What Do You Mean by "Hate" and "Xenophobia" Liberals?

Liberals react to the Trump candidacy with words like "hate" and "xenophobia."

"Hate," I suppose, is a code word for resisting liberal activism on LGBT. "Xenophobia" is a code word for resisting liberal policy on Muslim immigration.

Do you realize what you are communicating with words like that, liberals? You are saying that your opponents in the political arena are evil. And it does't take much of a leap from that to say that people like that shouldn't be allowed to spew their hate in the public square. In fact they probably shouldn't have a job.

And then liberals wonder why Donald Trump has emerged from nowhere to become the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

I'm not that worried that there are partisans running around using rhetoric like that, damning their opponents as monstrous and evil. That's what partisans do.

What worries me is that this good-vs-evil rhetoric filters down to good people that don't really wish hell and damnation on anyone. But they believe what their party and opinion leaders say, and so they come to think that the folks on the other side are beyond the pale.

It all comes of believing in politics as a force (!) for good, which is what liberals think, instead of as a necessary evil, which is what conservatives think.

Government is force; politics is violence. Once you decide that some issue requires a political response and a government program, you are saying that compromise and negotiation are no good. Only a war and the sweet use of government force will resolve it. OK, you only intend a verbal war, using "activism" to raise consciousness, and you only intend to push the market to do something that it should be doing without the nudge of government. But if at first you don't succeed then, no doubt, your activists will want to up the ante a bit. And if the results aren't forthcoming then, no doubt, your legislators and regulators will want to implement an extra nudge to push things along a little.

And it's a funny thing. You don't ever see partisans and activists saying that, hey, that program hasn't worked so well, so let's revise the program and ease off the spending and the subsidy. The classic case is reported in Charles Murray's Losing Ground. Liberals instrumented their 1960s Great Society programs will all kinds of reporting (jobs for social scientists) so they could show how great they were. When the results came in showing that the programs were mostly failures, liberals did nothing. And most of the programs are still here, 50 years later.

The trouble with the program of the left, I am convinced, is not that its ideas cost a bundle, and create and underclass of women that don't marry and men that don't work. The problem is that progressive politics needs a domestic enemy to fight. Which means that progressive politics is always pushing towards civil war. The great thing about conservative politics is that its enemy (and politics must always have an enemy) is typically foreign, not domestic. So conservatives rally Americans to fight Communism and Islamism, not other Americans.

The one time that conservatives really went after a domestic enemy was in the McCarthy era, when chaps like Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) were raising consciousness about Communists in the State Department and in Hollywood and in the schools. Some Communists lost their jobs, and Alger Hiss went to jail for lying. Liberals have never let us forget it.

So going after liberals is beyond the pale, even if there actually were Communists in the State Department and some of them were actually spying for the Soviets. But conservatives? Well, no need for conservatives in the nation's universities. Because hate.

Liberals call the fight against radical Islam "xenophobia" and "Islamophobia" and blame the NRA and conservative Christians for the Orlando massacre.

Because that is what they do.

The End of Conservatism as We've Known It

I'm lunching with a liberal friend today, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to say about Trump. What is there to say?

I think the first thing is that Donald Trump has broken the Republican Party that we have had since the end of the Reagan administration. Initially, the party was inclined to concede a few things to the Democrats -- a little tax increase here, a No Child Left Behind there -- but as time went on the party found itself doing a slow retreat, with nothing to show for its good will, before the culture war of political correctness that has done an astonishing job of marginalizing the Anglo-Saxon culture that underpinned the Bourgeois ethos and makes capitalism possible.

Now all that is gone, washed out with the tide. The good old libertarian conservatism that I have professed most of my adult life is broken. That's what the long withdrawing roar of the #NeverTrump folks is all about.

It is all broken because the chief political victim of the last 50 years, the white working class, has suddenly found a voice in Donald Trump. As is usual with politics the Trump promise to Make America Great Again (in the way that benefited the white working class from 1945 to 1973) is empty. We cannot "make it like it was." The world of the future will not be a world of good jobs at good wages with pensions and lifetime tenure. It just won't.

But the world being promised by the Democrats, of benefits and privileges to the favored victims, won't be the world of the future either. I'd say that the benefit state has gone about as far as it can go -- 35 percent of GDP decided by political power -- and any attempts to boost it with new privileges and entitlements and subsidies are likely to break it.

There's a cry in the land right now to end free trade. I don't know quite what people mean by that, but the simple fact is that free trade is just a fancy name for market prices, letting the decisions of consumers rule the economy rather than the political decisions of special interests. We could say that we want to increase good jobs at good wages, but we can't do it by legislating higher wages or forcing manufacturing onshore. Oh sure, we can muck around at the margins and give out a subsidy here and a tariff there. We can ease the pain of the buggy-whip makers. But the basic proposition of global capitalism, innovation and "trade tested betterment" and the sweeping away of the old methods that use more energy and labor, is irreversible.

It is shocking to a guy like me to see Donald Trump promising to renegotiate NAFTA and teach China a lesson. In my experience Republicans just don't do that. But the truth is that politicians tell voters what they want to hear and then go off and do what they need to do, and call it what they want. What will Donald Trump do if he is elected president? We don't know. What will Hillary Clinton do? We don't know.

What we do know is that governments are armed minorities occupying territory that tax the inhabitants thereof to reward their supporters. Republicans haven't done much rewarding of their supporters recently and their supporters are mad. But then Democrats have promised a ton of Hope and Change to their supporters and they haven't delivered much on that either.

There's a lefty piece out by Harold Meyerson today remarking on the hollowing out of the middle class and the prospects for the Democrats to do something about it while the Republicans become white nationalists. The only problem is that, when the progressives started, a century ago, the US governments at all levels were spending about 7 percent of GDP. Now they are spending about 35 percent of GDP. I'd say that the progressive opportunity to reward their supporters tends to tap out at 35 to 40 percent of GDP. So there is not much more redistribution that progressives can do to attract and reward supporters.

The problem for all governments, and progressives in particular, is that supporters insist on being rewarded. That is bad enough. But they get really mad if you ever take stuff away from them. That's how you go Greece or Argentina or Venezuela. It's easy for a government to give the voters money. It is near impossible to take it back when you have ruined the economy with your handouts.

Yet the art and practice of politics is to promise people things that they shouldn't be asking for and shouldn't be getting.

The Trump phenomenon means the end of conservatism as we know it. And probably the end of a lot of other things too that we don't yet know about.

Progressives vs. Conservatives on Power

I've been having an email exchange with Craig Greenman, who I emailed on a whim after reading a comment of his on NRO. Our exchange is labeled "Definition of a Conservative." His latest email puts up his definition of what progressives want to do against my definition of conservatives as not that interested in power.

In Craig's formulation "both progressives and conservatives want to empower the individual". He allows that a progressive is "someone who *is* interested in power, specifically the *empowering* of other people." The "question therefore is ḧow far to get the government involved in empowering people".

OK. Now I am going to analyze this under the assumptions of my Three Peoples theory, that there are three kinds of people in the political world: People of the Creative Self, who I would think include progressives and thinking conservatives, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Subordinate Self.

I interpret progressive politics as having two objectives. The first objective is to attempt to empower the People of the Subordinate Self, the workers and peasants. Workers and peasants do not want formal rights and power; they want substantive rights, like minimum wages and union rights and pensions and health care and education. The second objective is to empower themselves, the People of the Creative Self. This is where the progressive interest in LGBT rights and the environment comes from.

Now, when I was a control systems engineer I had a conversation once with a communications specialist. He reminded me that when doing data communications the key is what the system does when things go wrong. Anyone can communicate data over a gin-clear line. But what happens when there is an error? The astonishing success of the Internet, for example, is its amazing ability to deal with all kinds of errors about which you and I have no idea.

The problem with government is that nobody can agree what to do when things do wrong. And if they do, it will be too late. And the fact is that things always go wrong, in every human endeavor, in government and in the private sector. This truth is encapsulated in the elder von Moltke's dictum that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. And he was probably the most successful general in history.

So what do you do if the minimum wage creates unemployment in minority youth? What do you do if the VA provides lousy service and covers up its failures? What do you do if Social Security is underfunded by trillions? The answer is: nothing, not until the sh*t hits the fan, and maybe not even then. Why is that?

The answer is that when a government goes about empowering people it really just hands out free stuff and subsidies, in accordance with my dictum that a government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters. But what happens when the government starts running out of money to reward its supporters? The answer is: nothing. Why is that?

The answer is that the one thing that we humans utterly resist is a diminution in our standard of living. We think of our wages and our government benefits are our rights. What was the great railroad strike of 1877 about? The railroads were cutting wages because they were going broke. What about the fictional coal strike in Zola's Germinal? The owners were cutting wages because they were going broke.  It's not just the capitalists that have this problem. The Bolivarian government of Venezuela dare not reduce the subsidies and handouts to the workers of Venezuela when the price of oil gets cut in half. Instead it lets the Venezuelan economy go to rack and ruin in a hyperinflation that hurts the poor the most, just like Germany and Austria when their government revenues got hammered after World War I. They dare not cut government spending to fit the reduced revenues, because the people would toss them out.

I'd say there is a problem with a politics that gets into this kind of a hole. In fact I would argue that it is utter folly for the government to promise any benefits to people, because of what happens when things go wrong. When things go wrong people thrash around looking for scapegoats and woe betide the politician that proposes to cut benefits.

But why? Why does government get in such a hole all the time? I'd say it's because of the very nature of government which is to lead us to safety against existential perils, starting with invasion. It is an all-or-nothing thing. Either you beat the invasion, or you are toast. You do not taper or adjust; you bet the country on winning.

Notice that the transnational governing class takes exactly this approach on climate change. Climate change is presented as an existential peril, and we must push ahead on all fronts, because to temporize is to court disaster. Anyone that objects to the full-court press is a "denier" which is progressive-speak for cowardly traitor.

But how much of human relations should be conducted under this all-or-nothing model? Slavery? Well, we had a civil war in the US about slavery, and it didn't end well, not for a century, because the Republican victors quit defending the freed slaves from their former masters after about ten years; they had other fish to fry. Civil rights? It all started well, except that the only way that government could think about implementing civil rights was by quotas and applying the rubric of over- and under-representation.

That's why I have developed my catchphrases: government is force; politics is violence and division; system is domination. Everyone wants to empower people, but is government force the means, is political division the answer? And when something goes wrong, how do we fix it?

Then there is the little wee problem that comes next is that everyone -- conservative, progressive, liberal, fascist, Bolivarian socialist, Bernie bro, BLM activist -- wants to empower himself first. Give me the power, so I can empower you.

I don't know how progressives would propose to empower people in the best of all possible worlds, but the only thing they have tried up to now is to take money from Peter to pay Paul, or to regulate the economy with bureaucrats. Surely, progressives, there must be a better way to a better world than the violence of force and the domination of administrative system.

George Soros: I Wonder What He Meant by That?

I confess that George Soros is to me an enigma. On the one hand he sponsors the Open Society Foundations. On the other he funds the Democratic Party and divisive leftist groups like Black Lives Matter. On the one hand he is a speculator and an investor. On the other hand he seems to be a supporter of the bureaucratic and centralist European Union.

What does George Soros want? On Friday he was writing that the EU would inevitably break up. On Monday he is writing bureaucratic EU-speak about reforming the EU.

He writes that Britain had the "best of all possible deals" with the EU, yet voted to leave. Chancellor Merkel's refugee policy "was an inspiring gesture" but "created panic" and provoked the growth of "xenophobic anti-European parties" like UKIP. Britain's economy could take a hit, he warns, as half of its economy relies on Europe; and Europe could be hit worse as xenophobes like Italy's Five Star Movement get into power. What is needed?

None of this bodes well for a serious program of eurozone reform, which would have to include a genuine banking union, a limited fiscal union, and much stronger mechanisms of democratic accountability. And time is not on Europe’s side, as external pressures from the likes of Turkey and Russia – both of which are exploiting the discord to their advantage – compound Europe’s internal political strife.

All of this elite hand-waving misses the point. The problem with the European project is that it is not a project that seriously attempts to create a European people. It does not unify the people of Europe as a European people. Instead it amounts to a divisive politics-as-usual with the usual special interests competing for favors in Brussels and the transnational elite grandly ruling over all.

But what is the solution? As usual, Bismarck has the answer. How did he unify the disunited German states and principalities? He got them into victorious wars, first against Denmark, then against Austria, finally against France. By the time he had finished he had the whole German people (except the Austrians) unified in a single political unit.

The US had a similar experience. Roosevelt unified the fractious immigrants of the turn of the 20th century, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, by first leading them to fight the Great Depression and then drafting them to fight the Nazis. By the end of World War II the US was as unified as it has ever been, before or since.

So maybe, Mr. Soros, the problems with Russia and Turkey represent an opportunity. A nice little Bismarckian war against one or the other might just be what the doctor ordered to unite the various nationalities of Europe into a united European people.

The problem is to make sure that Bismarck and the elder von Moltke are directing traffic and not Wilhelm II and the younger von Moltke. The first two were geniuses; the second two were not.

Who is George Soros and what does he want? Maybe the truth is rather prosaic. The thing about most people is that they are experts in their own field, and develop fruitful ideas to guide them. But for the rest of their worldview they just go with the conventional wisdom. Soros has been a successful speculator, and has developed a theory to guide him. But otherwise he is just a conventional Euro elitist. He knows that the people can't be trusted not to fall for another Hitler, and so wise and educated people like him must make sure that nationalism never rears its ugly head again.

And, I think, a moneybags like Soros needs to keep onside with the ruling class. Just as Warren Buffett is known as a Democrat and serves up helpful sound bites on occasion, so a speculator like Soros needs to pay his protection money to keep out of trouble.

We have met the enemy and he is us, wrote cartoonist Walt Kelly. That is especially true in politics. What people want from politics is stuff they shouldn't have. That goes for George Soros as much as Brits that want things back the way they were and Trumpkins that want to Make American Great Again and geezers that demand our Social Security and Medicare in full and gays that want to poke at Christian bakers and teach them a lesson.

That's why conservatives think that the less government the better.

Post Brexit: The Eternal Contradictions of Politics

Yesterday, June 24, 2016, the voters in Britain elected to leave the European Union. I think it is time to recall Enoch Powell, of the "Rivers of Blood" speech, who said that the European Union could never work because there is no European demos.

He meant that a pan-European state required, to succeed, a pan-European people.

However, the Brexit election showed that there isn't a British people either. The English voted to get out of the EU but the Scots voted to stay in. England and Scotland have been Britain since the Acts of Union in 1707. But of course the Act of Union was a lie; it was the forcible joining together of two dynastic states, and the English and the Scots have quarreled ever since.

France? Put together by force. Germany? Force, in the wars provoked by Bismarck against Denmark, Austria, and France. Italy? A forcible takeover of the south.

The United States? Conquest of North America, followed by a rebellion by hot-heads against the Brits, followed by a split between North and South that ended in a bloody Civil War that restored the Union but divided North and South for a century.

My point is that nations and peoples do not just happen. There is always politics, and politics is violence. Every nation is some guy's power project. The European Union is the power project of a trans-national elite that decided after World War II that it would end the wars of nationalism by imposing a superstate over the eternally warring nation states. The current liberal project of a diverse America is a power project to end the dominance of white males and replace it with a new demos of women, minorities and immigrants who would vote for big government and empower Democrats to rule forever.

The point is that these power projects sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Sometimes the political activists create a new demos and rule forever. Sometimes they fail and get thrown onto the dust heap of history.

But here is the problem. When the power projectors successfully establish their power project and create a demos the demos expects something in return. They expect the ruling class to protect them from the swirling winds of power in the world. But what that means in the modern world is protection from the verdict of the market. That's what labor unions are for; that's what crony capitalists are for. They go to government for a sweet application of force to protect them from the market.

So everyone is is favor of freedom; but everyone wants to be protected from harm. Everyone wants the right to work and trade anywhere in the world. But they don't want everyone to come here and compete with them in the labor market. And they certainly don't want foreigners to come here and use government benefits that ought, by right, to belong to people born here.

So the Brits want to get out of Europe and restrict immigration and keep the NHS for Brits. But what about trade with Europe and the rest of the world?

So Trump wants to restrict immigration and bring manufacturing back home to America. And Make America Great Again.

But the point about the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that, one way or another, the established powers were unable, time after time, to stop the "trade-tested betterments" that various nobodies launched upon the market. So we got the Great Enrichment in spite of ourselves. If you listen to people, they tell you that they don't want to have to change and they are saying that they want government to protect them from the rest of the world. They want the goodies the market brings them, but not if the goodies put them out of business. So people want the betterment of the Great Enrichment, but not if they have to change.

I like to say that the decisive change of the modern era is that Gerald O'Hara's comment that "land is the only thing that lasts" is no longer true. In the old days you occupied land with your chimp troop, or agricultural empire, against the world, because land was life and the very definition of survival. But not any more. Today you can buy and sell food on the global market as grain travels around the world in giant 100,000 ton grain ships. Today what matters is the innovation of new products and technologies, new applications of technical knowledge.

But we humans are still living in the old world of Gerald O'Hara. We still believe in the permanence of land, even as we all move to the city and the suburb and work in offices rather than down on the farm.

Ever since the start of the industrial revolution we have been dealing with the problem of rural people moving to the city with their rural, tribal culture and confronting the urban, bourgeois market order. The Muslim hordes that are presently terrifying us all are just the latest wave in the migration to the city.

The migrants to the city come to the city with their culture of land, of defending their land from all outsiders. and they look to a powerful patron to protect them from the pirates and the pillagers that want to plunder their tribal lands. Only the city does not work like that. The city is not a world of separate landed estates; it is a world of trust and exchange and innovation.

How people adapt to the bourgeois culture of trust and innovation, and learn to be not that interested in power, is the great story that is never told.

Meanwhile we live in a contradictory world in which we all work in a world of trust the stranger, but we still want politicians to bash the stranger. That's a contradiction that won't change any time soon.

Two Cheers for Consumerism

One thing the left whines about all the time is consumerism. Their problem is the combination of corporations and advertising and waste. And liberals really don't like the things that people can be persuaded to buy.

Corporations are always trying to convince consumers to buy stuff they don't need, and then, with "planned obsolescence," they design products to wear out so that consumers will be forced to buy them all over again. And what about the blandness of "standardized mass consumption?"

I suppose this is just what Rodney Stark calls "upper-class asceticism." People raised to a middle-class competence are used to abundance, and they are already looking beyond abundance to a more nuanced relationship to "stuff."

These upper-class snobs tend not to understand how gorgeous it is for people living in their first prosperity after the eternal fears of rural indigence and the forced march of learning how to make it in the city: now they can afford to go out and buy stuff. They forget how young Americans loved getting out of the city after World War II and going to live in the quick-and-dirty Levittowns out in the suburbs. With a Ford or a Chevy that might, if you pushed it, have a V8.

The whole phenomenon of consumerism is not that hard to understand. It is almost all about women, and what they want.

First of all, women want pretty clothes that advertise their sexual desirability. Not that women think about what cleavage or tapered legs or dainty ankles mean to men. It's just that they instinctively want to dress so that they are noticed by men. I know a woman in her 80s that still cares about looking good when she goes out. The fact is that women like to ring the changes on their clothes, with different colors, different patterns, different textiles. Corporations and advertisers and taste makers are just giving women what they want.

Then there is cleaning. Once they have a kid on the ground, women get really interested in cleaning. There is no mystery about that; clean helps keep children alive. So women are eager for anything that cleans or makes cleaning easier. No wonder the supermarket shelves groan with cleaning and paper products that are designed to make the cleaning operation easier.

Then there is house and home. Women like houses, and they like them to be pretty and comfortable inside. So corporations and advertisers oblige them with beds and baths and cute little villages about an hour out of town where you can go and shop with a friend and bring home some knick-knacks.

And let's not forget food. The fashions and government mandates on food reflect the profound concern that women feel for the health of their loved ones. So if the government comes out and says that fat is bad, then women believe them and shift their eating habits to non-fat. If the government comes out and says that trans-fatty acids are a problem, women will act on that information. Because food and health are important to them.

If the left sneers at all this, and maintains that the sheeple are the victims of eevil corporations, I say that they are missing the point. And they may even be anti-woman. Because women are interested in clothes and cleaning and house and home and food, and they always will be.

But what about guys? For guys there is Cabela's, "the world's foremost outfitter." Because a man never knows when he may need to go out on an expedition to parts unknown. He never knows when he may need a gun, or a commercial-grade meat grinder, or a smoker, or a commercial-grade deep fryer. And then there are cars, with dials and gadgets and insane amounts of horsepower, but you never know when you may need it. And trucks. And sporting gear.

Then there is the great liberator of the modern age. Power tools. No modern man can or should resist the urge to possess power tools. In fact, most men need a building where they can store and use their vital and important power tools. The advent of inexpensive power washers means that men are now eager to go out ant scour the sidewalk outside their home.

All of this guy stuff is completely unnecessary, but it sure is fun.

Back in the day the left was outraged at capitalism because of the poverty of the working class. Now that the working class is rolling around in excess, they blame capitalism for the excess.

Really, when are we going to retire these whiners and all just go to work and get along?

How to Turn Left Through Modernism and Postmodernism

For straight lefties the "postmodern turn" is a bit of a puzzler. When you attack "meta-theory" as a form of domination, what is left of the granddaddy of all "meta-theories," Marxism?

That is the problem that David Harvey sets out to solve in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. And he is a solid Marxist, in the sense that his chapter on "Modernization," meaning the modern industrial market economy, is pure Marxism.

But in the end, he manages to privilege his own meta-theory above all others in a chapter headed "The Crisis of Historical Materialism," i.e., Marxism. And his judgement is: Not to Worry; our faith is good.

After all, he writes, what problem could historical materialism have with a postmodernism

that is anti-authoritarian and iconoclastic, that insists on the authenticity of other voices, that celebrates difference, decentralization, and democratization of taste, as well as the power of imagination over materiality[?]

What indeed? The only problem is that the left is profoundly authoritarian, totalitarian even, and raises the most fantastical icons to the sky, and denies the authenticity of any voices opposed to it, and criminalizes difference, abolishes decentralization, rides over ordinary middle-class taste with an M-1 tank.

But the really helpful thing about the chapter is that Harvey lays out his basic lefty Articles of Faith. For instance, the problem with the New Left of the 1960s was that the "push into cultural politics... set the New Left against traditional working-class attitudes and institutions." It was great that the New Left moved into "race and gender issues, of difference, and of the pronlems of colonized peoples and repressed minorities, of ecological and aesthetic issues". But what about the workers? The "New Left tended to abandon its faith both in the proletariat as an instrument of progressive change and in historical materialism as a mode of analysis." It is a central conceit of the left that its politics supports working classes and their needs rather than, as Samuel Gompers warned, substituting their own agenda and demolishing authentic working-class institutions.

But now, with postmodernism, the left has extended its conceit to imagining that it supports all marginalized people and their "traditional... attitudes and institutions," rather than imposing its own world view everywhere from the movies to marriage by force.

But the "interrogation of 'orthodox' Marxian formulations" was a good thing for Harvey as it forced the orthodox to consider new developments in the economy and state functions and culture. It taught the left the following lessons.

Difference and "otherness" This should not be tacked onto Marxism but be a part of its core.

Images and discourses "Aesthetic and cultural practices matter, and the conditions of their production deserve the closest attention."

Time and space matter Lefties need to take note of the way that modern art jumbles up space and time, and also how global capitalism exploits space, place and time in ways that lefties must challenge.

Marxism must be open-ended The postmodernist attack on "meta-theory" (i.e, the one true theory) should teach lefties to avoid their once-for-all approach to theory. "Meta-theory is not a statement of total truth" but must be a constantly updated battle plan to understand and take the fight to global capitalism.

 You can see what is going on here. Harvey understands that the expansion of victimhood from the working class to all the other marginalized groups of the world is a necessary part of any leftist future. And the control of the culture, what is allowed to be thought and saide, is vital. Lefties need to adapt to the new global, instant, pervasive culture of capitalism so they can compete mano-a-mano with the evil CEOs and fascists. And Marxists can't just keep spouting original Marxian chapter and verse forever (Although Harvey's economics is almost pure 1860 Capital); they need to update their theory as the cunning capitalists find new ways to exploit and to immiserate.

The sad thing about this is that lefty David Harvey is determined to keep the shackles on the economic and political and social phenomenon that has increased human prosperity from $3 per day to $100 per day in 200 years wherever it has been tried. He is like the slaveowner that feels he has to abuse his slaves just to make sure that they never even think about the possibility of rebellion.

In the end, Harvey wants the good old time religion, but informed by the postmodern turn into not just an updated historical materialism but a "historical-geographical materialism."

On that critical basis is becomes possible to launch a counterattack of narrative against the image, of ethics against aesthetics, of a project of Becoming rather than Being, and so search for unity within difference[.]

And thus "promote adherence to a new version of the Enlightenment project."