The Fault is Not In Our Elites, But in the World They Made

For some reason, I can't get excited enough about the Republican National Convention to watch it. Perhaps it's because I am going to observe my 70th birthday at the end of the month.

Or maybe it's because much bigger things are afoot than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

I wrote some disparaging words about the failures of the "administrative faction of the ruling class" at American Thinker this week, including blaming it for World War I and its failed aftermath.

Looking at the big picture, I guess you could say that World War I tore apart the 19th century world and World War II put the world together again. Except for the Soviet Union.

That's because in the US and UK, the ruling class came together on World War II and forged their peoples, broken by 20 years of misery, back into a nation again. Talk to a person in their 80s, the generation that was young in the 1940s, and they are all pretty good with going along to get along with big government. Hey, big government had its finest hour in World War II.

The ruling class was so pleased with itself that it went to sleep and figured it would rule forever. But obviously with the Crash of 2008, political correctness, the rise of radical Islam, and Brexit and Trump, something has changed. The post-World War II world is coming to an end, and we don't know what will come next.

Here's a piece about the failures of the GOP elite by Jeffrey H. Anderson. He lists four failures: failure to listen to the citizenry, getting suckered into the Democrats' model for nominating presidential candidates (primaries instead of smoke-filled rooms), failing to make a big picture case, failing to back the viable challenger (i.e., Walker, Cruz). All in all, he writes, "the problems in our politics lie more with the elites than with the citizenry."

All true, but all ground level, tactical stuff.

And really meaningless, because the GOP elite doesn't have real power. They don't get to make the world; they just live in it. Their failure is really the failure to take down the political and cultural world constructed by the Democrats. Yet how are the GOPers to do that, since politics is downstream from culture?

Let us try and construct a big picture to explain our situation.

Back in the 19th century the Left, in what we will call a genuine concern for the plight of the workers, built a political movement by splitting off the working class from an identity with the nation. This project failed in World War I when the working class identified with their nations and fought in the trenches against each other. Anyway, it had turned out, capitalism wasn't "immiserating" the working class, it was enriching it.

Still, you had to hand it to the Left. Their project worked pretty well. It is only now, a century after World War I, that the working class, in Brexit and Trump, has become disenchanted with the leadership of the Left.

The point is that people respond to divisive politics, and are easily persuaded that "they" are out to exploit "us." And everyone is in favor of government putting its thumb on the scales of justice if it benefits "us." So it took a while for the workers to realize that the Left didn't care about people like them.

But the Left had another card up its sleeve. It went from class politics to identity politics. Now instead of splitting the working class off from the nation it would split off all kinds of groups, from women to racial minorities to sexual minorities. Looking at the result, it is clear that divide and conquer is not that hard to do. You can get women to believe that they have been kept down by the patriarchy, blacks to believe that they have been kept down by the police, gays that they have been kept down by Christian bigots, and so on.

Conservatives have reacted by fingering the tactics of this cultural Marxism, the community organizer tactics of chaps like Saul Alinsky and the activism culture that all good little girls learn in government schools. And we are outraged.

But from a big picture view we must understand that all politics is division: that is the politician's stock in trade. It is just that lefties are so much better at it. And they have set the rules so that their divisive tactics are all about communities coming together while their opponents' divisive tactics are bigotry and racism.

In addition the Left has grown the government from 7 percent of GDP to 35 percent of GDP as it has rewarded its supporters with government loot. But the more loot is handed out the less that capitalism can innovate and create new wealth. And the more that the losers get angry.

That gets us to Stein's Law. If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Obviously, today's division cannot go on forever. So how can we stop all this division? The answer is right in front of us. The only time humans come together is during an existential emergency, like a flood or a war.

The only way we are going to be able to heal all the divisions provoked by the Left since World War II is by having us a great big war.

And it is pretty obvious what that war is going to be all about. Muslims.

Of course it's going to be pretty hard on Muslims who are, after all, just people. But the fact is that today's radical Islam is implacably opposed to everything that made the West great. Islam is opposed to the separation of church and state; it is tribal rather than national; it is opposed to social and economic innovation, the foundation of the Great Enrichment; it is social and religiously intolerant. It denies women a public life.

Suppose you were a populist leader looking for a way to unify a nation or a culture under your leadership. What would you do? You would look for an enemy that you could use to unify your people. Hey, liberals do it all the time, only their enemies are the racists, sexists, homophobes right here at home.

Don't like it? Neither do I. But the fact is that you cannot unify people around the concept of rainbows and unicorns. You can only unify them to face and to fight an existential threat to their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

So maybe that's why I can't get too excited about the political conventions. I think that much bigger things are afoot, but we are only in the early stages of this sea change in our politics and our culture, and the great events of the political season are meaningless skirmishes as great movements arise to deal with our existential crisis, and mobilize us, willy nilly, for war.

Everyone is Playing "Time for a Change"

When you think about it, it is remarkable how much of politics is the Blame Game. In the 2000s liberals liked to blame George W. Bush for everything, although his Iraq policy was the consensus ruling-class "regime-change" policy. Now conservatives are blaming Barack Obama for everything, even though liberals are confident that the problem is that conservatives opposed everything that Obama proposed.

There is a reason why so much blame goes in in politics. It's because government is force, and force is a very blunt instrument. So politics always comes down to our guys shoving around their guys. But the question always is: what happens if something goes wrong with our plan to shove the other guys around?

Here's a chap who says that the problem is that "the center-left has told the bottom 60% of the income distribution in their countries the following story: 'Globalization is good for you. It’s awesome. It’s really great...'" and so on. Only, of course, it hasn't been so great for a whole bunch of people, and now they are angry.

Here's a chapette who says that the problem is that "America has been rocked by a series of semi-coherent social movements that blend some real and compelling grievances with a great deal of confusion, cinematic victim-mongering, and wildly imprudent demands."

But don't forget that the last 200 years has seen a Great Enrichment of 3000 percent, and it has been lifting billions out of poverty in the last couple of decades. You'd think that everyone would be over the moon.

They aren't over the moon because at the street level life is always hard and full of disappointment. I like to say that the most disappointed are the "little darlings" of the ruling class that have been promised goodies and are now disappointed that the goodies haven't changed their lives and, anyway, the ruling class didn't deliver on its promises.

So the global elite promised wonders from globalization. Actually, they were right. Cheap everything from China has been a global miracle. But plenty of people have been hurt, starting with unionized workers that priced themselves out of a job. Whatever the advantages of "free trade" (which is just another term for market prices) the constant innovation of the market through market prices creates plenty of angry losers.

So the angry losers are rallying to politicians promising to punish the evildoers. Of course they are. Governments always promise to protect us from existential dangers and what is more existential than losing your job to a foreigner?

Yes, but what about the future? How can anyone expect Donald Trump to deliver on his promises of curbing immigration and teaching the Chinese a lesson? Good point. How can anyone expect Hillary Clinton to deliver on the fatuous promise of universal government health care and keeping all the Democratic victim groups onside? Everything the government touches turns to dysfunction, because government is force, and force is useful only for breaking things.

The truth is that we only advance by trying stuff, and most innovation is a mistake. So we bumble along from mistake to mistake, and turn around to find that, after 200 years of mistakes, we have increased per capita income by 30 times! And there has never been anything like it, ever.

We all wish confusion on our enemies, to teach them a lesson, and so we demand that it is Time for a Change. But the way to the future is by finding a useful way to serve our fellow humans, and not to demand our pound of flesh up front.

In the real world, humans demand to get their pound of flesh, their government check, up until the moment that the government runs out of money. Governments know this, so they do anything rather than disappoint their followers with "cuts" or "austerity." Until it is too late, Venezuela.

It is easy to say: Don't rely on government, but the truth is that the government takes 35 percent of everything we produce, so we have to take the government's dime and go along to get along. When the crash comes, of course, it will be minorities and women hardest hit, although in the Crash of 2008 it was probably minorities and white working class men hardest hit. Those folks are hardest hit because they have no option than to play the government's game. It is only people up the food chain that can afford to save for a rainy day against the government running out of money.

Meanwhile, I'm angry, I blame President Obama and politically correct liberals, and I think it is Time for a Change.

When Will Democrats Realize That Obama is Killing Them?

Government has only two things to do in this world. First, its job is to protect us against foreign enemies, pirates and plunderers and such. Second, its job it so protect us against domestic enemies, thieves and murderers and such. All else doth err.

But the whole program of the left is based on a denial of this. On foreign enemies they say that it is our aggressive foreign policy that incites anger across the world. Not the mention the precipitate of western colonialism. On domestic enemies they accuse the police of "brutality."

Hillary Clinton was playing that game a while back when she tweeted:

Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

President Obama was playing that game a week ago when he said the police could make their job safer by admitting their failures.

This sort of liberal jaw-flapping is annoying at the best of times, but when we have a Muslim global terror problem in the world, and a Black Lives Matter anti-cop program at home, it becomes unendurable.

At some point reality breaks through the liberal propaganda screen and people will start to demand that the government does its job, and protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. They will start to say that they don't care whether Muslims are peaceful and tolerant, just kill the terrorists; they will start to say that they don't care if the police have it in for young black men, just stop the cop killers.

At some point this election year, I predict, Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media are going to wake up and realize that they are losing the American people and losing the election. It will break through Hillary Clinton's skull that President Obama and his lefty rhetoric are enraging ordinary Americans and that they are going to vote for change over four more wonderful years of Obama.

By then, of course, it will be too late.

You may ask: why do the Democrats do this? The answer, I think, is that the Democrats and liberals want to use politics to fight a different war than the war against street thugs and foreign thugs. They want to fight inequality domestically and internationally. Not to mention save the planet from climate change. It stands to reason that nobody is going to allow them to do that while there are still street thugs killing people and foreign thugs mowing down French people watching patriotic fireworks shows.

So, in order to do the fun things that liberals want to do with their political power, they first have to say that there is no need to do the basic stuff of protection. That stuff is old hat, and anyway racist and colonialist and irrelevant.

Of course, they are lying about this, and worst of all, have come to believe their lies. The only thing that government is warranted to do in this world is protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. Everything else is just domestic loot and plunder, the armed minority of the ruling class taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters.

OK. I've made my prediction. Now let's see how it turns out.

President Obama's Divisiveness: What Does He Mean?

My question about President Obama is this. Is his divisive rhetoric just his inner leftiness? Or is it cynical and strategic, based on a hard look at the polls?

I would have thought that his speech in Dallas at a service for the five slain Dallas cops would have been not just in bad taste, but bound to stir up feeling against the Democratic candidate for president in 2016. Why lecture his opponents as racists and haters at a funeral service?

But David Harsanyi writes that, "like most people on the left these days, [the president] no longer bothers to make a distinction between a policy position and a moral struggle."

But, of course, the left's collapse of politics into a moral struggle is not the whole story. Politics is violence, so the moral struggle can only be effected by a violent struggle. Thus it makes complete sense for the left to escalate the struggle for civil rights into an armed struggle, as in Black Lives Matter.

Scott McKay writes about Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. After "rabble-rousing" in Ferguson, Missouri, he is how earning $165,000 a year as a community organizer for Baltimore's public schools, and living "in an 8,000 square foot house owned by board members of George Soros' Open Society Institute." Now he has been "feted for three hours at the White House."

See, I would have thought that Hillary Clinton, running for president, would want to damp down the lefty crazies for the duration of the campaign. I would have thought that she and Obama would have got together to keep the rowdies out of sight until after the glorious victory in November. After all, Hillary is the wife of the guy that ran as a New Democrat assuring us that there was nobody here except us moderates.

But maybe they have decided that the "we are all moderates strategy" can't win.

That leads to the other strategic idea, which would argue in favor of encouraging the thuggish Black Lives Matter. On this view you need to get 90 percent of blacks voting Democrat, and that means you need to get them frightened that Jim Crow is just around the corner and angry that the cops are killing their sons. If the Dems don't get 90 percent of the black vote and don't get a big turnout then they can't win a national election. As Steve Sailer puts it, the Dems need to "angry up" the various elements of their "Coalition of the Fringes" to keep them on the team.

I suppose the answer is: all of the above. The flaw in any conspiracy theory is to believe that the supposed conspirators really know what they are doing, and that the organizer of the conspiracy, the Mr. Big, also knows what he is doing. In reality Mr. Big is not as big as he seems. He is not master of all he surveys; he has to play politics with all the factions of his gang, and cannot just order them all into line for the good of the order. He has to temporize, and reward his hot-heads for their activism, and try to keep everyone happily fighting to bend the arc of history towards justice.

But there is a problem with the left's view of politics.

Let's think back to 1968. The New Deal wing of the Democratic Party just wanted to win the election on the old model of the New Deal coalition. But the New Left radicals and the peace faction would not agree to shut up, so they disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and represented that the police "rioted" against protesters in the park near the convention. In response the Republican Party became the party of "law and order" and won four of the next five presidential elections, and the Democratic Party had to claw back to the middle, using the astonishing political skills of Bill Clinton.

Stop press. Donald Trump just announced that he was the "law and order" candidate for president.

We racist sexist homophobes fail to understand that our liberal friends do not think like us. They really believe that their leftist politics is going to save the world, and they believe that the techniques of their politics, the division, the protests, the marches, the silencing of opponents are the right and proper thing to do. And above all they do not think that government is a necessary evil, on the idea that government is force and the point of social animals is to reduce the human and the material cost of force. They think that politics, emancipative and liberatory politics, is salvific.

So let's give President Obama the benefit of the doubt and accept that he actually believes the rubbish he spouts all the time. And the same for the rest of our liberal friends. What the president does not understand is that millions of Americans hate the continual division and hate the praise heaped upon low-rent community organizers. They just want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

And they want the government to protect them from enemies, foreign and domestic.

The only thing that will force the liberals to moderate their leftiness is defeat, repeated defeat, at the ballot box. That is all.

Learning from Haidt: Trumpism is the Natural Outcome of Ruling Class Failure

Yesterday I blogged a piece on Jonathan Haidt's analysis of Brexit and Trump and the confrontation of globalism and nationalism.

In Haidt's analysis, globalism is a little bit too far out in front and is provoking a nationalist and authoritarian backlash. I wrote that it was the globalists who were the authoritarians. After all, it is the globalists that have cunningly set up all kinds of global institutions from which there is no dissent and no means to petition for a redress of grievances. Can you spell Authoritarian?

But what really caught my eye was an analysis of how the world got here, looking at World Values Survey data. Haidt wrote that:

as they [countries] industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations.

This is rather obviously an analysis from the globalist elite; it feels a bit like a 19th century colonial governor in his magnificent plumed hat talking about the natives. Compassionate caring social engineers will raise up the benighted heathen towards the rational world of social programs and reason.

Of course, I think that this attitude is precisely what creates Trumpism. People carefully relieved of their religion and ritual their "deference to authorities" are being taught to defer to their globalist authorities and their social-engineering experts. So the only way they have to petition their global overlords for a redress of grievances is through Trumpism or its local affiliates. I don't call that authoritarian; I call it rebellion.

But beyond that I think that the globalist approach misunderstands what it takes for an individual to enter into the industrial world order and succeed in it. It is not a process of advancing from "religion, ritual, and deference to authorities" to "'secular rational' values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering." It is, I believe a process that must occur in every human heart to change from the rural subordinate culture of the peasant, with its deference to unpredictable lords and gods, to the responsible culture of the city, with its God that sets the world up to run by rules and divine justice, and its rulers that are accountable to the citizens. In other words, on my Three Peoples theory, the transformation occurs as people transition from being People of the Subordinate Self to People of the Responsible Self.

Trumpism, on my theory, is an inevitable result of a top-down transition to industrial capitalism where people are shuffled around into factories, promised life-time employment, kept shuttered up in labor unions, kept quiet with entitlements, educated in government child-custodial facilities, and protected from unemployment and de-skilling by social engineering programs run by the elite rather than by mutual-aid societies run by the people themselves.

Sooner or later, under the top-down system, the elite is going to make a mistake and will not have foreseen some social, economic, or cultural development, and the still-subordinate people are going to wake up and find out that their kind and compassionate political elite has not compassionately provided for them. In the particular case of the Trumpkins the white working class that was taught to expect a prosperous future by sitting back and following orders from its betters has woken up to find that their betters lied. The good old days of good jobs at good wages in the industrial sector are gone, never to return, and the skills that sustained the white working class half a century ago are no longer valuable.

Now, if the white working class had been raised to the culture of the responsible self they would never have got into this situation. They would never have believed in the lie of permanent lifetime employment. They would not have joined labor unions that ended up looting the companies they organized into bankruptcy. And when the world started to move on from Taylorist manufacturing the white working class would have moved on too. But they didn't. They believed the lies told them by the political left; they enjoyed their moment in the sun as political power forced prosperity on them for a season. And now they are angry; of course they are.

My theory of life, the universe, and everything, is that the old country way of "traditional values" was not in fact traditional values, because it was not self-conscious about values. People lived the way they had always done because that is what they did. They lived under a powerful lord as his serfs and underlings. And they worshipped terrible gods that might punish them for nothing. The worst thing was to change; that would almost certainly end in disaster. These people were People of the Subordinate Self.

But starting about 3,000 years ago, in and around cities and towns, people started to change. They started to live and work in a market economy, because that is what people do in towns. And they started to believe in a new kind of God, that ruled over an understandable world and dispensed not divine power but divine justice. They started to believe that to thrive they had to change and adjust to the changes in the market. They started to believe that they were responsible for their lives, and were responsible for doing something about it. These people were People of the Responsible Self.

Pretty obviously, these People of the Responsible Self are not going to wake up one day and say "we was robbed." Because they never would have gone to sleep. Of course they would not have done a lot of things. They would not have voted for politicians to loot other people to give them money for pensions. They would not have sat by while child education went from bad to worse. They would have voted out corrupt politicians on principle, never mind whether they were "ours" or "theirs."

But now our globalist leaders are shocked, shocked that the people they anesthetized a generation ago and more have woken up with a fearful headache. How could their rational secular governance have gone wrong? The science!

Yep. It's not just the white working class that has been living in the dream world. Hello ruling class! This is the future that you created with your top-down politics. You sowed the wind and now you are reaping the whirlwind. Get used to it.

And as for the science, it has been telling us for over a half century that top-down bureaucratic rule cannot work because there just isn't enough bandwidth in bureaucratic rule to fix problems in real time. Only the market can do that, and even then it typically does it with a nasty recession. But at least the recession is better than what they are experiencing in Bolivarian socialist Venezuela.

Jonathan Haidt's Nationalists and Globalists: Who are the Real Authoritarians?

In the turmoil of Brexit and Trump political intellectuals are trying to understand what is happening. So Jonathan Haidt writes in The American Interest that we must think of the warring sides as Nationalists and Globalists. He writes that

I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists.

I will propose that the opposite is true, that the problem is the authoritarian tendencies of the globalists.

Here is how Jonathan Haidt sets this up. He refers to the World Values Survey that tells a story about how people socialize to the modern capitalist global economy.

[F]irst, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.

Yes. Well. That's how liberals look at it, because it validates their welfare-state-run-by-liberals world view. And about that business of individual rights and protections "for everyone." Can you spell "authoritarian?"

And it is not true that people move away from traditional values as they industrialize. In fact they move from pagan and world-of-spirits religions to the Axial Age religions, most notably Christianity. Then, after they have mastered life in the city, then they start to shed their religion and the cultural traditions of Axial Age religion.

My world view says

First, as nations industrialize people start to move away from "subordinate values" where the name of the game is finding a powerful patron, from a pantheon of power-driven gods or a warrior lord or a labor union boss or a precinct captain, to "responsible values" championed by the Axial Age religions, where people are open to adapting themselves to the needs of other people and taking on the responsibility of serving others in order to serve themselves. Second, as they grow wealthier and move into the service sector they start to move from "responsible values"  to "creative values". In particular, many of these people of the creative self find in themselves a vocation to order around the people of the responsible self in order to force them to fund government programs to "emancipate" and "liberate" the remnant population of people of the subordinate self. Which they usually fail to do.

And when the plans of the creative elite fail to produce the requisite result the elite blames racists and xenophobes and redoubles its efforts to extend rights and protections through free-stuff government programs. And the elite encourages race-based divisive politics in the remnant population of the subordinate self and gender-based divisive politics in the creative elite in order to retain their grip on political power.

If the world view proposed by Jonathan Haidt above has relevance it would recognize that an evolved elite cannot really expect the middle ground of people that have come up from survival values to be enthusiastic about transitioning into "self-expression" and "emancipative values," and these folks probably should not be poked in the ribs about their backwardness and bigotry and racism and sexism and homophobia. The elite would realize that these people and their children would come to those values in due course and that it would be unjust and wrong to marginalize them for values that, for people in their stage of cultural evolution, are perfectly valid and appropriate.

But there is another thing to consider, one that the global elite really hasn't thought about. It is the old question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes -- who will guard the guardians? It is all very well to have an elite of creative caring experts busily extending emancipation and protection to everyone, according to their lights. But who will correct them when they make a mistake? And everyone makes mistakes. And who will punish them when they are corrupt? If you give people the power to emancipate and protect the world, but power corrupts, as the saying goes, and if you give people the opportunity to feather their beds with public funds they will usually do it. Look at the folks presently building and operating wind farms. Oh yes, wind and solar are going to save the planet. But meanwhile a well-connected elite is making a bundle in grants and subsidies and the average person is paying a bundle in increased energy costs. Is there anyone that can not see a problem here?

The way that the global elite has set things up there is really no way for the people to vote them out of office and change the rulers. There is no legitimate channel by which ordinary people can register their cultural dissent from the global elite, and no way to correct the global elite for malfeasance in office.

You can see that in the current flap over Brexit and Trump. The fact is that the Crash of 2008 was a failure of the global elite, however you look at it. If you take the official liberal line that it was greedy bankers wot done it, then the global elite is to blame. If you take the conservative line that is was liberal housing policy designed to emancipate minorities and women into homeownership by lowering lending standards, then the global elite is to blame. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Where is the banker that went to jail, if you are a liberal? Or, where is the political activist that went to jail, if you are a conservative?

Here's an issue. How come the global experts haven't been able to restart the economy at full speed in the eight years since the Crash? Is this "bad luck" or does it tell us that the global elite really don't have a clue?

Here's another issue. Supposing the World Values Survey approach is right and people move from "traditional values" and "survival values" to "secular rational" and "self-expression" values. Isn't it rather pushing it to import tens of millions of people into Europe and the US who are right at the starting gate in the values progression? Won'r this influx of people swing the cultural balance significantly towards the less advanced cultural context and "turn back the clock?" Do not the secular rationalists realize that this might be a bit of a problem, from their point of view?

Or, to put it less charitably, do not US liberals see a problem in importing a ton of Muslims with their traditional approach to women and gays? Let alone dealing with disaffected Black Lives Matter people that are regressing to a naked racist program (survival values anyone) and wanting to curb the police that ineffectively police the black areas of America's cities? Liberals tend to think of conservative Christians and right-wing extremists as the only thing between us and the millennium. But conservative Christians and right-wing extremists really only want to be left alone and not dragged into liberal plans to march in double-time along the arc of history towards justice, especially since this march to the future looks profoundly like straight-up injustice to them.

And that brings us to the final point. According to the liberal World Values Survey view, the educated cosmopolitans "embrace diversity." That is a lie. The educated elite demands that the rest of us embrace their particular cultural values and abandon our more traditional values forthwith. That is why my liberal friend muttered about "hate" and "xenophobia" last week. If you don't get on the team with gay marriage right now you are a hater. If you don't get on board with large-scale migration then you are a xenophobe. This doesn't sound like an embrace of diversity to me. It sounds like an authoritarian program of cultural imperialism, and you will be made to care.

But no. It is the nationalists who are the authoritarians. Sez the global elite.

Here is reality. Globalization is great for the global elite; they and their children get to traipse around the world from gig to gig, and for moral release, they get to help the marginalized and the underprivileged with other peoples' money. Globalization has brought billions of the world's poor out of indigence. Globalization is also good for people that have been able to migrate to western countries and pick up the work that ordinary western people don't want to do. But globalization is not so great for the people in the middle, because they are being forced to raise their game from being subordinate factory workers and office workers with lifetime tenure to become creative workers that must reinvent themselves all the time.

For some reason, the global elite has been blind to the effect of all this on the people in the middle who had become used to "good jobs at good wages" and all the thumbs on the political scales that helped them in the past. It stands to reason that the global elite should pay for their mistake, for they have been thoughtless authoritarians that did not consider the possibility of error. They did not consider that there might be glitches in their program, as would be natural in any human endeavor. And they certainly did not consider that their whole program might be folly.

As Dr. No told James Bond. You are a fool Mr. Bond, and a fool must pay for his folly.

My Solution to the Race Problem

So here we are, fifty years after the Civil Rights Era, and African-Americans are mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more.

How is this possible? Kindly liberals have spent the last half century battling the racists and thinking about nothing except America’s race problem and its legacy of slavery and racism, How is it possible, after all the wonderful programs to empower people, to fight ordinary racism, institutional racism, hidden racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and every other kind of pejorative that liberals bestow upon the “other” with remarkable facility?

Is the answer that we must redouble our efforts, that racism is like a weed, that has still not died off after 50 years of the application of liberal weedkiller, and that now we need to increase the strength of the weedkiller?

Or is it possible that the problem is not the racist weed, but the very approach the liberals have used, the idea that the application of political force can change minds and lives. Could it be possible that apart from the most egregious situations of exploitations, oppressions, and marginalizations, political power and government force are not the answer, that apart from the removal of the most egregious obstacles to ordinary human flourishing, political power and government programs cannot raise people up from slavery to freedom?

Now I have just about finished a book that is a translation of a number of lectures on Hegel given in the 1930s by Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Some time ago I read that this books was once the bible of mid-20th-century lefties like Sartre and the rest of the Frenchie lefties like Lacan and Althusser. So I knew I had to read it. I don’t know what Hegel really wrote -- maybe I’ll read the Phenomenology straight from the horse's mouth and get a different angle on it and report on it. But I do think that I understand what Kojève has to say about Hegel, in particular about Hegel’s famous Master and Slave narrative.

In the original German, Master is “Herr” which is a word with multiple meanings, including lord. So when we talk about “Mastery” we are talking about the German “Herrschaft” which means lordship and very likely more. The German for Slave is “Knecht.” Again, this must have multiple meanings and connotations for a German. My own relation to the word is in Wagner’s Die Walküre, where Wotan dispatches Hunding, brutish husband of our darling Sieglinde, with a word: “Knecht.” You can tell from Wotan's tone that Knecht is not a good place to be.

Now Hegel’s Master and Slave narrative begins with two warriors confronting each other in the Fight to the Death, because that is the only way to compel Recognition from the other. Slavery begins with one of the fighters deciding not to fight to the death and accept Slavery instead of death.

Horrors, you may say, and you may be right. But all is not lost for the Slave. For now the Slave must work, and in his Work he learns how to transform the world, while the Master just reposes on his masterful power and learns nothing. And in transforming the world the Slave slowly attains to Freedom.

Now, the original Fight to the Death is a struggle not just for Mastery but for Recognition, and the Slave loses the initial struggle for Recognition when he loses the Fight to the Death. But as he works for the Master and learns how to transform the world he starts to earn Recognition from other Slaves and eventually from the Master. It is his Work that achieves this Freedom and Recognition.

Now look what has happened with African Americans. It is not a pretty story.

Let us go back to the Civil War. The African American slaves got their freedom, but not really through their Work or even their Fight to the Death, although Frederick Douglass gave a pretty good impression of it when he was sent to a slavebreaker and fought him to a standstill. The slaves got freedom handed to them on a plate by the North; they were, in my concept, merely the little darlings, the political favorites of the ruling class, or perhaps merely an excuse to beat up on the South. After the war the Republicans sent a bunch of carpetbaggers and scalawags down to the South to keep things honest, and the freedmen were grateful and voted for the Republicans, but didn't get to really experience Freedom. And ten years after the Civil War the Republicans abandoned the freedmen to the tender mercies of the South and Jim Crow. In the century that followed African Americans struggled and worked in near Slavery, and then rallied the non-violent politics of Reverend Martin Luther King.

The Civil Rights Acts were a stunning victory for African Americans, but was it a Recognition for a century of Work or merely a political victory that depended on a political alliance between white liberals and African Americans?

After the Civil Rights era, liberals told African Americans that the need for Work was over. All they had to do was plight their troth with the Democratic Party and all their worries would be over, as liberals would fight in their corner for peace and justice. Bad move. Because the struggle of the previous century, since African Americans were freed from Slavery, went up in smoke. You don’t get Recognition and respect from having a powerful patron, or Master. You get it because of your Work, your track record in transforming nature and understanding the world. At least that's what Hegel, interpreted by Kojève, thought.

So today we have African Americans in a fine rage, ready like the warriors of old to achieve Recognition through a Fight to the Death with the police, and Iḿ not surprised. All the promises and the hopes of 50 years seem to have added up to bupkis. Even the election of America's First Black President hasn't changed things. In the new black activism there is, alas, no thought of Work, of achieving Freedom by Work and understanding and transforming the world. And indeed out in the world we normals sneer at African Americans for their dependent status as virtual Slaves on the liberal plantation. What can there be of respect or Recognition for people that have relapsed back into Slavery after all the struggles following on their enslavement in the tribal wars of West Africa, their deportation beyond the seas to the Americas, their centuries of slave labor? At this point, what difference does it make? Oops. At this point, what was the point of all the struggle and the heartache if it ends as dependency as the convenient little darlings of the liberals providing the votes for them to acquire political power and boss everyone else around?

And how long will African Americans stay the little darlings of the liberals? Until liberals don't need African American votes any more, or liberals fall from power to the Trumpification of America? Or the money runs out and Social Security and Medicare get first dibs on the reduced revenues?

The solution to the rage and the anger of black people is obvious. All the politics of the last 50 years has done nothing for African Americans, except keep them cunningly separated from the rest of America. So African Americans must start over. They must escape from the liberal plantation and devote themselves to Work and accept that the last 50 years were wasted in dependence as little darlings of the liberals, and that Day One is right now, as the First Black President leaves office having conclusively proved that empowerment through politics and quotas and diversity and political dealmaking is no Freedom at all, but a renewed descent into Slavery.

And the time is running out. Already the South and East Asian immigrants of the last half century are thriving so well that they are demolishing the Jews when it comes to getting into non-diversity universities like Caltech. And meanwhile elite universities have to enforce an Asian quota to keep the Asians down. It is not African Americans that you see doing the dirty construction jobs around Seattle, but Hispanics. I don’t know how the Black Lives Matter movement is going down with Hispanics and Asians, but I suspect that they are coming alive to the fact that the evil policemen whose lives are ruined by supposedly wiping out African Americans are frequently Hispanics and Asians. It complicates liberal race politics when policemen are no longer the stereotypical Southern racists with cattle prods. He who lives by the race card will die by the race card.

But I don't believe that the anger of Black Lives Matter is the whole story of non-white America. That's because when I go to Florida to accompany Lady Marjorie on her trips to care for her mother I interact with the hardworking aides. These aides, non-whites all, are mostly Bible-believing Christians. The black security guard down at the front desk is reading a religious tract on his smartphone. These people are doing Work, and they are all on the road to the middle class, if we give them half a chance. If only we can stop the community organizers from angrying them up and turning them into political cannon fodder.

Of course, Hegel's Master and Slave narrative basically validates the bourgeois narrative, that the way to the future is by serving other people not dominating other people. But the Educated Youth of 1848 rejected the bourgeois narrative of service and Work and returned to the age-old narrative of the Fight to the Death and domination.

All I can say is that the Fight to the Death narrative has failed every time that the Educated Youth of 1848 has tried it. Usually, it has failed for the very people they were trying to help.