Another Year of the Woman

Remember 1992? I do. It was the Year of the Woman. The idea was that women had been horribly treated, e.g., by Clarence Thomas talking about pubic hairs and coke cans, according to star witness Anita Hill. And therefore we needed to elect women up and down the ballot.

Funny, isn't it that in the Year of the Woman we also elected a notorious womanizer as president, and when it came to examining his peccadillos the Women were nowhere to be found.

Nothing has changed, has it, in 25 years. If Democratic women all get in a twitter and "can't believe he said/did that," then the Republican in question is guilty until proven innocent and a bunch of independent women buy into the latest slur and don't show up to the polls. Hey! It works every time.

And now, with three accusers of Donald Trump renewing their accusations of sexual harassment, going back to the 1980s, we can see the meaning of the whole Weinstein mess and the current mayhem in liberal media on the sexual harassment front.

This is all about another Year of the Woman in 2018 -- hey it's about time, for the last Year of the Woman was a quarter of a century ago. The idea, once again, is that Republicans don't care about women, indeed treat them like dirt, and therefore women should vote for good caring Democrats that care about people like you. So if we elect a Democratic House we can have a nice Trump impeachment, and if we elect a Democratic Senate as well we can have a nice Trump trial in the Senate. Also, there is an additional benefit that the mainlining of the question of sexual harassment conveniently pushes the Clintons away from front-rank politics. I suspect that until recently, the Clinton Crime Syndicate called all the shots in the Democratic Party universe, and you didn't cross the Clintons, not on anything, if you knew what was good for you.

The sweet article in the New York Times about movie star Salma Hayek's horrible experience with Weinstein shows how the system works. Yes, her problem with Weinstein was all about him wanting a piece of her action, and making her life a hell because she wouldn't lift her skirts. But believe me, I think you would find that's how the whole liberal politics-media-entertainment works, if you ever got a chance to look on the inside. Nice little body/career you got here. Pity if something should happen to it.

Notice how in the Republican Party all the disagreements seem to be out in the open between the McCains and the Flakes and the Trumps and the Bannons? Notice how you never seem to hear about any problems and disagreements on the Democratic side? Ever wonder why? It's not because they all get along in Demo-land. It's because they are all afraid.

But I think that the whole Year of the Woman operation is getting out of control. Because when you are getting beloved names in the New York Times and NPR bubble getting swept away, why then you are getting into a little bit of a witch hunt. Which is shocking, because as everyone knows, from watching Arthur Miller's The Crucible, it is only crazed 17th century Puritans and 20th century anti-Communist McCarthyites that you need to worry about on the witch-hunt front.

Hey, remember when Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and tried in the Senate? Democrats all closed ranks around this serial abuser of women. And won seats in the 1998 off-year election, which is extraordinary for the second term of a two-term president.

Is this a conspiracy, deep down in the deep state and the office of Mr. Big of the Democratic Party? I suspect not. I suspect that it is all what Jung calls the collective unconscious. You don't need a Mr. Big to tell everyone what to do. Look at the good little boys and good little girls at the FBI that just automatically knew what to do to protect Hillary Clinton and automatically knew how to spy on the Trump campaign using the FISA court. Nobody told them what to do. Nobody needed to tell them what to do. They just knew that Donald Trump had to be stopped and so they did what it took to do that.

Only, of course, they didn't quite succeed in 2016.

But will they succeed in 2018? We don't know. My guess -- and my hope -- is that our current ruling class is too soft to make this latest Year of the Woman work. I suspect that they are like the regime in France before the French Revolution. They are scions, and don't have the street toughness that real guardians of the regime need to have.

But I could be wrong.

The Three Peoples Theory and Work

I was walking down the Yellow Brick Road reading a lecture on work by dear old lefty Herbert Marcuse entitled "The End of Utopia" and I had a thought.

My reductive Three Peoples theory does not directly address the question of human work, not yet. And that is wrong.

In his lecture, from Five Lectures, Marcuse looks forward to a time, after the revolution, when "alienated labor" will be a thing of the past, and liberation and happiness will reign. He makes a distinction between "the realm of freedom" and "the realm of necessity." True freedom can only exist in a world in which the question of necessity has been removed. He look to a "new theory of man" that posits

a freedom no longer based on and limited by scarcity and the necessity of alienated labor... the negation of the need for the struggle for existence... the negation of the need to earn one's living; the negation of the performance principle, of competition; the negation of the need for wasteful, ruinous productivity[.]

In a world freed from necessity, Marcuse sees a flowering of the "aesthetic," featuring "a convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play... a society in which even socially necessary labor can be organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men."

Now, I don't know how that plays to you, but I immediately thought: this is how a young twentysomething thinks, the sort of chap that lives in some trendy urban district and dresses in artistical black. This representative of the People of the Creative Self thinks of work as a creative endeavor. In response to a question from his grandfather in respect of his career plans, he might say that he "wants to do something creative." He thinks, in other words, exactly like Herbert Marcuse, without the Marxist jargon.

Now it is no surprise that some lefty artistical kid from the People of the Creative Self would believe in work as creative play, but I immediately thought: what about the rest of us?

Obviously, when we talk about the People of the Subordinate Self then we are talking about people that work because they have to: this is "alienated labor" in the full Marxian sense of the word. The lowest level of this approach to work is the slave who does not do a stitch of work unless directly ordered by his overseer with the encouragement of his cowskin whip.

But it is interesting to recognize that this is not the way that work works in the real world. Nobody is a complete subordinate slave. Even the lowliest worker has some responsibility. And the record of slave plantations is that the slave-owner prefers to give the slave a certain amount of responsibility, such as growing his own food, rather than bear the burden himself of ordering the slave's every movement and providing every need. The slave-owner might even rent the slave, e.g., Frederick Douglass, to somebody else. You can see that the same thing applies to serfdom. The serfs are not slaves; their lords do not direct their every move, and the self needs to figure out how to farm and make his own food for his own family.

The record of capitalist employers in the wake of the industrial revolution is that they want and prefer, more and more, responsible and flexible employees. They do not want drones that work like automatons on the assembly line; for one thing, such workin' stiffs tend to join unions. Wal-Mart, for instance,  encourages its employees to take on-line courses in the back room, and it rewards them for upping their game.

Of course there is an exception to this. The socialist state likes its people dumb and stupid and subordinate. It doesn't want responsible, independent citizens, but subordinate subjects that can be ordered around by socialist managers with a taste for power. Anyone else is a wrecker and a saboteur.

What about the People of the Responsible Self? How do they think about work? It is obvious. People of the Responsible Self recognize that work, their contribution to society, is what enables them to hold their heads up in the world. For them, it is a thing of pride to have marketable skills that enable them to live a decent and independent life, serving their fellow men and respected by their fellow humans.

Notice how this attitude towards work is not comprehended by the Marcuse approach to work. In his world you are either working under the knout, in "alienated labor," or you are living in sunlit uplands in a "convergence of work and play." This is why my Three Peoples theory is so superior to the Two Peoples narrative of the left that does not even rise to the sophistication of Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic. My theory, reductive as it is, understands the great human middle, and not just the two extremes.

Now we come to the question of work for the People of the Creative Self. Here, of course, work is not something you do because you have to in order to get bread on the table. It is not even something you do to hold your head up in the world as a respectable bourgeois that pulls his weight. Your work is a creative project, something that is new and original. This is an individualism different from the responsible individualism that is celebrated by economics and sneered at by the Fabians. It is, as Charles Taylor writes, "expressive individualism," that expresses the individuality of its person as a efflorescence, a flowering, rather than merely as a separate atom.

There is one little problem with the notion of work as a creative enterprise. It is that, as Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will and Idea, that the creative individual is one in a million.

[E]verything that is excellent is always a mere exception, one case in millions, and therefore, if it presents itself as a lasting work... exists in isolation, is preserved like a meteoric stone, sprung from an order of things different from that which prevails here. (p.335)

Think Michelangelo, think Einstein. But the People of the Creative Self want to believe that creativity can become routine and unexceptionable, as least for special people like themselves.

You can see that my Perfect Plan fits into all this. First, it wants to encourage all People of the Subordinate Self to take on something of the armor of light, and become as responsible as possible, each according to his ability. Secondly, it recognizes that in the arena of creativity many are called but few are chosen, and thus many would-be creatives cannot really expect to be much more than merely People of the Responsible Self with a certain flair not given to the ordinary deplorable. Perhaps all they can aspire to is to drive a Subaru rather than a Honda. It therefore behooves the creative to treat the People of the Responsible Self with respect and compassion, for there but for the Grace of the God of Creativity go I.

The other thing about work is that, without work, most people go to the bad. This is because, as Schopehnauer writes, most of our life is lived in trying to obtain the satisfaction of some desire. But once the desire is achieved, we are back to zero, either overcome with "ennui" because suddenly our life has no purpose, or seized by a new desire and the need to obtain satisfaction. Thus it is that we work all our lives towards the shining goal of "success" or "retirement" only to find that success doesn't solve anything and that life in retirement still needs a purpose. There is no land of freedom in which work and play converge in some kind of aesthetic experience and everything is "organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men."

So it is that most moralists and philosophers have recognized that life in this world is always going to be a vale of tears. Only in the Happy Land of eternity can Eternal Bliss be found. Anything else is to "immanentize the eschaton."

The Question of Women in the Public Square

Over a century ago German sociologist George Simmel, observing the emergence of women into the public square, wrote that women would over the coming years reshape the public square to suit a more feminine sensibility.

And so they have.

Now I would argue that the shape of our political institutions reflect the age-old need to curb the power projects of men. As politics is civil war by other means, the whole point of politics is in fact to direct the male aggressive instinct into political wars rather than actual fighting wars. And then, since men tend to abuse the rules of any political system there is a need for checks and balances to limit the harm that can be caused by men of overvaulting ambition.

But what we have not done is design institutions to deal with the way that women tend to abuse power.

I was reading a piece a couple of days ago by a conservative woman in tech that was helping with coding camps for young women. But she became embroiled in a political war with liberal women for whom the teaching of technical skills was of secondary importance to teaching creativity, networking,  feminist politics and beating up on conservative women. And these women were damaging this conservative woman's business.

At this point, I think it is important to note that so-called "witch hunts" are typically hunts of women by women. Even in the prototypical Scarlet Letter about the poor helpless Hester Prynne, it is clear that the folks giving her trouble are the other women in the New England village.

And in a book I read about witch hunts -- which typically occurred in borderlands where central government power barely projects -- the witch hunt usually ended when the witch hunt started to involve the wives of respected notables. At that point it was time for the ruling class to intervene.

So the question that I have is how we adapt our institutions to deal with the way that women typically project power and abuse power. How do we "regulate" the Culture of Complaint in which women meeting together typically dish the dirt on another woman that is not present when that culture extends beyond the neighborhood community of women into HR departments and university administration?  How do we deal with the teenaged "mean girl" culture when it metastasizes into feminism and the naming and shaming of victims on the say-so of the accuser? How do we deal with the HR mentality that is focused on "codes of conduct" and diversity and inclusion rather than getting the job done?

Now, everybody knows that it is a wonderful thing that women have entered into the public square, into politics, into "careers" and that women can now control their own reproduction. But I wonder. I don't know whether it is a good idea for women to be encouraged and accommodated into public life. I don't know if abortion and divorce and gay marriage and the sexual revolution are a good idea. For all we know they might be the high road to civilizational oblivion.

We are doing all this because we are now ruled by the religious and cultural norms of the educated class's culture of creativity rather than the old bourgeois culture of responsibility.

But my guess is that there is plenty of life left in the bourgeois culture of responsibility before it will be time to throw it on the dust-heap of history. Because we still need it.

I suspect that cultural and religious norms are important for one simple reason. Survival. I don't know the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but I believe that all the religions and the cultures and the politics of the world are attempts to guess the actions and the strategies that will put children on the ground and help the community thrive. Some guesses are better than others.

For instance, I think that the lefty guess in the Communist Manifesto was a bad guess that has resulted in millions of deaths and misery wherever it is tried.

I think that the religions and cultures of responsibility that started up when cities first started up 3,000 years ago are telling us that the culture of individual responsibility is a part of the necessary culture of the city. So I think that the cultures that exist to mess with the culture of individual responsibility are probably playing with fire.

In other words I think that everything in left-wing religion and culture that is trying to smash and demoralize the bourgeois culture of individual responsibility is probably a dreadful mistake that will lead to the end of civilization as we know it.

Of course, everything in this life, this world, this universe, goes in a cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death, and ultimate renewal.

So the left-wing culture that seems determined to destroy the bourgeois culture of responsibility is maybe nothing but a refiner's fire that will clear the decks for the emergence of the next big thing in the human story.

Maybe so. And maybe it all seems perfectly sensible and reasonable if you are a Martian observing events on the Earth from the intergalactic bleachers.

But for us here in the middle of things, it would sure be a shame if the whole thing -- our thing -- got wiped out by a bunch of lefties that want government to control everything and a bunch of feminists complaining that "I Can't Believe She Said That."

So I say we need checks and balances on the woman's Culture of Complaint if women are to continue in the public square.

The Counter Revolutions of the Modern Age

Every revolution inspires its counter-revolution. The great revolution of our age is the Double Revolution in physics and in economy. The counter-revolution is the great movement of the left.

I first developed my notion of the Double Revolution in my "Communism Week: The Real Revolution of the Modern Age." My idea is that through two revolutions of ideas we moderns have radically changed our fundamental understandings of reality, and both revolutions have unmoored us from old certainties more than any previous revolutions because their descriptions of reality cannot be made in terms of everyday experience, of the things that we see and hear and touch with our five senses.

This fact is most obvious in the case of the physics revolution. During the 19th century there was a continuing battle over two conflicting theories of the nature of light: the corpuscular theory and the wave theory. Was light a stream of particles, or an emanation of waves? Particles and waves are both everyday experiences for humans. We understand that light bounces off a mirror like a billiard ball off a cushion and we understand the waves in the ocean, by direct experience. But which was it?

The answer developed during the relativity and quantum mechanics revolution was: neither. Or both. The fact is that, whatever is going on at the level of the atom, it is nothing like what we experience in our everyday experience of everyday life. We have mathematical theories to predict behavior and we have a sub-atomic "zoo" of metaphors and stories to talk about what is going on. An example of the mystery of the sub atomic world is the two slit experiment. If you shine white light through a slit it shines as a white slit when it hits a screen. If you shine a light through two close slits you get a wave pattern. But if you shine single quanta of light, one by one through one of two slits you still get a wave pattern. What does it mean? It means that we cannot experience the basic elements of reality as direct correspondences of human-scale phenomena.

But the same thing is true with the economics revolution, the conversion of economic life from face-to-face relations to the abstract coordination of the price system. This fact is illustrated by the story of market value. The classical economists first differentiated between use value, the value of a useful object like food, and exchange value, the value of e.g., "useless" but precious metals like gold. But in fact a price is a price, it reflects the accumulation of individual acts of buying and selling of perhaps millions of consumers and producers. An individual human can grasp the notion of use value: obviously useful things have value; and we can understand the notion of exchange value: grain prices go up and down with the weather. But the truth is that a price is a price; the only thing that is concrete is actual market transactions and their prices.

It is not surprising that this radical and overwhelming Double Revolution has spawned counter-revolutions. The most obvious one is the Communist-socialist counter-revolution. While advertising itself as the acme of progress it is in fact a nostalgic attempt to return to the good old days.

In its communist version the counter-revolution idealizes the supposed unity and equality of the village community. In its welfare-state version it re-enacts the lord-and-serf relation of feudalism. Both reactions advertise that Communism or welfare-state subjection is safer than the uncertainty of life under the market. But both of these assertions are a lie. In the village community, you better get with the program of the male village elders or the community of women or you are out of luck. In the feudal subjection you are only safe while you are useful to your lord, either producing revenue for him with your farming, or fighting and dying for him in his quarrels with the neighboring lords. If you live in a communist state, then your welfare depends on the decisions of men whose talent is for politics rather than production, and the record is that politicians are lousy at creating prosperity. If you live as a subordinate worker or beneficiary in the welfare state then your prosperity hangs on the continued power of your patron. If you work for the government you depend on your program continuing; if you work for a corporation you depend on the corporation continuing to expand and prosper.

Really, the only thing to do is to expose yourself to the market and obey its signals. As a worker you will be forced to update and improve your skills as the labor market changes. As a business you will be forced to respond to the changes in the market for your product. That way you won't wake up one day and find out that your secure job or secure government benefit isn't secure after all, because you never had a chance to go to sleep on the job.

The truth is that politicians do not care about you; they only care about your vote. Corporate CEOs don't care about you; they only care about the bottom line. The only person that cares about you is you.

Another reactionary counter-revolution is the environmental movement, which yearns really for a world before the Newtonian mechanical age and a return to a rural idyll before the invention of heat engines and power-assisted everything. Of course, life was always great for well-born scions, then as now. Well, it is great until the tumbrels start to roll.

The question is, how long are these counter-revolutions going to continue, and what will be the net effect of them a century from now?

Tax That Fellow Behind the Tree

Low and behold! Polling on the Trump tax plan shows that most voters are against it.

Well, they would be, of course, because about half of Americans don't pay federal income tax. Why would you be in favor of a tax cut that doesn't cut your taxes?

So even on the American Spectator website the bubbas in the comments section are hollering to cut the payroll tax rather than the income tax that Jeff Bezos is paying, and rightly so.

Sorry fellahs, but when you are evaluating policy change in terms of "what's in it for me" you amount to nothing more or less than the willing dupes of the ruling class. The ruling class likes its subjects to be quarreling about who gets the goodies. It is called Divide and Conquer.

Now I claim a certain expertise on government spending and revenue, 'cos I wrote the book with usgovernmentspending.com and its pal usgovernmentrevenue.com. And I say, cut it. Cut it all. Do not cut until the pips squeak. Cut until the pips stop squeaking.

Let us review federal spending. Out of the total of about $4.1 trillion budgeted for FY 2018, there is $1 trillion in Social Security, $1 trillion in Medicare/Medicaid, $0.8 trillion in Defense, $0.35 trillion on Welfare-other-than-Medicaid, and a trillion for everything from Education to interest on the national debt. You could look it up.

So, apart from Defense, which is the proper function of a national government, there is about $2 trillion spending on geezers like me. Everything else is loose change.

Then there is federal revenue. Out of the total of $3.6 trillion budgeted for FY2018, there is $2.2 trillion in federal income tax, $1.2 trillion in payroll taxes, and $0.3 trillion for everything else.

So the real money is in the federal income tax. You can see that the payroll tax about covers Social Security, and the federal income tax pays for everything else, including most notably geezer Medicare for chaps like me.

Now, I ask you, is it a good idea to spend so much of government spending on geezers like me? I say no, for the following selfish -- I mean deeply philosophical -- reasons.

• Average people would do much better if, instead of paying payroll taxes they saved for their own retirement. First, they would have real personal wealth, which could be inherited by their children; second, they could leverage their gradually accumulating wealth for down payments on houses, startup money for a business, education for the kids. Right now the government gets to keep the payroll tax monies until it decides you are eligible to get your Social Security check. Why? You think government can spend your money better than you can? Of course, there would be idiots that did not save a penny for retirement. No doubt they would be thrown upon the mercy of their children, although I read that in China, where there is no Social Security, people save like fiends.
• Are we really doing grandma a favor by throwing money at her health care at end-of-life? They say that we consume one half of our life's medical expenses in the last year of life. Is that just?  The truth is that few of us have a clue about what could be done to extend our lives. We go to the doctor and she gives us a pill. Is that really the best treatment? Few people could know unless they have the smarts to research their condition on the Internet.

The point is that, where government is concerned, we each of us act like Genghis Khan or Caribbean pirates. Loot and plunder is our philosophy. We are in favor of government action that puts money in our pocket, and we are against government action that favors other people. We dress up our greed in hypocritical appeals to helping seniors, the poor, and the children, but really it all comes down to whether we benefit, personally. Right now, our Democratic friends are declaring the end of the world because of the end of deductions for state and local taxes. But really, the people that benefit from the state and local tax deduction are the Rich in blue states. Hey Dems! You shilling for the rich today?

Of course, the looter culture used to make sense for humans. You invaded the neighboring tribal lands, killed the men, did a Rape of the Sabine Women on the females, and you got a larger food-growing territory. What was not to like?

Not any more. The industrial economy is based on a mutual-benefit equation. You do something for someone and they pay you for it. You invent something that transforms the world and you become insanely rich on a fraction of the present value of the invention to the rest of the world.

So any time that a corporate predator or a government program resorts to the old culture of loot and plunder -- and just about every government program does this -- they are busily impoverishing their fellow men and women, just like Genghis Khan, and they are monsters.

Now I am not hopeless for the future, because I think that the looter culture will gradually fade away. As proof I offer the actions of the West after winning World War II. What did the winners do after getting the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan?

No, we did not loot them to the bare walls. Instead, after a couple years of futzing around we lent them money to rebuild their economies, and we did not impoverish them with the traditional indemnities that used to be applied to the losers right up to and including World War I. Why?  Because the German and Japanese factories were no use to us as loot. Moreover, since we thought of ourselves as humanists, we were faced with the little problem of feeding the Germans and Japanese camping out in the ruins of their empires until they all got a job. In fact, we were right. Within 20 years the German and the Japanese economies were the envy of the world and -- this is important -- their products enriched us all, and challenged us to up our game.

(But the Soviets looted East Germany to the bare walls, transplanting all the factories in East Germany back to Russia in accordance with the reactionary loot-and-plunder philosophy of socialism. A lot of good it did them.)

Yes. I am a true radical. I believe that the only thing the national government should spend money on is defense. All the rest is merely loot and plunder that impoverishes us all.

Oh yes, there are some genuine public goods that cannot be delivered by the private sector. But I would say that the burden of proof, and it should be a heavy burden, should be on the chaps that say that that more government spending is needed to "help."

No, the only thing the government should be doing outside of defense is executing on my Perfect Plan. First, teach the workers and peasants newly arrived in the city how to become middle class. Second, stop ragging on the middle class and stigmatizing them as "deplorables." That is all.

Conventional Wisdom and Women Presidents

I am still descanting on my lefty pal Michael Mann's summary dismissal of the leaders of the central powers before World War I. They suffered, he wrote, from a culture of "militarism." They thought that all real men resolved their disputes with a nice little war complete, I imagine, with flashy uniforms and glittering medals.

Yes, of course the emperors and the generals of the time were idiots. But they were just average guys doing the average thing that they learned in emperor school.

Now we today have a different problem. Instead of the reflexive culture of "militarism" in our political elites -- which you still see in vestigial form, e.g., with the British royal family whose men still dress up in military uniforms -- we have the culture of "activism." Today all people in the educated elite think that they solve problems with political activism and beneficial legislation and identity politics.

So 90 percent of your politicians and your activists and your media personalities and your academic experts are just consumers and producers of the conventional wisdom of the cult of "activism."

But that is normal; that is the way the world works.

What is interesting is the man that breaks the mold. Never mind the guy that inherits a corporation as CEO, or that inherits a monarchy when his dad dies. Never mind the Buggins Turn in the US Republican Party that always seems to nominate for president the guy that lost the nomination last time.

The interesting people are the successful startups: the Gateses, the Jobs, the Google guys. Because they invented something that wasn't there before. What about the Founders, from Washington to my man Hamilton, that invented a new form of government based on their reading of the Montesquieus and the Hobbses and their actual experience of fighting and winning a revolution?

And what about the folks running for president in our own time? Jack Kennedy? Pretty conventional guy that succeeded in convincing everyone he was a genius. Lyndon Johnson? A master political operator. Nixon? A conventional man of his time that managed to derail the left-leaning Democrats. Carter? Utterly conventional, but played beautifully to the liberal desire for a faux populist with a big smile. Reagan? A man that had done his reading, formulated a strategy, and successfully ran against his party's conventional wisdom and won. Bill Clinton? A political genius that managed to steer his party away from its knee-jerk liberalism. Bush, father and son? Both utterly conventional. Obama? Utterly conventional lefty, but made to seem like a genius. Hillary Clinton? Utterly conventional without an idea in her head.

Then we come to Trump who found the white working class wounded by the side of the road and decided to act like the Good Samaritan. The point about Trump is not that he is a genius, which he probably is, but that he was the first person after Reagan to see the political potential in the white working class and figure out how to appeal to it. Today his strategy looks obvious: make a populist appeal to the broad middle: Make America Great Again. Hey, I couldha come up with that! Only I didn't.

Here's what I wonder. I wonder how long it is going to take for the Democrats shake off their politically correct microaggression anti-hate conventional wisdom and actually figure out how to appeal to the broad middle of America like Bill Clinton did.

I think it will take a couple of election cycles, just like it did after Ronald Reagan got elected. I think that the Democrats will have to burn through a couple of diversity candidates, starting with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) in 2020 who came up the old-fashioned way through the grace and favor of Willie Brown, before they decide to become New Democrats again and earnestly tell us that they have changed. No really!

Here's what I think. I think that at some point the women of America, the blacks of America, and the Latinos of America are going to find our that, despite what the Democrats tell them, they are really Americans first, and helpless victims second.

It only needs a political genius, that can wrap up the current educated elite's "activism" conventional wisdom in a paper bag and throw it in the dumpster, to figure this out and then America will be first-and-ten on the forty yard line.

I also think that Democrats will go through hell trying again and again to elect the First Woman President.

Here's my reasoning, which I can make because I am a sexist. I don't think that women are cut out for rejecting conventional wisdom, which is what it often takes to win a presidential election. More than boys, girls tend to be Good Little Girls that make their way in the world by following the rules and expectations. Hey, most men are like that too, but I suspect that there are more rebels in the ranks of men than in women, just as the IQ bell curve for men is flatter, with more men than women at the extremes.

I think that Margaret Thatcher is the exception that proves the rule. It took her ten years in the 1950s to find herself a parliamentary constituency. I think that she reinvented herself as a man in order to do it. Old videos of her speaking as Prime Minister in the House of Commons show how she learned to master the male Culture of Insult in the very masculine bear-garden of Parliament. Hillary Clinton was not that kind of woman. Nor, as far as I can tell, are any of the women senators on either side of the aisle.

Not to be militaristic about it, but a presidential candidate is trying out for the position of Warrior-in-Chief. He needs to present himself as a brave fighter. As Reagan did, as Trump did. And as Hillary Clinton did not.

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?