Contra-deBoer: Anti-nationalist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My fourth piece was "Feminist". Now we look at his "Anti-nationalist."

Not surprisingly, Fredrik deBoer is against the nation state.

A functioning, healthy left political movement would recognize the fundamental illegitimacy of the nation-state. It would see that structure as the product of capitalism and imperialism. It would recognize the nation-state as recently invented for the express purpose of enabling war.

Imperialism, of course, is a natural outcome of nationalism, and national borders exist "as structures designed explicitly to separate different classes of worker and thus prevent solidarity." In the short term, deBoer believes, the state is necessary for "establishing economic and social justice." But in the long term the state must be eliminated as "illegitimate."

I don't know quite how to deal with the "fundamental illegitimacy of the nation-state." Obviously all states are illegitimate, in that they are all founded on war, not law. That is true for the United States and the United Kingdom. To the victor the spoils. And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Russian nation state, born in a coup and a civil war, that consciously tried to Russify its non-Russian minorities.

Yes, the nation state was invented for enabling war, and the best explanation I have found for this is in The Sources of Social Power where Michael Mann describes the nation-creation process for England. It happened in the Tudor period when the king found that he could no longer fund his regime out of the royal estates. What with the development of guns and expensive navies, he needed money, lots more money, to be able to stand up to France and Spain and their military and economic might. So he started ramping up national taxes and using the merchants of London for their credit and disarming the nobles by demolishing their castles. The result of this power play was the English nation state.

Imperialism? Well, sure. The merchants had to get something in return for buying the king's paper. And what they most valued was a navy to keep the pirates at bay. One thing led to another and pretty soon a young punk like Robert Clive -- "out of measure addicted to fighting" as a youth, according to La Wik -- ends up in India and starts messing around in the princely politics of that ancient land and the Brits find that they have an empire. It is a mistake to think that empire is a conscious policy. History is a disaster, and empires crop up in the strangest places.

As for the idea that national borders exist to separate the workers and prevent solidarity, I think that we can refer to the current migrant crisis in Europe to let the air out of that one. Workers are like other humans. They want state power used to give them benefits, and will vote for politicians that promise them. But when things turn south they demand that the politicians continue their benefits and keep out the low-wage competition from immigrants.

As for the withering away of the state, a Marxist perennial, I cannot conceive of a time where the current practice will end. A government is an armed band that occupies some territory and taxes the inhabitants thereof for the privilege of being allowed to work for a living. The proceeds of this taxation is used to reward the government's supporters. On the day that this mechanism ceases to work then we may start to talk about the reality of the "elimination of the illegitimate structure that is the state as a paramount long term goal." If anything, the larger the social units, the bigger the government and the more powerful the state.

The folly of deBoer's idea is encapsulated in my catchphrase that Government is Injustice. All opposition political parties and revolutionary movements feed on the food of injustice. Every last member smolders with the knowledge of the government's injustice and the ruling class's pride and arrogance. And they are right. What do you expect from an presidential executive order or a bill passed by a majority in a democratic parliament? You expect a measure dressed up in the language of justice that rewards the government's friends and punishes its enemies. In their Calculus of Consent social scientists Buchanan and Tullock discovered the only just method of legislation. It is the rule of unanimous consent, a rule that requires the majority to buy the votes of the minority: in other words, pay for the costs that will likely be experienced by the minority. So every oppressed opposition that succeeds to political power imposes its will on the defeated foe. Just as deBoer proposes to use the power of the state to establish his moral social system of economic and social justice.

There may be a more legitimate political entity than the nation state, but we do not see its possibility on the horizon. The present turmoil in the European Union is a day-to-day testimony to this truth. The Greek people, encouraged by politicians, experience the EU economic policy as injustice; for some reason they do not experience any kind of solidarity with their worker pals in Germany. In return the German people, in the teeth of opposition from their betters, experience the open-borders policy as injustice; they do not feel solidarity with the migrants that are pouring into Europe from the failed region of the Middle East. And the EU ruling class is not shy about silencing voices that dissent from their ruling-class consensus.

Because Government is Injustice, any political entity, from a city to a world instead-of-a-state, will find that it has to deal with opponents within the walls. These will be disappointed inhabitants that experience the policy of the entity as injustice, and they will probably interpret the policy as motivated by malice. That entity will respond to the challenge to its legitimacy with force. deBoer understands this when he writes that the state will be needed to establish economic and social justice. Of course. In the future, all will be sweetness and light, but in the short term we must deal firmly with these troublesome exploiters.

The nation state ain't going nowhere. Not in our lifetimes, and probably not in this millennium.

Next up: "Pacifist."

Contra-deBoer: Feminist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My third piece was "Antiracist". Now we look at his "Feminist."

deBoer's approach to sexism is the same as his approach to racism. But he asserts that "gender discrimination is a unique form of injustice that has been ubiquitous in human history" [my italics], not just in the modern world. It is a "uniquely destructive injustice... the domination of women by men."  The same remedy is required: "addressing material inequality and material injustice" and pursuing a politics of "equal rights, equal power, and equal dignity for all gender identities."

But I'd say that we have a category error here. The notion of "gender discrimination" only makes sense in a state society with a justice system that reaches into tribes and families. Prior to the state, people lived in families, men and women, and the patriarch was law. It was the Roman Empire that made the first significant effort to penetrate the patria potestas with the state's law and an environment where discrimination had any meaning.

Actually, the domination of women by men goes all the way back to our ape ancestors. In the society of chimpanzees all males outrank all females, and the males are not slow to remind the females of this fact. There is also a complete division of labor between the sexes. The males defend the border of the troop's territory, and the females bear and raise the young using the food available within the troop territory. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

That is where we began. Since then there have been some changes made. For one thing, modern men have been socialized from border wars to wage labor. For another, the lives of women are no longer completely consumed by childbearing and childraising, and for over a century they have been coming out into the public square. This public square, as the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote a century ago, was defined by men for men. But he predicted that women would, in time, transform the public square to suit a more feminine sensibility. Now that the majority of university students are women, I think we can say that the current rape crisis on campus reflects a more feminine sensibility at work both in the administration and the student body. Has that happened spontaneously because individual people have adjusted their individual lives to new conditions on the ground, or because of the left and its activism? I suspect a bit of both.

I'm just a humble racist, sexist, homophobe, but I wonder if the rhetoric that deBoer uses is not dominatory in a male-centered, and Enlightenment rational sense -- which was critiqued by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Do women really talk and think in terms of material inequality and equal rights, equal power, etc.? In my experience women, unless they have been carefully taught, think much more in terms of relationship, in giving and receiving, and above all in caring for those they love. How would that work in the relentlessly political world imagined by the left?

For you will search in deBoer's manifesto in vain for the word "child" or "loved one" or "family". Forget "husband" and "wife" or "spouse" or even "partner." There is not a whisper of that. It is all very well to talk about rights and power and material security, but it rather elides the central fact of human life, that it is not about politics and government and a moral social system, or of economic reproduction, but of living and human reproduction and growing and dying.

Let us concede the point that women have been dominated by men since the dawn of time. But what do we make of the rich women of the Middle Ages that were married young and remarried and often lived to a ripe old age enjoying dowers from three separate dead husbands? What kind of domination would allow old widows to enjoy the fruits of the patriarchal estate in such a way while important dynastic questions were being weighed in the balance. A real patriarchy would have stripped the widows of their extravagant dowers without compunction. What do you make of the writings of women like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Willa Cather? Were these women just writing fantasies of feminine empowerment, or were they writing about women and situations they knew?

There are serious questions about the feminist agenda and whether it is really as good as advertised for women and other living things. Is the sexual revolution really so good for women? Hasn't it had the paradoxical effect of victimizing women in a humiliating sexual free-for-all? Has the divorce revolution really been so good for women -- or men or children -- or has it coarsened women's lives and thrown them into dependency on government? Does not legal abortion put pregnant women under hegemonic pressure to "get rid of it" for the convenience of the others in their lives?

If you ask me, a real Feminist movement would not be a movement of the left at all, but a vast informal network of communities of women working to serve the best interests of all women, and also the men and women that they loved. It would not be political, because politics is violence; it would not be governmental, because government is force. It would not, for sure, be armed to the teeth with an ideological agenda, ready to lay waste to its enemies. Because, to use a trope of President Obama, that's not who women are.

Next up: "Anti-nationalist."

Contra deBoer: Antiracist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My second piece was "Anti-capitalist". Now we look at his "Antiracist."

Fredrik de Boer's "functioning, healthy left political movement would recognize that racial discrimination is a unique form of injustice that has been ever-present in modern society." This is because racism is both "material oppression and emotional insult", and it arises out of the modern world's "history of the domination of non-white races by white races." So racism is not merely a function of economic inequality but a "unique and uniquely pernicious phenomenon". But "combating racism must begin with addressing economic inequality and material injustice." Overall, the new left movement would "assertively pursue a society of equal rights, equal power, and equal dignity of all races."

So if you think that racism is a special injustice, and if you think that the solution begins, initially, with fighting inequality and material injustice, then you are all set up to use government force to remedy the situation.

But I don't think so. I don't think that racial discrimination is "unique" or that it is peculiar to modern society. History, according to Theodor Adorno, is a disaster, and that disaster has a lot to do with the appetite for hegemony and domination in ruling classes and revolutionaries bucking for promotion to the ruling class. Conquest slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient world, and a thousand years ago the Vikings would sail up the rivers of England in the fall. They would kill the men, seize the harvest, and sell the women and children in the biggest slave market in northwest Europe, Dublin. Human groups have always discriminated against the "other," whether the other is the tribe next door or the Muslims in a no-go ghetto. Moreover, humans have also tended to prefer white to dark skin color. No doubt there is a class thing here: dark means someone that has to work in the sun. And of course the Circassian slaves (they have their own Wikipedia entry) were highly prized in the harems of the Middle East because of their whiteness.

The particular indictment of modern capitalism, of course, plantation slavery. It stands to reason, of course, that when you are buying slaves to work your highly profitable sugar or cotton plantation -- and you are using West Africans because by trial and error the slave masters discovered their immunity to malaria -- you need to find a way to justify the way you brutally exploit your slaves to help you sleep at night. What better than to classify the West Africans as a lesser race that can't deal with freedom and can't be responsible free men and women? And then when you lose a civil war to the northerners you bridle at the idea that your former slaves could in any way be your equal, let alone lord it over you in league with evil Republican carpetbaggers and scalawags. And the worst thing is that under capitalism, it pays employers to hire blacks who are willing to work for less than a white man. So you write Jim Crow laws and Davis-Bacon acts to make sure that doesn't happen. And the result? Your Southern United States stays poor and backward and morally depraved, and the blacks you oppressed migrate to the north. The fact is that only now are African Americans returning that once sterile and bare land, now manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of good Republican supply-side economics. Because that's where the jobs are.

Of course, if you have already decided that racism is uniquely evil, then all else follows. But suppose you end up creating ill will between different groups in society. After all, nobody thinks they are uniquely evil, and they tend to object strongly when somebody marginalizes them as evil. I'd say, for instance, that left politics is uniquely evil, as shown by the man-made famine in the Ukraine and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But try getting your lefty friend to agree to such a proposition. So when you start on the "uniquely evil" course you are creating divisions and conflict in society. And who knows where that might lead? It might lead to your glorious revolution being reversed by the reactionaries.

But here is yet another problem. When the educated elite of creative left activists has declared a group of humans as uniquely oppressed victims, and enacted not just non-discrimination laws but positive discrimination in affirmative action and "diversity" and a culture of offense, what does this do to the recipients of this rage for justice? I argue that it makes the recipients into a dysfunctional culture that cannot succeed in society without special privilege. I call it the "little darling" problem. And I mean problem, for the little darlings.

Back in the old days, racism was unexceptionable; today it is scandalous, and the left has done its part to make it so. But when do we declare victory? After every last racist has been hunted down and named and shamed and banished from progressive society?

And is racism a unique evil? That's the $64,000 question. What do you think?

Next up: "Feminist."

Contra-deBoer: Anti-capitalist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016. My first piece was "Materialist". Now we look at his "Anti-capitalist."

deBoer states that the "moral and practical problems of capitalism cannot be reformed away". So the left must build a "post-capitalist world" to deliver a truly "moral social system".

This world would take advantage of the incredible productive capacity that capitalism has unleashed on the world and use it to spread material goods through a system of collective ownership. It would not eliminate private property entirely, but rather entail universal joint ownership and control of the productive apparatus of society.

"[M]aterial security and comfort" would not be "earned"; they are "the fundamental right of all humans".

[This world] would acknowledge that we’ve moved from an age defined by scarcity to one defined by abundance, even while it acknowledged that there are certain resource limits on the planet. It would achieve material egalitarianism while preserving aesthetic, philosophical, social, and personal diversity. It would operate under the assumption that removing human beings from the immediate need to work to live would not result in mass apathy and listlessness, but rather unleash a massive flourishing of creativity, productivity, and inspiration. 

Notice that the imperative for a "moral social system" as a replacement for the capitalist world goes immediately against deBoer's first topic, Materialist, in which he privileges the "is" over the "ought." For his, the imperative of a moral social system means that the practical success of capitalism, to the extent we understand it even now, counts for nothing against the moral imperative of a moral social system. Earth to deBoer: the people in any society, except for a few activists, think that their own moral social system is the best going. And what happens to "preserving aesthetic, philosophical, social, and personal diversity" versus the "moral social system" that the left movement has set up? The whole point of the aesthetic or philosophical or personal life, as practiced for instance by the left for the last century or so, is to imagine a new point of view. So what happens when that point of view, perhaps shared by a coterie of the most moral people going, comes up against the one true moral social system just implemented by the left movement?

The idea of implementing a truly "moral social system" also goes against the anticlericalism in the Materialist paragraph. This is something that is hard for people on the left to grasp. The best way to realize it is to assert that all the movements of the left are secular religions, and that each claims to have discovered the true "moral social system." When you talk about discovering or developing a moral social system you are talking about what St. Augustine did 1,500 years ago and St. Thomas Aquinas did 800 years ago. They were clerics putting together a moral social system for the benefit of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. And the question for people on the left is: what happens to the people that don't agree with your truly moral social system?

It is all very well to say that material equality and material security and comfort are fundamental rights of all humans. The question is: how? How does the material for the material security get produced? Obviously there must be a bunch of people out there producing the products and services that yield material security and comfort for all. But who decides? The answer to the question was made by Eric Hoffer half a century ago. Either the boss tells the worker what to do, or the worker figures it out for himself. If the boss does this (whether an actual boss or the voting community) then the moral social system is based on force. If the worker decides what to do then he needs some sort of feedback to tell him whether he is making the right product in the right way for the right use of resources. We know what this feedback is called; it is called the price system. And it is telling that whenever people say: we don't need no stinkin' price system, economic chaos ensues.

It is obvious to me what this new post-capitalist world is all about, with its new moral social system where there is no requirement to work and everyone gets to practice "aesthetic, philosophical, social, and personal diversity". It is a paradise set up for artists and writers, Dichter und Denker, as the Germans say. La Wik, in the original German.

Dichter und Denker ist das Ideal der Verbindung von Kunst und Wissenschaft, insbesondere der Philosophie, in einer Person oder Gruppe.

Here is the translation from La Wik:

"Poets and Thinkers" is the ideal of combining art and science, particularly philosophy, in an individual or group.

By the way, in German Wissenschaft doesn't just mean science, it "incorporates science, learning, knowledge, scholarship and implies that knowledge is a dynamic process discoverable for oneself, rather than something that is handed down."

On my Three Peoples theory, deBoer's ideal is the cry of the People of the Creative Self. They don't want to be subordinate serfs, working for The Man. They don't want to be responsible individuals, working on a dull family and a career. They want to be funded to think deep thoughts and imagine a great thing.

deBoer skates over the cosmic responsibility that the leaders and followers of the post-capitalist world are taking on. He assumes that it is a given that we humans can replace the capitalist world with another that is better and more moral. He assumes that we understand how capitalism works. He assumes that we can design the moral system and then implement it.

I'd argue, even as a raging pro-capitalist, that the opposite is true. We really don't have a clue how capitalism works. All we know is that, in the past 200 years the peoples that have lived under capitalism have experienced a 3,000 percent increase in personal material welfare. We know that, e.g., when the Chinese government switched from a socialist-inspired economic model to a capitalist inspired model it resulted in the biggest increase in material prosperity in human history. We know that, e.g., when the Venezuelan government replaced a so-so capitalist economy and started driving towards socialism, it visited economic chaos on the Venezuelans.

Let us imagine that the Chinese government just got lucky, and the Chavistas in Venezuela just go unlucky. But, as Napoleon said about generals: "Is he lucky?" In other words: never mind how he did it, did he get the job done?

I'm inclined to go with modern science and its chaos theory. Like the weather, the economy is a chaotic emergent system. Central to the notion of emergence is the notion that the interactions are so many and so governed by chance that it is impossible to understand or control it. You don't try to control the weather; you merely adjust to it.

But humans bridle at the idea that they are at the mercy of events. Central to the conceits of prophets, rulers, thinkers, moralists, and political activists is the notion that they can grasp the meaning of it all and reduce it to a formula, as in "moral social system."

I don't think so.

Back in Marx's day, he had a point about Anti-capitalist. Based on the science of the classical ecnomists, t looked like capitalism was going to result in immiseration for the workers and the middle class. Only he was wrong. Capitalism didn't immiserate the workers, it birthed unimaginable prosperity for everyone. Today, the anti-capitalist had better come up with a better idea than, oh, we'll keep the good parts, but trust us, we know what we are doing.

Nest up: "Antiracist."

Contra-deBoer: Materialist

At the end of 2015 Perdue PhD Fredrik deBoer issued a leftist manifesto for 2016. It's helpful for a right-wing extremist like me because it seems to honestly propose a new Left. But of course to me the whole thing reeks of stuck-in-a-bubble cultism.

Let's look at deBoer's first topic; he argues that the new left movement must be "Materialist."

He starts by invoking Marx: "a functioning, healthy left political movement would be concerned with the material reality of the present world." It would not be anti-religious, but "it would be anticlerical"; " it would recognize that science is key to human flourishing" but would recognize that science can often be used to marginalize. It would reject "all forms of supernaturalism, the occult, and vague spiritualism. It would be concerned first and foremost with reality, and would privilege “is” statements over “ought to be” statements."

Very well, but a left movement that started with the "material reality of the present world" would have to start with understanding why, during the flourishing of capitalism as a social and economic reality, per capita income in the capitalist countries has increased by 3,000 percent in 200 years. Before we can do anything to change the current system we must understand why it worked and why it flooded the world with untold riches wherever it was tried. deBoer's invocation of science is significant, for it was Marx's conceit that his economics was "scientific." So it was, based on the best economics of the time, and it was by a critique of that economics that Marx came up with his doctrine of "surplus value" as the means by which the capitalist exploited the worker. The only trouble is that economics has moved on from the dichotomy of "use value" and "exchange value" to the notion of marginal value, but you will search in vain in the work of Marxists to find a reformulation of "surplus value" in terms of an economics that has solved the enigma of use value versus exchange value. And what are we to say about the reality that Marx's prophecy about the immiseration of the workers turned out to be completely unreal?

What does it really mean to be anticlerical but not anti-religious, to privilege the "is" against the "ought to be?" I'd say it gets you into a muddle. Anticlericalism starts with opposition to the institutional power of the Catholic Church and I suppose any other institution of religion. But what are we to make of the 1,000 year campaign of the Church against polygamous habits in the ruling class? Or its campaign against cousin marriage? Could that have succeeded without clerical power? The fact is that clerics have often been the most impressive force against unjust political rulers. You can tell that because rulers tend to get really pissed off by troublesome priests. And by clerics do we include left-wing movement activists that work for advocacy organizations? Should we not consider left-wing organizations as secular churches practicing the modern secular religions from socialism to environmentalism, and their officers as secular clerics?

And does anticlericalism extend to, say, the individual enthusiastic Christian church with its lower-middle class members and entrepreneurial minister, such as was experienced by liberal sociologist James M. Ault, Jr. in Spirit and Flesh?

What does it really say to privilege the "is" over the "ought"? As I see it, every single human on this planet privileges the "is" when it suits him and the "ought" when it suits her. Meanwhile everyone agrees that humans shall not live by bread alone. The whole point of any religious or political belief is that the "is" is not enough. Life "ought" to be better: fairer, juster, nobler, more equal. Any time that someone advocates for a better world they are privileging the "ought" over the "is."

I can see where deBoer is coming from in calling for materialism. He is reprising the Marx that excoriated the utopian socialists for their pie-in-the-sky ideas and offered his own social and economic analysis that was based on the best social science available at the time. Very well, but the new Marx must reformulate his "ought" on the "is" of today. And that includes the fact of prosperity unimaginable in the hungry 1840s, the post classical economics that has delivered withering critiques of socialist economics. And then there is the notion, advanced by thinkers like Deirdre McCloskey and George Gilder, that the foundation of our prosperity is not science but "surprise." People keep coming up with new and surprising ideas that bump up prosperity: from the textile revolution to the steam revolution to the oil revolution to the electric revolution to the information revolution. And that is to say nothing of the unremitting transportation revolution. It is not the science that makes the difference, but the application of science by humans to human flourishing in ways that nobody thought of before.

Marx had a point about materialism. The bourgeois revolutions were all about principles and rules, but what about the workers? Since then, politics has taken account of material needs, so the Materialist question has been answered.

Next we will look at deBoer's "Anti-capitalist."

What Our Ruling Class Gets Wrong

So the latest news is that the Swedish media have been sitting for six months on a rape event at a summer concert in Stockholm. So the Cologne Syndrome has extended to Sweden. Who knew?

What, you may ask, is wrong with our ruling class? Isn't rape the very thing they care about? Not quite.

The Big Idea that animates our ruling class is "Never Again." Never again will they allow another Auschwitz. And since everybody knows that the ordinary man and woman in the street is capable of acts of extreme nationalism and right-wing oppression of minorities it is the sacred destiny of the ruling class to prevent another Auschwitz.

A good example of this conceit is the essay "Education After Auschwitz", part of a collection by Theodor Adorno in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. The problem seems to lie with the ordinary people. "One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" and prevent them from being capable of doing it again.

When I speak of education after Auschwitz, then, I mean two areas: first children's education, especially in early childhood; then general enlightenment what provides an intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible[.]

 What absolute rubbish! I assume that Adorno is trying to say that, with proper education, it would be impossible to get people to become part of the genocide machine; they might even peacefully protest against it.

But of course, that's not the way it works at all. The Holocaust was not publicized like the Peace Corps, as in: come and save the world by eliminating the Jewish race. It was all done under a blanket. And each person with a part in the genocide had a minor, subordinate role to play. It is pompous to imagine that replacements could not be found for any functionary with a soft heart. The fact is that nearly everyone will do what they are told, because they are afraid. And that includes elite intellectuals.

If we are really serious about Never Again we must look to the real problem. It is politics, and the elite culture that frames politics. The ideas that coalesced in the Nazi horror were ideas imagined and developed not by brutish "young sons of farmers" that Adorno suggests were eager concentration camp guards but by the educated youth of the 19th century. A lot of the Nazi racism came out of the Romantic movement. Among other things Romanticism wanted to rediscover the local and the organic as a buffer against the rational and mechanical culture of the Age of Reason. (Hey kids! How about the current fad for local and organic?) This developed into a nostalgia for the volkisch ways of country folk. Then the second-rank intellectuals around the National Socialist German Workers Party found that could fashion various strands of Romanticism into the cult of das Volk. Volk good, Jews bad. Just like today's politics. For Democrats, it is abortion good, guns bad; for Republicans it is guns good, abortion bad. That's how politics works: good vs. evil. And it is intellectuals that provide the ammunition to load into the rhetorical guns.

The point is that any intellectual or political movement can do this. Right now, from the left, we have what conservatives like to call Cultural Marxism that  works to marginalize Christian and conservative voices. Its latest notion is to stigmatize college men that engage too enthusiastically in the sexual revolution that the left championed 50 years ago. So here we have a movement that insisted that sexual liberation was the only way, and then 50 years later starts to worry about a "rape culture." Here we have a movement that marginalizes opponents of gay marriage as bigots and homophobes. And is happy to use the power of the state to fine Christians that don't go with the Zeitgeist. Never again?

If you want to know what is wrong with the Muslim rape epidemic in Europe, you must start with the conceits of the European ruling class. On the one hand they have the conceit that they are Florence Nightingales compassionately bringing refugees from darkness into light, bringing the whole world into a single diverse global community. On the other hand they have the conceit that they must control and direct the opposition of the ordinary people in the various nations of Europe to this ruling-class sponsored invasion. What could go wrong?

Here´s another point. The reason that Germany, in particular, is importing immigrants is that the fertility rate of German women is now about the lowest in the world. Lifetime fertility per German woman is about 1.4 children. Thirty percent of German women are said to be childless.

Now, how could that happen? I will tell you. It is not because of brutishness in a certain class of rural people. It is because the ruling class, for over a century, has pushed a culture that sneers at childbearing and encourages women to "balance" their lives between family and work. The idea is that a career is a higher and more satisfying lifestyle that merely raising a family. So, of course, millions of women take the hint and devote themselves to education and paid work. Women put off marriage and family and have more sexual partners. But this is a problem because women that delay marriage have a shorter period to bear children, and women that have more sexual partners tend to have more STDs. And STDs like chlamydia tend to make women sterile. What could go wrong?

Conservatives say that the influence of intellectuals should be limited, as part of a general philosophy of limited government, and what I call the Greater Separation of Powers. Put it this way. Millions of people start businesses every year, and most of them fail, because the business idea was not up to snuff. The same is true of political and cultural ideas. Most of them deserve to end up in the ditch. But when intellectuals have a lot of influence on politics, and a powerful government can implement these ideas over the objection of opponents, then you are setting up a situation where bad ideas can take hold and cause social distress and injustice.

Well, here we are in 2016 and our conceited ruling class has got us into a fine mess on a number of fronts from immigration to spiraling health care costs to excessive government debt to the cultural sink of the lower 35 percent in America where the men don't work and the women don't marry.

And it's when things are in a mess that ordinary people turn to "strong leaders" that promise to "make America great again."

But the problem is not ordinary people turning to strong leaders. The problem is conceited rulers imposing their half-baked ideas on the rest of us.

Fundamentalism and Denialism on the Left

Today there are three pieces at National Review that show us the problems on the left. There's a piece by veteran David Horowitz about the way the left always blames America.

First the left extolled the Soviet Union against America. Then they advocated against the cold war. Now they advocate for illegal immigrants and enact nullification of immigration law in their lefty "sanctuary cities." Then there are the Muslims.

Exploiting the myth of Muslim persecution, progressives oppose scrutiny of the Muslim community, including terror-promoting imams and mosques. They immediately denounce proposals to screen Muslim immigrants as religious bigotry, and thus close off any rational discussion of the problem. 

 You know, don't you, that in America, "60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed at Jews, with a small minority directed at Muslims."

Then there is the faith in government action. Kevin D. Williamson critiques the Chinese attempt to curb a market collapse with "circuit breakers." He goes on to critique US measures to prevent the US housing market from finding a bottom.

Chinese authorities thought they knew how much shares on the Chinese stock market should fluctuate on any given day, too. Their counterparts in Washington believe that they know in which direction housing prices and gasoline should be headed on any given Friday morning in January — and what interest rates on credit cards should be, how much an hour of unskilled labor is worth in Muleshoe, Texas, how many people should be majoring in engineering vs. history — and how the renminbi should be valued, too, if you ask them[.]

Of course this is nothing new. Humans have always resorted to the magic of politics and religion when practical methods fail to produce the desired effect.

Then there is the tragi-comical situation of the New Years Eve violence against women in Europe by young Muslim males, and the efforts of the usual suspects to muddy the issue. As John O'Sullivan reports, the officials and media started out with silence, and only acknowledged the problem after it seeped out on social media. Then we had a woman mayor of Cologne telling women to travel in groups and wear modest clothing. This kind of avuncular advice to women used to be called blaming the victim.

But all this makes complete sense to me. First of all leftism is a religion. It understands the world as a regime of oppression and exploitation of marginalized peoples. The world would be a paradise of social justice if only we could stop the exploitation and oppression. This religion was famously invented by Marx and Engels and given a patina of science in Marx's Capital. This religion has provided a comforting view of the world, always providing a victim class du jour for whom to advocate. Right now, the left is invested in the plight of Muslims and eager to advocate for Muslims against the peoples and the governments of the west. Next year it will be something else.

Then there is the conceit of the liberal ruling class that political regulation of the market economy can limit the market's excesses and keep it within safe channels. Of course the political elite is always tempted to believe this; otherwise the political elite is merely an adjunct to the real action, the day to day reality of making and buying and selling and pricing.

It's easy to get discouraged by these knaves and fools, the fundamentalists on the left that still cleave to the old-time religion of Marxism and can't bring themselves to acknowledge post 1850 economics, the denialists in the ruling class that studiously avoid admitting the settle science of Hayek that bureaucrats can't outperform the market, not by a country mile.

But think how much worse things were in the 1930s. Back then they had a real Great Depression that kept millions out of work for a decade, and Hitler leading into a world war the Germans, the best soldiers in the world. Today we have a bunch of dawn-raiders in the Middle East doing what young men do naturally, and a bunch of Muslim immigrants in the West trying to look tough, just like immigrants to the city have been doing for the last 150 years.

I've been reading Norman Podhoretz's My Love Affair with America in recent days. He teaches us an important lesson about immigration. His grandparents were all four immigrants, observant Jews from the shtetl in Galicia in Central Europe just like Fiddler on the Roof. They never learned English and never even began to adapt to America. His parents, the offspring of immigrants, didn't really adapt very well to America either. But his generation were completely Americanized and his mother and her friends all played one-up with each other about which children had become doctors and lawyers. Dentists were definitely failed doctors and intellectuals like Podhoretz were an embarrassment.

Let us never forget that the stunning world of the exchange economy and personal freedom is bellowing at the immigrants of every generation at every moment. For the immigrants themselves it is utterly confusing and disorienting. For the children and the grandchildren of the immigrants the siren call of the modern era must become impossible to resist. Because in the end, who wants to wall themselves off from the great global dance in some ethnic holding cell and admit to being a failure?

The thing to remember is that workers or women or gays or Muslims that madly jump into the deep end of the pool of modern life are no use at all to lefties or liberals or activists or imams. Political leaders need subordinate sheep in order to strut their stuff across the stage, and they will use all their black arts to keep their followers in their political army.

Get those imams off welfare; put those immigrants to work. The great global job market teaches one great lesson: the consumer is king. And that is a lesson that has grown per-capita income by 3,000 percent in 200 years despite all the efforts of the lefty fundamentalists and the liberal ruling class.