FBI and DOJ: Idiocy or Conspiracy?

Now that the Trump Russia Collusion Narrative is crashing and burning, we are confronted with the Curious Case of the FBI Bonker, Peter Strzok.

Really, it would take a Tom Wolfe to come up with a chap like that. Because in real life you don't get a consummate villain that has done all the evil things in the movie or the novel: the chap that gets Hillary off the hook, uses the Fusion GPS Dossier to spy on the Trump campaign, and traps Gen. Flynn and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. All in one twisted cartoon villain suitable for appearance in a Batman or Superman movie.

And all, it seems, because the guy is an over-the-top Democrat partisan. What a fool, it looks like he has spoiled the Dems' whole game to catch President Trump in some sort of trap and then consign him and his deplorables to Outer Slobbovia.

No really! If you are going to be the Democratic hero of the ages, and trap the whole Trump phenomenon in Pooh's foolproof Trap for Heffalumps, you really need to keep your nose clean and not be tweeting to the girl on the team that you are bonking outside the holy bonds of matrimony.

When you look at the pattern the whole Trump Collusion game it looks like a monstrous conspiracy. It looks as though the Dems all got in a room together and the Democratic Mr. Big handed out assignments.

But I prefer the Idiocy Theory. I prefer to think that these people are swamp creatures that haven't yet advanced to consciousness and rational thought. So they are reacting to the election of Trump on pure instinct, not on rational strategic thought. They are all running around chaotically like Keystone Kops.

And by the way I think that also applies to Hillary Clinton and her operatives. The word seems to be that the Hillary campaign thought up the Russia Collusion narrative on the day after the election. And you can see why.

Want to know why they did it? Because they were ashamed, embarrassed that the smartest guys in the room had lost the election to an amateur with a combover. The Idiots.

So these small men came up with a way to deny that they had been well and truly beaten by Trump and his merry band of Trumpsters. The Idiots.

Hey, We woz robbed! they said. The Idiots.

Hey geniuses. When you are in a game in which, as St. Augustine wrote, the only difference between you golden boys of politics and a criminal gang is that you have "impunity," then you shouldn't be shocked, shocked, that the other guys came up and picked your pockets. You are all in the same game. You Idiots.

But, of course the real story is Hillary Clinton. The job of the defeated candidate, like the job of a defeated general, is to sue for peace. After an election, the job of a defeated candidate is to make a concession speech, that very night, to say that the election is well and truly over, that the other guys won, but we are all Americans before we are political partisans. But Hillary Clinton did not do that. The Idiot.

She is such a weak and foolish person that she let her campaign people cook up the Trump Collusion Narrative.

Just like that other weak and foolish person in 2000, Al Gore, that did not concede the election and riled his supporters up into the Hanging Chads narrative. How did that work out, sports fans?

This all echoes to me with the disaster of World War I. In The Sources of Social Power, Volume III, my lefty pal Michael Mann talks about "militarism," the culture of European leaders of the time that assumed that all international disputes were settled by war. So they imagined that the disputes of the early 20th century could be settled on the battlefield. And then lost their thrones and empires.

Of course, the use of the term "militarism" is problematic, right off. That's because it's a left-wing pejorative, a verbal battering ram that the left uses to devalue and marginalize any narrative except the One and True Lefty Narrative about class and race and gender and liberation and emancipation.

There is a better narrative for World War I. Let's just say that most European rulers in 1914 were dull idiots, playing the only game they knew, utterly oblivious to the fact that the world had changed, and that industrial nation states really did not need to settle their quarrels with military force. Forget that the policy of war was evil or monstrous. It just didn't make any sense.

Fast forward to 2016. Your Al Gores and your Hillary Clintons are playing the left-wing game of "activism." It's the only thing they know. They imagine that the way of the world is to offer their supporters "rights" and "entitlements" using government power to extract moneys from productive individuals and businesses. They are utterly oblivious to the fact that their politics is a creaking anachronism, just as "militarism" was a creaking anachronism a century ago.

Now I don't know if President Trump and his people are greater or lesser Idiots than their Democratic counterparts.

But I do think that the folks in the Democratic Party, from Nancy Pelosi -- who really seems to be exhibiting mild dementia -- to Chuck Schumer to mini-Idiots down in the Deep State like Peter Strzok are Idiots.

I keep getting back to my old pal Charles Dickens, who characterized the government bureaucrats of the mid-19th century as Barnacles and Stiltstockings working at the Circumlocution Office, with the motto "How Not to Do It."

I ask you: has anything changed?

Sightings of Strategery in Trumpland

Everybody knows that Donald Trump is a blowhard idiot -- that nevertheless won the 2016 election by colluding with Russia without, if the current results of special prosecutor Robert Muller tell us anything, leaving a trace.

But I wonder, more and more, who is the Mr. Big hat is directing the strategic operations of the Trump administration.

Whose idea was it to feature an Oval Office photo-op for each annulled regulation? Who was responsible for getting an Acting Director for the revolting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the  door immediately upon the resignation of lefty Richard Cordray? Who is behind the investigation of shenanigans at the FBI and the Justice Department that are just coming to light? Who set up Betsy DeVos and Scott Pruitt to set upon the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency from Day One?

My point is that President Trump himself cannot be responsible for all this. The president just doesn't have that much bandwidth. This whole operation was planned. Somebody set up a bunch of policy people -- probably way back in the campaign, and certainly no later than the transition -- with the mandate to go pedal to the metal and roll back the extremism of the Obama administration.

In recent days I've read accounts of total chaos on the Trump  campaign plane, complete with towering rages from the candidate. No doubt. But that tells us that someone, somewhere, was setting up all this strategery in some quiet place away from the sound and fury of the day-to-day campaign. And I am waiting to hear the first indication of who this someone was.

Just this week is the Trump administration decision to intervene in the question of administrative law judges. This is a case, Lucia v. SEC,

[that] concerns an agency’s decision to allow career bureaucrats to preside as the functional equivalent of judges during enforcement proceedings. These officials, called administrative law judges (ALJs), are hired by career bureaucrats. They are not appointed by the president, a court or an agency head, but they exercise significant authority on behalf of the U.S. government in official proceedings.

It sounds like inside baseball, but Charles Murray wrote a whole book, By the People, about the monstrous injustice -- and enormous power -- of administrative law judges being the judge, jury, and executioner in their own bureaucratic cause. Murray's solution was to encourage US citizens to make life so uncomfortable for the bureaucrats that they would be brought to heel. So this Trump administration action is shocking: it suggests that the Trumpists want to Do Something about the administrative state beyond mere civil disobedience. So I want to know who picked up on this and decided to get the Trump administration backing the anti-ALJ side.

My approach to this is similar to the Kremlin watchers of the Cold War. You couldn't know what was going on inside the Kremlin, and everything you heard or read was propaganda. But you could try to establish a pattern from Kremlin actions.

This is what I am trying to do with the Trump administration. We know that the left wants to paint a picture of complete chaos and incompetence. And the Trumpists themselves want to put out the notion of a strong and all-conquering leader. So we Trump watchers are reduced to figuring out what is going on behind the scenes, based on actual Trump administration actions.

All I am saying is that the actions of the Trump administration can't just be the sum total of one impulsive man in the Oval Office. There is evidence, if you like, of a Conspiracy. Some Mr. Big set all this up, with the approval and/or the direction of Candidate Trump, way back in 2016 or even 2015.

And if I were a betting man I would put money on the notion that all the tweeting and insults are also a part of the strategy, an effort to hide the movements of the Trump troops under a smokescreen of diversions and confusion.

And, for me, it is more than coincidence that the Trump administration is executing on a ton of issues that have been developed by the center-right policy institutions over the last couple of decades.

No, Liberals; The Danger is Not Nazis, It's You

The flap over the Nazi in Ohio, "A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland," has now got to the Weekly Standard.

New York Times reporter Richard Fausset wrote about an ordinary white guy, a welder, in Ohio, who is "the Nazi sympathizer next door." The problem is, according to Andrew Ferguson, that reporter Fausset didn't lay it on thick enough. He didn't excoriate the welder in good round terms, and so, the Times notes, the "article has drawn significant feedback, most of it sharply critical." You see Nazis are bad, bad, bad, and that's all you need to know.

Interestingly, the Times has a photo of the welder's bookshelf, which includes William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Gibbon's History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and even The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, byJohn C. Bogle. So the guy has actually read a book.

Of course my line on Nazis and Nazi sympathizers is that liberals have completely got the wrong end of the stick. The right response to the rise of Nazism and populism in the citizenry is not to "stamp out hate," but should instead be to ask a question: what are we ruling-class types getting wrong?

Nazism in Germany didn't just fall out of the sky on a sunny day. It came after the German ruling class had got Germany into a stupid war that Germany lost. It came after a ruinous inflation that wiped out all the mom-and-pop savers. It came after the French occupation of the Rhineland. It came after the Federal Reserve Board in the US screwed up its lender-of-last-resort role after the 1929 Crash on Wall Street.

Do you see the golden thread linking all these events? No? I will tell you. The golden thread is: stupid incompetent governing elites.

Now when your ruling class is screwing you over, you have two options. One is to do nothing and hope that the elite finally gets its stuff together. The other thing is to do something about it, and follow a leader that promises to Do Something About It.

Generally, a leader that promises to Do Something About It will go back to what worked in the past. That is why Hitler promised to return Germany to a culture of Blood and Soil: Teutonic tribalism and land for the tiller.

Of course, his policy was absolute rubbish for Germany, which had quickly become in the late 19th century the most advanced industrial country in Europe, from its manufacturing to its chemical industry to its physics revolution. But what did the people know? The people know nothing; they only know that things can't go on like this.

Well, the Germans put their faith in Adolf Hitler and he promptly made things worse, by losing the biggest war in history that ended in the total occupation of Germany by foreign powers and the rape of every German woman east of the Elbe.

But hey! This is America! Why should white welders in Ohio be rallying to the racist banner? Don't they realize that they are the residual legatees of a thousand years of white privilege?

It's a funny thing, but people don't tend to obsess over the wonderful advantages they have had in life. The Ben Steins are few and far between. What gets most people up in the morning is their rage at all the injustice in the world, particularly the injustice that hurts them as individuals and as a group.

The fact is that, for the last century, our liberal friends have been playing a pretty dangerous -- and I would say evil -- political game. They encouraged the lower orders to combine and to fight for privileges. First they led the working class to fight for special privileges in the workplace, including the right to strike and bargain for above-market wages and benefits. Then they led women and minorities to fight for special privileges in the workplace, including targeted hiring and promotion on the basis of race and gender.

Of course, our liberal friends think that this is all wonderful and advanced and a fight against hate and injustice. But they do not stop to ask how the folks on the receiving end of these privileges might think. What about the business owners, and stockholders and bondholders and customers of the unionized corporations? Well, there weren't too many of them, so the movement to privilege workers went full steam ahead until, in the 1970s it ran out of gas as upstart companies across the world started to compete with the privileged workers of America, and the good times stopped rolling.

At exactly the same time our ruling class started enacting policy to favor women and minorities over the white working class right across the economy, in particular in government jobs like police and firefighting.

And you want to act surprised and outraged that the victims of this policy are pissed off?

We conservatives like to complain about the "liberal bubble," especially the bubble that NPR listeners and New York Times readers live in. Of course everyone lives in a bubble; we all talk with people like us, and we all tend to agree with each other and agree that the "other" is ignorant or worse.

But when you are the ruling class you really need to get out more, and you really need to remember that all your ruling-class talking points are nothing more that bubba-bait. It might be for the white bubbas in Ohio. Or it might be for the brother bubbas in the 'hood, or the sister bubbas in the Gender Studies department. No matter; it is all bubba-bait.

Above all, a ruling class needs to remember that politics is division, and that everything a politician does is to seduce one set of voters with happy talk while demonizing another set of voters as haters and bigots. For half a century, Democratic politicians have been appealing to their supporters in terms of race or sex. Their voters are all helpless victims of injustice either because of race or because of "gender."

Well, what about the folks on the receiving end of this politics, specifically the white working class welder in Ohio? What is he supposed to think? Hey, it wasn't but 50 years ago that this guy's father was being told how the working class was being horribly treated by corporations and "the rich."  Now, all of a sudden, he is the problem because of generations of white privilege?

Don't you think, dear liberals, that your average white working-class welder might start moving towards people that told him that he was the victim, not the minorities and women presently beloved by the ruling class? And who is to tell him that he is wrong? After all, the US government does put its finger on the scale in favor of women and minorities, not to mention illegal immigrants in sanctuary cities.

Look, I get it. People believe what they believe, and reality and science and justice have nothing to do with it. Our liberal friends really believe in all the horse-pucky they have been taught about racism, sexism, homophobia, hate, and xenophobia.

That is why I have developed my catchphrase: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Oh, there may be some world of perfect justice, probably in another world. But in the here and now, every government action is force. And people on the receiving end of force tend to think  of it as injustice. Or worse.

And if you are the ruling class you better know enough to see through all the bubba-bait you put out in  order to catch bubbas and win elections.

The Soullessness of Sexual Aggression

Here's what gets me about all the liberal pervs exposed in the current Pervnado witch hunt. It  is that once you start going extracurricular you end up doing the most degrading and revolting things.

And the reason is obvious. You cannot just bonk the interns with a blithe disregard for the rest of the world as though you were living in a French movie. The rest of the world includes your wife, your friends, your business associates, and the public in general, and they don't like French movies enacted in real life.

So if you are a Matt Lauer, disgraced host of NBC's iconic Today show, you have to put out a public face of decency and probity. Matt was supposed to be a family man, with wife and children, so he couldn't be conducting open affairs with other women. He was a celebrity in Manhattan, after all.

So his sexual muckings-about had to be done furtively, and quickly. Press the button under the desk; press the flesh, expose the pubes, and on to the next gig.

Now I'm as bad as the next guy, with the most inappropriate fantasies, but I just cannot imagine conducting relations with a woman unless I can see the light of love in her eyes. To me, there is a basic question: what would be the point of a sexual relationship without the love-light in her eyes.

And the basic fact about a relationship with a woman is that the love-light comes from spending time with her, giving her the space and the time to kindle her love for you. You cannot get it in a hole in the corner, not for long, because women want to parade their love before all the world.

Hey, there's a new physics for you. Forget your Newton or your Einstein. Space and time are the necessary and sufficient causes of human female love.

So I now realize that the conventional representations of caddishness, from Don Giovanni to Faust are missing the point. Caddish men do not live a life going from affair to affair, from conquest to conquest. Not at all.

Instead the Weinsteins and the Lauers and the Clintons are married. They have wives and children, and a public persona. Their public profile means that they cannot be reported to be carrying on an affair, and cannot be photographed with their lover by the New York Times legendary photographer Bill Cunningham at some fancy charity fundraiser. So their perving has to be done furtively and out of sight, in good Victorian fashion, to keep up appearances. So they are reduced to discharging their lusts in hole-in-the-corner moments with whatever woman comes in handy at the moment. Assisted by a lock-the-door button under the desk.

Can you spell Double Standard? I thought that was supposed to have gone out with the sexual revolution. Only it didn't.

So let us propose a radical notion. The old rules of courtship and family and fidelity were not monstrous impositions of the patriarchy on a helpless womanhood. They were established because that is What Women Want.

To understand what is going on right now, you only have to realize that women are finally speaking up and saying that the sexual revolution and its hookup culture are not What Women Want.

Of course, I am not saying that women know What Women Want. They are, instead, rather like men in that they want a lot of things, and are a little blind to the fact that they cannot have them all at once.

But that is another story.

From Appeasement to "ils ne passeront pas"

Jonah Goldberg, at the end of a piece about double standards in politics, wants us all to get along, starting maybe with John Rawls' notion of the "original position," proposing that we imagine we are determining laws and customs from behind a "veil of ignorance," not knowing if we are rich or poor, black or white, man or woman.

It's a good idea, based on the civilized and charitable notion of seeing the other guy's point of view. Only we already tried it.

We tried it in the 1950s when President Eisenhower basically acceded to the New Deal. The result was the liberal pedal-to-the-metal Great Society and Affirmative Action.

We had George W. Bush who proposed a "compassionate conservatism." He was followed by President Obama with his pedal-to-the-metal big-government Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Not to mention pedal-to-the-metal identity politics and the utter elimination of non-left ideas and culture in education and the media.

So I don't think that compromise is going to work with our liberal friends. In fact, some might call our attempt to compromise by the less pleasant word: appeasement.

The reason that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination and got elected is that he says, in effect, No More Appeasement.

I'd be all in favor of seeing the liberal point of view if there was a hope in hell of liberals seeing my point of view. Right now, all liberals worth their salt are basically trying to drive conservatives and normals out of the public square, because they characterize any conservative notion as racism, sexism, homophobia or white privilege, and run with a shrieking Twitter mob to teacher with a complaint of micro-aggression or worse.

The only way that I have seen where liberals give  half a look at conservative ideas is after they lose three presidential elections in a row. Then, and only then do they pretend to be New Democrats and send some guy to the electric chair. That's on the day before they take Hillary Clinton off the leash to nationalize health care.

By my way of thinking we are about 50 years after the moment that liberals should have cried Uncle and agreed that their big-government administrative state was a loser. And it is about a hundred years after the moment that liberals should have admitted their their identity-politics model was a vile reactionary return to tribalism that has no place in  the modern world.

It is Conan the Barbarian time (who got it from Genghis Khan). There is no alternative to crushing our liberal friends, and driving them before us. No need to add the lamentation of their women. We already had that in the Fall of 2016.

Hopefully this can all be done in the sham civil war of politics and elections. But it is obviously going to take a vigorous ideological war in which we normals are going to have to challenge every dull and stupid liberal insult and cunning tactic and throw it right back in their faces.

And it helps rather than hinders that President Trump is unafraid to go right up against liberal hypocrisy with his tweets. As in calling out Pocahontas and infuriating every liberal from coast to coast. And that was really pulling punches on Sen. Warren (D-MA). The proper term of art for the inventor of the worst idea in government in half a century, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, would be Fauxahontas. But maybe Trump, a sensitive soul, couldn't bear to hear the lamentation of the liberal women, yet again.

The fact is that the brand of conservatism offered by Jonah Goldberg was a failure, because it didn't redirect the United States towards freedom and responsibility, but just retreated in good order before the liberal advance.

Well, we are now in our own Battle of Verdun, and we want leaders who will say,  as the French did in 1916: Ils ne passeront pas.

After we have won, then we can talk about In Victory, Magnanimity.

Imagine a World Without Totalitarian Moralists

I'm old enough to remember when consumers of conventional wisdom used to opine about the bad old days of religious wars.

I presume that they were talking about the Thirty Years War that devastated the German lands in 1618 - 1648. And maybe the Puritan-driven English Civil War. But I'm not all that convinced about how religious those wars were. The Thirty Years War had a lot to do with dynastic reasons-of-state of the French and Spanish monarchies. And I suspect the English Civil War was not just about Puritanism but the emerging bourgeoisie.

Anyway, I'd say that the biggest religious wars of all time occurred on the secularists' watch. I am thinking of the Napoleonic Wars after the French Revolution, and the Second World War inspired by the secularist Nazi ideology.

Ideology and power have always had a grubby relationship. Back in the good old days when the Franks were pushing eastwards into the Teutonic lands, it is impossible to pull apart the importance of loot and plunder for the feudal supporters of the Frankish kings from the importance of Christianizing the Teutonic tribes.

In our own time we are bedeviled by ideological groups that want to impose their ideology on the rest of us using political power.  Maybe the Puritans were mean to Hester Prynne way back then, so that a Good Little Liberal Girl like Margaret Atwood can imagine a Handmaid's Tale in our future. But we have the reality of liberal social justice groups that can't go home after winning their great victories. Fifty years after the civil rights acts, race and gender civil rights groups want to micromanage the workforce into minute race and gender percentages, and gays want to force people to bake cakes for their weddings.

And we have the delicious irony of progressive political icons harassing women for decades because their right-on politics meant that the Cokie Robertses of the world all knew not to get into an elevator with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) but didn't do anything about it.

I get what is going on here. To get traction on anything in the political arena, you need to make it into a moral issue. I don't know about the economics of slavery, but the way to end it was by making it into a moral issue. Same with universal franchise. It is unjust not to let everyone vote for elected representatives! Same with with welfare state.

Now, in my view, it is often hard to disentangle virtue and self-interest. If your politics is based on the government provision of pensions and healthcare to your working-class supporters, you need a rationale that is higher and nobler that the crude notion that you got the votes to tax and spend your way to handing out rewards to your supporters. You need to make a moral issue out of it. But what is your real motive? Helping the folks or hacking your way to political power?

We conservatives have a word for the society that mixes up the political, the economic, and the moral. We call it totalitarian. And it is clear that totalitarianism is an eternal temptation, and an eternal fear -- when the other guys do it.

That is the unsung point of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. A good lefty-liberal like Atwood can easily see how awful it would be for Christian conservatives to acquire totalitarian power and reduce low-status women to become the concubines of the political elite. But the same people are shocked, shocked that powerful liberal icons do the same thing. So where are the iconic movies anathematizing powerful liberal icons that treat helpless victims as concubines? Or worse, like Cokie Roberts, they know all about it and do nothing.

This is what my catchphrase "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice" is all about. Once a glorious moral movement acquires actual political power and starts to use the state to implement its vision of justice, the people on the receiving end of the movement start to experience injustice. And since politics is division, the art of dividing people, and government is force, the art of the clunking fist, it is not too hard to see that any government program involves the creation of injustice.

And it is not too hard to see that the victorious moralists fail to see how their ideas and programs are viewed by the people on the receiving end of their moralizing.

That is why the present cultural and political elite is in a state of disbelief about the Brexit/Trump/AfD phenomenon. Everything the elite does is justified by its moral framework: to help the workers, to help migrants, to help women, to help gays -- and to stop fascism in its tracks.

So why aren't the people grateful? After all we have done for them, out of the goodness of our hearts?

The answer is that there are very real costs to the political implementation of the moral vision of the educated elite. And down the ages, the elite is usually the last to know.

Is it too much to ask that we confine moralizing to religion and reduce the incidence of government force to an absolute minimum, to reduce the incidence of injustice and limit the scope of political moralizers?

It is too much. For, "if men were angels, no government would be necessary."

Over at The New York Times they are determining that all men are brutes. No kidding, girls. That's what all the cultural infrastructure to control sexuality was all about. It was intended to reduce the opportunities for male brutality, and protect women in safe spaces. Some things never change.

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.