The Madness of "Redistribution of Power"

Over at the New Republic, they have a solution for HarveyFrankengate. Let me give you the full deal from Sarah Jaffe:

Really making our spaces safe will require much more, though. It will require a real redistribution of power throughout the workplace, the campus, the economy, the world. Until then, the blathering class is right on one point: There is no such thing as a safe space.

See the wave of the magic wand? A "real redistribution of power."

But, honey, the problem is not the present location of power; it is power itself. That is the fundamental difference between left and right. The left believes that the solution to injustice is a redistribution of power. The right believes that the solution to injustice is the limitation of power.

Of course, nothing will change in the areas where young female pulchritude is the coin of the realm, in Hollywood and on TV. I think that Ben Stein's comment is dispositive. He says that "Hollywood is and always has been largely about women trading sex for advancement in their careers." Of course it is, because the coin of the realm for Hollywood is putting beautiful faces and bodies on screen. But, writes Ben, "actresses scare me." No doubt. The scariness of the long-distance beauty is recorded in the archaeological record in the symbol of the scary and all-devouring goddesses like Medusa and Kali.

So redistribution of power in entertainment and media is not going to solve anything, because the desirableness of young female flesh is never going to go away. That is why society has always taken a strong interest in what can be done to and for young women. Yes, it is true that young women are uniquely vulnerable to male power. But then it is also true that the women of powerful men also get to wield extraordinary power as the notorious "power behind the throne." And this power, according to The Sugar Barons about sugar plantation slavery in the West Indies, extended to the slave girls that the sugar barons and their underlings took as concubines. The slaves would look to the master's concubine to intercede in their behalf.

The great narrative of our time is the softening of power in human affairs. The rigid social structures of the agricultural age, with its slavery, its serfdom, its feudalism, are breaking up, and nobody knows why.

Well, we do know why. It's because political power is the power of the clunking fist, that knows only to subordinate and control. That is true whether the power is the power of a supervisor in a bureaucracy,  the feudal lord, or the government's regulator. But when you reduce the power of the clunking fist, all of a sudden a hundred flowers bloom. The way you dilute power is by introducing the market and its prices. Then the question is the product or the service, not the subordination of the subordinate to the boss that has the power to hire and fire, and promote those that truckle to his power.

Just to be sure, we humans conducted a planetary experiment to see what would happen if we throttled political power up to max afterburner thrust. We found that the political afterburner burned everything it touched to a crisp.

I have said, and I keep saying, that we are living in a remarkable era, when the certitudes of the agricultural era are falling away like autumn leaves. In a confused way the left understands this in its catalog of evils: racism, sexism, militarism, xenophobia.

Racism is the slow retreat of tribalism. But fighting racism only makes sense in the city, where people interact through the market, and of course it will take time for racism as thing to lose its hold on our minds. It is slowest in the latest arrivals in the city.

Same thing with militarism. I'm reading lefty Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power and he is conventionally weighing in against the militarism of the European powers in the run-up to World War I. Because that is what a lefty does. But I look at militarism differently. I wonder how quickly we should expect rulers to adapt to the new world. If Germany was militaristic in 1910, maybe that had something to do with the French beating them up for the previous 200 years. Enough, already. We can look back from today and understand that Germany is the leading country in Europe, and was bound to be back in 1910. But all the dull German leaders knew was that Russia and France were great powers that had historically always been a problem for the German Nation. In our time we Americans are trying to moderate our own military operations in the light of the follies of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to the Middle East. Today we see China building itself a military on the dividends of its extraordinary economic growth. But what is going to be the point of its military where national power is more a fact of economic power than military power?

We humans are presently in a long experiment to determine how to order our affairs in this new world after the end of the agricultural age. What is the place of power in this new age?

The truth is that nobody has a clue, and nobody is willing to listen to people that do have a clue. So we will blunder on into the future, as we have always done and Good Little Girls at the New Republic repeat the pablum they were taught in school.

Of Course Google Fired James Damore

Over at Takimag, Christopher DeGroot is complaining about our modern culture of conformity and manipulation. This is today's America: where a guy like James Damore, who determines that the diversity emperor has no clothes, gets canned from Google, and Damore has a girlfriend

who doesn’t share his nonconformist views and who “does not want to be identified or directly quoted,” being “keen to remain in the shadows.”

And, so DeGroot complains:

To be sure, it is now very difficult for people to understand the conformity and manipulation that lie behind America’s constant pseudo-moral show... To be a “good person” in 21st-century America, you must be a base dissembler, very eager and happy to carry out all sorts of meaningless and degrading tasks.

Well, yes. But was it not ever thus? Does not everyone, in every time, need to put on a pseudo-moral show? And are we not always humiliated into the performance of "all sort of meaningless and degrading tasks" by the ruling class of the time?

And are not the fearless thinkers and doers usually anathematized and humiliated? Start with the early pre-Protestant religious leaders, John Wycliffe (declared a heretic) and Jan Hus (executed). Then the textile innovators, attacked by the machine wreckers. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, hated by all good lefties. Hey, how about smart Jewish kid Michael Milken and his junk bonds. He went to jail for his sins. You don't muck around with the government's bond market without bending the knee, pal.

Of course when the enforcers actually start burning heretics, it is really just a sign that the ruling class is feeling a bit threatened, and needs to make an example of someone, pour encourager les autres. So, of course, James Damore had to be flayed and humiliated. You may not challenge the racism and sexism of the ruling class's "diversity and inclusion" racket if you know what is good for you. And of course James Damore's Good Little Girl girlfriend has made an appropriate kowtow to the household gods to keep her job.

Actually that's an important point. Good Little Girls are even less likely to challenge the status quo than Good Little Boys. There is something in every man that knows that It's All Bullshit, even as he behaves like a "good person" and "gets with the program, Jenkins." But my experience is that women are much less likely to think bad thoughts than men. Nothing remarkable here. Men have always been expected to take the bullet. But women need to stay alive and get their children to adulthood.

The thing about our era that makes it special is that, in between all the suffocating conformity, it actually does have a subculture of creativity and disobedience, in addition to the usual mono-culture of conformity and obedience. Of course, the people that imagine themselves the rebels and challengers of the status quo, your lefty friends, are in fact the most conformable Kates around.

As you know, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, we have a whole class of people, the People of the Creative Self, dedicated to the proposition that the only thing in the world is to be a writer or an artist thinking new thoughts. Of course, most of the People of the Creative Self are doing purely derivative stuff completely approved by the ruling class, and not really creative in any real sense. But at least the idea of creativity and breaking the mold is there.

I suspect, however, that the emergence of women into the public sphere in the last century has made it more difficult and more costly to be a rebel. You can see that on the university campus as lefty women combine to attack "campus rape" and "microaggressions." Women expect safety, physical and emotional, and they will weaponize their Culture of Complaint and make life difficult for you if they do not get it.

But hey. If you are a Real Man then you ought to have the cojones to be a rebel. And on this view, James Damore doesn't belong in an established tech company like Google. He oughta be working for a startup. And I dare say that, what with all the publicity and all, there are startups that are interested in hiring him.

In fact, maybe the whole Damore flap is his cunning plan to get his name out there as a rebel and get hired by some cool startup. How else are you going to get your name out there?

Thank Goodness for Steve Bannon

Naturally, when Steve Bannon reviews the Trump campaign, it all revolves around his contribution, starting out in mid August 2016 at 12, 15 points behind and ending with the upset of the century.

But when you listen to Bannon and Pat Caddell talk at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend about what they knew and what they wanted to do, you think: Wow, thank goodness for Steve Bannon and his Gen. Patton attitude.

The basis of the Bannon Doctrine is that the natives are restless.

Pat Caddell talked about how his polling showed this.

But what we found from the beginning was the level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable, and I believe worse than any time that we have ever seen in our country.  

As in:

• "the 70-75 percent of people who absolutely believe the country was in decline"
• "85 percent believe that the rich and powerful have rigged the rules and have the advantage"
• 81 percent think "Political leaders are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right for the American people." 

That is why Candidate Trump could win with his "Make America Great Again." Because it resonated with what people think.

Then Bannon went on to talk about the "nullification project," the attempt that started the day after the 2016 election to nullify Trump's win.

Yeah, this nullification project, which was both from the left and also from, I think, the Republican establishment, started immediately on the morning of the 9th and the 10th. They had to come up with an excuse for why they lost.

In my view, this nullification project, or "Resistance," is the really troubling aspect of today's politics. The whole point of elections is to reframe the natural civil war of all against all into a sham fight of electioneering and then a decision by the spectators as to who won. The key moment is right after the decision, when the losing party accepts with a good grace, says we are all Americans, and says "wait until next year!"

The fact is that in the last two change elections where the Democrats have lost, in 2000 and 2016, the Democrats have not conceded the election. Instead they have encouraged their supporters to believe that the election was stolen, and their supporters have believed it.

In this, as in many things, Democrats are klueless klots, completely misunderstanding the point of electoral politics. It really does not matter who wins the election, for the winner will do stupid things based on the misapprehension that government force can ever do good. What matters is that our disagreements about who gets the loot do not escalate into actual civil war.

Of course, I understand the annoyance of Trump, that he has broken into a nice little protection racket that has been very good to the courtiers of the capital city, just like the Capitol in The Hunger Games.

But really, the educated elite has had a pretty good run for the last 150-200 years, and dynasties typically don't last beyond about 200 years, max. Like all elites our elites have found it easy to believe that what was good for them -- lots of sinecures for the educated elite at the Circumlocution Office -- was also good for the nation. But, of course, as in almost all cases, the ruling-class agenda has not been so great for the great unwashed, and so the deplorables start to believe that the system is rigged against them.

The problem is, of course, that no ruling class ever went quietly. The whole point of power is power, and any outcome that means the end of power is a non-starter for any serious ruling class.

That is why, in China, the interregnum between dynasties is called a Time of Troubles.

So I expect that, sooner or later, the ruling class will come for Steve Bannon, and that the removal of Bannon won't solve anything.

But at least Steve Bannon showed the way.

Of Course Deficits Matter. But...

My man Kevin D. Williamson  has a long thumb-sucker on NRO about that hardy perennial, "Yes, Deficits Still Matter." He writes  that

Deficits matter because, ultimately, debts have to be paid, but also because the reality is that sometimes debts go bad, and the fact and fear of that possibility can lead to chaos.

And then goes off into a long peroration about risks and interest rates on consumer loans.

Actually, Kevin is wrong. At the sovereign government level, debts do not have to be paid.

On my view, the talk about bad debt and risks misses the point.

Now, the basic political situation in the United States is that Democrats are always proposing more spending. That's because Democratic voters are either lower-income people that need free stuff or are professional-class people that want government administrative jobs. Republicans are always proposing tax cuts, because Republican voters in general just don't like paying taxes.

The reverse of this situation is that Democrats are usually pretty careful about raising taxes; they like to say that they only want "to make the rich pay their fair share." Republicans are very careful about cutting spending because they know that hell hath no fury like a beneficiary scorned.

So national politics swirls around the need for Democrats to deliver for their voters by increasing spending, and the need for Republicans to deliver for their voters by reducing taxes.

Everybody knows that government debt is a problem, but not yet. So each side nudges the agenda as far in their direction as they dare. Everybody hopes that the big collapse doesn't happen on their watch.

But surely, sooner or later we are going to have to Do Something about the deficit.

Yes, but we won't do anything until we have a crisis. That's the way of government, and that is why it is foolish to have any government programs. You can never fix things now, because special interests and "the children," not until there is a crisis and the whole world demands that we Do Something.

For instance, take the case of the government policy that forced banks to loan money for home mortgages to borrowers with bad credit. Until there was a crisis and the whole credit system nearly collapsed in 2008, nobody except a few crazies even thought there was a problem. If you didn't believe in granting mortgages to people with bad credit you were a racist!

Yes, but what about Venezuela? Don't we end up like Venezuela if we don't Do Something about the deficit? Probably not. And here is why.

• Venezuela is an oil state, meaning that the government uses oil revenue to hand out free stuff. That's great when oil prices are high. But if the government assumes that the good times will roll forever, then it is going to run out of money when oil prices are low. Then the only alternatives are spending cuts and/or inflation.
• Venezuela's leaders are left-wing nut-cases, which means that they don't have the basic smarts to keep out of trouble.
• The US is the center of the world's economy, at least for now, and that means that everyone is willing to buy US debt, from domestic widows and orphans, to government employee pension funds, to foreign central banks.
• Whereas Venezuela has bled the country dry trying to service its debts, the US can probably just give its creditors a haircut if things get hairy. That means reducing the interest rate on existing bonds, which the US did in the 1930s. And there are a bunch of other possibilities. Of course the US has already lowered short-term interest rates almost to zero, which really hurts mom-and-pop savers. There is nothing like being the world hegemon.

When we do get to the point that we need to Do Something about spending, I expect that the government will do stuff like applying a means test to Social Security and Medicare. It already does, in a way, by partially taxing Social Security benefits, and by adjusting the Medicare premium based on last year's income. The fact is that the government and its bribed apologists have gotten pretty good at finding ways to fleece the sheep without the sheep really knowing what is going on. The whole point of Obamacare was to increase subsidies for Democratic voters by jiggling insurance premiums and avoiding the necessity of paying the subsidies out of the federal budget.

Of course, all this may not be enough. And there is always the possibility that the president of the day will be even more clueless than President Obama.

The basic fact of life is that there is only one government program that really matters. It is the government's program to sell its debt. As long as people are buying the debt, everything is copacetic. But if the day ever comes when the government has trouble selling its debt, then it is Katy bar the door.

But let us look at the bright side, and imagine a future of bright sunlit uplands. Some day we may enact the Chantrill Program for the 21st Century. On this program Social Security and Medicare would be privatized, maybe in some rigid program that forces people to save for their retirement in private accounts: hello Fidelity and Vanguard. Government education would be abolished, and replaced by on-line learning and associations of mothers getting together to teach the kiddies. Education and healthcare for the poor would be funded by rich people out of their charitable foundations and by health delivery organizations -- doctors, nurses, hospitals -- giving free care to deserving people that can't afford health care through no fault of their own. Really, the only expenditures at the federal level would be for defense, and the only debt issued would be for wars.

'Cos it's a funny thing. The one thing that government can do is shut down defense spending after a war. You could look it up.

Was It Really "Prestige" That Made Our Ruling Class Larger Than Life?

Today Richard Fernandez has a lovely piece about the end of "prestige," how the western colonial regimes used it to dazzle the natives -- right up until the Japanese kicked the Brits out of Singapore in 1942. The colonialists decided that the only way to rule their colonies was to appear magnificent and incorruptible, and so they developed ways of removing the undesirables that didn't quite measure up and might smudge the perfect escutcheon of white colonialist prestige. Fernandez proposes that the 1942 moment has arrived for the colonialists of our own day, the ruling class that rules so magnificently over the deplorables of the modern West.

It's a beautiful idea, and makes a lovely article, but I don't agree. The "prestige" of our ruling class was obtained by force and intimidation, as the whole Harveygate episode has proved. Up till now "don't get in a fight with a guy that buys his ink by the barrel" has been good advice. You didn't attack ruling-class notables because they had the power to banish you to Outer Slobbovia. And the ruling class had the power to take care of their own, like Sixties radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, high-class terrorists that never went to jail and today hold prestigious positions in the academic/foundation world. Ayers is the son of a utility executive, and Dohrn a daughter of the upper-middle class.

No, today's ruling class has maintained its prestige not by culling the chaps that didn't put on the right show but by memory-holing anyone that dared to challenge its prestige. That was why the waitress sandwich between Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd never had her day with Gloria Allred. That is why the women that accused Bill Clinton were harassed and demeaned. That is why the GOPe learned their lesson and learned to go along to get along as junior partners in the ruling class. It wasn't prestige that ruled over them; it was power.

Look at the presidency of Barack Obama. It had its share of scandals and mistakes, but at the end of it, President Obama looked back on a presidency remarkably free of scandals, knowing that the Democratic operatives with bylines at the New York Times and the Washington Post would scarcely disagree and say that Obamacare was and is a scandal, that the use of the IRS to harass Tea Party groups was a monstrous injustice, and that the president's Middle East policy was a disaster. Hey, better not disagree, else you're a racist.

My line is that all ruling-class power contains the seeds of its own destruction, because government is force and politics is division and system is domination, and so any ruling class, by its resort to government force to tax the population and reward its supporters, eventually cannot distract the populace from the accumulation of injustice with the brilliance of its regime propaganda.

Put it this way. If you tax 35 cents of every dollar, as we do, if you force everyone into one-size-fits-all programs of pensions, healthcare, and education, and if you regulate everything up the ying-yang, it cannot but be that great sections of the people are unjustly treated. You can persuade them for decades that all this is the most wonderful thing since sliced bread, but eventually more and more people will see through the charade. And then they will get angry.

This is what we are seeing, after all, with Harveygate. Lots of people kept silent after being treated like trash, because they knew what was good for them. But they were angry. And then one day the force shield retracted and Harvey Weinstein and every other power abuser was dead meat.

But our ruling class is in trouble for another reason. Eventually the prestige of handing out goodies to the bubbas begins to tarnish.

You do not do people any lasting good by making them into the "little darlings" of the regime. The white working class is dying of despair because for decades it was the little darling of the ruling class, coddled and given special rewards and benefits by legislative ukase, until it wasn't. Today women and minorities are the little darlings of the ruling class, and they have replaced the white working class as the special favorites of the ruling class. The problem for the white working class is that the special coddlings and rewards handed out to them by the ruling class allowed them to ease up and reduce their efforts to make it in the market economy; their little darling status allowed them to hide from the world in union jobs and lifetime employment. Until it didn't.

The same thing applies to women and minorities. All the diversity and inclusion means that right now the world is bending over backwards to make life easy for women and minorities in the public square. Until the world finds a new little darling to shower with love and kisses. Then all the special coddling and rewards will turn out to be a disadvantage to the former little darlings.

So the prestige of today's ruling class is breaking down, probably because it can't intimidate the way it used to, and it can't deliver like it used to.

The question is what comes next. The answer is simple. The little darlings of yore will be fighting to maintain their special privileges, and it won't be pretty. After all, the promise to Make America Great Again is really a thinly veiled promise to restore the white working class to its former glory. Only it won't happen, except if the white working class completes its move into the middle class and learns to go with the flow of the market economy. Meanwhile the new little darlings, women and minorities, will be scrabbling to keep their special status, and in the end they will fail, just like the white working class.

The solution to the problem of the little darlings is simple. Don't be a little darling. Don't accept the protection of some political sugar daddy; learn to make it on your own. Above all, you have to learn to change horses. Just like in the old days of coaches and horses, you have to change your horse at every stage if you want to get to your destination. Right now I have friends that used to be tech writers at Microsoft. Now they all seem to be turning up at Amazon. That is what it takes in the market economy. Jobs and corporations and skills come and go. You have to get with the program and make sure that you don't get left by the side of the road, cold and sick and hungry, with a horse that won't go. And the only way to do that is to take responsibility for your own life and never believe a politician.

It wasn't prestige that kept our ruling class in power; it was free stuff and intimidation. And now the free stuff and the intimidation aren't working like they used to. Which is a problem for all of us.

Why Did the West Walk Away From Slavery and Empire?

One of the attitudes our lefty friends like to pose is that but for them, we would still have slavery and imperialism. Today this survives in the left's anti-racism, which decries the racism and colonialism of the 19th century and imagines that, but for the left, it would all still flourish.

By the way, if you want to talk about slavery and empire, you can't do better than talk about their Last Hurrah in the Soviet Union, 1917-1990.

But my reading leads me to believe that slavery and imperialism were all over bar shouting when the left appeared in the middle of the 19th century. There was, of course, an anti-slavery movement that went back to the 18th century, but no real anti-imperialism movement until Lenin gussied it up.

On slavery I wonder how much of the anti-slavery movement was a pure moral movement and how much of it was just an internal squabble in the British merchant class between the entrepreneurial slave-plantation owners and the scions of the merchant class like William Wilberforce, whose grandfather had made the family fortune in the Baltic trade. Both of these groups were able to enter Parliament and engage in power politics with the old landed class by the end of the 18th century.

On empire my reading of 19th century history is that the western powers, while unreflectingly swinging their military might around the world, really didn't know what they were doing. They wanted to force the Chinas and Japans of the world to trade with them, and especially lower tariffs so that western goods could be imported into every country in the world. But they were not imperialists of the old school, who were merely interested in loot and plunder. They did not say to their conquered foes: you will give us your wealth and surrender your women and children into slavery; they only demanded that western merchants be allowed entry into the country on favorable terms so that trade could flourish and increase. They did, however, manage to capture most of the benefits of trade to themselves.

Then there is the 18th century Impeachment of Warren Hastings, the British Governor of Bengal. Chaps like Edmund Burke didn't like the way Hastings looted the Indians under his charge, especially his mean treatment of the Begums of Oudh. My point is: how come a little imperial loot and plunder had, by the end of the 18th century, become a scandal in the British Parliament?

So my view is that capitalism and the Great Enrichment turned men away from slavery and loot-and-plunder empire and towards the market economy of production for exchange and trading with the whole world.

Suppose we consider the slave plantations as Chapter One of the industrial revolution, with gangs of slaves doing simple repetitive jobs for a capitalized enterprise. But look at Chapter Two, where workers were assembled in factories doing repetitive jobs tending textile machines. Pretty soon they were allowed to form trade unions, become voters, and swing national politics towards their agenda of schooling and social insurance. Don't you think it remarkable that this occurred, and that the capitalists did not use their wealth to lord it over the industrial economy like emperors of old and keep the workers as slaves in perpetuity?

I think there is some truth to Marx's doctrine of base and superstructure. Once you get a market economy going men and women are changed by the new economic order and its "nudges." In this new world, slaves are low productivity automatons -- that might rebel in a slave rebellion! And loot-and-plunder imperialism amounts to impoverishing potential customers. How dumb is that!

It is telling that the last notable instance of loot and plunder in western history was the plundering of defeated Germany in 1945 by the Soviet Union. The Soviets removed to Russia just about every machine that was not tied down. But really, what good did it do? In the end the Soviet Union was an economic failure, basically because it operated on the old top-down model where the sovereign issued the orders and the slaves did what they were told, and the tributary states bowed and scraped whenever the sovereign demanded. In West Germany the western powers pretty soon decided they wanted the economy in Germany to recover so that Germans could become an asset rather than a cost.

OK, Great. This is now ancient history: slavery and empire are dead. What I would like to happen is that the present neo-feudal welfare state would go the way of slavery and loot-and-plunder, because we the people are better than subordinate peasants bowing and scraping to our Lords and Masters of the Swamp.

All Politics is Reactionary

Our lefty friends have made a big thing about representing their politics as "progressive" whereas the politics of their opponents is regressive and "reactionary." There are those that actually believe such nonsense.

A lot of people on the alt-right seem ready to take them at their word, understanding that all politics will end up as race or ethnic politics, so why not start a self-conscious white identity politics before it is too late? Vox Day, today, has a cartoon of Uncle Sam trying to put the American eagle back together again from all its broken parts from conservatives to Hispanics. Day's bête noire is "civic nationalism," the attempt to create a nation out of the constitution, the English language, and a common culture. On his view this is doomed to disappointment, because people keep their ethnic identities unto the nth generation.

The reason why this might be so is not hard to figure out. Politics is division, and the easiest way for a politician to divide is people by religion, race, ethnicitiy, and language. Thus presidential election campaigns to this day know they need to appeal to voters by touching all these idols. It still pays politicians to appeal to the Irishness in Irish Americans and the Italianness in Italian Americans. German Americans, of course, need not apply; their ethnicity was driven underground in World War I. Of course, the contribution of Marxism to this game was to introduce class as a good way to divide and conquer people.

Now, the question is whether the left's identity politics is unstoppable, or whether it will drive us eventually into a war of all against all. Maybe it will. Then again maybe it won't.

Here are my arguments for hope.

Base and superstructure. Marx argued that the economic relations of production are what really defines a society. All the politics and culture is just superstructure. On that argument, the base today is the market economy of millions of prices urging people every day to put their money and their effort into satisfying the wants of the consumers. And in this base we work with anyone that will work with us, because not to do so leaves money on the table. Willy nilly, the superstructure will end up reflecting this reality.

The need for big battalions. The present world of nation states did not come into existence because nations were ordained by God back in the Garden of Eden. They were forged by force. In Britain and France, this forced unification occurred centuries ago. These nations were forged because smaller units were too weak. But German nationhood was forged within historical memory by uniting Germans in three wars, first against the Danes (!), then the Austrians, then the French. The US, of course, was built by flat-out conquest, assisted by a bit of Dutch Finance in the Louisiana Purchase. The reason we see a lot of separatism, from Scotland to Catalonia, is that today people think they can make it without being part of a big fat nation state. I wonder if they are right?

South and East Asians. I had a email from a South Asian decrying the war against the west. The west, she insisted, invented the modern world, and it would be madness to throw it over. I dare say there are more like her. Then there are the words of a Chinese Christian reported by David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had 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 past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. 

I think that the biggest thing going in the world today is the determination of the Indians and Chinese to get back on top after the humiliation of the last 500 years. You get an insight into the humiliation the Chinese felt in the 19th century from Jung Chang's book on the last Dowager Empress Cixi of China. The Chinese ruling class was divided into a conservative faction that wanted to return to the ideas of Confucius and Mencius, and modernists that wanted to modernize. Notice that the modernist efforts began with nationalism of the Xinhai revolution, then Maoist socialism, and now the one-party capitalism (fascism?) of the current regime. Notice how they are flopping around between competing western ideas. Same thing in India, where the Indian National Movement became a sort of Fabian socialism, then reformed into the present reform towards a more naked capitalism.

In other words, if you are not doing some sort of western-invented capitalism with a market-directed economy, you are an idiot, Cuba and Venezuela.

Trumpism. So where does Trump fit in all this? Is he an idiot, as our lefty friends insist, or does he just play one on TV? Clearly, despite his populism, he is a capitalist, through and through, with his appointees ripping out administrative-state regulations by the bushel. He is supporting a tax reform to reduce loopholes and carveouts, to the extent possible. He appeals to the notion of the United States as a nation, not a congeries of identities. Hey, it might just work!

My Take. See, my ground zero is the staggering social and economic revolution of the last 200 years, what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. It is just as earth-shattering as the physics revolution that has brought us quantum mechanics and smartphones. The key point of the physics revolution is that we cannot imagine what is going on at the micro level; we just have to believe the math. Our daily-life concepts just do not describe the way the world works with electrons and photons quarks and all the rest of the Greek and Joyce-named stuff.

The world of the economic Great Enrichment is just the same. Markets and prices work in a mysterious way, through connections between millions of consumers and producers that magically coordinate economic efforts all across the world. All we know is that, if you try to replace the probabilistic economic state function with a rigid materialist administrative function you get the economic meltdown of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castroist Cuba, and Bolivarian Venezuela. No wonder many people want to retreat to the comfort of the face-to-face village community or the tribe of the kindred. The new world is too hard.

And yet. The worst thing in the world is to imagine that your political leaders will "take care" of you. They can't; they won't. As a black state representative said: Politicians don't care about you; they only care about your vote. Ask the white working class about that.

The only thing to do is to get out into the price-driven economy and learn how to swim in its frightening currents. There are no magic tricks, no simple solution, no safe haven. But the results! A thirty-fold increase in per capita income in 200 years! There has never been anything like it, ever.

The modern economy merely says that you should find something to do that other people are willing to pay for. First of all, find a way to be of use in the world; then get your paycheck. Is that not the basis of all the Axial Age religions? Of course it is, because the Axial Age religions all got started when cities got started, and cities are all about buying and selling, prices and credit, figuring out how to make a buck in the swirl of the money economy. Only now, everyone is involved in the city economy, and everyone needs to know its ways, its rules, and how to wive and thrive under its sway. If they know what is good for them.

And so the politicians entice us with their reactionary appeals to tribe and identity. A world that is, quoth the raven, nevermore.