get that taking money away from the capitalists and giving it away is exactly what Lenin did in Russia, exactly what the Castro Brothers did in Cuba, exactly what Chavez and now Maduro have been doing in Venezuela?

OK, let's admit that there are two narratives to account for the modern era.

One narrative is that the surprises of several economic revolutions have showered wealth upon all the people of the world, but disproportionately more wealth upon those communities that let capitalists get stinking rich.

The other narrative is that the benefits of economic production in the last two centuries only got shared because compassionate liberals forced the capitalists to share it out. You can see which side Harold Meyerson is on.

The president's new initiative is really cool, he writes:

Democrats have long sought to represent the interests of both business and labor... They’re the party that rewards work, that seeks to increase labor income even if — and you’d better believe they’ve polled on this — it means taking a bite out of capital income.

Hey, it might even win them back some of the white working class vote, he says. Yay!

OK. Here's my counterblast. (Aside from the fact that, given the swingeing taxes on business and labor, especially payroll taxes on labor collected by business, I'd say that Democrats are strongly opposed to both business and labor.)

The hollowing out in labor income since 1980, sez I, came from a number of secular trends and government policies. Let's list them, in no particular order.

• Labor income in the immediate post-WWII years artificially boosted by labor unions. After 1980, labor income reverted to the mean, as unionized companies went broke.
• Great Society programs that made it easier for people not to work, and imposed extremely high marginal tax rates on low-skilled workers trying to get off welfare.
• Entry of women into the workforce. More workers competing for jobs equals lower wages.
• Increased economic regulation.
• Staggering capital gains from the electronic, computer, and internet revolutions, that boosted capital income.
• Cheap money, which usually screws mom-and-pop savers.
• "Affordable housing" policy which has wiped out minority homeowners that got mortgages they couldn't afford.

Really, Harold Meyerson and I couldn't be further apart on this. For instance, I think that the current policy across the west of Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing is a clear sign that redistribution is failing. It is telling us that entrepreneurs and capitalists aren't investing enough in new jobs, so government has to pile on and help them by artificially lowering the interest rate. But Meyerson wants to reduce the return on capital with new taxes.

Look. Right now in the United States the governments are spending about $1 trillion a year on government pensions, $1 trillion a year in government health care, $1 trillion a year on government education, and $0.5 trillion a year on welfare. That's according to usgovernmentspending.com. All this money is straight-up redistribution.

So are we saying that $3.5 trillion a year in straight-up redistribution is not enough?

We are talking about $3.5 trillion in benefits that people don't have to work for. So no wonder the middle class doesn't work as hard as it might. And really, Harold Meyerson thinks that some fiddling with the capital gains tax and middle-class tax relief is going to fix the hollowing out of the middle class?

I tell you what scares me. Imagine what the economy would look like without the extraordinary wealth from electronics, computers, and the internet. And imagine the slashing articles Harold Meyerson would be writing to call for more redistribution from the greedy capitalists to the helpless middle class.

Harvey Mansfield on Democrats

The chaps at the Manhattan Institute have signed up conservative Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield to write a two-parter on our national political parties. Mansfield starts with the Democrats in "Our Parties, Part One."

This creates a good opportunity for me to match my rather wild and crazy ideas against a man who is rather less wild and crazy, if still conservative.

Mansfield begins by noting that the Democrats are increasingly liberal, and think of themselves as progressive, while the Republicans are increasingly conservative. The two parties and the two philosophies face themselves as opponents. The parties and their philosophies are how we divide ourselves.

So, for Mansfield, our politics reduces into progress, for and against. Liberals and Democrats are for progress, and conservatives and Republicans are against it.

On progress, an interesting problem appears in the facts of American politics: on the one hand, progressives keep gaining their point, the latest one being the growing success of same-sex marriage; on the other hand, their opponents keep resisting progress, own half the electorate, and win half the elections.

That's why liberals are so enraged by conservatives: they don't understand why "reactionaries" continue to oppose them. Perhaps there is something "permanent in the nature of politics about resistance to progress that sustains conservatives".

Actually, I don't agree that liberals are progressives and conservatives are reactionaries. I believe the opposite is true.

For liberals progress is progress towards equality, and there are always "fresh inequalities requiring reform." Since conservatism is a critique of liberalism, that puts conservatives in a tricky position. But where will equality find an end? That is what is implied in the notion of progress, yet progress never seems to know where that end might be.

But liberals are also all in favor of democracy, and therein lies a problem.

The idea of progress is caught between democratic majority rule, which often sanctions inequality and requires stable institutions, and its own formless drive toward ever-increasing equality. 

But what happens if the majority votes for inequality? Marx calls that "false consciousness". What about liberals?

The fact is, according to Mansfield, that progress gets liberals in a complete tangle. They say that they are in favor of progress and reason and science, but what does science tell us about equality? What do its experts tell us? And anyway, liberals have moved away from reason, calling it "anti-foundational," so liberalism has become relativistic, except where its own foundational beliefs are concerned.

Liberals use science to justify their government by experts --  which goes against the grain of the expertise of the generation of Adam Smith -- and in due course the experts like Lord Keynes said that bigger government was better, reversing the early idea of progress that bourgeois morality and government frugality was better.

With economics enlisted in the cause of progress it wasn't long before social sciences like psychology and sociology joined the cause, casting the poor as vulnerable, transforming politics into the care and feeding of the vulnerable and overstressed. In any case, progressive politics is designed to be irreversible. Politics becomes the common good of entitled benefits rather than "sharing and cooperating in a common life." This makes life less social, creating a "kiudgeocracy," a "clumsy, complex, incoherent means of administering law" that are minimally effective but maximally clumsy.

Mansfield thinks that "In sum, progressive government is increasingly responsible for our lives and will increasingly be held to account by a generally ungrateful citizenry", because we take its benefits for granted but complain loudly when it fails us. And the problem is that the entitlements are based on borrowing, and the costs have been consistently hidden from the beneficiaries.

The point is that the notion of progress has contradicted itself. It said it was a rule of reason to banish unreason and superstition, but now it has lost faith in itself by failing to say what its progress consists in.

Mansfield's hope is that "multicultural, entitled progress" is not the only progress America has known. There is the only progress of the founding, that "made a place for virtue and was accompanied by virtue."

My problem with all this is that it gives liberals too much credit. I don't concede that the liberals have a coherent world view. I go straight to the postmodern idea that all political thought is a narrative for power. The point about "progress" is that it demands government action. The point about "inequality" is that it requires government action. And look, here we are, the progressives, ready, willing and able to deploy the power of government to deliver on progress, on inequality, on whatever. The genius of Marx was to set all this in motion with the idea that we needed to overthrow the bourgeoisie in bloody revolution, because exploitation.

I am saying that all the talk about progress and science and equality is merely an apology for power. There must be a need for government power, otherwise there is no need for a progressive educated elite, and there is also no need for battalions of scientists and activists and bureaucrats. There must be entitlements and free education and free school lunches and tax cuts for the middle class because that is how every ruling class looks after its supporters. The reason that Harvey Mansfield finds the progressive doctrine incoherent is that the idea of progress, of reason, of science, is not supposed to fit into any coherent world view. It is all just meant to justify the deployment of government power on behalf of the progressive ruling class. That is all.

And I contest the idea that progress is progress. The one coherent thing about the Marxists, the Fabians, the Progressives, the Social Democrats, the liberals, is that they are not looking to the future; they want to return to a nostalgic past, the past of primitive communism, the past of feudal paternalism, the past of proper and permanent hierarchy.

The one consistent thing about the left is this. It has always traded on the fear of the modern world and its requirement that every man submit to the will of the market, that every citizen become a responsible individual that lives to serve others that he may serve himself.

To understand the modern world we have to start from this truth, that the modern world, for all its wealth and comforts, is in reality terrifying. It sets everyone to work. It puts everyone at the mercy of the market. It forces everyone to subordinate his prosperity to the needs of others. No wonder that the story of the last 200 years has been one lefty reaction after another that seeks to promise a frightened populace that it will lead it to safety under the wing of big government and force the world to yield a competence.

But there is something more terrifying than the market. It is big government. Big government is like any great army and its military plan of conquest. It enlists gullible young men in its army and then marches them to death. At the end of it the conquerors may conquer, or they may fail in bloody defeat.

No worries for the officer corps, of course. The Napoleon will surely survive if his plan succeeds and likely survive if his plan ends in miserable defeat. But the soldiers, or the entitlement beneficiaries, will not be so lucky. They will likely be left by the roadside, as Napoleon's army was left on the retreat from Moscow. Too bad for them.

There must be a better way, something more modern and compassionate than the reactionary plan of progress. But first we must read what Harvey Mansfield has to say in "The Parties, Part Two."

"Who Killed the Enlightenment?" is the Wrong Question

The idea of the 18th century Enlightenment was ideological. It was to create a cultural and political movement to overthrow the dark night of religion and superstition, and replace it with the bright light of reason. In particular, its leading lights wanted to chop the trunks of kings and princes away from their divine roots, the association of kingliness with godliness. Guess who would replace the benighted priests and the unjust kings?

But as soon as the Enlightenment had got fairly started, it faced a Romantic rebellion at the turn of the 19th century. Romanticism pointed out that while reason might be necessary, it certainly wasn't sufficient. What about instinct, creativity, genius? Where is their place on the lighted stage of reason? The modern era has been impaled upon the horns of this dilemma ever since.

The problem is obvious when you try to understand modern government and the modern exchange economy. The more you try to reduce government and business to a rational system the more you create a structure that is as fragile as glass. If you touch it, the whole thing collapses. See Soviet Union, collapse of. On the other hand business, which is said to be utterly mechanical and soulless, keeps coming up with unexpected surprises -- cheap textiles, steam transportation, electricity, the internal combustion engine, electronics, information -- which it then tries to reduce to a rational system that lasts until the next surprise knocks everything into a cocked hat.

Inquiring minds have tried to square this circle between reason and creative surprise with the idea of emergence. They talk about the consequence of the flap of the wings of a butterfly and chaos theory and "emergent phenomena."

Therefore, to complain that liberals "killed the Enlightenment" misses the point, as much as conservatives that claim to represent reason while liberals rely on "feelings." Strictly speaking, the Enlightenment has been dead for 200 years. Creativity, not Enlightenment, is the god of the enlightened and evolved.

For me the last nail in the coffin is the moment in The Dialectic of Enlightenment when Horkheimer and Adorno write:

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.  That is the only aim...

Enlightenment is totalitarian...

Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.

The point of the Enlightenment was that it was a cultural and political movement to take over the religious and political power in 17th and 18th century Europe. And it succeeded rather tragically in France in 1789. Period, end of story.

But let us continue to talk of reason.

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind argues that reason was developed by humans to to rationalize. He uses the research of French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning has having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasions, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.(p.89)

From my "Critique of Human Mechanics:"

[Haidt] found that people do not use reason to form moral ideas.  They have moral instincts and they use their reasoning minds to rationalize their instincts.  Moreover they do not use their reason to analyze their instincts; they use reason to criticize the moral judgments and behaviors of other people, and so he confirms the analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno that reason seeks to dominate.

The Enlightenment was a political project. It was a group of thinkers that wanted to sweep away the power of bishops and kings and princes and landed aristocrats and replace them with people like them. So the new class of intellectuals declared ideological war on the superstitions of religion and the injustices of absolute monarchy.

Why did they have to declare ideological war? Because that's the nature of politics. Government is force, so if you want to obtain control of the government it means that you must develop an agenda that relies on force, so you must gin up a justification for force. The usual thing to do is to accuse the current government of monstrous and evil injustice. We are used to modern accusations of injustice, but the same thing applied in the old days, when it was marcher lords like Harry Percy from northern England raging about the injustices of Henry IV down in London.

Disgraced me in my happy victories,
Sought to entrap me by intelligence;
Rated mine uncle from the council-board;
In rage dismiss'd my father from the court;
Broke oath on oath, committed wrong on wrong,
And in conclusion drove us to seek out
This head of safety; and withal to pry
Into his title, the which we find
Too indirect for long continuance.

Really, nothing has changed. Liberals were saying exactly this during the presidency of George W. Bush. Only they rated Bush as stupid, not cunning like Henry IV.

In the 18th century the Enlightenment thinkers were raging against Throne and Altar. But in the 19th century the educated youth found a new source of injustice in the wake of the extraordinary rise of industrial capitalism: the bourgeoisie. The capitalist bourgeoisie were exploiting the factory hands in the new manufacturies and Marx and Engels offered to lead the working class to smash the bosses and give back to the working class what the bosses had stolen from them.

This strategy was effective because the working class did feel exploited and did think that force was the only remedy. The Marxist ideology dominated the next century either in its pure form or in a diluted form, with Fabianism in England and Progressivism in the United States.

In the 1920s the Frankfurt School extended the exploitation theory from the working class to blacks, women and homosexuals. Thus the class conflict theory of exploited workers against the bosses, which needed the intervention of government force on the side of the workers, was extended to other marginalized groups. Government force would be needed not just to fight for the workers but to right the injustices committed against these other groups, and not to agree was to be a racist, sexist, or homophobe.

You can see the brilliance of this ideology. Nobody has discovered a way to push back against this agenda. You can gin up anything -- rape on campus, glass ceilings, police brutality -- and gin up a rent-a-mob and cry discrimination and injustice. Since the mainstream media always comes down on the side of the apparent victims, and anyone opposing the "social justice warriors" is automatically named and shamed as racist, sexist, homophobe, there seems to be no way to push back.

Then came the migration of people from Muslim lands, and Muslims were added to the cultural Marxist agenda. To criticize Muslims became "islamophobia." Any time that there was an Islamic terror event, the ruling class and its bribed apologists immediately worried about "islamophobia" and a "backlash." Never mind that at all times in the US the incidence of anti-semitism is about five times the incidence of anti-islamism.

But there is a problem. People expect the government to keep them safe. That is the number one core function of government. If Islamic fighters are killing people in Boston or in Paris, the people -- women, especially -- expect government to do something about it.

But that knocks the whole cultural Marxist game into a cocked hat, because the whole point is to keep the majority population cowed and afraid to criticize the ruling class by ginning up offence-taking in the marginalized groups, the little darlings of the ruling class, and threatening to name and shame anyone guilty of "hate speech."

And that's where we are today. The educated ruling class's ruling ideology is threatened by its internal contradictions. How can they stigmatize people for "Islamophobia" when the Islamists are actually out there beheading and shooting people?

This creates an opening for a conservative push-back against cultural Marxism. Politics requires an enemy, an "other" for "us" to fight against. For years, conservatives didn't have an "other", especially after the end of the Cold War. But now we do, and it's one of the groups that our liberal friends the world over have taken to their bosom as their special snowflakes.

Stay tuned, because it's going to get worse before it gets better.

But is has nothing to do with the death of the Enlightenment.