The Prehistory of the Three Peoples

In my "Dance of the Three Peoples" I have developed an idea of humans as Three Peoples: People of the Creative Self; People of the Responsible Self; and People of the Subordinate Self. It is, of course, absurdly reductive, but really not as reductive as Hegel's narrative of the Master and the Slave or Marx's narrative of the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. And it provides a helpful way of understanding our crazy modern world.

But the question arises: how did the Three Peoples get started?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

In the beginning there was only One People. Each community lived as a simple tribe and the men were ranked in a simple hierarchy from the Big Man down to the lowliest cripple, and everyone knew his place. His place was to defend the borders from the raids of neighboring Peoples. Of course all the real day-to-day work -- of gardening and food-gathering and preparation, of making clothes, and the care of children -- was done by the women.

But then the world began to change.

The change, of course, was the invention of agriculture, and the One People became Two Peoples. Now, instead of every man taking his place in the border defense force, most men specialized in growing food, principally grain. It turned out that the heavy work of plowing could not be done by women without risk of miscarriage, so men had to do it. That was OK because the work of border patrol was now chiefly done by marcher lords and their followers in the borderlands. Thus humans divided into a class system, a ruling class of warriors and a ruled class of farmers. We are talking about the men, of course. Women still did nearly all the work of food preservation, preparation, textile weaving and sewing, and the bearing and raising of children, all except for a few high-status women that had servants to do all that for them.

Let us call these two classes Masters and Slaves, after Hegel. So that you can get a flavor of Hegel's intent, you should know that, in Hegel's German, Master is "Herr" which translates on Google to anything from ruler to gentleman to master to Mr. And Slave is "Knecht" which translates on Google as servant and farmhand.

I like to use The Iliad to demonstrate this Master/Slave culture. Only, in The Iliad, the Masters are the Olympian gods and the Slaves are the Greek heroes who are completely at the mercy of the whims and power plays of the gods on Mr. Olympus.

Now, almost from the beginning there was a worm working in the depths of this simple and glorious Two Peoples culture of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft that would eventually destroy it. This worm was and is the middle-class culture of the city. Once you get a city you no longer just have farmers producing "for use." You have merchants and traders exchanging goods and services for money, and you have the birth of writing -- which began as a means of keeping records of goods stored in temple warehouses and the like. You can see that this new culture starts to break down the vertical hierarchy of lordship and servantship because the market economy requires horizontal relationships between traders. And another thing. The horizontal relationships between lords are always potentially heading towards conflict, whereas the relationships between traders must feature trust and reciprocity, if for no other reason than the fact that trust lowers transaction costs.

Pretty soon these merchants and traders invented new gods, all across the world in the Axial Age. These gods were no longer the jealous and power-driven gods of Mt. Olympus but gods that set up a set of rules for humans to live by, and humans were judged at the end of life or in the next on their faithfulness in observing the rules and the commandments of their gods. Instead of just being the playthings of the gods, humans now had to be responsible and trustworthy in their lives just as they had to be responsible and trustworthy in their trading lives.

For thousands of years these new People of the Responsible Self got tucked into the royal train of the Herren. That's because the rulers and the traders needed each other. The rulers needed the taxes and tolls they could get from the merchants. And they also needed the credit they could borrow from the merchants for their wars. On the other side the merchants and traders needed the police protection they got from the rulers, to keep pirates and plunderers away from their ships and their caravans. And in due course they appreciated a legal system that could use state power to enforce contracts.

By the early modern period this condominium had become so mutually beneficial that the kings could disarm their feudal lords and fund their armies out of taxes on trade. They could deepen the credit system with a central bank that doubled as buyer of government debt and as lender of last resort, with access to the entire wealth of the ruler's domain in the case of periodic credit crises. The Dutch used this system to throw off the yoke of Spain, and the Brits used it to conquer the world, and to deliver a blow to the French from which they have still not recovered.

But then the world changed.

Let us date the moment of change to the year that the Brit Carew Reynell wrote in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer." And the reason was manufacturing.

By 1848 even a rich kid like Karl Marx could realize that the new industrial world had transformed the world. But this was awful. It would mean that the kings of the new economy, the middle-class capitalists, would rule the world and that would be disastrous because they would exploit the industrial working class of proletarians just as the Masters of the agricultural era had exploited the Slave peasants for thousands of years. The only solution was for a new class of educated, progressive minds that understood the arc of history to stop the capitalists in their tracks with violent revolution. Now instead of a dark world run by the owners of satanic mills grinding the faces of their workers in the mud, a new era of light would be born with enlightened and creative minds administering a world of peace and justice using the best ideas that had been thought and said.

Thus died the old world of Two Peoples, of Herren und Knechte, and thus was born the new world of the Three Peoples: the People of the Creative Self, artists and writers and activists, that wished to guide the world into an age of perpetual peace and end the vile exploitation of the People of the Responsible Self, merchants and businessmen, over the People of the Subordinate Self, victims and oppressed groups everywhere.

To be continued.

What a Nice Little Nazi Movie Taught Me

I was on a flight yesterday and got to watch the Emily Watson vehicle The Book Thief. It's all about a nice little illiterate girl in a small German town in the 1930s who steals a book at the grave site of her dead brother.

But then she is inexplicably delivered by a Nazi social worker to a older couple in town. The stepmother is cold and severe and the husband is a lovable sign-painter, but not much in the get-out-and-get-me-some-money department.

But why did Liesl's real mother give her up? Is she dead? Was she a Communist?

Pretty soon the girl Liesl learns to read, thanks to the lovable sign-painter, and starts happily singing Nazi songs at school in her Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform at school.

Her blond protector at school, Rudy, is crazy about Jesse Owens, to the extent of daubing himself darker with boot polish. That causes a lot of worry and embarrassment.

Everything goes along fine, although sign-painter Hans is a bit slow getting his Nazi flag displayed on the Führer's birthday.

But then the Jew shows up. Max is the son of a guy that saved sign-painter Hans' life in WWI, so Hans has to take him in. That's a problem, not just from the risk of discovery, but from the food point of view. But the foster-mother takes in laundry, and Liesl gets to deliver the finished laundry, including at the fancy house of the Nazi mayor, whose wife takes a shine to her and lets her look at her dead son's books in the mayor's family library.

Everything goes fine until the evil Nazi mayor stops Liesl from going to read in his library and now there is less money from laundry. But Max the Jew in the basement is an intellectual, and he starts teaching Liesl how to express her thoughts.

After a close shave, Max decides to stop living in the basement and risking the lives of the whole family, so he disappears. Still the experience of caring for Max has brought Liesl and her cold stepmother together.

Then comes the war and bombing and everybody gets killed one night except Liesl.

Then the Yanks appear and the war is over and Max shows up at the door of the tailor that took Liesl in after the death of her stepparents. Liesl lives to be 90 and is a famous author. She has children and grandchildren and lots of photos on the side tables.

Do you notice how the movie carefully tends every liberal meme about Nazis and writers and artists (even lowly sign-painters) and Communists? Gee, it's almost as if these days in the West you better mind your Ps and Qs when you write screenplays if you know what is good for you. Just like in the bad old days of Nazi Germany.

Now let us imagine a similar movie set not in Nazi Germany but in the land of the free and the brave.

Tyler grew up in Ohio's Mahoning County, where the jobs left decades ago and the white working class is dying of despair. His father seems to have disappeared when he was a little boy, but his mother worked two and three jobs and Tyler had knack for Math and got into a selective college, though nobody knows how.

But in his first year at college Tyler got accused of rape by a girl majoring in Gender Studies and was expelled from school after a hearing by a Title IX administrator. Still, Tyler got a job at a computer store and continued developing his software and tech skills so that he got hired by a start-up where he was maintaining the computer equipment.

The startup failed, but Tyler's experience there got him a job at a swell Silicon Valley firm and all went well until he went to Japan for a diversity seminar. The experience upset him so much that he wrote a thesis on the folly of mandated diversity, given the science on sexual differences and the whole idea of individual responsibility and the wide range of abilities and talents in humans.

Tyler was fired by a female diversity VP whose main leg up was a legacy admission at Harvard. And now Tyler needed to help support his mom. After years of night school she had become a math teacher at a local community college, but got fired when the dean found out about Tyler.

But it all ended happily ever after when Tyler was hired by Gab, his mother got asked by a bunch of local home-school mothers to tutor their kids, and Tyler married a stunning blonde yoga instructor who fell in love with his manly courage and his love for his mother.

Yeah. Good luck getting this movie green-lighted. Good luck getting it in movie theaters. And good luck with Antifa protesting against "hate."

But really? What is the difference between today and the Nazi 1930s, except that nobody is getting put in concentration camps. Yet.

But they are banning movies. And they are breaking windows. And people are losing their jobs for having the wrong politics.

And our liberal friends will be the last to know.

Is It The Sixties Again

One of my current obsessions is that this "Resistance" from the left is the Sixties all over again, really another Awakening of secular religious enthusiasm on the left. And my hope is that ordinary Americans will hate it just as much as they did in the Sixties.

Today there's a thumb-sucker from Charles R. Kesler at the Claremont Review of Books that fully rehearses the Sixties Left and tries to make sense of the Teens Left.

On Kesler´s telling the Sixties Awakening correlated with the switch at elite colleges from "legacy" admissions of WASP scions to SAT-based admissions of bright youngsters of every background.

So by the early Sixties these young heads full of mush were writing the Port Huron Statement that featured enthusiasms like this

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love, [where freedom meant] finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic. [The object was not] to have one's own way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own.

Now this is very interesting to me because it fits my reductive Three Peoples theory, that there are three kinds of people: the People of the Creative Self (artists and writers); People of the Responsible Self (bourgeois middle class); and People of the Subordinate Self (marginalized victims).

But now I make a new departure in my theory. I now announce that the traditional Great Awakening of religious enthusiasm arises when a large cohort in society goes through the subordinate-to-responsible transition. Thus the Puritan Awakening in 1600ish, the Great Awakening in New England in 1745ish, the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York from 1790 to 1820. These people were all becoming responsible middle-class and needed a religious faith and community to make sense of it all and help them make the transition.

But obviously the same applies to the responsible-to-creative transition. The transition here is from a life in which you try to adapt responsibly to a world laid down by a Divine Artificer to a life you create for yourself. So while the folks in upstate New York were going through the transition from subordinate helplessness to individual responsibility the Romantics were experiencing their uniqueness and developing a culture of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism.

Let us call this responsible-to-creative transition a Creative Awakening.

I reckon that you could call the 1840s one of these Creative Awakenings, with Marx and all, and also the 1920s youth culture after World War I. And also the Sixties with the Port Huron lefties talking about "finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic... [and] one's own."

Of course one of the problems with these Awakenings, whether subordinate-to-responsible or responsible-to-creative, is that its enthusiasts are enthusiasts. They are not content just to experience the epiphany themselves; they want to share it with the whole world. Indeed, the impulse to share very easily becomes an instinct to compel.

When the Great Awakenings of the subordinate-to-responsible transition get a little over-enthusiastic our lefty friends start to rage about "theocracy," where the churches of the enthusiasts start to "legislate morality" on the likes of liberals. When the Creative Awakenings start to get over-enthusiastic we racist sexist homophobes start to talk about totalitarianism. The point is that in each case the enthusiasts are trying to combine the political with the moral/cultural, and you are a heretic or a class enemy if you don't go with the flow.

The wise men of the modern era decided many moons ago that a separation of church and state was a requirement of a modern society, a protection so that one dominant sect would not get exclusive control of the levers of power.

Because all power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.

You can see the problem with the current Creative Awakening, which I think has a uniquely feminine flavor on account of the fact that universities are now dominated by women. It is not just that there will be diversity, but that anyone disagreeing with the diversity mantra gets fired from Google. It is not acceptable for a few extreme white right-wingers to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate generalissimo Robert E. Lee. The protesters must be smashed. No disagreement is allowed because we Resisters are easily triggered and require our safe-spaces free from hate.

The problem for all enthusiasts is that their glorious vision of heaven scares the hell out of everyone else. Oh, your average liberal that reads her New York Times cover-to-cover judges that the BLM and Antifa extremists are overenthusiastic, but at least their hearts are in the right place. But everyone else wonders when the street thugs are going to come for them.

Thus in the Sixties, the liberal media put an avuncular arm around the "kids" while the rest of us curled up in disgust at these privileged youngsters daring to lecture the rest of us on freedom and love. (OK, I was one of the youngsters, but you get the point.)

Today we seem to be getting a repeat performance, with Gilbert T. Sewall writing about a "quasi-religious caste and its diversity catechism now directing the nation's institutions."

Not only in media, academe, advertising, and entertainment but also in corporations, government, and the military, chaplains of diversity enforce the new canon law.

But if you ask a liberal about what amounts to a "secular religion" they will look at you in blind disbelief. The last thing in their minds is that their belief system -- their "values," their "ethics," -- amounts to a religion in everything but name.

Actually nobody regards their view of "life, the universe, and everything" as a religion. They think of it as "the way things are." Other people have religions, and they are wrong to impose their religion on the rest of us.

Will the Teens turn out to be a rerun of the Sixties, with the ordinary normals rebelling against a new Creative Awakening that is turning into a secular Inquisition: "are you now, or have you ever been, a racist?"

Nobody knows. But obviously President Trump with his call to nation and patriotism, is consciously trying to lead America away from the secular religious state of the liberals, and protect it from the crusading Creative Awakening of the progressives.

Yes, But Is China Right to Fund Hi-tech Manufacturing?

What do we do about China? That's the question behind the North Korea problem, and David P. Goldman, "Spengler," has commended Steve Bannon for his strategic understanding of the issue. The Norks aren't the problem; China is the problem and the economic war it is waging.

China is establishing a dominant position in high-tech manufacturing, including a new US$50 billion plan to build a domestic semiconductor industry.

Etc. Well. Is that a problem or not?

I would say it is not. I'd say that semiconductor manufacturing is already a low-margin industry where you have to swim like mad just to stay afloat. Why would China want to put money like that into semiconductors just to play catch-up?

I will tell you why. It is because that is the only way that politicians and their crony-capitalist toadies know how to act. Oh wow! we gotta be big in semiconductors, else we'll be second-class citizens in the world.

Against this attitude is the story of commerce since the industrial revolution. Again and again an innovation has completely altered the terms of trade, and the surviving early adopters made gigantic fortunes, because they embraced the innovations and did the right thing at the right time. But sooner or later the new industry became just another big industry, not making enormous profits, and not changing the world. But, of course, it is precisely at this point, possibly in the wake of an economic downturn, that government steps in, "to save our (already mature) industry!"

The point is that politicians and activists and crony-capitalists are idiots. It is not just generals that are always fighting the last war. It is everybody in the ruling class. Because that is all that they know.

Now I have been reading a biography by Andrew Roberts of Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister at the end of the 19th century. The Brits were facing the rise of Germany: what to do?

Well, Lord Salisbury was pretty good at it, jousting and fencing with the brash German state, as it came to world-historical relevance. Then there were the French, mad as hell after losing the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Then there was Russia that was always making a nuisance of itself knocking at the door of the rotten Ottoman Empire in Istanbul.

But Lord Salisbury's successors obviously were not up to the mark, because 1914.

Of course there was plenty of blame to go around, from the growing protectionism, to the shallow folly of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to the general failure to learn the lessons of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, that warfare with rifled artillery and machine guns was going to be really horrific.

My point is that in the 21st century, national power and greatness is not served by national fisticuffs, nor is it served by backing last year's horse in this year's Kentucky Derby.

America's greatness has been fed by its open society and the fact that many of the commercial, industrial, knowledge, and technical innovations got seeded and grown right here, making enormous fortunes (which are the flip side of enormous benefits to consumers).

If China is to take its place at the forefront of nations it will not do it with political intervention in the markets or backing yesterday's technology. It will come because Chinese inventors and entrepreneurs will invent things that nobody had thought of before. And that will create unimaginable wealth that will spread across the globe, starting in China.

I'd say that in the strategic future, the key issue will be the relation between a billion Chinese, innovating and producing and consuming, and a billion Indians doing the same thing. The US, I'd say, is likely to be a bystander as the two great ancient civilizations of the world truly burst through into the modern era.

In such a strategic environment it seems to me that the sensible policy is a gradual retreat, trying to manage the expansion of China and India to world dominance in a way that leaves us in a good position.

But what we really want to avoid is a repeat of 1914 when a adolescent Germany wanted to flex its muscles and the brilliant minds in Europe couldn't think of a way of containing a rambunctious Germany without sacrificing a generation of young men on Flanders fields.

I mean really. A century ago Germany was bidding to be the leading nation in Europe, and after two world wars and a Cold War, guess what: Germany is the leading nation in Europe. Just what was all that warring and sound and fury about, chaps?

So here we are a century later. China is bidding to be the leading nation in the world. And even the "white supremacist" Jared Taylor says that Asians are superior to Americans.

Let's do this sensibly, and let's not do the Rise of China to the drumbeat of a couple of world wars.

I tell you what I wonder. I wonder if the rise of China will take place mostly with overseas Chinese that have moved away from China because they feared what might happen to their wealth, what with a Communist Party dictatorship and all in China.

And then there are the Indians. The interesting thing about India is that it has been invaded and mucked around with time and again over the past few thousand years, most lately by the Mughals and the Brits. But it doesn't seem to matter to Hindu culture. It still goes on rocking.

Look at the Indian National Movement. It got rid of the Brits and also confined most of the Muslims into East and West Pakistan. It could do that because the Brits had kindly located all the Muslims with its various Censuses. Is that strategic brilliance or what?

Here's a question. What is the real secret of Hindu culture? Hey, maybe we "white supremacists" could learn something from the Hindus!

And let's use the rise of China as a challenge to Americans to up our game, so that we and China and India can all fight like mad to give the best products and services and culture and politics and prosperity to the world without having the whole thing degenerate into a street fight between rival gangs.

BLM Practices Vile Cultural Appropriation

Everybody knows that cultural appropriation is just about the worst sin imaginable. Because.

Yeah, why is that, exactly? I mean, isn't it a compliment if you pick up somebody else's cultural practice? What about Jazz? What started out as black music, and then crossed over to white guys, eventually has become a white-bread thing. You don't see many blacks these days at downtown jazz clubs. Why, there was even a dumbed-down Jazz for whitey, called Swing.

Anyway, now we have this beautiful bit of cultural appropriation by Black Lives Matter.

White people, if you don’t have any descendants, will your property to a black or brown family. 

What's this about "will" and "property," homeboys? Are not the cultural phenomena of "last will and testament" and "alienable private property" white things?  So how come that BLM activists are culturally appropriating these western cultural traditions? What will be left of the Western Canon by the time that BLM activists have done with it? I dare say that back in the day in West Africa the descendants of a deceased man got to inherit the movables, but I dare say that land and all the important things belonged to the tribe and could not be willed, as we do in the west.

Willing and alienation of property are western things, and should not be casually appropriated by leftist activists that don't know nothing about nothing, except the latest vile protest chants from their liberal masters.

Look, the fact is that everything human, except genes, is cultural appropriation. We humans see a cool idea and we copy it.

OK. Steal is more like it.

Of course, I get it. What people are really getting at with the cultural appropriation gig is that, in this global world, our own little corner of paradise is only years, maybe months, away from being submerged in the flood tide of modernity and whirled away into oblivion.

Moreover, the whole point of practical politics is to keep our voters divided from their voters. Thus, cultural markers are a good way of defining the border. If you allow other people to recklessly appropriate our people's cultural markers how soon will it be before the vitally important divisions, upon which political careers and political power depend, are blurred over and people forget what they are so angry about?

I will tell you the  real grounds for the left's cultural appropriation obsession. The whole point of the left, since at least 1848, is to be a nostalgic and reactionary movement against the cultural and economic tsunami of capitalism. Leftism is a neo-feudalism that returns responsible individuals into the serfdom of the agricultural age, doffing their caps to government teachers, government pensions, and government health care  administrators. We often think that the cultural and economic ferment of the modern era is damaging to the bourgeois ethos of individual responsibility. But probably the opposite is true. The modern economy and the modern service culture are probably more damaging to the old agricultural  patron-client culture of lordly power and peasant subordination that we now see continued in the neo-feudal welfare state.

We live in interesting times, and nobody can know how it will all turn out. All across the political scene reckless activists are pursuing agendas based on their fervent idea of the truth. But suppose their rage is all sound and fury signifying nothing? Suppose they are energizing the opposition more than mobilizing their own supporters?

Practical politicians know you need to be careful. They know that you need to be really careful about how you go poking around riling people up. You never know when you might poke a hornet's nest and rile up the opposition rather than your own supporters.

Right now we have all kinds of activist groups, from left and right, issuing ringing declarations and damning their opponents to hell and back again.

On the left, the accusation of cultural appropriation seems to be one of the preferred ways of marginalizing opponents, right there alongside "white supremacist" and "racist." And so that's what the lefty activists do.

But I think the lefties over at BLM should stick with their neo-feudalism, and stop their vile appropriation of western cultural practices.

I mean, once you start appropriating western concepts like "wills" and "private property" where will it  end?

No, Political Power Does Not Effect Beneficial Change

I was looking for a quote to hang today's post on, and here it is, from William Voegeli. He is reviewing The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla:

[Lilla] wants the Democratic Party to abandon identity politics for the sake of its electoral viability. Effecting beneficial changes requires wielding power, he argues, and in democracies, securing power means winning elections.

The current liberal politics of "prayer meetings", "therapy sessions", and "seminars" are not the way to do it. And the problem is that once you open the can of identity politics sooner or later the whites are going to want in.

Thus Mark Lilla, who wants liberalism to return to a golden age before identity politics. No doubt, but the age of liberalism without identity politics was the age of Big Thinkers imagining a glorious future without having to deal with the grubby reality of getting elected by democratic majorities. Then came the birth of working-class identity politics in the mid-19th century, invented by the left. By the end of the 19th century practical politicians like the conservative Lord Salisbury understood that you did not get to the Happy Land of "wielding power" unless you had first bribed the voters right before the election. For someone to imagine that liberals can dispense with identity politics is a fantasy.

But that is not my point. My point is to point out another fantasy, that the whole notion of "effecting beneficial changes" with political power is a chimera.

Oh yes. There are some things you can do with political power. You can write laws to make it difficult for the politically powerful to use their power to fill their pockets with loot. You can write laws to make it easy for ordinary people without connections to get good jobs without hacking through a forest of credentialism and having to pile up a mountain of debt. You can make it illegal for government to discriminate on the basis of race or gender. And you can get serious about the notion that government exists to protect its people from enemies foreign and domestic rather than line the pockets of its supporters.

But beneficial changes? How do you know, pal? What makes you think that your beneficial changes are going to do anything more than put some money in the pockets of your supporters? And what about the people that think your so-called beneficial changes are going to make things worse? Got any settled science on that?

Let's look at the most consequential beneficial change effected in the modern era. It is, as I keep saying, the Great Enrichment that has brought us in 200 years from $1 a day per-capita income to $100 a day and very likely more.

Which politician did that? Which political party did that? Which Big Thinker did that? I am talking about the process of winning elections and then writing laws to effect beneficial change.

The answer is: none of the above. OK, there was a chappie back in 1688 in Britland that said: wow, with all this new manufacturing we could be ten times richer than we are. But I think it is ridiculous to suggest that anyone in Britland then or later actually went into office determined to effect beneficial change to make us ten times richer. Let us take the followers of the classical economists that rolled back the English Poor Laws right after the Great Reform Bill of 1832. They thought they were abolishing a great evil; their opponents ever since have regarded such economism as a monstrous evil.

When Britain repealed the Corn Laws in the 1840s, it was at least partly a street fight between the new cities that wanted "the cheap loaf" and the country gentry and peasantry that wanted a high price for grain. And when child labor was prohibited it was at least partly about adults wanting to remove the competition of low-wage children from the labor pool.

And what  about the glory of New Deal liberalism, with its Social Security and its Medicare? What happens when those beneficial changes run out of other people's money?

In other words, when it comes to politics, beneficial changes take a back seat to simple power plays, because that's all most people understand, and that's what drives most people's votes.

In fact, I would argue, most of the beneficial changes of the last 200 years happened by accident, and if the political players had known what was happening they would have strangled the changes in their cradles. That stands to reason, because the powerful tend to be people benefiting from the current correlation of economic forces. Any change is likely to demote the current ruling class ever so slightly from its current hegemony. And the whole point of a ruling class is to stop that sort of thing cold.

The left belongs to a tradition with a faith in the ability of politics to transform the world. Instead of creating a voluntary community of the like-minded and working on good and evil within that community and reaching out to others to persuade them in the truth of their vision, the left has another vision. Its way of transforming the world is to implement a vision of good and evil is through force, the force of government.

And the way you get to do that these days is that you bribe your favorite identities with identity politics, and then persuade yourself that you are "effecting beneficial changes" as you distribute the loot to your followers.

But where in this philosophy do you get to decide how much is enough? When you you decide that all your effecting beneficial changes have gone a bit too far? Is it when your entitlement boards of trustees report that in 20 years benefits will have to be cut? Or when your National Debt goes over 100 percent of GDP? Or when inflation starts picking up as the government has to print money to pay the benefits? Or does it take a vote of the people to cut their benefits?

One little thing you might like to take into consideration is that, on my superficial investigation of government spending, the only spending that ever gets cut is military spending. It's amazing. After the war, governments do tend to cut military spending. But health care spending? Education spending? Pensions spending?

Good luck on that pal. Nobody thinks that cutting their own richly deserved government benefits amounts to "effecting beneficial changes."

I can't imagine why.

The Folly of Exhuming the Graves of the Past

If you are sitting there wondering what all the fuss about Confederate statues is all about, then I have a simple answer for you.

It is all about virtue-signalling.

Or more exactly, it is all about calling out people that turned out to be on the wrong side of history.

And, of course, it is all about the fact that modern leftism is a secular religion, in which public deeds are judged as personal moral actions.

In other words, in lefty world, your political positions and acts are judged as though they were personal moral positions and acts.

And that, in my view, is utter stupidity, since politics is division and government is force, and therefore nobody involved in politics should cast the first stone.

This came out rather clearly to me in a book by a recovering French lefty, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times. He opens the book with a conversation he had with Nicholas Sarkozy, in the run-up to Sarkozy's successful campaign for the French presidency. Sarkozy was a friend, but Lévy couldn't vote for the center-right politician. Why not? Well, because of the four political events that define Lévy as a political person.

And what are those four events? Thank you for asking.

First, the Vichy regime. Should we "forget Vichy's crimes...?" Of course not.

Second, the Algerian War. That was the last colonial gasp of the West in the 1950s in which France put down an insurrection in its North African colony, and then walked away from the mess it created. Should we stop "beating our breasts" about this criminal brutality? Certainly not.

Third, May 1968, the student rebellion in Paris. Should we judge it a black hole "sucking up everything that was solid" in traditional and Gaullist France? Certainly not: it was a "happy moment: new freedoms, novel power for women to do what they wanted with their bodies... modernity."

Finally, The Dreyfus Affair in the early 20th century. That was about the Jewish army officer that was degraded and imprisoned for espionage. Dreyfus was almost certainly innocent. Was this about "Tradition, Authority, Nation" or a case of the reason of state losing its way?

Do you see what I see? I see a mindless attempt to separate the sheep from the goats. It wants to know: Do you have the right thoughts? Or are you a deplorable?

Just for contrast, here is what I think are the Big Issues for France over the last century.

One, the incompetent failure to manage the rise of Germany. France got into three wars with Germany, in 1870, in 1914, and in 1939 and lost them all. Well, it would have lost them all if it weren't for the good old USA. Now I would say that the big question is: what went wrong that France could be so stupid?

Two, the folly of France's corporatist, managerialist state and economy in which nobody can be fired, and that nobody can be hired, and France's farmers get to loot the rest of the country. It actually works OK for the top 25 percent with good college degrees. But anyone else better get a government job and hang on tight.

Three, the folly of Muslim immigration. The record on immigration in the US over the past century and a half is that, in the early stages, a new immigrant group barricades itself in an ethnic ghetto until its members acquire the skills and cultural knowledge to venture out into the wide world.  It was nip-and-tuck that the US managed to integrate the Irish, the Germans, the Italians into the Anglo-Saxon culture, and I think that World War II did it. But now the best and the brightest encourage immigrant groups in their instinctive separatism.

See, my idea is that the correct policy for the last 150 years would have been: first, encouragement of a moderate nationalism; second, education of the working class and immigrants to understand and accept the market economy and submission to the verdict of the market in prices and wages; and third, a moderation of immigration to make sure that assimilation is the only strategy that pays for immigrants.

And the left has been on the wrong side on all these issues.

Now I do not say that the moderate left is as bad as the leftist monsters -- the Lenins, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros -- that created a river of blood and a harvest of sorrow for at least 100 million humans in the 20th century. But I still think that the butcher's bill for moderate leftism will be horrendous.

But meanwhile we are busy exhuming the graves of the past instead of preparing sensibly for the life of the future.