How Would Corporations Become the Employers of the Poor?

It's all very well to say that corporations should act like the noble lords of the year 1000 and take the heads of the poor in their hands and make them into their bondsmen, their slaves. And then train them in the culture of work and service.

But how? In the first place we don't give corporations the right to compel people the way that governments do. That's part of the modern Greater Separation of Powers of which we've heard tell. These days we try to separate the political and its force from the economic and its prices from the cultural and its social and moral pressure.

So it was easy for the lord of the year 1000 to combine all three and take the responsibility of feeding the poor by taking them into bondage, where they got fed in return for that bill-hook and whatever work the lord's overseer could extract from his new bondsman. But today it isn't so simple.

Using Eric Hoffer's analysis of work, we would also say that work in the year 1000 was regarded as a curse, a mark of bondage. The submission of the hungry man to the dominion of his lord obviously fits comfortably into that culture.

In that old system, says Hoffer, the lord told you what to do and when to do it. But now things are different. Now "the chief problem is not to induce people to work but how to find enough jobs for people who want to work." Now work is not a mark of bondage but "a mark of uprightness and manly worth." We talk about people that go to work, obey the law, follow the rules as the very salt of the earth.  This situation, writes Hoffer, "is not only unparalleled in history but remains more or less incomprehensible to many people outside the Occident."

Well, that was back in the Sixties. Now China and India have abandoned the failed idea of the totalitarian state and the collapse of the three sectors, political, economic, and cultural into the single all-powerful party government. And the Soviet Union is no more. Now everyone is getting the work bug, now every peasant is turning up in the city and learning to deal with the modern paradigm. It's not the lord's job to put you to work. It's your problem.

Suppose we collapse the current welfare system, as an evil and corrupt system that effectively enlists the poor as a kind of state militia, housing in their public housing barracks, paying them as though they were soldiers, and leaving them to fester in their barracks as soldiers in the standing armies of the absolute monarchs first used to do five hundred years ago.

How would we get there from here? There is the whole paraphernalia of labor market regulations that create the modern underclass. It starts with the prohibition on child labor, the collapse of apprenticeship, the swingeing taxation on labor through "social insurance" programs that rack the cost of labor into the stratosphere. And then there is the minimum wage, which keeps young and inexperienced workers out of the labor force where they might compete with older workers.

For me, this whole superstructure of the left's political faith is a massive human disaster. It chops up the high road to prosperity with monstrous barriers and tolls and opportunities for the dominion of political power over the radical equality of the market and the constant urge of its price system.

In my ideal society, with limited government and radically reduced taxes, people would naturally seek employment, and the least skilled and least desirable bringing up the rear.

Why would corporations employ the scum of the employment market? Why would they pay enough for a "living wage?" Why would they bother to provide a genuine path upwards for the least among us?

Suppose we give corporations subsidies to employ the poor? Yes, but then we are opening the doors to crony capitalism and political chicanery. We would encourage fly-by-night operations taking the subsidies and delivering nothing in return. And of course the left would pounce on every minor problem and glitch and use it to smear the entire private sector and the whole idea of a market economy just as they do today.

Suppose we order the corporations to employ the poor? Yes, but then they are going to demand quid-pro-quos, and then we are back into the whole lobbyist special interest game that ends up benefiting the powerful and hurting the people.

The point is pretty simple for me. Ever since the "useless" feudal retainers were first "hurled" upon the labor market five hundred years ago, government has tried various forms of force and compulsion to deal with the poverty problem. Government has tried compulsion every which way from Sunday, from incarceration to housing to money to food.

But there is another idea, that hasn't been tried in over a century. It's the system that was used by charities towards the end of the 19th century and described by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion. It's as simple as A-B-C-D-E-F-G. It starts with A for Affiliation. Who is affiliated with this person down on their luck and could be persuaded to step up and help? It goes on to D for Discrimination. That's about separating the sheep from the goats. You want to help people who really need help and would benefit from help and are not just working the system like that fine old proletarian Alfred P. Doolittle. The process culminates ends with Employment, Freedom, God.

Employment is where the corporations come in. But would they step up to the plate?  I think they would.

The point is that corporations follow the zeitgeist. They do what is expected of them. And we need to change the culture from the current Poor Law mentality in which we don't expect anything from the poor except to have the government give them money, courtesy of the parish beadle or the government social worker, and hope they don't cause any trouble. We don't expect anything of ourselves except to pay our taxes.

We need to change the culture.  We need to make the poor everybody's business, from the householder to the small retailer to the construction company to the big corporation. So everybody pitches in to help, not because they must, because they are compelled, but because the culture tells them what to do and they do it.

But can we change the culture?

Our liberal friends have done a bang-up job pushing their cultural agenda, from environmentalism to the sexual revolution to gay marriage. That's what it would take to change the culture on welfare. The problem is not the corporations. They will do the right thing, because corporations always need the good opinion of the public. The solution doesn't belong to corporations. It belongs to us: imagining the possibilities and then making the possibilities happen.

So if we want the corporations to give work to the poor, we have the change the culture so that it is the most natural thing in the world for a corporation to hire, train, and bring the poor into the modern work culture, where the poor get to believe like the rest of us that work is "a mark of uprightness and manly worth."

A New Kind of Corporate Welfare

The best way to get into the middle class is on my Road to the Middle Class featuring a self-directed program of religion, education, mutual-aid association, and living under law.

But it's not for everyone. That's obvious, or we wouldn't have our burgeoning underclass wherever welfare states are found. The foundation of human society is voluntary cooperation; but there's always a temptation to ease off in the harness and hope the other horses take up the slack.

That's why God invented divine justice: to take care of the slackers.

But why wait for God to take care of things? Almost everyone can contribute their little bit, and it's a shame to segregate the unskilled, the unlucky, and the un-motivated off in a welfare concentration camp in the inner city to be used as cannon fodder in the activism wars of the Reverends, marchin' and protestin' and stuff.

My plan is that we ramp down the welfare programs and send the welfare folk to place their heads in the hands of the corporate CEOs. It's similar to the old way of the year 1000 when a starving man would place himself into servitude as a bondsman by placing his head in his lord's hands: a head for food.

I say this because it is obvious that the old plan, of giving people money for nothing, has clearly failed. That's what the conservative Charles Murray has found in his Coming Apart and that is what the liberal Robert D. Putnam has found in his Our Kids. Middle-class, educated, career-oriented people of all races, including African Americans, are pulling away and the lower 30 percent, black and white, is descending into cultural chaos. The men don't work and the women don't marry.

Marx well said that the agricultural revolution "hurled" the rural poor, the band of "useless" feudal retainers, onto the labour market. There, of course, they lingered for a century or two as miserable proletarians until sucked up into the mines and factories of the industrial revolution where they were treated as little better than slaves.

But in time the capitalists realized that treating people like slaves wasn't good for profits. In the first place the workers formed labor unions to oppose the bosses and time has shown that labor unions are poison for a corporation, the best way to kill it off. The whole point of a corporation is a team, with everyone working towards the corporate goal of great products, good jobs, and fat profits. It doesn't help to have a head of rebellion right on the factory floor.

It was a German general that articulated in 1921 the new corporate attitude, General Hans von Seeckt said he wanted

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.

He was talking about the need for a new kind of soldier, but you can see that the corporation needs the same kind of employee. Both organizations need swift, efficient team members, but more than that they need responsible team members, not mere underground drones marching around in their platoons in the movie Metropolis.

You can see how this works in a news article from the Wall Street Journal. Audi is building a green field auto plant next to the village of San Jose Chiapa where they will build the Audi Q5 SUV for export all over the world. Of course, as part of the deal, they are setting up extensive training in Mexico for the new workers.

But they are also sending the top technical workers, the quality-control analysts and the like, to Ingolstadt in Germany for two years of training in the Audi systems and the Audi way.

Each Mexican worker is paired with a German "buddy" who acts as a mentor, showing the ropes.

We know what this is all about. It is "boot camp" in corporate culture. It is indoctrinating new workers into the corporate culture and system at Audi so that they can return to Mexico to make cars that meet the amazing modern standards that gives us amazing cars that work for 100,000 miles trouble-free. And also become committed members of the Audi team.

Of course people coming off welfare aren't going to go to Germany for training. But they can be handed over to buddies in factories and big-box stores rather than to Reverends in the protest line. They can be immersed in a corporate culture where going with the flow means doing a good job and being polite to the customers rather than making protest signs and yelling catchwords at a TV camera.

In addition these former welfare recipients will enjoy a predictable and secure world, with benefits and a reasonable expectation of stable employment and chances for advancement.

But best of all they will be living in a life that benefits them and benefits us all. As welfare recipients they are useful only for their votes to support the politicians that promise to defend old benefits and offer new benefits. As corporate workers they will be contributing to the economy and providing, in a modest way, products and services for others.

OK. Nothing new here. You can see bright young minorities in every bank branch and less educated ones at the local big box store.  And they are clearly being trained and indoctrinated in the corporate culture, to become "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated," and hey, maybe even "joyful in taking responsibility" as a woman and a Target associate.

(See where that "associate" comes from? One guess: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.")

For over half a millennium, with Poor Laws and welfares, respectable society has punted on what to do with people "hurled" on the labor market by economic revolutions. The ruling class just handed out a pittance to the people left behind by progress. And really, in the Obama years we are seeing the final collapse of this cruel and inhuman cop-out in the absurd gussied-up protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere (which were, Messrs. Obama, Holder, and Soros will doubtless agree at the Last Judgment, pure astroturf).

Now is the time to put an end to this injustice, and use the most obvious resource invented to make lost souls into productive contributors. And really how come it's taken this long? Yes, corporations use systems, and systems are domination. But the fact is that corporations have taken the demoralized proletarians of Marx and Shaw and made them into nauseating middle-class bitter clingers, the despair of good progressives everywhere.

Wouldn't it be too harsh to render up the underclass to the corporations? Maybe. But we humans know that if you can't manage to socialize people with kindness then you have to "put a bit of stick about" as the chief whip Francis Urquhart says in the Brit version of House of Cards.

As God does with his divine justice.

A Brief History of Welfare

I had a minor epiphany over the weekend. Checking back to The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, I recalled important information about welfare in the year 1000 in England.

The deal was that if you were starving you went to your lord and placed your head in his hands. He would then hand you a bill-hook, as a symbol of your servitude as his bondsman. It was called "head for food." You gave up your freedom for food and work.

So let's take a look at welfare down the ages, and let's start with the Roman Empire. In The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann talks about the gradual decline of the peasants. The deal was that everyone was supposed to serve in the legions, but the problem was that as the demand for military service increased the peasant couldn't work his own land and serve in the military and provide his own weapons at the same time. So gradually the Romans started paying their soldiers for long service and supplying arms and armor.

Later on, the lower orders got hit by the slaves. The abundance of slaves meant that free men couldn't get work at decent wages. Also there was the little cultural problem common to both Greeks and Romans that free men didn't work for free men. No free man would work for another.

So that's why the Romans went for bread and circuses and the "anona" welfare system. The sturdy peasants were being slowly squeezed out of their landholdings and became concentrated into the cities where they were kept quiet with food and entertainment. Sound familiar?

Notice the difference with the feudal welfare system, where the lord accepted the risk proposition for the lives of his bondsmen. He took their work and fed them. Whether he made a profit on the deal was something else.

That something else was the agricultural revolution, which extended over several centuries in the middle of the last millennium. The agricultural revolution changed everything on the land. It resulted in Marx's famous declaration:

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated.

 So we can see that the unfortunates "hurled" on the labor market were either useless "feudal retainers," the bondsmen and others that had placed their heads in the lands of the lords, or they were succored by the Church and its monasteries. The formal and informal arrangements that integrated the poor into feudal society were broken up. The agricultural revolution did for the retainers and Henry VIII did for the rest.

By the end of the 16th century things were getting pretty grim out in the countryside, so the politicians decided to "do something." What they "did" was the Elizabethan Poor Law. The Poor Law was cunning. It put the responsibility for relieving the poor on each parish. But since each parish was stuck with the bill, you can imagine that each parish was eager to move its poor on to the next parish.

Later, as Foucault relates in Madness and Civilization, we get the great confinement: in hospitals, schools, prisons, etc. And of course in the British workhouse. The point, I suspect, is that the wealth unleashed by the agricultural revolution provided the means to confine people that society didn't know what to do with: the poor and sick, the criminal, the young. And really, what is easier? Just lock 'em up if you can't figure out what else to do with them.

Ever since, welfare has shuttled between "outdoor relief," which is money for nothing, and "indoor relief" which means incarceration in the French hôpital, the British workhouse, the government child custodial facility, the prison, or penitentiary or reformatory or custodial facility. In all cases society is paying the poor and the feckless to go away and not bother us.

Now in the years of the Poor Law before the industrial revolution the poor were kept away from the cities and on the land. This was enforced by things like the guild system which prevented the poor from finding employment in the city. And it kept the poor out in the country where they could never achieve strategic concentration. So the ruling class and its supporters were on one side, and the poor on the other.

The industrial revolution changed this situation, because the industrial revolution brought the poor into the cities where they achieved strategic concentration. And the politics changed too. Instead of the poor being outside the system, a mere expense to the ruling class, they entered the political system and became a power player, or at least a source of votes for ambitious politicians. This meant that welfare was no longer an annoying expense for the ruling class; now welfare payments became a reward to the poor for supporting the ruling class.

My little epiphany last weekend was to realize the profound difference between welfare in the feudal age and welfare today. Then as now the ruling class obtained the loyalty of the poor by giving them food and free stuff. But in those days the ruling political class was also the ruling economic class. They gave food to the poor out of their own pockets, but they also got the poor to work -- although Marx's comment about "useless" retainers suggests that they weren't doing much useful work.

Our age is different. In our age the political class buys the support of the poor with an abundance of "free stuff." But the poor don't have to work for their relief. As Charles Murray shows in Coming Apart the bottom 30 percent of white adult males aren't too interested in work. About 30 percent of them are effectively out of the labor force. The difference between now and then is that today the political class takes the money for the support of the poor by force from the economic sector. And it doesn't extract anything from the poor except their votes at election time.

Various reporters have noted that lack of employment is a killer in our society. It may be because humans need to be challenged by work in the world. It may also be that, as Eric Hoffer writes, our age is an age of work. It used to be that work was "viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage." But today work is the sign of worth and responsibility. No wonder that the unemployed are demoralized.

So maybe we have a possible solution to the 500 year Poor Law problem.

It is notable that in our society the people with limited appetite for risk find employment in large hierarchical bureaucratic institutions. In return for loyalty and a modicum of work, these big-company, big-government employees get security and pensions.

Why do we not apply the same logic to the poor? Put them to work in big corporations, with modest wages and modest work requirements. And the security that they crave.

And let's take the relief of the poor out of the political sector where the poor just become the pawns of the politicians as the politicians use them in their contemptible power games.

The Obama Implosion Alert.

We knew that liberal government was going to fail about 40 years ago. That's when, as Charles Murray wrote in Losing Ground, the results came in on the social science that instrumented the War on Poverty. Liberals read the results and did nothing.

The War on Poverty conducted in the 1960s included a raft of programs recommended by liberal social scientists, from welfare to job training and community activism. Result, according to the social science instrumentation? No difference. Of course many things got worse, such as out-of-wedlock births and a move away from work.

Yeah. It's 40 years later and liberals are still saying "more of the same."

Fast forward to today. In Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart we see that for the top 20 percent of whites, about 5 percent of the adult men aged 30-49 in the top 20 percent aren't making a living, and 30 percent of adult men aged 30-49 in the bottom 30 percent aren't making a living. You can calk about "income inequality" till the cows come home, but the problem here is cultural inequality. Rich people work hard, and poor people don't. That's the opposite of 100 years ago when poor people worked hard, and so did their children.

Now my feeling is that we are approaching a tipping point. I think that the full-on liberal activist program of President Obama is going to force the American people to demand a change.

Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy argued that the voters can't really tell the politicians what they want. The only thing they can do is use their votes to elect the politicians that will rule over them. Voters can only call for Four More Years or say that it is Time for a Change.

Most of the time politicians present the voters with muddy compromise. They shift a little to the left while trying to assure the right that nothing has changed. And vice versa. But President Obama has rejected that model of government. He is committed to getting as much of the progressive agenda enacted, by any means possible, while he is in office. Presumably he feels that by throwing everything against the wall, some of it will stick.

The other possibility, of course, for Obama's legacy is the experience of the German Army in 1942. The southern army group headed for the Caucasus while the Sixth Army was assigned to take Stalingrad. The southern army group covered a lot of ground, but because Stalingrad on its left wing did not fall, all that territory was gained for nothing, and when the Red Army attacked and encircled the Sixth Army the entire southern army group had to retreat. It was, of course, the turning point in the whole war on the Eastern Front.

I think — OK I hope — that President Obama and the Democrats are in the overstretch situation that the Germans experienced in 1942. They've pushed their wave way up the beach and the tide is about to turn. Think of Obamacare as the Democrats' version of Stalingrad. If they can't get Obamacare to work, they are screwed.

In military affairs, the danger of an over-extension is that you are really vulnerable to something going wrong.  If the tide of fortune changes, it's likely to bury you in the undertow.

If you are a liberal, you think of everything that the president has done as sensible moderate stuff, long overdue and held up for years, decades, by racist, sexist, homophobic Republicans and conservatives, people that have opposed and stymied the progressive agenda at every turn. As conservatives and Republicans gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt for most of the Iraq War, so do liberals give President Obama the benefit of the doubt for all of his initiatives.

And just as liberals pretty quickly decided that President Bush and all his works were wrong and ought to be opposed, so do conservatives (and quite a lot of moderates, I'd say) think that President Obama and all his policies are wrong.

We think that the Keynesian stimulus was wrong, particularly as its main effort was to funnel money to state and local governments; we think that Keynesian economics has been proved wrong both by theory and by experience. We think that Obamacare was wrong; we think that government is completely the wrong institution to deliver any kind of service because government is uniquely incapable of fixing problems, because just doesn't have the bandwidth to fix things. We think that the liberal green energy program is utterly foolish, not just because the idea that CO2 is going to fry the world is unproven and because green energy has turned out to be a cesspool of crony capitalism that pays billions to crony capitalists and stick the middle class and the poor with the bill, but because wind and solar represent a step backwards, for a simple reason. Wind and solar are less concentrated than fossil fuels and nuclear. We think that the president's policy to regulate the internet as a monopoly telephone utility is utter folly. We think the president's policy to hammer out a nuclear deal with Iran is utter folly. We don't have a clue what he thinks he's doing.

Then there's the big stuff, the cultural collapse at the bottom of society, described by Charles Murray and now by Robert D. Putnam in Our Kids, that demonstrates that, after all the liberal welfare state programs, from health care to welfare to education to activism, the poorer people in our society are getting absolutely screwed. Liberals say it's all because of "economic inequality." Really? After fifty years of the Great Society? After a century of middle-class entitlements and labor laws? Things still aren't copacetic? No, liberals. The problem is cultural inequality.

Could it be, liberals that the problem is not "economic inequality" but your programs? Could it be that just shoveling out benefits to people tears society apart, and denies low-income people the chance to contribute to society?

Could it be that it is the liberal programs themselves that are causing the problem? Could it be that "fighting inequality" with government programs is precisely the wrong thing to do?

Like I say. At some point mainstream elected Democrats are going to look at the polls and say to themselves: "If we don't separate ourselves from President Obama yesterday we are all going to lose our elective offices." And then you'll see a stampede among the lemmings that you never saw in your lifetime.

Liberal Robert Putnam Still Doesn't Get It

So now the other penny has dropped. Back in 2012 Charles Murray reported in Coming Apart that everything was copacetic in the upper 20 percent of America. But things were not so good in the middle, and in the low-income sector the men didn't work and the women didn't marry. This was not so good for kids.

Now liberal Robert D. Putnam, author of the bestseller Bowling Alone is out with Our Kids. Putnam says that rich kids are doing fine but poor kids are not. Writes W. Bradford Wilcox in The Wall Street Journal:

[Putnam] argues that children's acccess to the core institutions that foster their development — strong families, strong schools, strong communities — is increasingly separate and unequal.

Murray's book was just about white America, because he did not want to get into trouble for raaacism as he did with The Bell Curve. But Putnam is a liberal, so he's allowed to talk about black folks. He gets to write about black "Desmond, son of affluent married parents, and Elijah, whose working-class parents, in his own words, 'couldn't live together for nothing.'"

Bully for Putnam. But what does he suggest? You guessed it: more of the same.

Mr. Putnam concludes "Our Kids" by calling for a raft of civic initiatives and public policies, many of which seek to add to services for poor and working-class children and their parents.

Oh great: more free stuff. Like that's going to make a difference.

It's comical. Over a decade ago, Robert D. Putnam wrote a book where he observed that Americans aren't as civic minded as they used to be, and don't join civic organizations like they used to. But he fails to make the obvious point that maybe, maybe, Americans don't join because government has taken away the public square with government's stupid programs that encourage and reward people for being helpless freeloaders.

Now Putnam writes about how, oh wow, rich kids with married parents are doing better than poor kids with single parents. And what does he propose? More government programs to encourage freeloading. And the current liberal ignis fatuus, more preschool.

Now I've developed the notion in my American Manifesto that government is always and everywhere an armed minority occupying some territory, taxing the inhabitants thereof, and keeping itself in power by rewarding its supporters with free stuff. Thus the liberal welfare state stays in power by offering free stuff to its supporters: minorities, women, government employees and gentry liberals.

There's only one little problem with this: freeloading on free stuff is anti-social. You just have to ask Kant's question whether this would work if everyone did it. No, it wouldn't! If everyone is competing for free stuff, and politicians are competing to offer free stuff, then you don't have a society any more. You just have piracy and plunder.

The dirty little truth about liberals is that, for all their preening and self-congratulation, their liberal welfare state is nothing more than a robber state. Liberals tax productive citizens, anyone that has to work to put food on the table, and they give the tax monies to their supporters, the freeloaders. Everything else is just window dressing and distractions from cute little fluffy puppy dogs.

What your liberal neighbor and Robert D. Putnam can't see is that this current springtime for freeloaders can't go on like this. It is hammering the poor, and it is making life pretty miserable for the ordinary middle class.

Eventually the American people will get this and throw the liberals out. The tragedy is that they will probably "get it" far too late.

ISIS is Just a Normal Religious Frenzy

After reading the already classic Atlantic piece on “What ISIS Really Wants” by Graeme Wood, you can understand why the liberal response to Islamic terrorism has been so inadequate. The problem is that liberals completely misunderstand the nature of the last two centuries. Take this mind-blowing statement of ignorance and misunderstanding.

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes.

Oh dear, liberals. Where to begin? First of all, it may be convenient for liberals to write off the Protestant Reformation and the little matter of the French Huguenots and the Thirty Years War as "wars of religion," but the notion rather elides what was going on.

Centuries ago there was a fundamental transformation in the culture and economics and power in Northwest Europe. Not surprisingly there was a mighty clash between the various actors at all levels of social interaction, political, religious, economic, military. Marxists might even call it a "class struggle."

Now what on earth do you call the convulsions of the 20th century and its two world wars? I'd call it a monster religious war of the ages between at least three secular religions: communism, fascism, and democracy. Each of these secular religions has a different idea of the meaning of the modern age and the way to organize human society and to live in community.

Of course the worst convulsions occurred in countries like Russia, China, and Germany where the people experienced military defeats and a collapse of the old order. What on earth would you expect in the wake of collapse and ruin? I tell you what I'd expect. I'd expect a profound turn to religion. Only, of course, in the modern age, I would expect secular religions to burst forth.

Now, according to sociologist of religion Rodney Stark in books like The Future of Religion, when people get the religious bug they go in one of two directions. They either attempt go back to the tried and true, as in going back to basics, or as in recovering the true meaning of the gospels. Stark calls this kind of approach a "sect," meaning a religious group that breaks away from a mainstream church looking for the original meaning of the religion.

The other approach is religious innovation, forming a group that looks forward to the truth rather than backward. Stark calls this kind of group a "cult." In practice, many groups combine a backward and a forward look. Nazism combined nationalism and socialism, which we will stipulate as forward-looking, with a return back to blood and soil. Communism imagined a glorious future of perfect community that seemed oldly nostalgic to a mythical past of "primitive communism."

Now let us turn to the Middle East. Just like China and Russia in the 19th century, the Middle East is in crisis. Nothing works, and the people are desperate. Not surprisingly many Muslims have turned to Islam and tried to discover where things went wrong. ISIS, on the report of Graeme Wood, is an attempt to recover the original truth of Islam from its founding texts. According to Islamic expert Bernard Haykel, ISIS "is trying to re-crate the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of war" and the caliphate and slavery and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

On the view of Rodney Stark this is completely understandable and normal. Let's look at another authority, William G. McLoughlin, who has studied religion and politics in the US in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. He argues that the US has responded to perceptions of social crisis with repeated Great Awakenings in religious enthusiasm followed by political reform. The First Great Awakening in the mid 18th century was followed by American Revolution. The Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century was followed by the Civil War to end slavery.

Of course, we Americans look at our history and nod in appreciation at the successful upheavals where we went from a bad place to a better. But the opposite can happen. We conservatives would argue that the rise of communism as a solution to political crises in Russia and China and elsewhere have yielded nothing but disaster. At any rate, Russia and China aren't going the communist route right now.

So the question is whether ISIS and the Iranian Revolution are going to usher in a political and economic and cultural revival in the Middle East or whether they will bury their peoples in a maelstrom like the maelstroms of Soviet Russia and Maoist China. For us in the West the answer is obvious. ISIS and Iran are leading the people of the Middle East off the cliff.

But the ISIS enthusiasts don't agree, and chaps like Rodney Stark would say that they are doing what the West did five hundred years ago when in the Protestant Reformation it attempted to distill the original true essence of Christianity with the benefits of the printing revolution that let any middle-class person conduct their own independent study of the Christian scriptures.

A chap like Ken Wilber has a slightly different take. His "integral psychology" is based on a number of stage models in developmental psychology: stuff like Piaget, Maslow, and Kohlberg. On Wilber's view, when a people experience a disaster, like the Germans in World War I, they respond by stepping down a level in development; they go back to the developmental stage that worked in the past. Thus the most advanced country in the world, the nation that came up with German philosophy, relativity, and quantum mechanics, predictably returned to the idea of race and land, and invaded the empty wastes of Russia to acquire more "living room."

So what will happen with ISIS and Iran? We cannot know, of course. But I think that my view, distilled from thinkers like Stark, McLoughlin, and Wilber, are a much better way of understanding the Islamic threat than tired liberal talk about "wars of religion."

What End-of-Dynasty Looks Like

If you are a conservatives like me you look at the news every day for portents. You hope to see signs in the sky that the Liberal Dynasty is coming to an end, and that the way is clearing for the Glorious Conservative Future.

I know. Life isn't really that simple, not even close. But still, it's obvious that the liberal regime is tired and uncertain. Liberals know something is wrong, even if the New York Times and NPR insist on assuring everyone that everything is copacetic.

If the Liberal Dynasty is really ageing, then it ought to look a bit like China in the second half of the 19th century. I've been reading Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, and I have to report, liberals or no liberals, it's pretty harrowing, as you read about the Manchu ruling class stumbling from one disaster to another. It's sobering to realize that when Cixi died, in 1908, the horrors hadn't really begun.

Jung Chang (author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China and Mao: The Unknown Story) is writing a revisionist history. In her story Cixi is a frustrated reformer instead of the Dragon Lady of previous histories that held China back and frustrated all the reformers.

In any case, the situation in China, from the start of the Opium Wars in 1839, was extremely challenging. The imperial system, that had existed for a thousand years, was suddenly confronted by western commercial powers that wanted to open up China to trade. That's what commercial nation states do. Their merchants want to trade, and they pressure and fund their governments to protect their trade from pirates and plunder.

China's response to this challenge was, to radically simplify, twofold. On the one side were the conservatives who wanted to continue the Confucian system as written, and on the other side reformers that in varying degrees liked the western system and/or realized that China better get with the program or else. Complicating the whole thing was Japan, that woke up from its ancient slumber and decided it wanted to dominate east Asia, including China.

Understand that emperors (and the rest of the Manchu ruling class) were educated solely in the Confucian classics. So when the west came in wanting to set up trading ports and institute western commercial law, and build railways and so on, what on earth would Confucius say? No much. But obviously the western ways would completely transform China. Everyone understood that.

In the event, of course, China under various incompetent emperors and advisers and the remarkable Cixi stumbled from one cock-up to another, during which the education system was completely revised, Beijing University was founded, a modern navy was built and destroyed by the Japanese, and the western armies visited Beijing in 1860 and 1900.

Indeed, China came into the modern world just in time for nationalism and socialism and all the horrors of the 20th century that we, in the Anglo-Saxon west, have mostly dodged.

Back to the Liberal Dynasty. Are we looking at some sort of Mandarin end times with the manifold failures of the Obama regime? We have the president invoking various readings from the liberal scriptures as in Crusaders and colonialism and endless racism while he mindlessly sets liberal activists loose to tangle the nation up in stupid Obamacare and stupid race wars and mindless green politics. Is that a repeat of the Chinese stumblings in 1840-1900?

The answer is that we don't know. Obviously liberalism and big government social democracy is in trouble. Any fool can see that. But politics and reform isn't a simple matter of issues and policy proposals and reform. Politics is about power, and liberals still have lots of power, and they still have lots of faith in their project. And they have the 47%, the folks getting some sort of free stuff from the government.

It's obvious though that liberals are nowhere where they'd thought they were after the glories of 2008 and America's First Black President. It was obvious back then that liberals thought they were going to own the future: a quick stimulus to set the economy to rights, a health reform to finally set health care on the right path, and green energy to save the planet from global warming. Grateful minorities, women and educated youth would then vote them in for a generation.

In fact, the opposite has happened. The economy has sputtered, Obamacare is a metastasizing disaster, green energy is a bird-slaughtering boondoggle, and Congress is solidly Republican. How could it have happened?

That's exactly what the conservatives asked in China in the second half of the 19th century. They were trying to do everything by the book but things were collapsing all around them.

Who knows how things will end up in America in the first half of the 21st century?