J.D. Vance's American Victims, Black and White

Guess what. The US has long had two underclasses, one white and one black. The white underclass has always been the Scots-Irish that settled in Appalachia, the southern uplands. The black underclass are the west Africans brought to the Americas in the slave ships.

Here's the difference, according to former hillbilly J.D. Vance.

[T]he two groups took different approaches to politics. The white poor, unencumbered by legal discrimination, focused on a politics of class... Black people, meanwhile, understandably voted the color of their skin, putting their trust in whoever promised to tear down the most legal barriers. 

Really. Now let's analyze this using my reductive Three Peoples theory.

These two groups didn't take "different approaches to politics" because, as Eeyore said, they was "pushed." As People of the Subordinate Self they do not act upon the political stage, they are the chorus, the rank-and-file in somebody else's power project. And both groups have had a pretty hard time of it, because their leaders have not been too careful about the interests of their followers.

I dare say the white upland farmers of the South were attracted to a kind of class politics. That's because the South, before and after the Civil War, was run by a planter/merchant elite that ran the place in their own interest as planters and merchants. But there has been plenty of race politics too, whenever the ruling class needed to rile up the bubbas.

I dare say that African Americans have tended towards a racial solidarity politics. In the Jim Crow era, it was natural to vote for the Republican Party that had freed the Negro slaves, even if it had abandoned them to Jim Crow in 1876. In the quotas and diversity era is is natural for blacks to vote for the party that offers them free stuff by virtue of their race.

But here's the point. You really don't want to become the rank-and-file in someone's political army, whether you are white or black. That's because armies are not run for the benefit of the rank-and-file soldiers; they are run for the benefit of the generals and their political masters. That's why I have developed my idea of "little darlings." If you are the little darlings of the ruling class, watch out. One fine day (that's un bel di in Italian) you will find yourself abandoned by the side of the road, sick and wounded, just like a soldier in a rifles-and-bayonets army.

The root cause of black and white underclass malaise is simple. Blacks and whites enlisted in some ruler's political army, and believed the recruiting sergeant and his promise of loot and plunder. It all started out well. Until the ruling class decided it had other fish to fry. The ruling class cast the white working class adrift about half a century ago, just as the labor-union arc of history started to bend towards oblivion. And now blacks are wondering angrily about what happened to all the Hope and Change they were promised and that they believed in eight years ago just as the affordable housing bubble collapsed on them.

We are starting to see the harvest of the liberal sowing of race and class politics, as angry and disappointed hyphenated Americans that have been left behind turn on each other in the flatline Obama economy.

But the reality of life is still the reality of life. Social animals help those left behind up to a point. But when the going gets tough, the tough get going. If you are not adapting to the changing economy then you are going to get left behind. Society will help you for a season -- especially if you are useful to someone's power project. But society will not help you forever.

The Scots-Irish and the West Africans both came from war-torn borderlands where force ruled. The Scots-Irish left their borderlands because of poverty, and the West Africans were the victims of inter-tribal warfare, conquest slaves sold to the European slavers. Both groups have had a problem adapting to the life of the city, where cooperation, not fierceness, is the order of the day.

Unfortunately both groups have suffered as political opportunists have exploited their fierceness and recruited them as political soldiers. So they have not adapted well to the cooperative culture of the city.

And time is running out.

Frankfurt School Analysis, Part Two

These days the Frankfurt School is conservative Enemy #1, on account of “cultural Marxism” and political correctness. But I have been reading a book about Horkheimer and Adorno written in the 1970s, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, by Zoltán Tar.

In Part One, I looked at Tar’s view of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality. Both books were lefty responses to the rise of fascism. Dialectic rather importantly reminds lefties that, foes of domination and oppression as they are, the very fount of their faith issues from the Enlightenment and its program to dominate Nature.

The Authoritarian Personality is something of a joke to me. It is a bunch of lefties trying to understand fascism as a natural outgrowth of lower middle-class culture and the natural end-point of bourgeois capitalism. These lefties are blind to the obvious notion that, when the economic interventionism of the democratic left fails, as it did in the 1930s because its ideas are bad science, the people naturally turn to a strong leader to get them out of a jam.

Zoltán Tar writes off the Frankfurt School as a failure, in part because of the haut-bourgeois Jewish origins of Horkheimer and Adorno, whose Jewishness keeps interfering with their leftiness. This meant that they fell away from the true faith of Marxism:

Critical Theory dissociated itself from the basic tenet of Marxism: the unity of theory, empirical research, and revolutionary praxis… The crucial issue here is the abandonment of the Marxist method for metaphysical speculation.

Amusingly, Tar then admits that the Marxian prophecy had failed:

The Marxist prognosis about the polarization of classes in a capitalist society (bourgeois versus proletariat), with the Verelendung [immiseration] of the latter… did not take place.

Hey! I’d never known what the original German word for the “immiseration” of the working class. Elend is the German for “misery,” according to Google. Thus Ver-elend-ung. So immiseration is a direct translation!

Hey kids! Maybe the failed Marxist prognostication is telling us something! Maybe it is telling us that the portentous Marxian combination of theory, research and praxis was, as the Brits say, a load of bollocks, because its basic prediction, the immiseration of the working class, never took place. In fact the opposite is true.

And by the way, what does "revolutionary praxis" mean when it's at home? The only thing I know is that revolution combined with praxis means riots, and killing, and secret police and revolutionary terror.

As I have mentioned, what Tar could not know in the 1970s, as he complained that American academics knew next to nothing about the Frankfurters and Critical Theory, was that Critical Theory would turn out to be the left’s star turn. Imagine!

In the hands of Horkheimer and Adorno’s students, the Marxian “polarization of classes” was expanded into a polarization of races and genders. Why not? Politics is division and if you can’t burn the place down with class division and the instinctive animosity between rich and poor why not go back further into mankind’s instinctive past and gin up a race war? And Herbert Marcuse with his convoluted idea of repressive tolerance, or tolerant intolerance, or intolerant tolerance, gave the left permission -- as if it needed it -- to persecute anyone it chose in the name of tolerance and diversity. Today every lefty knows how to play the game of political correctness and humiliate anyone that dares to disagree with the lefty agenda du jour. Including getting them fired. They get it in their mother's milk.

Hey lefties, wasn’t firing people for their beliefs a big issue for you in the Fifties when a few Commies got fired from their government teacher jobs and a few Hollywood lefties got blacklisted, but not actually driven out of the industry?

But those Commies were on the right side of history.

The biggest jobs program since World War 2!

Hillary Clinton is promising to enact "the biggest infrastructure and jobs program that we've had since World War II," according to Yahoo writer Rick Newman.

Oh great. According to Newman:

Clinton's plan would amount to $300 billion in transportation projects spread over five years... That $300 billion would come from new taxes on the wealthy...

Oh great. Do these people never learn? That taking money from rich individuals and spending it on crony capitalist "infrastructure" deals is bound to be a net loss economically? Because the things that rich people would have done with their money would have done more for economic growth and "jobs" than the crony capitalist/union deals that government calls "infrastructure."

Of course, they don't want to learn. The ruling class does not have much interest in reducing the size of government and releasing resources to the private sector. Where's the power in that? Where's the pay for play?

Also, the Clintons have done us a favor with the corrupt Clinton Foundation links to the State Department under Hillary Clinton. It has shown us how expensive it is to keep a presidential operation in being, and how politicians will stop at nothing to fund their political operations, and how the world is full of people eager to pay for play with politicians.

So of course when the politicians get into office they need "infrastructure" programs to pay off their supporters.

But the sad thing is that the journalists of the nation -- Rick Newman excepted -- allow this to go on without protest. Hey, liberals: I thought protest was your thing. There are all kinds of issues, mostly about evil Republicans, for which the journalistic response is immediate recourse to protest or the fainting couch. But the journalists of the nation seem to be able to digest economic and Democratic Party sponsored rubbish three times a day without so much as a hiccup.

Let us get this straight. All government spending, from the Pentagon to the latest wizard wheeze for an offshore wind farm, is a weight on the economy. Period. All economic regulation, from labor laws to building codes, is a weight on the economy. Period. Some of these things may be good ideas, and not just special interest giveaways, but they are good in spite of the damage they do to the economy. We may say that we want to spend money on Social Security to help seniors, but those monies sent to the government are monies that might have been saved for private investment. We may say that we want a living wage of $15 per hour, but that means that unskilled minority youth gets screwed.

But you won't see liberal journalists writing things like that. And you have to wonder why. I think that most of the time liberal journalists are strategically incurious about economic knowledge; they instinctively know that economic knowledge is bad for their career. Also, I suspect that there is a "you'll never work in this town again" aspect to journalism. You go along to get along. Or else. I suspect there has been quite a lot of that during the Obama administration.

The fact is that the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has been a surprise all the way. It is my belief that the Great Enrichment, seen as a succession of surprise innovations, has succeeded because most of the time the special interests and their bribed apologists in government and media did not see it coming. And when they finally realized what was happening and mobilized against the innovation -- e.g. cab cartels against Uber -- it was too late. Except in Austin, Texas. But Austin, Texas, is a liberal town.

All along, during the last 200 years, one crank idea after another has come along to discredit capitalism and the Great Enrichment. And intelligent, educated people have believed each one and boosted it. Marxism, Fabianism, Institutionalism, the National Industrial Recovery Act, cheap money, economic regulation, Keynesianism. The educated ruling class has lusted after anything that could discredit capitalism. Yet one after another, these gods have failed. What is wrong with these people?

Yet here we have Hillary Clinton running on increasing taxes and rolling out yet another stimulus program.

OK, I'm not dumb or somep'n. I know what it's all about. It's because the average voter doesn't give a flying fig for economics and the market system. All the average voter cares about is the prospect of some loot from the government. Although I suspect that the average voters doesn't really understand how many middlemen get their cut when politics is involved.

It was the conceit of the present educated ruling class, decades ago, that an educated ruling class, relying on the advice of experts, would use the best science and knowledge to govern wisely and well and neutralize the brutish instincts of the hoi polloi and the corrupt spoils system.

Instead, it has governed by appealing to ignorance and greed. Just like every other ruling class in history. And today's spoils system, featuring the Clinton Crime Syndicate, makes the spoils systems of Tammany Hall & Co to be Boy Scout stuff.

So when will the kid show up to tell us that the emperor has no clothes?

Frankfurters for Breakfast

These days the Frankfurt School is conservative Enemy #1, on account of “Cultural Marxism” and political correctness. But I have been reading a book about Horkheimer and Adorno written in the 1970s, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, by Zoltán Tar.

Those were the days before the fall of the Soviet Union and before the ideas of the Frankfurt School had been enthusiastically taken up by every lefty activist in the culture war on everything to do with ordinary middle-class culture.

Horkheimer was the long-time head of the Frankfurt School -- the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany -- starting in 1931, and Adorno was his colleague and collaborator.

Dr. Tar views the head of the Frankfurt School as a straying Marxist, a guilty haut bourgeois intellectual with independent means infected by the pessimism of another bourgeois intellectual with independent means, Arthur Schopenhauer.

But Tar's bigger problem with Horkheimer is the central argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that domination is the problem in human society, whether domination of man by man or domination of nature by man. You can see why. The whole point of the leftist program is that political power and domination are needed to counter the domination of the market and the capitalists. But is it? There is no doubt that the market bosses everyone of us around. But is that worse than politicians and activists bossing us around? Or kings and noble lords? Our lefty friends just assume that they are on the side of the angels, and that their program will usher in an age of justice, emancipation from domination and liberation from work: in a word, equality.

Of course this last is rubbish. It is true that the idea of social animals is a reduction of force, but it is clear that no society has been without hierarchy, or ever will be. And no humans are ever likely to be free of the need to work, or rely on the work of others. But that is the essence of the left's program.

Politics, the left says, can reverse the domination of capitalists and employers over their subordinate workers. Oh yeah? You mean that the domination by people that do not have explicit government power is likely to be more dominatory than the domination by people armed with the power of the state? If you think that, I gotta bridge to sell you.

Politics, the left says, can lift the burden of work from the brow of labor. Oh yeah? Then who is going to produce the product? The tooth fairy?

At least Max Horkheimer raised the question about the universal problem of domination of man by man and of nature by man. I would say that he failed to answer his question, but at least he raised it. The domination of nature has become, of course, the great issue of environmentalism and climate change.

Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment during World War II, a response of lefty intellectuals to the horror of fascism. After the war they collaborated on The Authoritarian Personality, a book that blamed the lower middle class for fascism. Certain people, you see, are prone to succumb to the authoritarian politics of fascism, making fascism the natural end point of capitalist democracy. Dr. Tar takes this seriously. Adorno and his collaborators set out to show that certain people, those inclined to conventionalism, authoritarian submission and aggression, superstition and stereotyping, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projection, and concerns about sex: these kind of people are susceptible to fascism.

Yes, it was easy to write about fascism then, before the feminist fascists, the Black Lives Matters fascists, and the LGBT fascists, with their appetite for authoritarian aggression and concerns about sex, had appeared on the American scene.

What these lefties do not recognize is that fascism, of the eevil right-wing kind, rears its ugly head whenever center-left governance screws up the economy and people start to get desperate. That's what happened in the 1920s in Germany, and so the lower middle class turned to a strong leader that promised to fix things. That is what has happened in post crash America and so the lower middle class is looking for a leader to Make America Great Again. This has nothing to do with authoritarian personalities, but a natural and instinctive human response to things going wrong. When you are stuck in a jam, you look for a leader to get you out of the jam.

Since the 1970s the left has discovered that it really likes the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as an all-purpose tool to beat up the bourgeoisie. The new game is the idea that white males are the dominant hegemons of the world and that the left is called on to oppose their domination and liberate and emancipate all the groups subordinated to white males during the last 500 years of white patriarchal hegemony.

Again, nobody is allowed to ask whether the domination of leftist politicians and activists is any less of a domination than the domination of patriarchal white males. The left is on the side of the angels and you are a racist, sexist homophobe if you disagree.

I'd say that the verdict is already in. The white males of the patriarchy, for all their faults, were and are not that interested in power. The bourgoisie of the 19th century was quite happy to give the workers the vote and bring them inside the tent. The capitalists of the 19th century, feared by the haut bourgeois intellectuals of the Class of 1848, turned out to be amiable philanthropists. First they built corporations to cut the price of oil by 90 percent and steel by 66 percent. Then they retired and went off and founded medical schools and built libraries. The Class of 1848 and today's lefty politicians and activists? They care about nothing but power, and they have spread death and disaster wherever they have seized power.

That is because they have completely missed the point. The best society is not the society that has found the magic bullet to end oppression now. The best society is the society that has found a new way to reduce the need for political power and its inevitable domination and oppression.

Next we will look at the Theory of Society sociology that Adorno outlined in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Descent into Feudalism

We moderns are all for freedom, right? And our lefty friends are all for liberation from oppression and marginalization, right?

So how come we are taxed on every hour of work? How come we stand in lines at the airport, like peasants? How come the government sequesters our savings for us in government "trust funds" and in special government-regulated IRA and 401k accounts?

The answer is that the final centuries of the last millennium were an outlier. The old feudal system of warrior lords lording it over the peasants had broken down. The ordinary people were "on their own" and they were busting out of the cages that had confined them for millennia as the subordinate creatures of their noble lords.

And the new feudalism was still in its conceptual stages. Feudal Concept One was the Marxist idea that a revolutionary cadre would fight for and protect the workers against the capitalists. Feudal Concept Two was the Progressive/Fabian idea that wise, educated experts would manage the world on behalf of the workers.

How's that new feudal system doing, boys and girls?

Now in my reductive Three Peoples theory I assume that the world is always composed of three kinds of people. One of them are the People of the Subordinate Self. In my idea, people graduate from the world of the subordinate self to become People of the Responsible Self. And I assume that people are eager to graduate from subordinate slavery to responsible freedom.

But what if I am wrong? What if many People of the Subordinate Self are perfectly happy living as subordinate drones of the ruling class? What if they naturally live as grumpy peasants, forever complaining about "them" but not actually doing anything about it?

If you look around you, it seems to me to be inescapable that many people are perfectly content to live as subordinate peasants, or as we say now, victims.

It is pretty obvious that the whole program of the Democratic Party is a program of feudalism. Democratic voters look to their leaders to provide them with benefits without which they would be helpless.

But the rise of Donald Trump shows that the same applies now to the Republican Party. Mr. Trump is running on a platform to Make America Great Again, and he will create the jobs and punish the Chinese in order to do this. He is appealing, we are told, to the white working class that has spent the last half century dying of despair after the Democrats abandoned them when the Dems decided to be the noble lords of women and minorities rather than the noble lords of the working class.

Here is what I have to say about this.

I don't like it. The whole point of the modern Great Enrichment is that we come out of our cages, we break out of the lord's manor, and we take responsibility for our lives. We do not rely of a powerful patron to provide us with the necessaries of life; we go out into the world and find something useful to do, something that other people are willing to pay money for.

On my view, if we return to feudalism we will return to stasis. There will be no more Great Enrichment, but only obedience.

And the problem with feudalism is what I call the little darlings problem. If you are the little darling of the ruling class, whether peasant or worker or woman or minority, you are facing a big risk. What if the ruling class finds that you are no longer useful in their power project?

It happened to the peasants during the agricultural revolution and the growth of the nation state. The absolute monarchs disarmed the nobles and the nobles decided their didn't need no stinkin' peasants eating their heads off on the odd chance that the nobles would need them in their baronial armies. The liberal ruling class decided that they didn't need no stinkin' white working class once they decided that leading women and minorities was much more fun.

As that black state senator from Louisiana said a while back. The politicians don't care about you; they only care about your vote.

How Bad is Western Decline?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Joel Kotkin writes of two dystopian novels, one about the Islamification of France and one about the Latinization of the US.

But the problem in both novels is not the Muslims and the Hispanics, but the failure of the French and the US to uphold and live their values and their culture.

Controversialist Vox Day, quoting my man Alexander Hamilton, blames the Irish and the Jews for wrecking America. Hey, why not blame the Germans? They invented everything, good and bad, since David Hume.

It is true that all the immigrants have rather mucked up the good old ideas of 18th century political science, including the separation of powers and the limitation of democracy. But the immigrants also represent an infusion of energy. The fact is that the WASPs that dominated the US northeast have ebbed noticeably since the Irish showed up in 1850 and the Jews turned up in 1900. The residual legatees of the WASP inheritance don't seem that eager to promote and spread WASPiness any more.

So, while it is true to say that the Irish and the Jews didn't really understand the virtues of the American Founding, we could also say that the descendants of the Founders don't really seem to be up to the mark set by the Founders.

The truth is that we can't keep the past, either by faithfully repeating the holy words of the Founders, or by preserving the old ways, or by keeping out newcomers. Or even by relentlessly indoctrinating the newcomers with the right thoughts and habits.

Here's my take. Given the non-stop follies and mistakes of humans, particularly humans with power, it is astonishing that the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has been as successful as it turned out.

Don't forget: nobody really understood what was happening when the modern prosperity started. And nobody really understands what is going on today. There are fools hawking nonsense all over the place, from George Soros pushing his pro-globalist anti-nationalism, from the PC left pushing their poisonous identity politics, from the educated class pushing its climate change hysteria. Then you have the Muslims tumbling out of their disaster of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, here in the US, we are not just being influenced by the Irish immigrants of 1850 and the Jewish immigrants of 1900. Or the Hispanic immigrants of 1985. What about the East Asians that are already becoming the richest group in America and taking over 40 percent of the student body at CalTech? What about the South Asians also filling up the tech slots?

I don't think this "diverse" group is going to surrender the world to Muslim fanatics. I suggest that most of these groups take the western cultural, economic, and political heritage very seriously. There's my evergreen quote from David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing. He quotes a Chinese Christian, talking about the pre-eminence of the West.

At first, we thought it was because you have more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the last 20 years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Imagine what it takes for a son of Confucius to say that.

In all the chaos of politics and terror and economic dislocation, it is well to remember that many people from outside the northwest European culture are very interested in understanding just what it was that made the West into the world-dominating cultural, economic, and political hegemon. They don't want to tear it down. They want to understand it, they want to inhabit it, and they want to make it work for them.

Is it 1787 Yet?

If you were living in France in 1787 you probably thought that things were peachy keen. Talleyrand evokes this with his comment:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life.

And so on.

But, as Fred Reed writes, all was not well. The natives were restless. Maybe it was exactly because life was so sweet, what with "Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science," that people started getting all riled up. Anyway, the government was running out of money and had to go to the States General to ask for more. And that got the revolution train into high gear.

And, according to Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the Revolution the problem with the ancién régime was that it had become a dry-as-dust administrative system to which everyone was subordinate without participation and without responsibility.

Hello? Anyone see a similarity to the Obama régime?

But the truth is that nobody knows nothing. Just like Hollywood. The current regime might last 1000 years. Or it might end tomorrow. There are always malcontents, always people suffering under injustice, because government is injustice, and you never know when the pot will boil over.

All I can do is listen to my liberal friends and think about to what extent they are living in fantasy land. Obviously they believe a pack of lies. But then so do conservatives like me. And so do the Trumpkins, and so do the Black Lives Matters.

What I do believe is the one thing that we all shy away from. Eventually we and our kind are on the losing end of history. Once upon a time imperial Rome was a big city of about one million, according to La Wik. Then it contracted to a nothing. What happened to all those people? Better not to ask.

Native pre-Columbian Americans were almost completely wiped out by European diseases, principally smallpox. Their culture would have completely disappeared and been forgotten but for the faux-compassion of Indian Reservations and liberal anti-colonial politics.

What about the white working class in the US, allegedly dying of despair? What about the children of liberal academics that seem, from my personal observation, to be remarkably childless? What about the bloodletting in the Middle East? Is that a people rising to dominance, or the last flailing of a defeated culture? Fred Reed:

In the United States of today, clouds gather as the royalty toast each other with expensive wines. In numbers that a half century ago would have seemed impossible, the American young live with their parents, being unable to find jobs to support themselves. Waitressing in a good bar pays better in tips than a woman with a college degree can otherwise earn, assuming that she can earn anything at all. Employers having learned to hire them as individual contractors, they move into their thirties with no hope of a pension for their old age.

Well, is this the worst of times or the best of times? Will Uber and robots make everyone of average or less intelligence superfluous? Who knows? The story of the last 200 years has seen constant innovations that have surplussed numerous worthy occupations. The left calls it "de-skilling." And yet the world goes on.

All I can say is that if you look at the pictures of the floods in Louisiana, you see people helping each other, without regard to class, race, gender, or any other means by which politicians and activists divide people into us and them.

Good for them. Maybe there is hope after all.