Militarism vs. Activism: Ruling Class Culture Then and Now

In his Volume 3 of The Sources of Social Power lefty historian Michael Mann makes a strong argument that the European powers got into World War I because of "militarism."

To understand why they started the war, we must place ourselves back in a culture in which war was considered normal and legitimate, in which states were believed to have survival and security interests that ordinary male citizens were expected to defend with their lives, and in which all obeyed authority figures regardless of how stupid these were -- unto death.(p.165)

Mann has a point. The culture of militarism a century ago was strongest in the Central Powers like Germany, Austria, and Russia, and "these old regimes decided to stick with what they knew well: militarism" with its culture of "honor, glory, status, credibility, and shame[.]"

So Mann thinks that the politicians of the time were idiots still marinated in the old culture of war and diplomacy, a world of states perpetually threatened by the aggressive neighbor, and ruled by men who were steeled in the warrior culture needed to keep a people safe from harm in a dangerous world.

But really, is it sensible to imagine that the old warrior culture, that went all the way back to hunter-gatherers protecting their tribal patch of land from the dawn raids of the neighboring tribes, would end without a staggering demonstration of its futility?

My line is that the modern world of production, manufacturing and exchange is a stunning revolution that completely changes the nature and the rules of human social cooperation and competition. Is it reasonable to expect that all the rulers would go to capitalism school and learn the new culture and thus reject the old ways of martial honor and glory? That old culture was absolutely necessary for community survival all the way down to the day before yesterday. And that culture was a superstructure built upon the economic base of growing food. You had to occupy -- and thus defend -- a patch of land that was able to grow the food to feed your people. Otherwise you were out of luck, pal.

Let us think, contra Mann, of the recent history of the world as a normal and inevitable catalog of errors, that visited enough disaster upon humans to persuade them to become sadder and wiser. First the old dynastic regimes and their warrior culture went down in the folly of World War I. Then the folly of race and Lebensraum (i.e. patch of land) won by military expansion and conquest went down to utter defeat in World War II. Then the reactionary dream of a socialist empire went down to double defeat for socialist Russia and socialist China in the Cold War era. Then the globalist dream of teaching the natives democracy went down in the Bush Middle East wars. God knows what follies will go down to humiliating defeat in the next few decades.

But the point is that this history of horror is not a scandal. Of course things would work out in a succession of disasters. That is the way of the world. Humans do not give up on their projects after a minor setback. Almost all people start projects, whether families or businesses or wars, "breez[ing] confidence of victory[.]"  But, Mann asks in the case of war, "how can this be when there are always at least as many losers as winners?" Because, dear sir, all living things conduct their affairs with a breezy confidence of a happy ending, from the tree growing precariously out of a crack in a rock to marcher lord Harry Percy predicting victory over King Henry IV to the CEO of a tech startup expecting to create the next Big Thing on the internet. Breezy confidence is the way of the world.

Now, I would say that the old culture of "militarism" and "imperialism" is pretty well and truly buried in the cold ground. Nobody thinks of national martial glory or the loot and plunder of empire. The disasters of the last century have taught us to say goodbye to all that.

Instead there is a new spectre haunting the world, the spectre of "activism." In the old days young men were indoctrinated in the warrior culture of militarism, of honor and glory, of war and diplomacy as natural and physical, and the necessity of every political entity holding up its head in the dog-eat-dog world of international rivalries and power. But now young men and women are all carefully taught the culture of "activism," the idea that politics can solve the problems of the world, that a campaign of activists, utilizing the protocols of legal process and the peaceful protest, can direct the arc of history towards justice and peace.

People like me believe that this culture of "activism" is a tragic error, a mindless reaction against the new culture of global enterprise, because government is force, and politics is division, and government systems are domination, and there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. People like me believe that there are only a few things that can be achieved by government force and the political division of us versus them, and that if you try to bulk up government to deliver "justice" you will be sadly disappointed.

But millions of young men and women are taught the faith of "activism" in our schools and universities, and develop a vocation to "do something in activism." That is the meaning of the left, from the social insurance government programs of 19th century socialism to the political correctness and "intersectionalism" of today. It is a tragic error because as soon as you start using government power to right the injustices of the past you begin to create new injustices with your rage for justice and your deployment of government force.

The one thing that is obvious as we look at our liberal friends is that they have not even begun to doubt their progressive faith and their practice of "activism." If anything the election of Donald Trump, like any Big Push in World War I, has intensified their determination to push forward with their agenda of politics, politics, politics. Obviously nothing less that utter defeat and humiliation will change their minds.

So that means that we can look to a future punctuated by horrible "wars of activism," and the only thing that will get us through to green and pleasant uplands warmed by the sunshine of a post-"activist" world will be humiliating and demoralizing defeat for the forces of "activism."

The big problem that I see, and the source of enormous suffering for ordinary people, is the problem that no government in this world dares to reduce spending, because hell hath no fury like a government program beneficiary facing a reduction in her benefits. If you look back over the last century the only way that spending gets reduced is in the magic show of "devaluation" or the tornado of hyperinflation. No legislature worth its salt will come up with a program to reduce "entitlements." The Liberals in Canada tried that in the 1990s and were shut out of power for almost two decades. The Social Democrats in Germany tried it, by loosening up labor market regulations in the mid 2000s. They lost the next election and are now reduced to a shadow of their former selves. So much for a frank discussion of the issues. The way things really get decided is the Greek way, reducing spending under the knout of the EU, or the meltdown of Venezuela, which could not bring itself to reduce spending when the oil price collapsed in the fracking boom.

And indeed, fixing things by modest adjustments to entitlements and government spending is not going to invalidate the elite culture of "activism" any more than the industrial revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie and working class in the 19th century taught the aristocratic ruling class to mend its ways. (except, of course, Lord Salisbury). The only thing that changes hearts and minds is humiliating defeat and despair.

So I chuckle about lefty Michael Mann and his haughty pronouncements upon the old military elite of 1914 that brought about its own liquidation in the war that was going to be over by Christmas.

Because my question is: what will it take for haughty lefties -- like Michael Mann and every Good Little Girl intersectional feminist tweeting lefty inanities to the world -- to cry "uncle" on their progressive project?

The answer is sobering. Obviously nothing less than utter ruin will change those lefty minds.

Yes, Why Are We Having This Harassment Panic?

Writer Christopher DeGroot is pissed off that the centrist ladies at Quillette dumped him when they found out that he linked to American Greatness and that he "distinguish[ed] between white supremacists and nationalists who happen to be white." They are all cowards, he complains.

He then links to a piece by Claire Berlinski on the current sexual harassment panic in which she writes about her amusement at the Oxford don that grabbed her butt at a party when she was 20. Then she wonders aloud why we are having this sexual harassment panic. Is it because, per uber-liberal Hanna Rosin, men are becoming expendable in the post-industrial economy? Is it because, per Freud, women are castrating men en masse? But here's a plausible reason: "The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump."

I admit, she does have a point. Suppose you are an average college-educated woman that has been taught lefty lies K thru grad. school and believed them. Suppose you believed that the bad old days of the patriarchy were behind us and that America was finally Ready to Elect a Woman President. Supposed you believed the lefty reactionary faith that political power was the royal road to emancipation and liberation. Suppose you believed the lefty Big Lie about women as helpless victims of the patriarchy since the dawn of time.

Well yeah. Then I expect you'd be terrified by the election of Donald Trump. You'd suddenly worry, deep in your collective unconscious, that the world view you had been carefully taught was all wrong. You'd marinate in your Culture of Complaint and tell all your friends that "I can't believe we elected a man like Trump." You'd be all ginned up to destroy any and every man that overplayed his hand in the dance of the sexes. Because if you can't trust the voters to elect the First Woman President who can you trust?

But your real problem would be that you have been taught and believed in a lie. Because everything taught by the left is a lie, including "and" and "the." It is not true that women can be an "independent woman," per Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Women need protection, for a bunch of reasons. It is not true that women can be like men where sex is concerned, per the sexual revolution. It is not true that women can blithely destroy their in-utero babies without the guilt pursuing them for the rest of their lives, and above all it is not true that beneficial legislation can do anything for women except make them the subordinate slaves of the state.

What feminists call the patriarchy is merely the bald fact that women need protection from sexual predation, and I dare say that down the ages well-born women have been better protected than lower-class women. What feminists call the patriarchy is merely the eternal fact that women need support when they are bearing and raising children, and they always will. What feminists call the patriarchy is simply that men are more programmed for taking risks than women, so women in the current work-force tend to choose jobs in well-established companies, and singularly avoid tech startups.

But the worst thing of all is that the feminist Good Little Girls have adopted the leftist faith in politics, the faith that life is a dog-eat-dog battle and that without political power you go to the back of the line.

Wrong! In the first place, humans are called social animals for a reason. We make our way in the world by suspending the war of all against all within our communities. No really!

Then there is the modern miracle. The last two hundred years has seen an astonishing transformation in life, and foremost among the changes is that instead of a strictly hierarchical society where you nestled up as a helpless victim to some powerful patron for protection from rapists, looters, and plunderers, today you can go forth into the world of the market economy, and in the market economy force does not rule. Instead trust rules.

By the way. Back in the bad old days when people needed powerful patrons, they had this cozy cultural thing called the droit de seigneur. If you don't already know what that means you better not ask.

Do you see how important trust is for a woman in the public square? It means that Claire Berlinski can laugh off the Oxford don that grabbed her butt at a party, because she trusts that she can make him behave. It means that a starlet that gets the Weinstein treatment heads out and never comes back, because to submit to the Harvey treatment after the first time means to accept the role of subordinate slave to his slavering revoltingness.

Oh yes, you can have your laws to punish harassers, and sometimes it comes to that: the heavy-handed application of the criminal law in order to keep lawless men in check.

But the real secret of our present prosperity and our present freedom is the simple application of the TIT FOR TAT rule from the Prisoner's Dilemma. You trust people that establish a track record of trustworthiness with you and you continue to transact with them; you dump the untrustworthy right now and forever. Otherwise you are a subordinate slave.

That White House "Celebration" of Tax Cut Passage

Look, I'm a Trump enthusiast, mostly because I think we need a genuine saboteur and wrecker at the helm of the federal government right now.

But I realize that you can't believe nuttin' that you see and hear on TV and the web, whether it's the crazed lefties at The Nation, the educated elite at The New York Times, the tame regime operatives at NPR, the NeverTrump folks in old conservative media, the middle-America mouthpieces on FoxNews, or the BannonBots on Breitbart, or whether it's a politician with an ax to grind.

So I am always looking for the message coming through in spite of all the spinmeisters.

So when I watched the Trump-led celebration of the passage of the tax cut bill at the White House yesterday, December 20, 2017, it was obvious that everybody was pretty happy. And, of course, Trump called out all the major players, the leaders and the committee chairmen that were part of the action.

It was also clear that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) was there as a mascot, to show that Trump cares about black people too. On the other hand, Scott was there to recite that the tax bill also delivered for blacks. Somebody had to do it.

But what came through loud and clear to me is that Trump has been working with congressional leaders to get this thing passed. Who knew? I thought that Trump was a complete insult machine that had everybody on Capitol Hill as mad as hell. Apparently not. Apparently Trump has been on the phone to them. who knew?

Ii also thought that chaps like Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) went out of their way to lavish praise on the president and the moment.

Oh yes, of course the parade of corporations announcing $1,000 bonuses and investment programs was orchestrated and staged. But why wouldn't they play along? The reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent means that they can spend less time and money on tax avoidance, pushing for tax loopholes and keeping money offshore, and more time and money on doing business. What a concept!

The interesting thing to me is that most Americans think, right now, that they are going to be paying more in taxes. Gosh. I wonder where they got that idea! Surely not from the professional journalists doing their job in the national media! So it will be interesting to see what happens when Americans actually start seeing larger paychecks when the new tax-withholding tables take effect in February. Hey, maybe they won't even notice for a month or two, since most paychecks are paid electronically.

The bottom line is that the White House celebration showed a bunch of politicians patting themselves on the back for working together and getting something done. I get the feeling that the process brought the president and the congressional leaders together.

I say that we could do with a little more where that came from.

But now, let's get interest rates back to normal and let's start getting the bubble fodder out of the mortgage subsidies, so we can prick the next bubble early and often.

OK, Mr President. Now Stop the Next Bubble

After the usual Keystone Kops shuffle, with the Senate parliamentarian nixing a couple items in the House Bill, the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act heads to the president for signature.

Right here, right now, Mr. President, there are two things to do.

1. Get interest rates back to normal. After the Crash of 2008 we have had ten(!) years of low interest rates. And no wonder, for the economy took a while to recover from the credit meltdown. But now we have sensible supply-side policy in place, instead of stupid subsidize-and-regulate. My guess is that the invigoration in economic growth -- already forecast to hit 4% annually in the current quarter -- means that we need to get in front of the business cycle, and increase interest rates now so that we don't have to play catch-up as usual to kill an overheating bubble economy. This time there is going to be an unusual factor, the repatriation of perhaps trillions of dollars in profits of US corporations, that I expect is going to unleash a huge credit boom in the US. Please, Mr. President, get the word out to the Federal Reserve Board that you will give them cover as they bring interest rates back to normal and maybe pitch them up 0.5-1 percent above normal to cool the over-excitement. Oh, and yes, the spending on interest on the National Debt will go from $314 billion a year in FY 2018 to $900 billion and very likely more. You can check out what will happen on my Interest Analysis page at usgovernmentspending.com. But I am sure that your chaps at the Treasury are already eager users of the Interest Analysis page.

2. Start increasing the down-payments on home mortgages. The main cause of the Great Recession was the violation of Walter Bagehot's dicta in Lombard Street about credit. First, all credit should be properly collateralized, meaning that if a loan is terminated, the value of the collateral is sufficient to pay the balance of the loan. Second, borrowers should be able to pay their payments. In the 2000s, as a result of US government policy, people got 100 percent loans, meaning that in any downturn they went underwater and couldn't liquidate their mortgage without somebody getting a haircut, and sub-prime borrowers got about half of the loans, meaning that in a downturn a ton of borrowers would not be able to make their payments. Hello! The whole policy of subsidizing home mortgages has been a disaster, because quite simply the easier you make it for people to get mortgages the higher house prices will go and the more difficult it becomes for young people to buy their first home. And the bigger the financial panic when the music stops, housing prices crater, and the sub-prime borrowers go to the wall.

I don't know whether this policy is possible, or if you care about it, Mr. President. And if you pursue it the Democrats will be all over you as a pal of The Rich, because high interest rates, and a racist sexist homophobe, because sub-prime minority home-buyers. So you will never get the credit you deserve.

But there is such a thing as doing the right thing.

How Come All Those GOPe Senators are Voting For the Tax Bill

If there has been one constant in the first year of the Trump presidency it is that there are quite a few GOP senators eager to announce to the world their independence from the hated Trump. Your McCains, your Flakes, your Corkers have all been a thorn in the side of the Trump agenda.

But now it looks like they are all voting for the Trump tax package. What gives?

I admit that the settled science on this is not very helpful. The book on this was written by James Buchanan and Gordon Turlock, an American and a Brit, in The Calculus of Consent. Their line was that, in any legislative initiative, the folks in favor of the proposal would expect a material benefit for their constituents, and those against would expect a material cost for their constituents.

So if the proponents lacked a majority of representatives for passage they would have to buy votes from the waverers, putting sweeteners in the proposal to get to 51 percent and passage.

So what is the game that the GOP waverers are playing on the tax bill? I will tell you.

There is an additional factor that is not covered in The Calculus of Consent. It is this. If you are a GOP senator you need to show to the world that you are a big enough and powerful enough that the president and the congressional leaders will need to give you your own special Christmas ornament on the bill's Christmas tree. For if you are not big enough to get your own special deal, what are you? Chopped liver?

So now, miraculously, all the guys that were causing trouble and saying that they would not support the tax bill are now all in favor. And it looks like the final tax bill will pass in the House and in the Senate if they can drag ailing senators like McCain (R-AZ) and Cochran (R-MS) into the Senate to vote for final passage.

So nothing has changed since the times of the good old barons of old, who would sulk in their castles until the king showed them some respect and ransomed home their captives, or not.

The signal finding of The Calculus of Consent was that the only just form of voting was unanimous consent. That way the proponents of a measure would have to pay the costs to be borne by the opponents of the measure. The example they used was a new county road. The proponents would believe that the road would benefit them; the opponents would be opposed to paying for something that would not benefit them. So unanimous consent would have to pay the opponents or give them a benefit in lieu.

Either way, you can see that the whole procedure is still robbery, the same as a gang of robbers -- with the addition of impunity, according to St. Augustine.

Look, it is tremendous fun to have stick it to people you don't like and make them pay for your stuff. That is the whole principle of the left. I can understand that, as per Conan the Barbarian, the best thing in life is "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" Yay! And he got it from Genghis Khan.

But I think we are coming to a point in history when it is time to put away childish things, and say that nearly everything should be done, not by force, but by cooperation and consent.

But I don't see my liberal friends being within a country mile of understanding this, nor women in general. Yes, women are in favor of big government, per this. Which means that women are in favor of forcing other people to pay for their stuff.

And you thought women were all sweetness and light.

Like I say, government is force, and politics is division, and system is domination.

Oh, and there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

And you have to give each GOP senator their own special goodie in order to get their vote for a tax bill.

The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination

For a while now I've been writing that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." And the justification I would come up with that, once your rebellion against injustice succeeds and you wield the levers of political power, then you get to impose, by force, what your tormentors used to do to you. And you have the nerve to call it justice.

Imagine my shock and surprise when I found that the philosopher Schopenhauer agrees with me! He argues in The World as Will and Idea under §62 that right is merely the absence of a wrong.

[T]he concept of wrong is the original and positive, and the concept of right, which is opposed to it, is the derivative and negative; for we must keep to the concepts and not to the words.

So that's all right.

Thus energized, let us think a bit about the wrongs, the injustices forced upon us by our left-liberal ruling class in the name of justice.

The first two are obviously the negative and the derivative of my Perfect Plan.

The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture, instead of leading them to the Promised Land of middle-class responsibility, and this is unjust. This has obviously been really cool for liberals, because they have acted as the patrons and the champions of the working class and marginalized minorities, and reaped the political power of giving people free stuff. But it has not been so good for their clients: the working class that right now is dying of despair, and the blacks that are alienated from the rest of society and encouraged to be racists and maintain a separate culture from the rest of America.

The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class, especially with its experimental and creative intersectional sexual culture that it forces upon everyone, instead of allowing the middle class its own space for Christianity, marriage, family, and individual responsibility.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked education. Government compulsory K-12 education has worked well for the children of the educated and for the folks with lifetime tenure as employees and administrators of the government education system. But the government education system has always operated as the agent of the ruling class, implementing its latest power project. First it was to marginalize the Catholic Irish; then it was to prepare children to be good obedient factory and office workers. You could see that this agenda a rough kind of sense to it, making the children of the immigrants and the working class numerate and literate whether they liked it or not. But in recent years the education system has veered towards educating children as little liberals. The result has been utter mayhem in schools in minority-dominated inner cities. And that is to say nothing of higher education, with which liberals have made debt slaves out of university students.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care. Back in the day, ordinary people got health care from the "lodge doctor" at their mutual aid association: the Masons, the Elks, or their union. Young doctors just out of medical school would work almost for free serving the lodge members while they were starting their careers. But now health care is crony capitalized, as the health care professionals insist on their pound of flesh every time the politicians offer new free stuff to the voters.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement. The Social Security system is not a pension system, but an income transfer system that takes money from young workers with families and pays their well-to-do parents. It is generational injustice, where the beneficiaries get to determine how much the kids have to pay. And worst of all it denies workers without family wealth the chance to build wealth that can be then used partly as retirement income and partly as wealth to transfer to the kids.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity. Back in the old days, before the welfare state, the poor really were starving and dying. But in those days the only effective charity was voluntary charity from charitable women and organizations. Today the hunger problem has been solved, and welfare excuses the poor from work and marriage. This is a vile injustice, both on the welfare recipients that do not take responsibility for their own lives, and on the ordinary middle class people that pay for government officials to buy the votes of the poor with the middle-class's money.

Aside from these six injustices, I'd say that the Liberal Domination has been going swimmingly.

Pervnado Meets OxyContin

What do the current enthusiasms about sexual harassment in the workplace and college campi and the opioid crisis have in common?

In regard to the Pervnado of mostly liberal icons having their wicked way with innocent Good Little Girls, you can easily miss the point, as Suzanne Fields does when she writes that

Nobody wants to return to the artificial morality of the 1950s, when women were denied the freedom to be their sexual selves and harassment was often accepted as the way of life for men in power and left women powerless.

Hmm. What exactly does it mean to say "women were denied the freedom to be their sexual selves?" And really, did women in offices suffer sexual harassment in those days, or was it only on Hollywood's casting couch and in Mad Men's fictional advertising agency?

I'd say that "the rules" right now are that women are free to use their "women's wiles" including their sexual power but they are also able to turn around and change their minds. That is what the whole game of "microaggressions" and "safe spaces" is all about. The fact is that women expect to be protected. Women may demand the right to be "intersectional feminists" and be gender queer black women bisexuals, but if something goes wrong they are going to expect "justice." If there are not enough women in the executive suite then women expect the rules to be changed to help and protect them.

One way or another -- sexual revolution, women in the workplace, or whatever -- women expect to be able to strut their stuff and also get protection. It's coded in the genes. The question is, half a century after the sexual revolution with its promise of pregnancy-free sex, what does it mean for women to be their sexual selves and be protected from the preverts of Gen. Jack D. Ripper's memorable obsession?

My guess is that feminists are going to be no help at all, so it is going to be up to female normals to reestablish some sort of sexual code. I have an idea that it will mean something like the old code that, when a man proposed to a woman, he was on the hook unless and until she broke it off.

But I tell you, politics and politicians and gender activists are not going to be the ones to lead us to the Promised Land. It has to be a cultural thing outside the arena of politics and government. Because politics is division and government is force.

Then there is the opioid crisis, with the white working class dying of despair. One of the chroniclers of the problem, Angus Deaton, proposes a new "social contract."

That is, the basic positive relationship between people and society, starting with a good job that pays good wages. That’s how one gets going on the American Dream.

But that is what got us into the mess in the first place. Educated elitists, activists and politicians created the welfare state and work-place rules that taught the American people to believe that all they had to do was to get a good job with benefits and then they could repose upon their benefice for the rest of their days and get a defined-benefit pension to boot.

Sound really copacetic, right? Except that some people used political power to deal themselves a better deal that the market really justified, as in unions, and dealt themselves defined pensions in an unknown future, and the economy and the world changed. Right now we have government employees using their union power to deliver princely pensions. Only it is bankrupting state and local government, particularly in liberal states like Connecticut and California.

If you guarantee somebody something, then somebody else has to pick up the risk proposition. In a political system it means that the powerful get to decide who gets the goodies and who pays the price. There is only one just way to proceed. Everyone must be subject to market changes and accept that it might move against them and force them to look for another job. You wanna pension? Then save your money. You want medical care when your body starts to give out in your fifties? Then go out and get health insurance now. Yeah, we will look after you, pal, if you make all the wrong decisions, but you won't much like it. The wonderful thing about human society is that we can take care of each other. The horrible thing about human society is that most of us, including me, freeload off the rest of society, in ways we often don't appreciate.

But the one thing to avoid is a comprehensive and mandatory government program to take care of us. Because at the latest in 50 years, you will be suffering with an expensive, inefficient system that is being scammed fifty ways from Sunday, and that is impossible to reform because of the fierce opposition of the scammers and other dogs-in-a-manger.

Yeah, we all want our cake and to eat it too. And that applies to every area of human life, but in particular to sex and work. The challenge, and it is eternal, is to limit the power and the looting of the freeloaders and the folks that want to get their money back when the cards go against them.