Why are Liberals in a Blather Over Gender?

If you are a conservative then gender is pretty simple. Or as they say nowadays, binary. There is male and there is female, and that's all there is to say, except vive la difference.

But liberals are in a complete blather about gender, insisting on the one side that gender is not binary, but multifaceted, and on the other side that cisgendered white males are the very devil.

What is going on here?

I think that my three stage theory of humans explains everything.

On my view there are three kinds of people. There are the People of the Subordinate Self, the peasants, serfs, and victims of the world. They experience themselves as helpless and naturally seek to attach themselves to a powerful lord. They are clients to a great patron. We know who they are: women, minorities, rank-and-file Democratic voters.

Then there are the People of the Responsible Self, the responsible individuals that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. These people think they they are responsible for making their way in the world on their own and they understand that to do this they must serve other people, spouses, children, communities, and consumers. It's up to each individual to figure out how to contribute to society and thus earn a living.

Finally, there are the People of the Creative Self, people who believe that meaning in life comes from work of a creative endeavor. You cannot just go to work and follow the rules; you must create your own work, and discover your own rules, for otherwise you are just a routinist and a mass man.

In my view, it is easy to be a subordinate self; anyone can give up and become a victim. It is challenging, but rewarding, to become a responsible self. Most people are up to the challenge of responsibility. But it is very hard to be a successful creative person. The reason is simple: many are called, but few are chosen.

In our modern America, as I've written before, the nation is divided into two cultural/political camps. On one side are the People of the Responsible Self and they identify as conservatives, libertarians, Christians, Republicans. On the other side is a coalition of the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self and they identify as liberals, progressives, atheists, victims, Democrats.

In the old days liberals and progressives were proudly elitist and served their subordinate clients as great lords, but the strain, the stress as we like to say, was unbearable. That's because the life of a person truly dedicated to the creative life is remarkably challenging.

So liberals came up with a cunning plan. Instead of living lives of true creativity they would live lives of ersatz creativity. They would get get tenure in universities and churn out ersatz scholarship; they would get creative on gender, faking life as creative people. But above all they would reimagine themselves as victims, and they would partake also of life as subordinate people. They would create and inhabit dozens of sexual or gender identities and also pose as helpless victims of the white patriarchy.

Now you understand what all the Title IX rape crisis is about. Now you understand what all the gay marriage thing is about. Now you understand the whole Bruce/Caitlin Jenner media mega-splosion.

But it's all a lie, and the worst kind of lie: the lie people tell themselves.

The most creative thing that most people can ever hope for is to create and raise a clutch of children. A few people get to create new mechanical contraptions; a few people get to create new abstract concepts. But the most that the overwhelming majority of people can hope for is the responsible task of searching out a mate, creating and raising children with that mate, and leaving the world a better place than they found it.

But we humans are forever tempted by squirrels! We are forever getting distracted from the hard work of making a living and caring for those we love. We are forever imagining what might have been, what could have been, what should have been, given a couple of breaks.

And of course when we have power, cultural and political power, we get corrupted by that power, and we declare that our sordid little appetites and oppressions are actually noble and grand.

Usually we only fool ourselves, like our liberal friends in America, right here, right now.

My Problem with Gay Marriage, Transology

I was reading the comments on an article over at RedState about the Jenner transsexual case, and was struck by the repeated posts of "Zoe_Brain," referring to countless scientific papers that reported on the perfectly natural and physical nature of transsexualism.

Of course the other commenters were making standard conservative arguments against transsexualism by appealing to natural law and God's law.

In other words, we had "is" battling with "ought."

Now I take a different view on the whole World War G and World War T issue, and I suppose that my view amounts to "social Darwinism."

To tell the truth, I don't really know what Social Darwinism is supposed to be, only that it is bad.
Darwinism Good, Social Darwinism Bad. Everybody knows that.

Only I don't understand why there is any difference between the natural selection of beneficial genetic traits in the survival of living things and the natural selection of beneficial social/cultural traits in the survival of living things.

That was just a rhetorical flourish. Of course I know why Social Darwinism is Bad.

If the notion that society advances by the natural selection of social and cultural memes then the whole Leftist project is rubbish. The whole Leftist project is based on the notion that we know what is the best social/cultural arrangement for humans; it is the arrangement being advocated by the current generation of leftist political activists.

Let us therefore try to draw a bright line between left and right on this. In the leftist view, the just society is discovered by left-wing activism, organizing people politically and imposing the leftist solution on the rest of society by force. The right has a whole panoply of views, from the Christian view of God's law to the Enlightenment idea of natural law to the Burkean view of gradual reform, having regard for the ancestors and the generation yet unborn to the Hayekian view of human society as an irreducibly complex social organism. Force may or may not be appropriate.

My view is: we don't know how to organize society for the survival and the flourishing of humans and other species on this planet. All we have is a bunch of theories. So here is my take on the present issues:

Gay marriage: It's telling that religions down the ages have voted against homosexuality. Could it be that the religions that have valorized homosexuality have disappeared from this earth?

Transsexualism: Completely new, because prior to the current generation we didn't have the medical technology to do anything about it. But see gay marriage above.

Sexual revolution: Religions tend to be strongly pro-natal and strongly against libertine sexual behavior in women. And of course honor among women is chastity. Could the collapse of child-bearing in educated women, particularly in Germany where 40 percent of college-educated women are childless, be telling us something?

All I am saying is that when you normalize cultural memes like gay marriage, transsexualism, and sexual freedom in general, you are launching cultural memes into the social world that might have unanticipated consequences.

In fact, despite all the catchphrases about "freedom" and "safe spaces," all cultures valorize certain social behaviors and shame other behaviors. Some people shame sluts; other people shame privileged white males. The question is: which social behaviors are beneficial? And by beneficial I mean "promote human survival and flourishing."

We don't know. I'm a libertarian conservative, so I believe in freedom, because I believe that letting people make mistakes is the best road to the future. That way, I believe, mistakes will be made, and the people that make them will have to pay the price, even to the extent of getting a Darwin Award.

In my view, gay marriage and the normalization of transsexualism are mistakes because they encourage people to believe that there is no cost to veering off the mainstream of heterosexual pairing, marriage, and raising the next generation. People that do that should know that they are going off the mainstream of life.

In my view we already know that sexual libertinism is destructive, that the delay of childbearing is destructive, that the devaluing of lifetime marriage is destructive. But we are not allowed to say it.

In my view we will pay, at some point, a frightful cost, for our present cultural and social follies, courtesy of the left. And that cost might be as high as western civilizational annihilation.

Because that's how the world works. People and groups introduce political, economic, and cultural memes into the world. Some of the memes die immediately, but others grow and take over the world. Any meme, even one that takes over the world, might be destructive; we just don't know until we try it. People come into the world and adopt the memes they find close at hand. When they do so, they lash their lives to the mast of their particular cultural meme-boat.

And as their life works out they find out whether their choice was a good idea or whether it was a good idea at the time.

I don't have a problem with gays living together, if they want, or transsexuals changing their body parts, if they have the means to do it.

But I think that it's a mistake for society to go beyond tolerance to celebration of behaviors that veer off the mainstream of life. Because survival.

Look on the Bright Side of Obama's Follies

Today in National Review the classicist Victor Davis Hanson writes about the world as Pottersville, the mean and nasty world that is developing without the good-natured power of the United States to stand up to the Potters of the world. Pottersville is what the ideal New England small town Bedford Falls would have become had It's a Wonderful Life hero George Bailey not lived and the greedy banker Mr. Potter had had his sneering, cynical way.

Golly Gee. That's just a day after I wrote about the "Fargo" Presidency, comparing Obama to clueless car dealer Jerry Lundegaard, who thought he could make some quick money by having his wife kidnapped. What could go wrong, I asked.

Yes, things do look like a mess, what with the Iran threat and the ISIS threat and the Putin threat, but they always do. Just think about the last 100 years. In World War I it was the Hunnish threat. After 1917 it was the Bolshevik threat. Then it was the Nazi threat. the End of the World was nigh.

After World War II we got the Cold War and the global Communist threat. Only this time we had the additional threat of global thermonuclear war. Then, with Korea, we discovered the Maoist threat. Then with the birth of Israel and its wars, the Nationalist Arab threat. Then it was the domino threat, with the Soviets backing anti-colonialist thugs all over the world. Then Communism collapsed, China and then India took up capitalism, and lo and behold now we have the Islamic threat.

And that's to say nothing of all the threats that liberals throw up, from racism to pollution to population explosion to global cooling to sexism to world hunger to homophobia to ozone holes to global warming to peak energy to islamophobia.

Yes, but after the disasters of Obama, what will come of the United States? Can we roll back the thugs and the jihadis and resume our climb to the sunlit uplands of live-and-let-live under limited government and capitalism? The simple answer is that we don't know.

But think back to the middle of the Civil War. I wonder what people thought then about the future of the United States. Or back in December 1776 when Thomas Paine wrote "These are the times that try men's souls." What about the days of the Robber Barons when everyone was railing against the evil railroads? Or in the mid 1800s when the Irish were staggering ashore more dead than alive from the coffin ships. Truth is that the past always looks more tranquil and ordered than it seemed at the time.

My favorite example of the past is the British Empire. We like to think of it as Britain painting the world red. But actually it was one disaster after another with the government trying to pick up the pieces. Local chaps on the ground out across the other side of the world were always getting into a scrape. Before the days of the telegraph it would take three to six months for the news of the disaster to get back to Britain and then the government had to decide what to do about it. If anything. But first it had to pretend to the domestic public that everything was in hand and there was no need to worry.

But think about the disasters: losing North America; the Crimea War; the mess of the Indian Mutiny (called the Great Uprising in India); Gordon in Khartoum; the South African messes ending in the Boer War. Nothing but incompetence recovered at enormous expense in lives and treasure.

The good thing about the Years of the Obama Disasters is that they have really discredited the Democratic Party and liberalism with the American people. It's going to make really hard going for Democrats for a few political seasons. That means that there will be a calm in the usual trade winds of liberal cultural domination. That will provide a chance to do some genuine reform that rolls back government, just a little, for just a while, until the political climate returns to normal and the liberal trade winds resume.

And think of the gift of Hillary Clinton as the Democrats' Anointed! We conservatives and Republicans should be paying the Democrats to keep her in the race.

Hmm. I wonder.

Obama: Not Cloward-Piven but Jerry Lundegaard

Some people think that the Obamis are executing on a brilliant Cloward-Piven strategy to make the country ungovernable. That's why the president and his minions are "angrying up" African Americans against white cops killing young blacks.

All part of the plan, according to John Nolte.

Keep ‘em down. Keep ‘em angry. Pretend you are their savior not their oppressor, and keep ‘em voting for the very thing destroying them: big government and the Democrats who control it.

This sinister plot is no secret. It’s openly called the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

But I think that the Cloward-Piven Strategy, named after two lefty professors predicting revolution, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. Sure, it can angry up the proles so that radical leaders can enlist them into a political street army. Then the police hold back from vigorous policing and the violence gets worse. But then what?

I suspect the same goes for Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's all about mobilizing the urban working or underclass against The Man, making him follow his rules. But like Gandhi's non-violence, it only works against a "Man" that operates according to bourgeois law and a "Man" that has compassion for the struggling masses.

But the question is, with Cloward-Piven and Alinsky, what next? When you've got your urban army set up and organized, what do you do with it? Can you look around a corner and see where your lefty activism is going to take you?

There, in my opinion, is where things start to go wrong.

It's like the set-up in the movie Fargo. Car dealer Jerry Lundegaard sets up a cunning plan to have a couple of low-lifes kidnap his wife so his rich father-in-law can pay the ransom and Jerry can get his hands on his father-in-law's money. What could go wrong? As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds would say.

Everything, that's what.

Think of the Obama presidency. After the biggest financial crash since 1929, the Obamis say Hey, let's nationalize the health care system, let's drench the energy sector in stupid green subsidies and drive coal plants out of business. Oh and let's make sure we get out of the slump with a quick $1 trillion stimulus to keep state and local government employees on the job. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from a failed Obamacare built on lies and a fracking revolution that makes nonsense out of green energy. And an excruciatingly slow recovery because of all the new costs that the Obamis have thrown over the economy.

Now the Obamis think it's a brilliant idea to end the "broken windows" and "stop and frisk" policing of the last 20 years. Because Black Lives Matter. Because liberals hate the unjust "stop and frisk" policing policy that unjustly targets young men of color. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from murder to mayhem. Here's Leah Barkoukis in "Families of Shooting Victims to de Blasio: 'We Need Stop-and-Frisk'." You mean that urban residents actually want unjust and racist "stop and frisk?" Golly. Who could have seen that coming? In Baltimore:

Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend.

And now in Baltimore "the people who not too long ago decried the presence of police in their communities are now are wishing they’d come back."

There are two narratives about urban policing. There is the Robert Peel narrative, that in the modern big city policemen are needed to control young lower-class single men. Robert Peel was the guy that created the Metropolitan Police in Britain in 1829. Then there is the progressive narrative that the "gentle giants" are victims of the system. Because racism, or inequality.

The "broken windows/stop and frisk" policy belongs in the Peel tradition and was developed in response to the urban riots of the 1960s and the explosion in crime thereafter. The combination of riots and crime created the "law-and-order" politics that elected Richard Nixon to the presidency.

The idea of "stop and frisk" is that you go after minor street crimes on the theory that the guys creating street disturbances are the same as the guys doing the murders.  Says Wiki:

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy, including the controversial mass use of "stop, question, and frisk" by the New York City Police Department.

When Wiki writes "great debate" and "controversial" they mean that liberals hate it.

But there is a bigger issue that "stop and frisk" solves. The problem is that people in the inner city won't testify about gang murders; they are too afraid. Of course the inner-city folks blame the po-lice for their failure to arrest and convict the killers. But "everybody knows" who done the killings, including the police. So the police get their own back by arresting the known thugs for minor crimes whenever they catch them. The young thugs and their liberal activist mentors hate this.

And so when Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York City he pushed back on "stop and frisk".  Of course he did; he's a progressive and progressives hate "stop and frisk." And in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore police all over the nation have eased back on "stop and frisk." Hey, why risk your freedom and your family and your career because you didn't dot the 'i's and cross the 't's in your last arrest? But coincident with the backoff in "stop and frisk" has been a startling rise in urban killing. Who could have see this coming? As always Heather Mac Donald is the go-to person on this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

What we are getting is almost a scientifically controlled experiment to measure the effectiveness of "stop and frisk." We all know, because we all understand scientific method, that "correlation is not causation." That goes back to Hume. In the last 20 years the crime rate has come down dramatically. And also police forces across the nation have been implementing "stop and frisk." But hey, that's just correlation.

But now, courtesy of Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio and the lefty rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore, we have a suspension of "stop and frisk." And low and behold, urban killings are up sharply.

I'd say that this is just about as close as we get in this world to "causation."

What is the explanation for the dumb-as-posts policies of our liberal friends, who just cannot seem to learn? Why in the world have liberals insisted that "stop and frisk" was mere racism and oppression, and are now seeing their opposition to effective policing blow up in their faces?

Here is my evaluation, gleaned from a commenter at National Review. The answer to the question is that liberalism is not a governing philosophy. It is a secular religion. "The Z Man" is commenting on the inability of the progressive ruling class to curb the Clintons:

The central issue is that Progressives lack the ability to police their ranks, other than the hunting of heretics. They are good at chasing off a guy like Juan Williams for apostacy, but they can't figure out how to police common criminals like the Clintons.

See what he is saying? He is saying that the only thing the Progressives know how to do is to police orthodoxy, and hunt the heretics. But that is a tactic of a church or a religion. It does not try to look around the corner and think about what the hunting of heretics might do in the larger world. It does not think about a code of honor for the governing class, either from a moral or a strategic perspective.

And here is The Z Man's big point. "A political class with a moral grounding would have cut off [the Clintons] long before they made it to national politics." But in 1992 the Dems were desperate.

But now we have the "Fargo Presidency." Hey, let's angry up the African Americans and drive them to the polls in 2016. What could go wrong?

Well, everything, that's what. Let's just start with the vital Republican "war on women." If everything is quiet at home and abroad then it's a fine idea to terrify women into believing that evil white Republican men want to take their contraception away from them. But suppose the news is full of urban rioting and the sudden rise in crime?

Then America's biddable women, that once were soccer moms and then security moms and then hands-off-my-uterus moms, would now become law-and-order moms. It's visceral. A woman cannot begin to function as the bringer of life until she is safe. As Jack London opines in The Sea Wolf, when the ship starts sinking the women start shrieking. They expect the men to make them safe. Of course Jack London was a jerk and an alcoholic and a drug addict. But he did believe in socialism.

The number one question women have is "Mr. President, Is it Safe?" And it looks like "safe spaces" will be front and center in 2016.

Thanks to the Fargo Presidency.

Where's the Conservative Narrative We Need?

On a day when former Speaker Denny Hastert gets indicted for paying hush money, Jonah Goldberg writes about the astonishingly low bar for Clinton misdeeds.

[E]very time there’s a new revelation about the unseemly practices of the Clintons, every time a new trough of documents or fresh disclosures come to light, scads of news outlets and Clinton spinners insist that “there’s no smoking gun” proving beyond all doubt that Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation did anything wrong.

Whatever happened to the Caesar's wife standard? How come that Denny Hastert, a private lobbyist, is in the dock and, e.g., Lois Lerner, a government official that seems to have grossly abused her power, isn't? And how come Hillary Clinton isn't under indictment right now for violating government record-keeping mandates?

Or what about the delicious interview between Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina and Andrea Mitchell where Mitchell is clearly warning Fiorina that there's a lèse majesté problem with criticizing Hillary:

She's had a lifetime, though, in public service. Going back to before she was first lady in Arkansas. She can argue that she's got a record on women's issues, from the Beijing Women's Conference to all of her work with the Children's Defense Fund going up through the Senate, senator from New York, that’s a record. Secretary of state. How do you compare yourself to her? 

When, in a month of Sundays, has Mitchell ever defended a Republican white male like that?

Let's look at another notion, the "cares about people like me" metric used in presidential polls. It's said that Obama beat Romney roughly 80-20 on the cares-about-me question. Really? You might think that if you had been glued in front of your TV in summer 2012 and an endless roll of Joe Soptic commercials.  But come on: Mitt Romney's whole life has been about service to his church and showing up when asked. Barack Obama? Well, now that the elections are all over we are getting to see more and more of the small and narrow man inside the media bubble.

Conservatives often despair about winning the "cares about people like me" stakes. But I think we have been going about it all wrong. The way that Democrats frame it, it's all about feudalism. That's what the Joe Soptic ad was about. Romney was the lord of the manor; he should have sent his wife out to succor Soptic's wife with flannel and a basket of food.

That's all wrong for Republicans. What Republicans need to advertise is that they care about the responsible middle class, people who, in Sean Hannity's words, follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. That's what Republicans did in the 1970s with the Silent Majority meme and Democrats hated it; they hated it because it worked. What Republicans need to hammer on again and again is that Republicans care about people who do the right thing, who get married, have children, save for college, help their community. And if the government or its bureaucrats or its activists come down on you, then Republicans will have your back.

It's my belief that the Obama boys have set this up beautifully for 2016. Where is the responsible middle-class person who is not worried about saying the wrong thing -- to a woman at work, perhaps -- and then losing his job, because sexism. Where is the Christian small business that doesn't wonder if some gay person will come through the door tomorrow and set them up for ruining their business, because homophobia? Where is the liberal college professor that does not worry about getting his career ruined by some "triggered" "studies" activist, because identity?

I was reading Charles Krauthammer's regular Friday column today where he mourns the awful time his fellow physicians are having, beset as they are by government, insurance companies, lawyers, and the dread electronic health records (EHR) mandate. But if you read the comments you can see very little sympathy for the docs. Hey, they seem to say, if the docs don't want to get with the program, they can quit.

Yes. No doubt. But the EHR initiative is a case of government coercion. It is government saying you will convert to our idea of what EHR should look like. Or else. Do we really care that little about government coercion in America in the 21st century?

It's strange to me how easily we accept government force. Perhaps it's because we mostly all work in some corporate bureaucracy, and so live in a world of corporate mandates. The mandate, for us, is our way of life; you suck it up and do what you are told, just like in the feudal era. Sucking up to the powerful is just what we all do.

But I yearn for a world where we don't suck up to the powerful, where the thing most honored in the public square is not the helpless victim or the cosseted "activist" but the responsible individual.

Will Demographic "Diversity" End in Tears?

All across the world different races and religions are mixing it up as never before.

Well, maybe not. Hey, maybe things were more mixed up in the Roman and the Ottoman Empires than right now. But never mind: we all think that the races and the cultures are mixing it up like never before.

Against that the lands of the former Ottoman Empire right now are sorting into silos like mad in massacres and genocides.

In his new book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission Charles Murray is sanguine about this, at least as far as America is concerned. The United States, he tells us, was always a diverse nation, starting from the founding from Albion's Seed when the four British groups, Yankees, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish, didn't like each other at all. That was followed by German and Irish immigration, and then southern and eastern European immigration. And don't forget the Swedes!

Of course, everyone right now is terrified by ISIS and Islam in Europe. That's when they aren't terrified by Hispanic immigration to the US or black thugs in Baltimore or alternatively racist police in any inner city! My favorite professional firebrand Vox Day notes four different outcomes of "the demographic destruction of Anglo-Saxon America."

a) subjection and eventual elimination of minorities,
b) subjection and eventual elimination of the majority,
c) partition,
d) ethnic subsumption.

For various reasons, I expect (c) to be the most likely in the USA and (a) to be the most likely in Europe.

There's only one problem with this analysis: capitalism. I think that the great story of the last 200 years is the frantic effort of the left to keep people in their national and class and race silos in the face of capitalism mixing them up. That's why Marx had to predict that capitalism would "immiserate" the working class. That's why the Frankfurt School had to invent cultural Marxism to reimagine the working-class vicitms as race and gender victims. That's why the Democrats had to restart immigration in the 1960s. Unless they all acted right now the people would be converted by the Great Enrichement into contented middle-class cows with no interest in race, class, and gender wars.

Why did they do this and try to angry everyone up? Because if you leave people alone in capitalism the penniless immigrants will mostly turn into doctors and lawyers if you give them a generation or two of peace and prosperity. And that would be the end of left-wing reactionary politics, the totalitarian impulse to reduce everything to government. That's why President Obama and his minions are working overtime trying to "angry up" African Americans. That's why the feminists are trying to divide the sexes on college campi with their "rape culture" lies. Otherwise all those folks will eventually wander into the middle class and not respond to race appeals.

Here's Joel Kotkin showing what is happening out there in America under the radar of the racist-sexist mainstream media. The three major minority groups, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, all do fine when they get out of blue states.

We found, for all three major minority groups, that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation.

And don't forget that, except for blacks, everyone else is interracially dating and intermarrying like mad.

Don't forget that the public school system is a ruthless homogenizer. Don't forget that for the 50 percent of people that go to college, they tend to "lose their religion" and become middle-class professionals. Don't forget that for the 100 million or so working in the private sector, cooperation and trust and teamwork is the driving cultural meme. You trust and you exchange with anyone who can be trusted. The idea is to be friends with everyone. Otherwise you lose.

Nobody can know the outcome of the great mixing of the races of the current era. Politicians may rile the groups up into global thermonuclear war. On the other hand there is the relentless cultural force of capitalism: the guy with the biggest market share and the biggest economy wins.

Summing Up "By the People": We Want More

In his latest book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Charles Murray asserts three propositions. First, the Constitution is broken. Second, we can fight back against the administrative regulatory state. Third, in a "diverse" nation there cannot be one-size-fits-all solutions to problems. Fourth, it's time to ridicule big government, because the gigantic state that the Progressives so earnestly built over the last century is ridiculous.

You can see my blog on the three Parts of By the People here, here, and here.

When he says the Constitution is broken, Murray means that we can't go back to a small state and limited government by mere political means. Too much of the Constitution has been destroyed: the Welfare Clause, the Commerce Clause, and the Supreme Court's deference to the federal government's regulatory authority.

When he says that we can fight back, he is proposing a cunning way of neutralizing the power that bureaucrats now possess to cow individual Americans and businesses into submission. He proposes a "Madison Fund." It would be a privately-owned foundation that would push back at bureaucrats on behalf of individuals and businesses oppressed by the regulatory state.

When he says that a diverse nation can't reduce everything to one-size-fits-all administrative programs he is saying that a diverse nation has diverse communities with different and conflicting moral systems. Any government law or regulation is likely to favor one group's moral system over another, and that creates conflict. The way to avoid crushing other people and their moral systems is to keep government small and limited so that as much of the law as possible covers universals like prohibitions against murder, theft, and fraud, not to mention national defense.

When he says we should ridicule the man behind the curtain, he is suggesting that it is time for us Americans to stop deferring to the present ruling class, and tell it like it is: today's government is an incompetent mess that wastes our taxes and treats us like children.

But for me this is just a start. I don't just want to knock the helmet off the government's policemen, I want to diminish the very idea of objective government by experts that the educated class of the late 19th century has imposed on us, and my objection is fundamental. For me, government is force, and so the Progressive philosophy of government by experts is flawed at the very start. What do you mean by saying that pensions, health care, education, and welfare can only be achieved by force? Aren't these all highly desirable goods that most people will seek out and acquire on their own without government coercion?

You see, I think that the whole liberal project is hiding from a brutal truth, that the project judges there is no way forward except force. The administrative state is a system of force. It says that we educated chaps will consult our experts for the objective settled science and then we will implement it through the government. By force. The notion of "activism" is that activists can objectively detect injustices and then advocate for social change to deliver a regime of peace and justice. But if government is going to direct the transition from oppression to peace and justice, then we are talking about force. In fact I would argue that if you pay attention to the devotees of activism, they are out looking for things that can only be resolved by government force.

There is a kind of beautiful symmetry in the activists' system. They think that politics is the highest calling. But that means that there must be an issue on which to divide people, the "we" who want reform and the "they" that don't. So the whole process involves a contest to make "us" a majority so we can pass a law to force our idea on the minority. The interesting thing to me is that this is merely a sublimation of the old warrior ethic. The point about the warrior is that he is called to defend his community from the enemy. So force is involved, and it is necessary to exalt the warrior and his code of force in order to safeguard the community so that he will protect us from marauders. But, of course, the presence of warriors in a community is dangerous; you have some people within the boundary of "we" where force is forbidden whose whole reason for being is to be trained and ready to respond to threats with force. So here you have people that experience themselves and tell us that they are devoted to peace and justice: yet their whole being is about conflict, just like the warrior class of old.

Charles Murray's most penetrating insight in By the People is that you cannot have big government in a diverse nation characterized by a number of communities with different moral traditions and priorities. On his view the attempts by particular moral traditions to impose their will over the whole is bound to fail, or if it succeeds is bound to create opposition and discord. Our liberal friends are pushing forward on all fronts to impose their moral system upon America in all kinds of ways from their benefits state to their government by race, their program to push feminist and gay narratives on the American people, their war on global warming. Don't agree with the liberal moral system? Then you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, or denier. If Charles Murray is right about the needs of a diverse America, then the liberal program will end in tears.

But ultimately I find myself unsatisfied by Murray's book. Yes, there are some things we can do at the margin of the big-government state and we should do them. But I Want More!

First of all, I'm concerned that Murray is only pushing back on the Progressive Era governing model, of educated rulers using the best science and the experts to formulate government programs to improve peoples' lives. Don't forget that there is also the Revolution model, of courageous community organizers leading the people marchin' and protestin' against an unjust system and taking the ill-gotten gains of the rich and giving them to the poor. Our liberal masters use either of these models, as needed.

For instance, the Obama administration takes the fact that global surface  temperatures have gone up by about one degree Celsius and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased in the last century to all little under 0.5%, attaches it to the agreed scientific theory that carbon dioxide has a "greenhouse" effect, and then demands that we surrender huge powers to the government to change energy production and use. Because Science. That's the science and experts apology for increasing government power.

Then the Obama administration takes incidents of blacks getting killed by whites as grounds for federalizing local police forces. Because oppression. Or justifies a higher minimum wage. Because inequality.

See what is going on here? If you are a member of the liberal ruling class you naturally want more power. That's what all ruling classes want. In the modern era there are two justifications for more government power. One is: Because Science. The other is: Because Oppression.

Whenever there's a crisis other than a direct military threat, why do we always assume it requires more government power?

My question is: if this is such a great idea, why does it even need government force? I say that before we start trying to solve a problem with more government force we should have first explored all the ways we could solve it with less government force.

Temperatures are going up? Maybe we should think about encouraging people to learn how to adapt to temperature changes rather than spend billions and billions on government subsidies, grants, and handouts to politically connected corporations.

Oppression and inequality? Maybe we should first winkle out all the present government policies that promote oppression and inequality: licensure, subsidies, taxes, work disincentives, minimum wages.

All I am saying is that I want the American people to say, whenever some new plan comes along to increase government power, "oh yeah: Because Science." Or alternatively: "oh yeah: Because Inequality." That's what we need to change.

If we can reverse the narrative on Because Science and Because Inequality then we will really be changing things for the better.

And that is my dream.