An Age of Atheists That Ignores Secular Religion

I have been over to Third Place Books a couple of times to look at Peter Watson's Age of Atheists. According to the publisher blurb on Amazon:

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzche declared that “God is dead” and ever since tens of thousands of brilliant, courageous, thoughtful individuals have devoted their creative energies to devising ways to live without God with self-reliance, invention, hope, wit, and enthusiasm. Now, for the first time, their story is revealed...

[It] sweeps up William James and the pragmatists; Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and Albert Camus; the poets of World War One and the novelists of World War Two; scientists, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking; and the rise of the new Atheists—Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

So I decided not to buy it.

Because the issue of the Age of Atheists, to me, is the question of the secular religious movements that have swept the globe like nothing else in history.

I mean, seriously. Sixty years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto Russia determined to try it, and 100 years after the Manifesto China tried it out, and India kinda, sorta tried it out.

When has there ever been an intellectual, or religious, or political movement that conquered the two most populous nations on the earth within a century?

Look, I am sure it is great fun to check out Picasso, Freud, Joyce, and even the second tier chaps like Dawkins and Harris and their courageousness. As if. As if they weren't boosted and celebrated in all the right places.

I've just finished a harrowing book about the youth of a believer, a believer in the secular religion of socialism. Child of the Revolution is the memoir of Wolfgang Leonhard, the son of a communist activist who fled Nazi Germany in 1935. This kid got the full indoctrination treatment at special schools, and he became enough of a true believer in the Marxist-Leninist theoretical system to become a member of the "Ulbricht Group" that followed the Red Army into eastern Germany and set up the communist East German state.

Yes, but what about freedom? To Leonhard, the west had no idea.

For us freedom meant insight into historical necessity. We were free because we were the only ones who possessed this insight on the basis of scientific theory[.]

The point is that for Leonhard and for many like him, ten years of the study of Marxism-Leninism provided him with a complete answer to life, the universe, and everything. He was appalled by the brutality of Stalinism but continued to believe in Marx's idea of every people finding its own independent way to socialism. But socialism was truth and truth socialism.

I have written that one aspect of this new secular religion is that today every well-born youth, male or female, wants to get into "activism," to do something for social justice. And that such activism gives meaning to their lives. You know, just like religion.

I want to read more about this, and understand it more. Because one thing I believe, that British social scientist Steve Bruce is wrong when he says in God is Dead that secularization means that "shared ideas are no longer as persuasive as they once were" and "a long-term decline in the power, popularity and prestige of religious beliefs and rituals."

Hum. If you confine "religious beliefs" to belief in God, I agree. But that misses the point completely. The question is, if God dies, then what takes His place. The answer is pretty obvious: transcendental religion gets replaced by secular religion that replaces a god-based religion with a secular religion that satisfies all the needs of what Nicholas Wade calls The Faith Instinct without actually enthroning a god in heaven.

And I want to know more about how this works.

Not Just Obama, But Liberals Created Trump

There is a lot of good clean commentary on the rise of Trump, keyed into Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" speech. Here's a good piece by Laura Hollis on the ten things that Obama did to create him, with advice on what not to do, including:

Stop pitting Americans against each other; focus on the positive; don't apologize for America.

And so on.

But let us cut to the chase. The reason the white working and middle class have gone for Trump is that his slogan, Make America Great Again, provides them with a place to belong.

Marx wrote, famously, that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

No it isn't. That is complete rubbish. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of tribal warfare.

The class struggle arose in the context of the rise of the cities and the market economy, where the lower class migrated to the cities and their jobs, and there achieved enough strategic concentration that they could combine, for almost the first time in history since the fall of Rome, to agitate for their interests. The genius of Marx was to articulate this truth, and to teach the sons of the bourgeoisie that they could mobilize the working class for their own educated-class power project.

The rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with the rise of the nation state. I'm not sure that the bourgeoisie planned it that way. More likely the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the interests of the absolute monarchs because bourgeois merchant credit could be used to finance nation-state armies, and nation-state armies and navies could protect international bourgeois commerce.

I think it is fair to say that in the bourgeois era, the political question was who best deserved to represent the nation: the old landed aristocracy or the new merchant bourgeoisie.

In the last century the liberals, progressives, left, whatever, has tried to marginalize nation-state politics and replace it with class politics and now identity politics.

So the point of Hillary Clinton and her "basket of deplorables" is to marginalize the old nation-state politics and elevate the identity politics that the Democratic Party uses to gain power. Instead of doing a politics that heightens the idea of nation, and all people living in the United States as Americans united as one people, Hillary Clinton subscribes to a politics of identity, a race politics that heightens race identity, a gender politics that heightens the identity of women and LGBTs. The other side of this politics was to marginalize and anathematize nationalism as equivalent to Nazism or white identity politics.

And you have to give liberals credit on this. They have done an amazing job on a lot of Americans to get them to move their allegiance from America to their race or their gender.

But there is a problem with this. The United States is a nation state. The President of the United States is not just the administrative head of government, he is also the chief priest, if you like, of the national cult. There are, you will notice, several holidays -- holy days for the celebration of the national cult -- at which the president is expected to preside. He is expected to utter words that dignify the occasion and stir the national soul with the three principles of the national cult: that America is the best country in the world, and the American people are the best people in the world, and the American way of life is the best way of life in the world.

This is something that President Obama has not done. This is something that Hillary Clinton has not done. And so they have left a yuge opportunity for some fool candidate to run a campaign to Make America Great Again, and celebrate America as one nation and the American people as one people.

The point is that for the ordinary white middle class they have nowhere else to go. The ruling class has stopped celebrating the working class, and whites are not allowed to have a white identity politics. But what the white middle class can do is rally to the banner of America. And so they have.

This is the point to blame the GOP establishment that has failed to rally Americans to the flag in the last 20 years. But I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. The liberals and the media have made life very difficult for them, because, as Hillary Clinton has said, you are with us or against us. If you are with us you are all in favor of our identity politics. If not, you are a deplorable, and a racist, sexist homophobe besides.

It is not easy to figure out how to counter people that will stigmatize you as a racist for all time if you beg to differ with the liberal agenda. But in the end, someone would figure it out and that someone has done so. His name is Donald Trump.

Liberals like to think that they are beyond and above nationalism and the flummeries of celebrating America. To replace it they have chosen identity politics, which they will manage at home, balanced by a cosmopolitan globalism abroad. But that leaves the average American with nothing to believe in.

Maybe that is why a large majority of the American people have come to believe that America is on the "wrong track." Per David French it goes beyond a sour economy. He quotes Kellyanne Conway:

We noticed a number of years ago that the responses to the wrong track question are not purely economic . . . In fact, for many Americans, they are not connected to politics or policy at all.

Kellyanne Conway is now with the Trump campaign. Ahem.

When Al Gore lost the 2000 election I noticed that Gore, and following him, liberals, did not concede the election and say, OK, now we are all Americans. Instead they put bumper stickers on their cars to "ReDefeat Bush." But Bush sat down with Ted Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind. Then in 2008 President-elect Obama did not reach out to Republicans and develop a program that both parties could support. He said "we won" and developed a program in Congress without a single Republican vote.

In the old days the candidates would say after the election that we are now all Americans and call for unity.

I am not saying that this sort of thing is bad for Republicans. I am not even saying that it is bad for America. Although it is. I am saying it is bad for Democrats.

It is bad for Democrats not to embrace the national cult. It is bad for Democrats not to say, after the election: we are now all Americans together. It is bad for Democrats to stigmatize your opponents as deplorables and racists.

This is something that progressivism, going back to Marx, does not appreciate. That's because Marxism and progressivism are really secular religions; they are using politics to implement their heaven on earth. There is a reason why the Founders proposed no establishment of religion, and Thomas Jefferson talked about a wall of separation between church and state. It is much harder to compromise questions of religious faith than to compromise questions of law and distribution of loot.

And the whole point of politics is to avoid civil war and compromise differences instead of fighting to the death.

Democrats and liberals are blind to this, probably because they do not understand that their progressive faith is in fact a religion.

My dearest hope is that African Americans and Hispanic Americans will rally to Trump's banner, and decide to think of themselves as Americans who happen to be black or Latino. Because then they will start to enjoy life in America instead of being shock troops for the liberal agenda.

One fine day, perhaps, we humans will rally worldwide, as merely humans, and not as tribes, or classes, or nations, or identities. But until that day the best thing going is the nation state and its supporting cult of the nation, the national people and the national homeland and the national government. The alternative that liberals propose, of warring sub-national identities presided over by a global elite of the educated and the evolved, is a royal road to conflict and the killing fields.

Yes, Inflation is Hidden in Govt.Health Care and Education. But Who Will Bell the Cat?

If you want to know where inflation went, given that it must be somewhere, what with zero-interest-rate-policy and all, the answer is simple, writes my man Kevin Williamson.

Inflation went to live in the sectors run by government. Housing price inflation. Education price inflation. Health care price inflation. And usually, each of these things screw the young and poor.

Obviously the Fannie/Freddie housing scam favors people that already have houses. Fannie and Freddie just make it easier for young people to waste their youthful energy on propping up the house prices of their elders with liar loans. In the ensuing crash, women and minorities hardest hit.

In lower education we have lifetime teachers failing to teach poor and minority students and in higher education we have "free money available to consumers in the form of loans with no underwriting standards and concessionary interest rates." So universities jack up their prices and hire lots more administrators. And the kids pay the bill.

In health care "Pouring an extra $1 trillion into health-care subsidies will not make medical care less expensive; it probably will end up making it more expensive." The big idea with Obamacare, you'll remember, was to force the kids to get health insurance once they got off their parents' policy at age 26.

But that doesn't stop a commenter from complaining about the system.

4. Except for hypothetical idealistic beliefs in the perfection of a market system, realize there is NO BENEFIT to having for-profit healthcare unless you are a doctor, pharmaceutical company or insurer.

As long as there are people like that there will be politicians offering "free" health care.

But enough of that. Wot I want to know is, how do we crash the system so that the government inflation is purged out of housing, education, and health care?

I think we could do it on housing, because nobody really understands Fannie/Freddie, and the government has inadvertently throttled the housing game with Dodd-Frank bureaucracy. Kids and minorities and women hardest hit.

On education, the lower education answer is school choice and homeschooling. And really, how dumb can the teachers be for putting all their political eggs in the basket of one party?

The real question is health care. How do we lance the boil? How do we start a parallel system, that is like Uber to the taxicab cartel, that quietly and inconspicuously starts undermining the whole horrible corrupt government-irradiated health care system?

Honestly I don't know. But that is why we have entrepreneurs and innovators and startups and venture capitalists. Get to work you guys, and no lunch at Il Fornaio until you launch the affordable health care app.

Hey, I know. How about health care on the home-delivery model used by the food-delivery apps. You hit the Health app on your smartphone, and wait for a health care provider to show up at your door. She could have a van all tricked out with the regular stuff you need to provide GP services.

Hmm. That would mean elbowing in on the Fire Department's aid car racket.

What Will Happen to the Deplorables?

Let us suppose that Hillary Clinton and the elite Democrats actually believe that half of the Trump supporters are the "deplorables," the racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes, of liberal imagination.

It seems fairly obvious, given that Hillary Clinton used the same ideas in an interview with an Israeli media outlet, that anathematizing of the deplorables is part of basic campaign strategy, unveiled in Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech.

The next question is: what shall "we" do about them, the deplorables? Should they be sent to re-education camps? Fired from their jobs? Their children taken into care? Shall they be deported?

It's all very well to anathematize people in a political campaign, but what happens after? Well we know, because we have the liberal record of the last 50 years.

On race, after the success of the civil rights acts which basically resolved America's race problem, liberals made it worse by wrecking the black family and calling racists everyone that disagreed with them.

On sex, after the success of getting votes for women and making women into a majority of colleges students and graduates, liberals have conducted a war on men and boys to remove the last remaining vestiges of sexism.

On homophobia, after whisking gay marriage through the Supreme Court, liberal vigilantes are seeking out unredeemed Christians and destroying them with the power of the state.

On xenophobia, liberals ignore the law on immigration to advocate for unlimited immigration and the exemption of illegal immigrants from the law of the land.

On Islamophobia, liberals advocate for a religion that opposes everything they stand for.

And yet the deplorables are the other guys.

Look, I understand what is going on here. Liberals are just blindly executing on the Frankfurt School tactics that recommended the left to abandon the class politics of Marx that advocated for the working class, and switch to an identity politics that advocated for marginalized people everywhere, women, blacks, and gays. They are not realizing that they have basically won the culture war. Of course not, they are culture warriors and culture war is what they do.

You might say that the left followed Eisenhower's advice, that if you don't know how to solve a problem, make it bigger.

But my problem with this is that it is still a tactic, because when you look at the left's program together, its anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc., it runs up against a little problem. It is a totally incoherent mess.

It is fine to advocate for African Americans, and make up for centuries of exploitation, but in the end African Americans must make their peace with America and join the middle class as ordinary responsible citizens that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

It is fine to advocate for women's education and advance in the labor force, but in the end women are the generators of the next generation; most women must have babies and raise them. It has long been a conceit of high-status women that they should be above mere child production. This is odd, because the production and the socialization of children is the only job in the world that really matters. Everything else is just frosting on the cake and providing the food and shelter to make the next generation possible.

It is fine to advocate for sexual minorities and allow people to veer off the mainstream of heterosexual mating and reproduction. But the vast majority of people must and will mate with the opposite sex and have children. It is a monstrous lie to pretend that gays and gay marriage is anything other than the extremes of the bell curve and anathematize people that live on the mainstream and believe in what they are doing.

And so on. It's fine to be nice to immigrants like me, but we cannot invite the whole world to America. It's fine to be nice to Islam, but it would be good to get some reciprocity from the imams.

So what is the problem? Why are the liberals trying to unmake America? What is their point?

I have attempted to explain this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. I understand liberals as People of the Creative Self. Liberals are communicants in the cult of creativity; they believe that the best life is the creative life, creating a work of art that blows the doors off the past, creating a new society liberated from the superstitions and injustices of the past They also think you are nothing unless you are creative.

It is that last place where liberals have gone off the rails. It is true that creative innovation is a wonderful thing, but it is not given to many of us. Creative people, genuinely creative people, are very few and far between. For the rest of us, we have to make the best fist of our modest talents and energies and participate as conforming members of human society. We cannot hope to be comets flaming across the sky; our only hope is to be steady points of light in the firmament, shining a little light on a dark and fallen world. Our contribution is to help things as they are, rather than to imagine and implement things that never were. Still, we can make a creative contribution to society by creating and raising children. And that is not nothing.

In my view, our liberal friends will eventually collide with the above reality. They will find that the deplorables will rise up against them and reassert the right to be ordinary and modest and conservative people that deserve the support of society even if they are horribly backward and unredeemable.

The funny thing is that the whole movement of the left arose precisely to give voice to a group that seemed to be left behind by the blinding changes of history. The left arose to advocate for the working class that did not have the market skills and the cultural skills to thrive in the early industrial age. The working class deserved special protections, the left argued, and should not be shamed and marginalized as backward and stupid.

The fact is that the bourgeoisie, the rising class of the time, listened to the left and acceded to the legislative program of the left. Whatever their faults, they were people of good will, and were willing to compromise with people struggling to cope with the new industrial world.

The difference today is that the left is now not willing to compromise with the people left behind by the creative revolution. The left thinks they are deplorables, not to be endured.

"And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." So said the Fool at the end of Twelfth Night.

That is what I would be worrying about, if I were a liberal and a Democrat and a supporter of Hillary Clinton.

Politics is About Power. That is All

There's a long thumbsucker in National Review today about Hillary Clinton and what she stands for. William Voegeli tries to penetrate through the vapid rhetoric about change and meaning. Here is what Clinton said back in the 1990s:

Let us be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.

Rather obviously, this is not about government, but a totalitarian mash-up of politics and religion. And it is about the eternal quest of politicians to imagine that their profession is something higher and nobler than just using force to keep the natives quiet.

The truth is that anyone in politics is sniffing out an issue, any issue, that can be used as a means to power or a means to continue power.

And what hope is there for conservatives in this? We think that the whole point is to reduce political power because political power is normally a means to death and destruction. There seems to be no escape from understanding the world in terms of Power and Possession.

The conservative conundrum is the same as the pacifist's. What chance have you, in a world of war and conflict, to stand aside and merely pontificate that war never solves anything? Meanwhile, somebody's army drives right over you.

While you and I are working and attending to our families, a thousand liberal activists are dreaming up a new way to deploy government power. How can we hope to stop this unless we are opposing liberal activism with conservative activism?

Down at the city zoo it is not enough for them to take care of the animals. They must be saving the Red Wolf from extinction! They must be forming themselves into the number 350 to show that they are concerned about CO2 concentration and are working to save the planet!

Over the weekend conservatives have been chuckling about Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment. But the bigger question to me is the blind folly of Clinton. Here the liberals are: they have fought racism to its knees, taught women to shatter glass ceilings, cunningly pushed gay marriage through the Supreme Court, and they are worried about the mass of deplorables out there, the racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. Don't liberals realize that they have won? That they have enacted just about every government program imaginable?

Really. Liberals have implemented a huge agenda over the last century, riding roughshod over the American people, and they seem to think that it's time to amp up the rhetoric to make sure that none of the gap-toothed primitives dare to move a finger.

Look, I get it. the point is political power. And political power always needs an emergency. It really doesn´t matter what the issue is. You just need to rally your supporters and remind them of the existential perils out there that are waiting to engulf them unless they follow you once more into the breach.

Which is to say that when the rule of the progressives ends it won't be with a whimper but with a bang. Because liberals won't give up their political and cultural hegemony without a fight.

And that means that whatever comes next, whatever its agenda, it will have to obtain political power to vanquish the old order of politics, politics, politics.

And so the cycle will begin again. Politics. Power. Force. Domination. Injustice.

Arabs, Power, and Charles Koch

An acquaintance told me a story about his college days in the 1970s in the UK. He opted to live in a student dorm for foreign students. The idea was that one Brit student should live with the foreign students to interpret British culture to the foreigners.

But he found that mostly he was trying to explain the foreign students to each other. The foreigners were just as confused about other foreigners as they were about the Brits!

But one group of students was different. The Arabs. The only thing that Arab students understood was power, power and possession.

That was back in the 1970s so I am sure that things are different now.

OK. Let us segue to a video featuring Charles Koch, he of the Koch Brothers, and Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs," who makes a living championing the "skill trades." Pull quote from Koch:

People who lead happy, fulfilling lives are ones that develop their abilities and figure out how they can best contribute … and they’re rewarded for it and respected for it.

Of course this is the basic contract of the exchange economy. Find something to do that other people will pay for, and do it. It is based on true altruism, thinking about the other and their needs before thinking about your own and setting forth your non-negotiable demands.

The other philosophy, the power philosophy, is based on the idea that you compel your welfare out of the sweat and the work of others. By the dawn raid on the neighboring village. By defeating the neighboring country and imposing an bone-chilling indemnity on it.

The great lesson of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is that the way to human prosperity is the way of surrendering to the market, and doing what the market -- which is nothing but the aggregate expressed needs of other people -- demands with its price system.

Oh and one other thing. Innovation. The great thing about the last 200 years is that numberless nobodies had an idea for a product or a service that nobody else had thought of, and they went out and did it. When this idea was a true innovation, in technology or in organization, the innovator very often built a huge business making huge profits, while the business lowered prices of oil by 90 percent or steel by 67 percent.

The big thing about this age of innovation was that the powers that be did not, or could not, prevent it. That's why Charles Koch in the video talks about "permissionless innovation." You shouldn't need to ask someone's permission to try something new. You shouldn't have to get credentialed to do hair-braiding. Or even inventing a new pharmaceutical drug.

The big thing about all this is the retreat from power. The basic assumption is that humans can work together and do things for each other without the overweening threat of force. This, according to my acquaintance, is something that the Arabs in the 1970s did not understand.

And, of course, it is something that our liberal friends do not understand. They think that the economy must be dominated by a central administrative authority of credentialed experts, and that these powerful experts will lay down the parameters of human cooperation in the economy.

I wonder what it would take for our liberal friends to abandon their faith in power and surrender to the altruistic wisdom of the market.

Yes, But How Bad Is It?

Yesterday the jauntily optimistic Rush Limbaugh had a field day with a piece in The Claremont Review of Books on the 2016 election as "The Flight 93 Election." The piece argued that, if conservatives are right about our issues, then conservatism -- its gradualism, its respect for the rules -- must be wrong. It's time to say "let's roll," and accept that we have to crash the airplane, even if we die in the process.

We are getting to the point, writes the anonymous author, where the left doesn't think it needs us any more.

Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

 Actually, I think it is better to compare this time with the Soviet Great Purge of 1936-38, and I just happen to be reading a book about it, Child of the Revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard. Leonard was a red-diaper baby whose lefty mother took him to the Soviet Union in the mid 1930s when Germany became too hot for her after Hitler came to power.

To illustrate my point, let us compare two texts. The first is from Portuguese-born SF writer Sarah Hoyt. She is writing about an American instructor at her Portuguese university giving a lecture in American literature.

Until in the middle of a lecture he said something like “When any writer sets out to do x, he–” And stopped, growing pale, and started apologizing profusely.

Apparently looking on that sea of female faces, he thought he was about to be crucified. When we got it through his head that we were not offended, he said “Oh, wow. American women would be. I’d have to say he or she.”

OK. Now let's switch to Leonhard in a class in Moscow in 1937. The teacher was reading "a passage out of a book by the anti-fascist author Georg Born." But a whisper ran around the class and then a kid stood up.

"Comrade teacher, my father told me that Georg Born was arrested a few days ago as an enemy of the people."

Our teacher went pale as ashes.

Now, my theory is that a revolution transitions into its Reign of Terror phase when it is clear that the millennium is not here, and ain't gonna be any time soon. That is when the party leader needs to start dealing with the "enemies of the people" before they start up a head of rebellion.

And really, why be surprised that liberals are amping up the terror? Things aren't going too well for them right now. Their high-handed assumption that the economy would bounce back with a quick kick in the stimulus has proved wrong, and so the introduction of Obamacare created double-trouble by weighing down the already deflating economy with the lead weight of regulation.

And the point is that, like lefties everywhere since the French Revolution, their religion is politics; they think that the way to solve the problems of the world is through politics. That means, to deploy my catch-phrases, they always think that a bit of government force is needed, a bit of political divisiveness is needed, and a few more of the bad people need to be crushed by government injustice.

The point is that, as we have seen with every lefty regime since the French Revolution, this is not going to end well. As in revolutionary France, as in fascist Germany, as in the Soviet Union, as in Castro's Cuba, as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, as in prostrate Venezuela.

Let us give Wolfgang Leonard another word. He is talking about the four types of members in the Komsomol, the Soviet youth movement, in the 1930s.

There were first the enthusiasts--young people bursting with activity and initiative[.]

[There were also members, like Leonhard, who] joined the organization from political conviction and found themselves principally attracted by questions of the organisation's programme and political discussions.

[There were "careerists,"] principally among the sons and daughters of officials of the Party, state, and economic organisations.

[Then there were young people who] had joined it because that was what everybody else did... because it was the thing to do. I found this type mostly among the girls in the Komsomol[.]

Nothing changes, does it.

Personally, I think that the Obama PC push has been a strategic error for the liberals. The future outlined in The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira was that the new majority of women, minorities, the educated, and young people would rule for the next thirty years.

And so the new majority might have done if Obama & Co. hadn't pressed the pedal to the metal, and inspired the Republican base to rebel against leaders that weren't leading, and provoked the dying-of-despair white working class to get angry and follow the populist Trump.

Now the whole conservative movement is in ruins and nobody knows what comes next. Or, if you use Mencius Moldbug's formulation, the good old days of the Cathedral and the Inner Party ruling the nation and the folks in the Outer Party touching their forelocks are over.

Now of course, it's possible that the bishops of the Cathedral may turn into Jacobin monsters, mobilize their Black Lives Matter shock troops and wipe white middle-class Americans off the map.

Or not.

What is certain is that the politics of the last 30 years, since 1988 and the end of the Reagan era, is over. Something else is going to take its place.

And one thing more. However crazed the crazies may be, there is a moderating factor. It is that for a modern ruling class to rule successfully it must make capitalism work. The reason that 2016 is the end of an era is that the economy has not been doing well, and the people are restless.

Get the economy right, and all things are possible.

But that is a very hard lesson for religious enthusiasts, particularly our modern secular religious enthusiasts, to learn. Because, after all, when the question is saving souls, or saving the planet, who cares about stupid things like profit and loss and economic growth?