Six Good Things About Capitalism

Everybody is recoiling in shock at the Millennial Kids. How could they be rallying to the socialist Bernie Sanders? Don’t they know that socialism has been a disaster wherever it was tried? Did they never hear of Venezuela?

OK, I do understand. Bernie is offering the Kids free college. And who ever refused a politician offering free stuff until they got their first paycheck and notice the deductions?

But why be surprised? The Millennial Kids have been taught for 20 years by government teachers. You think the lifer wardens and trusties at the government child-custodial facilities are going to teach the inmates about the wonders of life outside the razor wire?

So when Peggy Noonan wrote that:

In the young [Sanders’] support is understandable: They have never been taught anything good about capitalism and in their lifetimes have seen it do nothing—nothing—to protect its own reputation.

she struck a chord in me.

Actually, those Kids probably have seen a capitalist do something to protect its reputation. Ever heard tell of them “Koch Brothers.” They have put their mouth where their money is.

And look where it got them. It got them mentioned by the execrable Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and denounced by the left everywhere as the epitome of evil villainy. Do you wonder why most capitalists keep their heads down?

So it falls to us foolish scribblers to stand up for capitalism. Here are six good things about capitalism. (Hey, Peggy, how often do you use your bully pulpit to say anything good about capitalism?)

Capitalism has increased per-capita income by 30 Times in 200 Years. That is 30 times as in 3,000 percent. As Deirdre McCloskey writes, there has been nothing like it, ever. She calls it The Great Enrichment and The Bourgeois Era, but that doesn’t really begin to describe the utter impossibility of the whole thing.

Capitalism is not investment, or savings, or accumulation. It is Surprise. Capitalism is the surprise of the textile revolution. Imagine! Cheap cotton textiles for the masses! It is the surprise of the oil revolution, bringing the illuminating oil for those oil lamps in Western movies from 80 cents a gallon down to 8 cents. When I was a young computer guy, working on an IBM 1130 with 32KB of memory and a 1MB disk, I never imagined the possibility of a smartphone with 32GB in my pocket which would play tunes in my car. Back then, it was inconceivable! Not to mention the pseudo-random noise communications.

Capitalism is permanent revolution. You want revolution, you Bernie guys? Real revolution, unlike the fake revolutions of lefty politics where one ruling class is replaced with another? If you do, then you want capitalism. Capitalism is the story of nobodies changing the world. Who was Hargreaves, inventor of the spinning jenny? A nobody. Who was John D. Rockefeller, inventor of the oil industry? A clerk in a store. Who was Andrew Carnegie, who brought us cheap steel? A telegraph messenger. Who was Steve Jobs? A college dropout. You want to talk revolution, forget politics and create a business start-up.

Capitalism gives young people a chance. Notice something about corporations in their growth stage? They hire young people. Notice something about well-established corporations and government? They are full of time-serving middle-aged lifers. ‘Nuff said.

Capitalism learns every day. Government never learns. Of course, capitalism doesn’t want to learn. That’s why capitalists like the ethanol guys in Iowa are so eager to crony up with government and get permanent subsidies. But the capitalists have to learn, and they learn every minute, every day from the world’s most amazing information system, the price system. Of course, the price system isn’t a Newtonian mechanical system at all; it is more accurately a probability state function, like in quantum mechanics. If you want a system, go to government, where Newton’s Third Law operates in a blind battle of equal and opposite forces battling to a bloody stalemate.

Capitalism is the deadly foe of discrimination. Can’t get a job because you are brown or black or white or female or male or gay or Muslim or Christian or an immigrant or young or old? Capitalism says: No Problem! We’ll hire anyone, especially if you are cheap! That’s why they had to have all those Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation in the South and the Davis-Bacon law to enforce “prevailing wages” in construction to keep blacks from competing with whites. And that’s why we are talking about building a wall on the Mexican border.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Capitalism is the magic bullet for young people, because it is a rebellion of termites constantly undermining the foundations of established privilege and power.

But now you understand why Bernie Sanders doesn’t like capitalism. For an old geezer like him, there is nothing good there.

Feminists Reach that Scarlett O'Hara Moment

We all know the moment in Gone with the Wind. After lying and cheating and manipulating her way across 300 pages of novel -- or hours and hours of movie -- Scarlett asks the departing Rhett Butler.

"Where shall I go? What shall I do?"

After last week, in which ageing feminist icons were embarrassing themselves for Hillary, and the brash but eternally foolish Camille Paglia was coming out for Bernie, the real walk-the-walk feminist Carly Fiorina told it like it is.

To young girls and women across the country, I say: do not let others define you... A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses and uses all her God-given gifts. And always remember that a leader is not born, but made. Choose leadership.

But even this is pure modern fantasy. Nobody gets to live the life he or she chooses, least of all women, least of all feminists. Scarlett O'Hara did what she had to do, given the facts on the ground that the South was a devastated land, defeated in war, and given her dynastic desire to save Tara. She didn't choose it; it chose her.

Yes, yes, you say, but Scarlett lived in the patriarchal Old South. She didn't have the choices that today's young women have.

To which I say; Bologna. In my view, young people today are brutally limited in their choices by a cruel and unjust liberal educated ruling class. Back in the 19th century young people had a much broader canvas on which to paint, mainly because the old feudal order had broken down and the New World Order of the educated and the evolved hadn't yet established its hegemony.

Let's tell it like it is, in my language. First of all, a person needs to obtain food and lodging. So that limits the choices, for a start, because if you obtain food and lodging by working it kinda limits your choices. Work has a way of filling up the day. You can, of course, choose to live on welfare, or by living off someone else, or going to live on a commune, but I wouldn't recommend it. It helps, of course, if you have a university professor for a father, like Carly Fiorina. La Wik:

At the time of her birth, Fiorina's father was a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He would later become dean of Duke University School of Law, Deputy U.S. Attorney General, and judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her mother was an abstract painter.

So really all the guff about Carly working as a secretary is just presidential log cabin talk. No offense, but I'd call that being born on third base.

Secondly, a person needs to mate and have children. Oh yes, you can choose a diverse lifestyle, picking one of the fifty or so gender options at Facebook. But unless you have children you are voting you and yours off the planet. I suspect this is why almost all religions are pro-natal. If you are a Shaker and don't have children or a modern liberal and you only have one kid, you and yours aren't going to be around too much longer. At a societal level the anti-natal attitudes of modernity are yielding birth rates that point to declining populations everywhere from Germany to Japan. They had a similar problem in the high Roman Empire, and look what happened to the Romans.

Speaking of the Romans, I am reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by the worthy and feminist and lefty professor Mary Beard. She frequently alludes to the relative freedom of Roman women, even if it was not satisfactory to the culture of 21st century women university professors.

But really, in a society where ambitious men proved their worth by getting an army command so they could do a spot of conquering, as Pompey did in Asia Minor and the Levant, and Caesar did in Gaul, what exactly does Beard have in mind for women? As she writes, the tombstones of the era celebrate men's glory in war, and women's glory in tending the home fires. Remember, no free person in that era did anything that we would characterize as "work;" that was for slaves.

The reason we moderns do not continue the old culture is not that we are virtuous but that, on the one hand, we do not need many men to guard the ramparts of empire, and on the other that modern hygiene means that the average women needs to bear only about two children to continue the dance of the generations as against six or more back in the old days.

It is notable that the cultural change affected men first. In the 19th century we invented careers and wage employment and sports. Careers amount to a sublimation of the conquest instinct, and wage work substitutes for long-service rank-and-file soldiering. And sports sublimates the war instinct, where you can root for the home team against the rascally foreigners from another city.

Today, with modern hygiene and machine textiles, women do not have to spend their entire lives bearing and raising children and weaving on the home hand-loom. So where shall they go; what shall they do?

The instinct of the feminists was that women should have education and careers just like well-born men. That, of course, is what Carly Fiorina, the well-born daughter of a professor and an artist, assumes.

Just between you and me, I think that is rubbish. First of all, it assumes that the male education-and-career arc is willingly chosen by men. I suggest that men ideally would like to do nothing, but nothing does not get you money, power, and the love of beautiful women -- or even plump, pretty women -- so men go to work. Secondly, it assumes that women want to live like men, and they don't.

I think that, over the decades, women will move to a more integrated life, weaving together the themes of marriage, family, wage-work, teaching, telling stories, and maintaining family and friendship ties. That is how I experience modern women that have grown out of the indoctrination of their youth.

Here's an idea. Now that western humanity is more or less literate, how about we close down the literacy boot camps we call public schools, and just leave the education of our children up to the women? I predict that they will weave a dense cooperative network of homeschooling arrangements that will educate and socialize children much better than our present administrative and bureaucratic monstrosity? But what about the poor, you say? Well, how about our well-born women getting up off their duffs and opening charity schools in the inner city and getting all the neighborhood women involved? They could arrange "protection" from the local gangs.

But is this remotely possible in the near future?

You never know. The good thing about 2016 is that, thanks to people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the ruling class of the educated and the evolved is is a complete mess. With its pernicious program of internal colonization it has divided, demoralized, and destroyed a thriving bourgeois culture and brought the land of the free and the home of the brave to an angry and vindictive nadir.

But what is the alternative? Is it Bernie or Donald? Of course not. The way forward will be blazed by men and women outside the political world slowly, by trial and error, creating a new world out of the wreckage of the old, and presenting the old ruling class with a fait accompli.  Because politics is downstream from culture. Or, if you are a Marxist, society is an economic base that raises a cultural superstructure.

Then will come the ruling class's Scarlett moment, when they will whine: Where shall I go; what shall I do?

And we will say to the old elite, what Lee Iaccoca said years ago: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Take Your Pick: Nationalist, Socialist, or Both

In the sore losers department, National Review is running pieces today, here and here, mourning the sad state of America today, how our prosperity and our freedom have been lost to a powerful and unaccountable government by administrative hegemony. Charles Murray, as usual was way in front on this, with his quiet manifesto of revolution, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.

Mona Charen puts it best, in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, tagging the results as "victories of an inane socialist demagogue and a foul-mouthed nationalist demagogue." Gee, why don't we combine the two?

Look, there's no mystery about the anger. America is not working very well for ordinary Americans; they feel trapped. The sensible response of a trapped rat is to lash out. So Bernie Sanders encourages his Millennial Kids to lash out at Wall Street bankers and make them pay for free college and free health care. Donald Trump encourages his white working class supporters to lash out at the China that has stolen their good jobs at good wages.

Sanders blames greedy billionaires for the problems of the middle class and the poor; Trump blames treacherous immigrants, crafty foreigners and incompetent leadership in Washington. Some people seemed surprised that there was overlap between Sanders and Trump supporters, but it makes perfect sense.

Well, the richest men in America are people that have brought us Microsoft and Apple and Google and Amazon. And what have they done to deserve such riches? They have merely made it possible for anyone in the world to buy a smartphone for $99 that is cheaper and more powerful by orders of magnitude than anything dreamed of in the vacuum-tube-powered 1950s. That is how you make the really big money these days. Or, like Carlos Slim, you can do it the crony capitalist way by charging Mexicans an arm and a leg to phone home to Mexico. Why don't we make him pay for the wall?

The great truth of social animals is that War is not the Answer. Except for pirates and plunderers. The problem is to decide who is a pirate and a plunderer. The whole point of socialism from Marx to Bernie is to blame the capitalists for their riches on the pardonable assumption that they are no better than the feudal nobles of old. The whole point of nationalism is that foreigners are dangerous so we should put them down before they put us down.

And they were right, up until about 200-300 years ago. Feudal nobles were predatory scum, wasting the product of their peasants on their prideful power games. The national land was life, and the land of the neighboring tribe could be put to use feeding our people.

But in the unbelievable increase in prosperity of the last two centuries all this has been turned upside down. The way to make real money is not to exploit the peasants or the workers, but to come up with something new, like coal, oil, nuclear power instead of wood and windmills, textile manufacturing instead of hand-work, rail transportation, electricity, personal transportation, information and communications. And the way to prosper is to trust anyone that demonstrates trustworthiness.

Well, that doesn't seem to stir the hearts and minds of Americans in 2016. What we seem to want is scapegoats and... yes, what comes next after the sacrifice of the scapegoats?

Back to National Review and Charles Murray and their jeremiad against the unjust administrative state. The question is: who will bell the cat? Who will dare to start to wind down the vast wasteful looting of today's big government programs? Who will dare to dismantle the vast injustice of the administrative state? Who will dare to do that when the Millennial Kids are baying for free stuff, and the white working class is baying for the lost Eden of good jobs at good wages.

History teaches us that the only way we get to demolish the privileges and the plunder of today's regime is when Attila the Hun shows up and sweeps everything away.

The problem is that Attila is no respecter of persons. He sweeps away the good with the bad, and leaves misery and famine in his wake.

If only there were a better way.

Politics Always Breaks Your Heart

Government is a devil's bargain. One the one hand people need protection from pirates and plunderers. On the other, they need protection from the protectors.

Think of the situation of English peasants about 1,000 years ago. They were subject to the raids of the Vikings every autumn who would sail up the rivers, kill the men, take the newly harvested grain, and sell the women and children into slavery.

England needed a government strong enough to deal with the Vikings. And it got it, in 1066, from William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy. But the Normans were in fact Vikings that had conquered and settled down a century before in Normandy. Still, after the Norman Conquest the Brits went unconquered for 600 years, until the Dutch invaded in 1688 with a 500 ship invasion force.

Fast forward to 2016, and we have the Republican voters in open revolt against their betters in Washington, DC. So who do the voters choose as their champion against the dreaded establishment? Why, none other than rich kid Donald Trump, who has made a career out of playing footsie with the establishment. This is the man who is to be our savior?

If you vote for Donald Trump you are voting to kick out immigrants and teach China a lesson. If you are voting for Bernie Sanders you are voting to put Wall Street in jail and get free college and free health care. If you are voting for Ted Cruz you are voting against the two-party Washington cabal. That's the trouble with politics and government. It's always a war, and the leader is always promising to mobilize the nation (at enormous expense) to go out and defeat the foe.

The problem is that, in the old Pogo comic-strip line, we have met the enemy and he is us. We got the immigration crisis because we have been condoning illegal immigration for decades. We got the Wall Street crash because lefties like Bernie were advocating for decades against banks "red-lining" poorer neighborhoods and restricting mortgage lending there. We got the RINO Republican establishment because it is death to a politician ever to propose a cut in government spending of any kind, let alone a reform of the big entitlement programs.

Really, nothing has changed in the last 1,000 years. We demand to be protected in old age, we demand the government picks up the tab for educating our children and relieving the poor. And then we are shocked, shocked, to find that government is for sale to the highest bidder?

Here we are after 200 years of stunning capitalism that has raised per capita income by 3,000 percent in 200 years, and half the Millennial Kids think that socialism is a better idea. Here we had, in 2012, a presidential candidate in Mitt Romney who had done nothing all his life but turn around ailing churches, olympic games, and corporations. And we rejected him for a man that had majored in the divisive tactics of community organizing.

Winston Churchill is said to have approved of America because in the end it does the right thing after trying everything else. Even then, I suggest, we do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

So it is my great hope that the Republican Party will win in 2016 because of the support of the white working class that helped defeat Mitt Romney in 2012, and that the new Emerging Republican Majority composed of 50 years of Democratic rejects will revive the economy, repair the culture, clean the Augean stables at the federal government, and roll back the Muslim impertinence under the leadership of a guy that has spent his life playing the crony capitalist.

And after Donald Trump's victory in New Hampshire it is starting to look like the only thing to hope for.

What a country! What a world!

The Metastasizing Injustices of Liberal Race Politics

Conservative media sources have noted the dog that didn't bark after the Iowa caucuses. Usually, after such an historic event, the liberal media is all agog with the wonder of the First Latino to Win a Presidential Caucus. But this time, when the son of a Cuban immigrant won the Iowa caucus all we heard was crickets. Until The New York Times ran a piece that told us that Ted Cruz wasn't really an authentic Hispanic. Or Latino. Or whatever the totem word is today.

How is that not being celebrated as historic or at least worth a headline for a day or two?

The answer is not that complicated: Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Rubio meets conventional expectations of how Latino politicians are supposed to behave.

Neither of these candidates claims to speak for the Hispanic population or derive a crucial portion of their support from Hispanics, and neither bases much of his political identity on being a Latino.

For "conventional expectations" you should read "approved liberal ruling class expectations."

And just to make sure, race journalist Jorge Ramos had written a piece in January that "There is no greater disloyalty than the children of immigrants forgetting their own roots. That is a betrayal."

There is a reason why I keep banging away on the idea that Politics is Violence, or alternatively, that Politics is Division. The whole point of liberal race politics is to divide off preferred minorities into the Democratic Party in return for race-based benefits enforced by the government's men with guns. Blacks and women and Latinos qualify; others need not apply.

Back in the 1960s you could make a half-decent argument that blacks needed a leg up after 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow. It was a specious argument even then, but life is more than just rigid application of the rules. It is unjust, according to modern Enlightenment ideas, to use the power of government to enslave or discriminate against blacks according to their race. It is still unjust to use cultural and political power to favor one group of people over another in the years since.

You can warble all you like about historical marginalizations oppressions and exploitations, but the use of government power to favor or disfavor particular groups is unjust. Who cares? Well, sooner or later, the people experiencing the sharp end of government injustice get pissed off.

That is one argument explaining the rise of Trump and Sanders in this election cycle. Trump represents the white working class that has been the main victim of liberal race politics over the last century. You might say that it took the white working class a powerful long time to get riled up. Sanders represents the Millennial generation that is suffering from the lousy economy and the sky-high college fees.

You can talk all you like about xenophobia and anti-immigrant bigotry, but wages are depressed by immigrants like me. The people that suffer most are the people with marginal skills and intelligence that are forced to compete at the low end of the wage scale against the new wave of immigrants.

You can talk all you like about the ignorance of the Millennial Kids warming to the socialism of Bernie Sanders, but the Millennials have been screwed. In part they have been screwed because the economy is still suffering after the real-estate collapse, and that collapse was caused by a government program to push mortgage loans on sub-prime, often minority sub-prime borrowers. The sky-high college fees are caused by mountains of government subsidies for higher education, which merely encourage universities to raise the tuition and hire more administrators and end up burying students in debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Our government today is a huge pile of programs to help this or that group that suffered from perceived injustice at some point in the past. Every now and again one of those programs distorts the economy so badly that we get a crash of some kind. The crash may be financial, or it may be the slow-motion death by municipal unions at the City of Chicago.

Anyway, eventually the carefully constructed ramparts of privilege constructed by cunning politicians a generation ago or a century ago start to crumble. The injustices created by the ruling class and their government programs become so large that the victims start to reach a critical mass. And that is what we are seeing now.

Unfortunately there is nothing written in the sky that says that those suffering from injustice will choose appropriate means to right their injustice. Egghead "sophisters, economists, and calculators" like me think that the less government the better. But what do we know? The victims of government injustice just want someone to lead them and "do something" about it.

What everyone would like to know is what happens next. The answer is that nobody knows. And the truth is that whatever happens, there is no guarantee that it will solve anything, and do any more than replace an old injustice with a new injustice.

Politics is violence, and government is force. They are very blunt instruments for solving the problems of social animals like humans. Because the whole idea of social animals is to reduce the expensive resort to violence and force. You can see the problem when you consider that government is here to use violence to curb those that resort to violence, whether domestic or foreign. Where does that end?

It ends, for now, with an election in November. After that, who knows?

Breaking the Liberal Spell

There will be life after liberalism, but it is anybody's guess how long the liberal hour will dodder along into decrepitude. Here are two different looks at the problem.

Jay Cost talks about the problem of the establishment. Don't just rail at it, he writes, do something. And that something has to deal with the fact that it pays the elite players to service the special interests.

I think our political class is not responsive to the interests of their constituents, nor do I think that the rules of the political game make them responsible to the general welfare as a whole. Rather, I agree with Ted Cruz when he talks about a bipartisan cartel, which, in my estimation, is committed to the propagation of interest-group liberalism; the misuse of the state to funnel public resources to the interest groups that supply the most campaign cash, lobby the hardest, and are generally most adroit at the Beltway game.

For Cost, we have to change the rules of the game, so that ordinary corrupt politicians will do good things for America.

But the problem is not just the rules of the game. There is also the Zeitgeist. Joel Kotkin has a long piece about the dreadful effect of elite-liberal faith in densification, which encourages restrictive zoning in blue cities and the California coastal zone. The result is that ordinay middle-class families are priced out of the market by home prices in the Bay Area and numerous other liberal-dominated areas like New York City and Seattle that are sky-high. So young families are moving to cities like Houston and Dallas Ft. Worth, where they issue three times as many building permits per capita as in California.

We know what is going on here. Liberals all believe in sustainability, in protecting the environment by limiting the footprint of urban areas. And, of course, they are trying to shut down fossil fuels, because climate change.

Very well. But, according to Kotkin,

increasingly the worst influence on housing stems from the proclivities of contemporary progressivism. Whereas earlier Democratic presidents, from Roosevelt and Truman to Johnson and Clinton, strongly supported suburban single-family growth, contemporary progressives display an almost cultish bias towards the very dense, urban environment. The fact that perhaps at most 10 to 20 percent of Americans prefer this option almost guarantees that this approach would be unacceptable to the vast majority.

The problem is, of course, that only liberals get to expound on urban policy, and right now, in the Obama administration they are trying to regulate suburbs out of existence, because inequality.

There are a whole host of other issues where liberals are just steamrollering over the culture of ordinary middle-class families with children, because they can.

I get it. I really do. Urban liberals want cities to become creative hubs where young people can go and become creative artists, just like in Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class. Then they find that the poor are priced out of housing so they start campaigns for "affordable housing," as if that is going to make a difference. The problem is that the vast majority of people want to live in a nice quiet suburban house with a yard, and they don't want to live in an exciting urban creative hub. I like to say that Americans prefer this because American women, like the females of most species, like to retreat from the public world when it is time to bear and raise children and build a nice safe comfy fluffy nest. In the end the vast majority of people are going to impose their wants on the elite, but it is not going to be easy.

Eventually the political system will roll back the huge liberal lurch of the last ten years. Even though ordinary middle-class people don't have a voice in the intellectual conversation of the nation, the weight of their concerns will change the nation's politics. But the liberal totalitarian push to implement their vision without regard for other views will make the process darker and more cruel than it could or should be.

Liberals have been governing without the consent of the governed for quite some time now, and their governance is folly. The idea of "the consent of the governed" is not some good-government pablum. It just recognizes that a governing elite, in its own best interest, shouldn't try to ram its agenda down the throats of the governed, because in doing so it will incubate dark forces that will wreak terrible vengeance on it, the ruling class.

If liberals really believed their own propaganda, that history was on their side, they could be a lot more relaxed about their agenda. Just a nudge here and a friendly word there could keep the project on track. The fact that liberals use totalitarian techniques, from naming and shaming to a full-court press in the bureaucracy, shows that they really don't believe that their agenda is on the right side of history. They demonstrate that their agenda can only succeed if it is backed up with violence and bullying, with what the noted academician Melissa Click calls "muscle."

And think of this. Only 10 to 20 percent of Americans want to live in a dense and urban place, e.g., like Portland, Oregon, where, they say, young people go to retire. Yet liberals are going flat out to force everyone to live like that.

The current liberal surge is not going to end well.

Jonathan Haidt is a Good Guy. But...

Back in 2012 when I read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind I gave it full marks. But I pointed out a basic flaw in his argument.

We humans, he argues, are wired to make instinctive moral judgments, and he has identified a moral matrix with 6 different axes, including Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation, that differentiates out our moral instincts...  Conservatives score about equally on each of the six axes, implying that conservatives value each of these moral axes as of equal importance.

But liberals don't. They rate Care/harm of overwhelming importance, Liberty/oppression pretty highly, Fairness/cheating moderately, and Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation hardly at all.

But, I protested, this is baloney. Liberals do too believe in all six axes. What is environmentalism about if not the sanctity of the planet and the avoidance of environmental degradation? Liberals may not believe in the authority of fathers and CEOs but they deeply believe in the authority of liberals and liberalism, and you will be made to care. Liberals believe in loyalty, otherwise how could those liberal professors all select their own kind for tenure, forsaking all others.

If a dull dog like me could see that immediately, why couldn't Jonathan Haidt, and why couldn't the educated evolved liberals that reported disinterest in loyalty, authority, and sanctity? We know why. It is because liberals think of loyalty, authority, and sanctity as nationalist, religious values, and they know that liberals don't believe in that stuff because they are educated and evolved.

In reality, liberals are in denial. The six moral axes probably apply equally to everyone. The point is that everyone has a religion -- in the broad sense of faith in a narrative about the world and what it all means and what we should do about it -- even the people that insist that they don't. And because liberals are in denial they are putting themselves and us at risk.

Jonathan Haidt now has a conversation with conservative John Leo online that has something important to add to all this. It extends the encounter that Haidt experienced with SJWs at an elite private high school. And it dovetails with my "Three Peoples" theory. The key section is about the moral urgency of social justice in the academy. Jonathan Haidt:

They’re so devoted to social justice, and they have accepted the rule that you can never, ever blame victims, so if a group of victims makes demands, you cannot argue back. You must accept the demands.

And the official victim class now includes seven groups:

You know, the big three are African-Americans, women and LGBT. That’s where most of the action is. Then there are three other groups: Latinos, Native Americans… [LGBT]

But now we have a seventh–Muslims. Something like 70 or 75 percent of America is now in a protected group.  

This really fits into my "Three Peoples" theory, because it tells us a lot about the religion of the People of the Creative Self.

The religion of the People of the Subordinate Self is the Propitiation of the Gods and their mortal representatives on earth, the feudal lords and powerful politicians. The religion of the People of the Responsible Self extends from Hinduism to Judaism to Christianity. It is about living a responsible life and making the most of God's understandable universe.

But the religion of the People of the Creative Self is a horse of a different color. And we can see one of its characteristics in the modern university. The idea is to wage holy war on behalf of the innocent victim groups that have been exploited and oppressed and marginalized through no fault of their own since the dawn of time, or at least since the rise of the West in 1500. That fight is the road to virtue and salvation. Anything less is a damning sin.

Of course, it's a wonderful thing to advocate for those less fortunate or less privileged that yourself. But it becomes a problem when you harness it as your religion to the vehicle of state. Because politics is violence, and government is force. You end up forcing everyone to sit in the pews of your established Church of Social Justice and force them to tithe. There is a word for religion combined with politics. In former times we called it theocracy. But in the 20th century it took on a new form and we called it totalitarianism.

The fact that the social justice warriors in the academy don't get this demonstrates their stunning ignorance or something worse. First, they don't seem to understand that they do too have a religion, and a very enthusiastic secular religion at that. And they also don't seem to have grasped the basic lesson of the 20th century, that you don't combine economic power, political power and moral/cultural power in one and then hand them over to the state, not unless you have a sick attraction for heaps of dead bodies.

By the way, Jonathan Haidt, who once was a Democrat, now considers himself non-partisan. The only thing that would make him vote Democrat would be if the Republicans nominated Trump or Cruz. Which goes to show that Haidt doesn't get it, despite his book and his research and his encounter with the SJWs at "Centerville High." Trump and Cruz represent the two groups that liberals say are beyond the pale: white working class and Christian evangelicals. Haidt is saying that if those two groups, that in my opinion have been egregious oppressed by liberals over the last half century, elect one of their own, he is outta here. We can't have those bitter clingers actually having some influence on public policy.

Well, Jonathan Haidt, back in 2008 I, a severe conservative, voted for Barack Obama. Not because I thought he would do America a lick of good, but because the Democrats and the liberals and the victim classes are after all American they have a right to have their turn on the bridge of state after eight years of George W. Bush. The alternative is civil war. If you don't see that the folks directly oppressed by the liberal establishment deserve their turn at the wheel, led by people who are, after all, perfectly conventional establishment figures, one a crony capitalist and the other a star scholarship boy, then you really need to go back and read your book again.