Supposing I Got to Set The Syllabus for AP History

The chaps at Powerline are doing the dirty on the College Board's Advanced Placement courses for US and European History. They don't like the knee-jerk leftism of the curriculum.

The critics of AP History syllabi complain that the College Board rehearses the liberal line of a consistent move from superstition to "secular modernization," and leaves out stuff like the history of economic freedom and liberty. Nothing about the Soviets' Ukraine famine. Nothing about the fact that the anti-slavery movement was "inspired by religious faith" of Christians like William Wilberforce.

That set me to thinking about how I would frame European and US history.

Wait. Before framing US and European History I would be framing the human story in an overall Grand Narrative, one in which the liberal notion of "secular modernization" would be a curious millennarian cult of our time significant in its pious faith that it had escaped from the superstition of former times and oblivious to its own superstitions and naivété.

That's because my faith is that religion is a constant in all human eras, and the idea that we are now "above" religion is a pious fraud. The reason is simple. The whole question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything," cunningly developed by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, never goes away. The whole point of religion whether a totemic tribal religion, an Axial Age religion, or a modern secular religion like socialism or progressivism, is the eternal human need to determine the meaning of life, the universe, and everything right now as a guide for living life right now. But the truth is that we don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and we are not likely to find out any time soon. Indeed, I say that the more we know about the universe, and science, and stuff, the more we realize how little we know, and the more mysterious the whole question of meaning becomes.

I suppose the liberal line is that humans were stuck in religious superstition and ignorance until the Renaissance came along and then, with the Age of Reason, humans found that they could understand the world using Science without imagining spirits in trees and God in his Heaven. What people needed was good enlightened teachers that understood the new world.

But if you ask me, Martin Luther King Jr's faith that the arc of history bends towards justice, echoed by President Obama, is just as much of a religious faith as the Christian faith in God's justice and the Last Judgement.

My theory of history, curiously, is fairly close to the Marxian theory, that the economy, the way that people get food and shelter, is the base, and religion and culture are a superstructure built upon the foundations established by the economic facts on the ground. So in my view the "progress" of recent centuries is more a reaction to economic changes than to any enlightenment.

So my Grand Narrative starts with the rise of the city in Mesopotamia (and doubtless in China and India) in the two millennia before Christ. The point of a city is that it is a place where trading and markets happen. And that is where the Axial Age religions got started. Why? Because whereas life in the country is governed by the weather and the collective defense of the border, the life of the city is an individual affair. And so you get the phenomenon recorded by preachers as late as the Great Awakening in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 18th century.

When we began to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages... they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to used the means appointed was a damning sin.

My belief is that everyone above the rank of peasant or proletarian, and anyone living in a city, needs to  learn to live life as a "responsible being," and it is my belief that the Axial Age religions are the religions of responsible beings that live in cities and need to think of God as a creator of the universe that says to his people: you figure this out and learn how to wive and thrive in a world by following rules and finding ways of serving your fellow humans. In such an economic environment humans start to need a culture of freedom and liberty because no king or government planner can have enough knowledge to tell people how to serve their fellow humans: each of us must do that for ourselves. And as the cities have gotten bigger and bigger, and more and more of the human population has come to live and work in cities, the need for people to take up the challenge of individual responsibility has grown. But as long as most people were still on the land growing food this culture did not dominate the world. Peasants lived as fatalists and the subordinate serfs of lords that provided them "protection" in its full meaning, including the notion of a protection racket. And that was good enough.

Up until about 1850 I think we can understand history as people gradually moving to the city and picking up the culture and the religion of responsibility.

But in 1850 a new world dawns, the epoch of creativity. We are now in a new Great Awakening, the awakening to creativity. So a teacher of creativity might say:

When we began to teach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages... they seemed to see for the first time that they were creative beings, and that a refusal to used the means appointed was nothing less than deplorable.

My takeup of Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment partakes of this. The reason, on McCloskey's account, that per-capita income has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years is innovation, innovation that has not been snuffed out by the powers that be.

So I would say that the cultural superstructure that allows innovation must be both a culture of responsibility, that has been around for the last 3,000 years in the city, and also a culture of creativity, the faith that it is possible to think new thoughts and invent new things and not have the world come to an end.

Hello. It looks like my reductive Three Peoples theory has snuck its nose in the tent again, since we are talking here about three cultures: creativity, responsibility, and subordination.

Now, in my view, this new Age of Innovation has taken us completely by surprise, and we are still trying to figure out what happened. But that also means we are in another Axial Age, in which people will be reinventing the idea of religion, trying to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in light of the new facts on the ground.

Naturally, when people invent a new religion they tend to think only of their own needs and not how other people fit into their view of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Thus our liberal friends make a big deal of their culture of creativity, including demanding that Christian bakers bake cakes for gay weddings. 

Now, in my view it is great for gays to go out and get all creative about sex and get married and all. But it is grossly un-compassionate of them -- not to mention bigoted -- to demand that everyone bows the knee to their creative views on sex. For one thing, as Schopenhauer pointed out, the successful creator is one in a million. In our modern notion it means that tons of people want to be creative artists, but only a very few have the chops to make it and the luck to get the support of a Peggy Guggenheim.

Here is how I think the new religion of creativity should look. It should be first of all a religion of sacrifice. Creative artists should expect to be failures, and very humble if they get to succeed. Second, it should be a religion of compassion, meaning its believers should be compassionate for people that are not called to be creative, don't understand about creativity, and don't want to be creative.

So if I were designing the syllabus for AP history we would be looking at the past through the lens of my Three Peoples theory, and understanding how radical the new world is, and expecting that most actors in history would be complete idiots, rehearsing the old ways in a world they don't understand. We would, for instance, be very compassionate about liberal educators that don't have a clue. What could we expect? That a million educational lifers would suddenly get wisdom?

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.