Breaking Out of the PC Box

Presidential candidate Donald Trump recently got in trouble for objecting that the federal judge in his Trump University case was probably biased, being a member of a La Raza associated lawyers group and all.

And the GOP elders all united to condemn Donald Trump for racism.

Come on, Americans, this circular firing squad has to stop.

Not that I blame the judge, Gonzalo Curiel. Getting on the bench is a political thing, and if you have Hispanic ancestry it helps to belong to a Hispanic group to demonstrate your racial bona fides to the Great Mentioners that get your name on the List.

But unhyphenated Americans have got to get with the program. We must stop the silencing, the oppression, the totalitarianism of leftist PC politics. Jonah Goldberg this morning has a piece on liberals wanting to start a "conversation," which usually means liberals getting set to shut you up.

And that means, following Vox Day, that we have to take the attitude of "We Don't Care" whenever liberals play the racist/sexist/homophobe card.

Let's give the liberals credit. The whole intolerant tolerance thing invented by Herbert Marcuse is pure genius. You set up a frankly racist sexist politics and then you accuse anyone that objects to your racist sexist politics of racism and sexism. What is not to like?

And liberals will go on doing this until we non-hyphenated Americans say: "Call me a racist, sexist hompohobe. I Don't Care."

And the time to start practicing this new and improved attitude is right now while Donald Trump is running for president.

It ought to be a scandal that a federal judge belongs to a group with "Raza" in its name. It ought to be a scandal that Justice Sotomayor can utter a racist catchphrase to suggest that a "wise Latina" has a special inside track on the law. It ought to be a scandal that liberals are packing public institutions across the land with knee-jerk liberals on the argument of "diversity." It ought to be a scandal that Reverends Sharpton, Jackson, and Wright have not been dispatched to Outer Slobbovia for their frank racism.

Look, I know why the Republican elite responds to a cry of racism by cowering in their bunker. It is because their experience is that you can't win, because The New York Times can put you above the fold for a month to make sure that you know your place, because their experience is that a misplaced word can cost you your career. And it's because Republicans are decent people that are not that interested in power and just want everyone to get along.

Trouble is that Republicans are dealing with people who are interested in power, very interested in power. The aftermath of the anti-Trump riots in San Jose, California illustrated that perfectly. A Huffington Post writer, Jesse Benn:

Violent resistance matters. Riots can lead to major change (*note the irony of that hyperlink going to a Vox article). It’s not liberal politicians or masses that historians identify as the spark underlying the modern movement for LGBTQ equality. Nor was it a think piece from some smarmy liberal writer. It was the people who took to the streets during the Stonewall Uprising. It was the Watts Rebellion, not the Watts Battle of Ideas, that exposed the enduring systemic neglect, poverty, inequality, and racism faced by that community. Similarly, it was the LA Uprising, not the LA Protests, that led to significant changes in the Los Angeles Police Department. More recently, the Ferguson and Baltimore Uprisings both helped prompt the Justice Department to investigate their corrupt police forces.

What this young man does not seem to understand is that once you justify violence for your side, the good side, then you have licensed it for the other side, the bad side. The whole paraphernalia of laws and institutions and elections and representation is to provide ample opportunity for people with a grievance to advertise their oppression and get the ruling class to pay attention without going into the streets.

That's why the liberal resort to shutting up their critics is wrong; that is why teaching young heads full of mush that "riots can lead to major change" is wrong. That's why the cringing GOP establishment is wrong.

If we shut down robust debate in the public square then we are setting ourselves up for trouble. If we practice racism and call it "diversity" then we are setting ourselves up for trouble.

The reason that Donald Trump is presumptive nominee of the Republican Party is that the professional politicians in the Republican Party have failed us. Not because they are evil and feckless, but because they have been cunningly herded into a box by the left and its Frankfurt School identity politics.

Well, now it is time to break out of the box. Frankly, I don't know how to do it. I figure that the professional politicians and activists are the ones that should know the techniques of changing the "conversation."

But somebody has to figure it out, and soon.

Conservatism is Dead. So What Comes Next?

There's a piece in the American Spectator today saying: sorry, neoconservatives, you were wrong, about Iraq and other things. Then there is Vox Day responding to SF novelist John C. Wright about what to think about "Who Killed Conservatism."

The point is that the conservatism that triumphed with the Reagan administration in the 1980s is dead. Who killed it? No, not the neoconservatives, and not the various sectors of the conservative movement, or the "cuckservatives."

What killed conservatism was the so-called "progressives."

The point of post-World War II conservatism was to amend soften the administrative state of the Roosevelt years, to bring back some semblance of the market and unbuild the corporative regulative state which was strangling America. And it proposed to continue the containment of the Soviet Union started by Democratic President Harry Truman. Oh, and it was on-board with the civil rights revolution. In the votes for the Civil Rights Acts the northern Democrats were most in favor, Republicans next, and Southern Democrats last.

This conservative movement had its finest hour in the 1980s when the misgovernment of the 1970s from both parties provided an opening for an "amiable dunce" like Ronald Reagan to implement a supply-side revolution based on lower tax rates, spending cuts, and deregulation, and a determination to win the Cold War.

The success was remarkable, and conservatives thought that liberals had got the message. The economy thrives best if the government keeps a distance, and the Soviet Union was an evil empire.

But it turned out that liberals merely hated the Eighties and the message it brought, and instead signed up for a hyped-up Marxism from the Frankfurt School, that switched the focus of leftist politics from the working class to racial and gender identity politics.

This completely changed the rules.

There really is no compromise between a free-market national conservatism and the left's gender identity politics. But the conservatism of Bill Buckley and the Jewish neoconservatives was not built to deal with that. So it had to be destroyed.

But nothing happened for a while as the two implacable sides faced off through the Bush and Obama years. However, we can now see that something was building, ready to blow the lid off.

But what everyone forgot about was the white working class, once the "little darlings" of the liberals but cast out to outer darkness when the liberals got race politics and gender politics in the 1960s, and now dying of despair.

The interesting thing about the new liberal politics was that it did not make ordinary white middle class Americans into the villains, although it did continue to harass corporate CEOs and "country-club" Republicans. Instead it made working class white Americans into its Emmanuel Goldstein. They were racists and bigots, like Archie Bunker. It is hard to know why liberals did this. My guess is that liberals could not square the circle politically if the white working class was to continue being its little darlings as well as their new hot numbers, blacks and women.

It has taken 50 years for white working class Americans to find a way out of their despair as the forgotten Americans. That's because the Republican Party and conservatives generally had nothing to say to working class Americans because Republicans and conservatives are People of the Responsible Self that think you should get off your butt and make things happen in your life rather than wait for a leader to lead you to the promised land. The white working class, then and now, is People of the Subordinate Self. It expects to be led.

Well we know what happened next. Donald Trump. Who knew that you could bring the white working class into the Republican Party by offering to build a wall with Mexico, and hammer the Chinese sending us all those cheap smartphones and making "politically incorrect" statements that would have sunk any other candidate?

And who would have thought that Trump's candidacy would have demolished the old conservative coalition? As Newt Gingrich has said:

You have a Trump -- this absurd amateur. I mean it's not technically possible -- all of us, men and women in politics -- it's not technically possible to announce in June for the presidency never having run for anything and then beat 16 people... And he just beat them all.

 Actually, there is nothing unusual here. The Republican Party is constitutionally incapable of fishing for votes. It has always been, in the words of Michael Barone, a party of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans." Thus, it has never had anything to say to hyphenated Americans. But it has never had to, because group after group has been thrown out of the Democratic Party: social conservatives, Christians, and they had nowhere to go but the Republican Party. Finally the white working class has finally given up on the Democrats and found a candidate to bring them into the Republican Party.

Now things will never be the same. And really, it's a good thing. That's because we have been waffling on with the old conservatism when the assumptions have changed.

We are no longer dealing with the old liberal ruling class that just wanted to regulate everything from Washington. We are dealing with a progressive cultural Marxist movement that wants to fundamentally transform everything in America. So now we need a different political and cultural movement to defeat and destroy the progressive left. We cannot continue with the go-along to get-along conservatism of old.

Is the answer coming from Vox Day and the AltRight? Day says that the AltRight stands for the following

1. Nationalism
2. Western Civilization
3. Winning

I imagine that is based on the idea that the national state is the best thing yet invented for creating a unified political community, a demos. And that western civilization with its markets and law and limited government is the best thing yet invented for humans to wive and thrive. And that the time has come to stop being the Outer Party that governs when in office, while the Inner Party rules when in office. (Compare the Bush and Obama administrations.)

But you can see that, whatever is going to replace the old conservatism, we really haven't a clue how the replacement will work out.

The White Working Class Was Once the "Little Darlings" of the Ruling Class

Another day, another WaPo article about "The incredible crushing despair of the white working class." And as usual it blames the white working class for its problems. Working class blacks are three times more likely to have an optimistic view of the future.

What's the problem?

Part of the optimism gap is indeed because of "a shrinking pie of good jobs for low-skill/blue collar workers," Graham said in an email. "Whites used to have real advantages (some via discrimination) that they no longer have ... they are looking at downward mobility or threats of it, while poor blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to parents who were worse off than they."...

If you're a working-class white American, in other words, it may seem as though you are stuck with a losing hand in a bleak zero-sum game: Minorities are getting richer. The rich are getting richer. They're all doing so at your expense, and it's difficult to imagine things being any different in the future.

Cue a plug for my "little darlings" theory. Don't become a little darling of the ruling class. Because when they are done with you they will throw you onto the ash heap of history. Like the medieval peasants.

Once upon a time the ruling class loooved the white working class and gave them lots of presents and gew-gaws, as Sugar Daddies will do: Union laws, child-labor laws. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Obamacare. So you learn to be a medieval peasant all over again and tug your forelock when the lord drives by in his private jet.

But then comes the day when the lord fancies a new bit of crackling. In the 1960s it was blacks and women. And so, rather quickly, working class whites became embarrassing. And then downright bigoted and mean. You got movies like In the Heat of the Night where the hero is a black man and the villain is not the racist white planter but the greasy white soda-jerk.

But never mind about the Washington Post and its articles written over the grave of the white working class. go read the comments under the article. Where's all that celebrated liberal compassion?

Yep. The comments that I read told the white working class to stop propping up the bar and go and get a job. Or words to that effect. Try this:

Why can’t poorly educated angry people who believe in conspiracy theories get jobs? Probably because those are the exact qualities employers DON’T want.. 

DON'T become the little darlings of the ruling class. I am talking to you, ladies. I am talking to you, African Americans. I am talking to you, Hispanics. Or you too will end up on the ash heap of history, just like the white working class.

I always wondered what happened to people thrown on the ash heap of history. Now I know. They do not die, they only fade away, from the death of hope.

You can see that the various means by which humans fortify hope are important. There is the charismatic leader, the tribal gods. There are the Axial Age religions that promise humans the ability to understand the world and work to live in it. There is the millennial hope of leftist movements for perfect community and equality. There is the revival of tribalism in fascism and Black Power. And of course there is the hope provided by the comfort of being the ruling class's little darlings.

You can see the advantage of the Axial Age religions. They do not get blind-sided by history, like the rise and fall of tribes. Or the vagaries of ruling class favors. They simply say things like: If you love God, God will love you back. Or: God sent his Son to die for you so you don't need to sacrifice any more.

Well, it looks like the white working class will have its revenge, as its support of Donald Trump has demolished the conservative-Republican coalition of the last 50 years. So conservatism and today's Republican Party might end up being thrown on the ash heap of history.

How do you like them apples?

The Childless Liberal City

On the one hand liberals believe in creativity. On the other hand they don't believe in having children. Not much.

On the one hand cities are crucibles of creative innovation. On the other hand cities are not that good for children.

On the one hand women are good little girls that suck up the Zeitgeist and believe what they are told to believe. On the other hand women want to live in a leafy suburb when they raise their children.

So here comes urbanist Joel Kotkin writing about families and cities. Cities, he writes, have been all about family.

What is a city for? Ever since cities first emerged thousands of years ago, they have been places where families could congregate and flourish... As for modern European cities, the historian Philippe Ariès argued that the contemporary “concept of the family” itself originated in the urbanizing northern Europe shown in Rembrandt’s paintings of bourgeois life. Another historian, Simon Schama, described the seventeenth-century Dutch city as “the Republic of Children.”

And if you want a cheap look at that, go watch The Admiral, about the very bourgeois Admiral Michiel de Ruyter of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. The movie-makers go to a lot of trouble to show de Ruyter, who beat the Brits in several sea battles, as a man that just wants to go home and live with his wife and children in the Dutch city.

But today the city is not very family-friendly. I suppose we have urbanist Jane Jacobs and her Death and Life of American Cities to thank for that. Jacobs, who came to adulthood during World War II and whose husband bought a building at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, championed a Village kind of life with stores and sidewalks and vibrant street life. And activism. Jacobs had three children.

But most women don't want to raise children in the hurly-burly of the city. That is why women (and not eevil auto companies and oil companies) have driven the move to the suburbs. Women like fluffy nests and back yards and flowers and greenery. And 80 percent of people want to live in a detached single-family house.

But educated women are a bit different. It takes time for them to slough off their good-little-girl education and discover that they want what other women want. Also, they probably could never have afforded to buy 555 Hudson Street, even right after World War II.

Why do liberals insist on turning cities into hipster-friendly places that families don't like and can't afford? And why do they continue to make war on the suburbs?

I like to think it is because of their identity as People of the Creative Self. Liberals believe in living a creative life, but they do not think that creating children is creative. So they believe in making cities comfortable for creative people like them, people that dream in their twenties of getting into writing or activism, or "something creative."

And they believe in using political power to force other people to conform to their People of the Creative Self culture and to force them away from more traditional middle-class life style and culture.

Just like Jane Jacobs. Only she put three children on the ground as well.

Meanwhile things are going to get worse before they get better because anybody who is anybody instinctively supports the liberal densification agenda that wants to put everyone into dense cities even as people are fleeing the dense cities for the suburbs.

As even The Daily Beast recognizes.

The Paradox of Power and Not-so-Power

In the last week or so, while cudgeling my brain, like an Alger Hiss, over the newly published Bourgeois Equality by Deirdre McCloskey, I used my dissatisfaction with its 787 pages to come up with a new catchphrase.

I asserted that the notion that ties the bourgeois experience together -- its rhetoric, its innovation, its having-a-go -- is that the middle class is not that interested in power.

The "post-1848 clerisy" -- liberals and progressives and lefties --  are very interested in power, and especially political power. The Judgment of Marx in 1848 was that the economic power of the bourgeoisie, upon which rested the superstructure of its political power, could only be reduced by a countervailing political power organized by a revolutionary avant-garde of chaps like him. Liberals and progressives and lefties have not changed their opinion since.

For the left, the first and last and only way to change the world is through politics.

The counter argument, proposed down the ages, is that while political power has its moments, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- not forgetting the Key to All Mythologies -- is the limitation of political power.

Deirdre McCloskey makes this clear in her oft-repeated assertion that the last 200 years has seen a Great Enrichment in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day wherever capitalism -- or innovation or "trade-tested betterment" or "having a go" -- was allowed to germinate and grow by the local political power structure. And there has been nothing like it before in history. Ever.

Her point is that the norm in human history is that the political powers-that-be have tended always to smother any signs of innovation in their cradles. That's because innovation and Schumpeter's "creative destruction" always threatens the status quo and the established interests, the regime supporters that get rewards for their support from the ruling class. And really, what is the difference between innovation and rebellion, from the point of view of the ruling class and its regime supporters?

The point is that enrichment is only possible when the political class takes its clunking fist off the brow of labor and allows it to innovate and creatively destroy the status quo. The more the ruling class believes in power the less it is likely to allow innovators and have-a-goers to innovate and have a go (and by the way, the less that the economy will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state). The opposite is also true. The more a ruling class is not that interested in power and the more that it allows innovators and have-a-goers to have a go, the more enrichment will occur (and, by the way, the more that the enrichment will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state).

Here we see the fundamental error that the "post-1848 clerisy" has been living for the last 170 years. The answer to the problem of injustice is not government power, because government is injustice. The answer to the problem of poverty is not yet another Poor Law, because the best solution to poverty is more enrichment from innovation and having-a-go.

Of course, we should not be so hard on the "post-1848 clerisy." They are not the only people that think the solution is power. Almost anyone that gets into politics ends up following the sterile road of power. Politics is about power, and it is a contradiction in terms to run for office and political power by promising to reduce the incidence of political power. Donald Trump is proposing to use the power of government to teach the Chinese and the Mexicans a lesson. His opponents in the Democratic Party are proposing the usual list of new expansions of government power to teach the One Percent a lesson.

And when we turn to the American people they always call for politicians to "do something" rather than "undo something."

It is, of course, a paradox that in order to promote enrichment the ruling class needs to lighten up on political power. It also makes complete sense.

The best way to increase the power and scope of the human experience is that you are not that interested in power.

"Make it like it was"

In the last week I have proposed the idea that the significant characteristic of the bourgeoisie, or the People of the Responsible Self, is that we are not that interested in power.

Craig Greenman, responding to my post "Yes, What is a Conservative?" takes issue with my definition.

My guess is that there are a number of conservatives, just like there are a number of folks of every strong political persuasion (including liberals and whatnot), who are interested in power. It would be difficult to convince me or any other Left-leaning person that some members of the Bush administration weren't interested in power -- or that many of the powerful folks who support them aren't interested in power.

Of course. When you are using power, you call it "helping people." When people are using power against you, you call it "injustice."

More generally, I would say that conservatives are like other people. They appeal to government when they are feeling threatened, and they are right to do so because that is what government is for: protecting its people against threats foreign and domestic. The classic line is the appeal a woman made to Ed Koch when he was running for mayor of New York City, reported by the Huffington Post.

Ed Koch, the late mayor of New York, once recalled, while campaigning on the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, an elderly woman who approached him and implored that he “make it like it was.”

Yep, we all want that. But there's a problem.

Right now, I understand, France is in the middle of a wave of strikes because the government is trying to undo various social-welfare benefits, like the 35 hour week, in order to make France more competitive and revive its faltering economy. This neatly illustrates the problem with government putting its thumb on the economic scales:  it can't ever take them off without the threat of riots in the streets, especially where the French are concerned.

It's an interesting question. According to Deirdre McCloskey the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, in which per-capita income went from $3 per day to $100 per day, occurred because of the bourgeois rhetoric to allow innovation, "trade-tested betterment," rather than throttle it in its cradle because it threatened the status quo and the established interests. Notice the chilling truth here. If you want betterment then the price of that betterment is that the government stands by without intervening while established interests, probably its supporters, decline and die off.

But what about the transgendered? That is the question that Craig Greenman proposes. Suppose you feel different. Suppose you apply for job after job and can't get hired? What do you do?

So s/he will seek help from somebody who *has* made it in society, somebody who is better placed in it: a politician or activist on the Left.

This helping person will often be a straight Left politician or a party that consists primarily of them.  And those politicians will use the power they have, that has been loaned to them by the voters -- voters like me -- to help him/her.  They might even propose a law that says discrimination on the basis of gender in the workplace is wrong.

Actually, this scenario is false on several levels. First of all, someone who is different does not know what do do about it or even imagine that there is any possibility of "doing" unless someone "raises their consciousness." So the helpless victim does not seek help, the "politician or activist on the Left" seeks them out and offers to help. That was the whole point of the Frankfurt School back in the 1920s. Its leaders recognized that the "helping the working class" had problems because in defiance of Marxist economics the workers were getting richer. What could believing Marxists do? The Frankfurt Schoolers solved the problem by extending the Marxist paradigm to other victim classes and began to raise their consciousness, just as they had with the working class.

Secondly, we are not talking about "helping." We are talking about the clunking fist of government force, something about which liberals are very sensitive when George W. Bush is president. The question is: Should the government use force to mainstream the transgendered?

Thirdly, liberals are not "propos[ing] a law" to help the transgendered. They are using top-down administrative ukase and boycott and intimidation tactics to force their views on America and you will be made to care. Politics is violence; it is not "helping;" it is not "peaceful protest." Liberals are not proposing and negotiating laws in Congress. They are using their cultural and political power as the ruling class to do a cram down. They are doing that because they know they don't have a chance of doing it the right way, with consultation and compromise and legislation.

There is, of course, a long-term cost to this sort of hegemonic culture, as I write here and here. It leads to a society where nobody trusts anyone.

And this brings us around to the place we started, an article by Rachel Lu about conservatives in academia. Was is possible for conservatives to get a job in academia? Answer: not never, but "hardly ever." As the song goes.

But should we do anything about it? Should universities be forced to appoint Vice-Provosts of Viewpoint Diversity? Should Hollywood be forced to hire conservative creatives as well as award Oscars to African Americans? Should the fashion industry diversify its workforce to include married Bible-believing Christians and their cranky ideas on female adornment? Should the news media diversify away from liberalism and create an inclusive newsroom culture where conservatives feel safe?

I don't think so.

If you are a conservative in America you know that you need to keep your head down, at work and at competitive social events. That's just the way it is, because of the hegemonic liberal culture, those nice people out there "helping" us deal with marginalization and racism, sexism, and homophobia. Would we like to teach liberals a lesson? Of course. But then we think to ourselves: No, that would be wrong.

Because you can have a wonderful life in America, even if you don't own the culture and possess the power to name and shame this week's Emmanuel Goldstein, even if you wake up one morning and find that liberals have decided that you are Emmanuel Goldstein this week.

The world is full of problems and injustice. But the question is always: is the only way to solve this problem to apply the sweet use of force?

Usually, the answer is no.

Craig Greenman: But What About Transgendered?

Yesterday I wrote a blog about defining conservatism in response to a comment on NRO by academic Craig Greenman: "Yes, What is a Conservative?" Craig kindly responded by email, and here is his full response.

Thank you for using my question in your blog!  It's always an honor when one's thoughts serve as a catalyst for another perosn to move beyond them in various ways.

I think your definition of "conservative,"  as a person not particularly interested in power, is very interesting.  It accounts for both of my suggested definitions, in a sense:  A conservative could be someone (1) who does, believes, or values, what has happened in the past because she doesn't seek to overcome the past or move beyond it, towards any personal power of her own; or a conservative might be someone (2) who believes in the idea of a "free market," because she submits herself to the judgment of the market and doesn't insist that her values are always right.

So your definition might be a neat way to tie those two definitions that I offered together; and it also fits with what one other thoughtful person said on the NRO site, connecting conservatism with the notion of "gratitude" (in this case, I take it, gratitude for the traditional arrangements, institutions, and so on in a society; or gratitude for the judgment of the market), which I guess was argued by Jonah Goldberg.

But as I read your definition, I thought, hm, this seems a bit too wide.  All conservatives are people who are not particularly interested in power?  I don't know.  My guess is that there are a number of conservatives, just like there are a number of folks of every strong political persuasion (including liberals and whatnot), who are interested in power. It would be difficult to convince me or any other Left-leaning person that some members of the Bush administration weren't interested in power -- or that many of the powerful folks who support them aren't interested in power.  So I agree with you that some people on the Left could be interested in power, but that's a shared malady, it seems to me.  I don't fully buy your definition, then (if I may use the market language, "buy," which is so at the center of the academy now, too -- recalling where my post originated).

I agree with you, in any case, that a big part of wisdom is realizing "that life, the universe, and everything is not just about Me."  As I grow older (I'm 44), this feels more and more true, if only because I am constantly reminded, by my interactions with my students, my colleagues, my neighbors, my state, my country, and nature itself (including my finite physical body!) that I am not the center of the universe.  One of the reminders of everybody else is being on National Review Online and knowing that there are millions of people in the U.S. who think differently from me.  And you and I, too, probably have very different views of many things.

But let me riff for a moment on the notion of power.  Let's take an issue that you've commented on, it looks like, on your blog (I looked around just a bit before commenting here).

Let's say I'm a young person who looks and feels strange.  I don't exactly know why, but I don't quite fit into my body, or who I feel like I am.  And people pick on how I move, act, and dress.  Maybe I've been bullied a lot, too, in school.  I grow up and I enter the workforce.  By then, I've tried to understand myself, and adjust my life accordingly; and the way I dress and act, consequently, doesn't seem to fit the gender that my genitalia and other features outwardly reflect.  I've tried my best to be myself -- to be an individual in a society that's supposed to care about individuality -- and I'm a hard worker, or at least as hard-working as most people, and an honest person, which is shown by the fact that I don't hide who I am.  I have something to contribute to the market.

Then I go to job interviews and I am rejected, again and again, because I look and act different.  I am weird to many other people, even though I'm good at what I do and I try to be nice to them.  But I don't get a good job, because, again, I'm different.

What should I do?  Should I just say, well, it's not all about Me, and if people don't want to hire me, that's okay?  It's all right to be a marginal member of this society?  It's all right to be bullied, formerly on the playground, now by the market itself, so to speak?

I'm trying to tell the story of a transgendered person.  This person will probably vote on the Left in this election.  Is the reason because s/he is particularly interested in power?  No.  More likely, s/he wants to live a productive life without harassment, and to join the workforce and make a good living.  But because s/he is different, neither (1) the traditional values nor (2) the market -- to borrow on what I said above -- will respond to him/her.  So s/he will seek help from somebody who *has* made it in society, somebody who is better placed in it: a politician or activist on the Left.

This helping person will often be a straight Left politician or a party that consists primarily of them.  And those politicians will use the power they have, that has been loaned to them by the voters -- voters like me -- to help him/her.  They might even propose a law that says discrimination on the basis of gender in the workplace is wrong. They may also go overboard sometimes, in not fully thinking through how changes to help this transgendered person might harm, in some way, some conservative people, especially conservative women who will feel unsafe as a result of new policies.

But I don't think our transgendered person, or transgendered people in general, are particularly interested in power.  And the people they look to for help, often, if they are interested in power, are interested in it, in part, anyway, from a genuine desire to help people like our friend.

My point is this:  Sometimes people don't have the option to as easily submit to traditional values or the market as you and I, as non-transgendered men, say, have.  It's one thing to not want power over other people; and I think it's noble, the way you don't want an excessive amount of that; it's another thing, though, to want enough power to be able to flourish as a hard-working person in a society, and to use power, when you have it, to help people who are left out.  Many good people want those kinds of power, and many really nice things happen as a result of it, it seems to me.  Mistakes also happen, but with every government, with every society, and with every culture and family, mistakes happen.  We do our best and hope for better.

As I've reached the higher points of my profession, it's become easier for me, personally, to say, yes, we all need to submit to the universe; it's not just about Me; and young people, for example, need to learn not to be so damned insistent that their way is the correct way.  I experience this now at middle age.  But I recognize that part of why I can say that is because that same system is treating me much better than it used to.  I don't deny that one has to make compromises with the universe and society, and that activists on the Left can be too strident in sometimes refusing at all to do that.  But we have to recognize the extent to which those systems of (1) traditional values and (2) the market, may reject people to a larger extent than they reject you or me.  And maybe that fighting back of those people, or appealing to those who will fight on their behalf, is a good way to keep *us* in check, you and I, to make sure *we* don't get too cocky -- like our submission to the universe is as easy for everybody.

This, to me, then, is also wisdom: knowing that the very gesture of submitting to the universe may not be equally possible for all of us. And that sometimes power is useful for helping people just stay in the game and have a chance.

I'm sorry I went on so long.  I hope this makes sense, as it's a very large question and I'm only making some suggestions.  I may be mistaken in various ways.

I appreciate your quoting me and I think your own piece here -- including your definition of "conservative" -- is worthwhile.  Take care.