The Two Heads of the Forces of Lefty Reaction

A while back I introduced the idea of the Double Revolution of the modern era. In my view this is a revolution in physics, from the mechanical model of the Newtonian era to the uncertainty model of the quantum era, and a revolution in economics from the mechanical supervisory model of the feudal era to the emergent price-driven economy of the post-industrial revolution.

And I said that, inevitably, there arose a reactionary movement opposing the Double Revolution, what we call the left. I called out the communist-socialist reaction as the example of this.

But this morning I was re-reading Jonathan Haidt on the current political divisions, his "Age of Outrage" in which he worries about the outrage culture on campus, and I clarified my thinking.

The reaction against the economic part of the Double Revolution comes in two flavors. The first is what I call "activism," a faith in politics as a form of salvation. This reactionary movement is best seen as neo-tribalism, as it uses the unconscious drives of the tribe against the threat of the Other to motivate and to inspire. The second is the hierarchical practice of the administrative state, the rule by educated expert and administrative bureaucracy which has precipitated into the modern welfare state. I consider this part of the reactionary movement to be a neo-feudalism.

There is nothing scandalous, nothing monstrous about this movement of reaction. It is what you would expect to happen in response to the utterly transformative Double Revolution in its economic manifestation. This is confirmed by the developmental psychologists and their epigones like the New Age philosopher Ken Wilber. When people are frightened and disoriented by trials and setbacks while living the higher levels of consciousness they turn to the tried and true of the old, lower, levels of consciousness.  That is why Hitler was able to appeal to the German people, the most advanced country in the world but frightened by the post-World War I convulsions and failures, with a program of blood and soil.

Yes, of course the reactionary movement of "activism" appeals to tribalism. We are, as Jonathan Haidt writes, profoundly tribal.

We are exquisitely designed and adapted by evolution for life in small societies with intense, animistic religion and violent intergroup conflict over territory. We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds.

Anyone that wants to bring humans together in any enterprise or project is going to appeal to their tribalism, for good or ill. The problem with tribalism is that it is designed to raise consciousness for the inevitable conflict with the neighboring tribe, for death or glory, and this is very seldom required in the modern economy and society where the fundamental requirement is for people to submit to the notion that they are obtaining their livelihood by serving others, not fighting others. The fight, if there is one, is between different businesses to see which one will win in the fight to serve the consumer.

The problem is that over the last 150 years the left has marched through the institutions and taught every Good Little Boy and Good Little Girl that "activism" is the highest way of life, so even though almost every Good Little Boy and Good Little Girl is really not cut out to be a Social Justice Warrior, everyone of them has a yearning to "get into activism."

I wrote a week or so ago in "Militarism vs. Activism: Ruling Class Culture Then and Now" that I thought that "activism" was just as harmful a culture as the "militarism" culture that led the leaders of 1914 into World War I. Too many people now are instinctive "activists" and don't really understand the awful consequences, just as too many people in 1914 were instinctive "militarists" and really did not understand the consequences.

Somehow, some way, some day we are going to have to lance the boil of modern "activism."

The other reactionary movement is the neo-feudalism of the welfare state and the administrative state. It is telling that in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels prophesied that capitalism would rehearse the subjection of peasant to lord with the subjection of proletarian to bourgeois capitalist. Only that is not what happened, because subordinate peasants and serfs were not particularly useful to the capitalists. They found that they needed responsible, resourceful employees not dumb-as-dirt peasants and slaves.

I am trying to think of a single word to describe the neo-feudalism movement, but it hasn't come yet. Serfism, subordinism, administratism, expertism, manorialism, patronism? I can't figure it out yet, but I will.

While the "activism" culture organizes humans into a permanent war of all against all, just like the old "militarism" of the dynastic monarchs and the tribalism of the hunter-gatherers, the neo-feudalism puts people into a permanent subjection to an administrative system that has significant powers over their lives but is usually unable to adjust to changing conditions. In other words, it promises security and safety but in fact cannot deliver them, because security and safety can only be delivered by reacting to dangers and threats, and the bureaucratic welfare state cannot do that, not until it is too late.

It is remarkable, but the model for how things ought to be in society are present daily in the life of the human body. Some of the larger, cruder things are directed by the brain and the central nervous system, but the moment-to-moment, day-to-day life of the body is conducted cell by cell in exquisite instinctive individual responses by each individual cell to the overall needs of the body according to chemical codes and operations that we barely understand.

That is what the modern economy and society asks of us: to respond to the prompts of prices of goods and the needs of other people that we can serve, each of us individually and without the clunking fist of some political or economic overlord telling us what to do and when, or the rage of tribalism inspiring us to fight to the last man against the hated Other.

Politics of the Three Peoples: The Trump Gambit

In yesterday's piece, "The Politics of the Three Peoples," I attempted to describe the natural political tastes of the the three kinds of people in the modern era. How the People of the Subordinate Self want a neo-feudal welfare state to take care of them; how the People of the Responsible Self want a minimal state that protects life and liberty and defends a law-based people going about their business; how the People of the Creative Self want to run things, to create a perfect state abounding with compassion and justice, as a witness to their wonderfulness.

But what, you may ask, is the consequence of these Three Peoples with their conflicting ideas about government and justice?

The first, and obvious thing, is that the People of the Subordinate Self and the People of the Creative Self are natural allies. The People of the Subordinate Self want stuff in return for their support of their liege lord, and the People of the Creative Self are glad to give away Other Peoples' Money in return for the support of the People of the Subordinate Self so they can creatively create the perfect state with Hope and Change.

This is clearly demonstrated in my catchphrase that government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters, with the "supporters" as the People of the Subordinate Self, the "inhabitants" the People of the Responsible Self, and the "armed minority" the People of the Creative Self.

The only problem with the happy dance between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self is that it is not a self-regulating system. This is brought out by Ilana Mercer in a recent piece on African politics. There is no regulating system to tell African dictators just how much loot and plunder to reward their supporters is too much, so they tend to loot the place to the bare walls. This is obviously true also in lefty dictatorships like Venezuela. Any country experiencing hyper-inflation has a ruling class that has seriously screwed up its sums: the amount of loot that can be consistently extracted from the populace to give to its supporters. In countries like the United States we merely have an obvious prediction that things cannot go on as they have forever: the entitlements will run out of Other Peoples' Money at some point, but not yet.

The dance between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self is a big problem for the People of the Responsible Self. We really do not want to play the game of taxing the inhabitants to reward our supporters. We think that such a philosophy of politics is stupid. The world is much too complicated to reduce it to a matter of loot and plunder. We do not really want to live at the expense of our fellow citizens and we do not thrill to the orgasm of ordering our fellow citizens about and putting our hands in their pockets. We do not boil with a rage to be revenged upon corporate profits or greedy bankers, and we do not thrill with the prospect of fundamentally transforming society.

And that is why conservatives have been in retreat for the last century. We do not want to use the state to advance our power project, because we have no power project. We just want to let the exchange economy have its way and keep a sharp eye out for the occasional egregious injustice that might be correctable by beneficial legislation.

That is why Donald Trump is such a phenomenon. He has cut this Gordian Knot by the simple expedient of exploiting the egregious injustice suffered by the white working class in the past generation and linking it to the negative agenda of the libertarian, conservative Right.

The Trump phenomenon is perfectly simple, in retrospect. In their enthusiasm to right the wrongs of the past, our liberal friends determined to help the women and minorities that had been marginalized under the regime of "white privilege." But they forgot to check the possible operation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It turned out that their post Sixties identity politics harmed not the scions of "white privilege"-- people like me -- but the white working class, the sons and daughters of the Irish, the Italians, and Scotch Irish, that in 1900 and through the Great Depression were considered to be the working stiffs of the marginalized working class.

So today the cunning President Trump is standing up for the rights of the white working class by passing a tax bill that lowers federal income tax for the broad middle class, including the white working class, and puts a cat among the international pigeons by lowering the rate on the corporate income tax below the rate in most First World countries.

Do you see what he has done? He has put himself at the head of the white working class, giving voice to its feeling that it was robbed, but is actually going to help it by reviving the whole economy through reduction of business regulation and taxes. If he can pull it off this ploy he will go down in history as another Ronald Reagan.

So, on my view, the Politics of the Three Peoples plays out with the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self ganging up on the People of the Responsible Self and milking them dry. And so it will continue unless the People of the Responsible Self can find a group that has been lately shafted by the criminal conspiracy between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self and offer that group assistance, as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

See? Life is not that complicated after all.

The Politics of the Three Peoples

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I propose that humans come in three flavors. First there are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, that understand life as subordination to some lord or patron. Then there are the People of the Responsible Self that first emerged in the cities of the Fertile Crescent some 3,000 years ago. Cities require their inhabitants to be independent and responsible rather than waiting around for instructions, and so they are. Then we have the People of the Creative Self, that believe in creating something new in the world. I first developed this notion in "The Dance of the Three Peoples."

Obviously each of these three peoples have different ideas of politics.

Let us begin with the political agenda of the People of the Responsible Self. These people obviously want a minimal state that will provide a law-based framework for them to work and trade in the market economy. So the political program is what developed in the late 18th century during the rise of the bourgeoisie: constitutions, limited powers, defense of trading networks, sound money, government limited to defense and infrastructure and defense of property rights. But this political regime started to break up when the working class obtained political power after the industrial revolution; the working class did not experience themselves as responsible individuals but as a subordinate class of victims. They wanted education for their children, and social insurance for themselves, and they wanted somebody else to organize it for them.

The People of the Subordinate Self experience themselves as victims. They are looking to powerful leaders to protect them from the vicissitudes of the world, both natural and man-made. During the feudal era these people were serfs and peasants, living on land "owned" by some warrior lord. This lord protected his serfs from predators, but the price of this protection was that the lord got to predate on his serfs. In addition, the serfs were expected to serve in their lord's army. Between lord and serf there grew up a culture of expectation. The lord expected the serfs to loyally serve him, work his land, and fight his wars, and in return, with his "grace," he looked after his loyal retainers. It is obvious that this culture has been reborn in the western world in the neo-feudal welfare state, where the people expect benefits because of their status as supporters of their political liege lords. Rather than responsibly provide for their own welfare against a rainy day they submit to a system of welfare organized and administered by their betters.

The People of the Creative Self experience themselves as creators. They might be artist and writer creators; they might be business entrepreneurs creating a tech startup. Or they might be "activists" that want to create a just society through the process of "change" or revolution. These creators in their different realms all want to be the agent of change, with a world-changing book, a world-changing business, or a world-changing political system. 

There is nothing problematic in wanting to make a great movie; you can recruit tons of people willing to finance and work on it, and after it is finished the creative team will disband and coalesce again on another creative project. There is nothing problematic in wanting to creative a great business; the great business creators of the last 200 years have assembled teams of people to help them make great products. When the business was a success, the investors and employees shared in the success; when the business failed they used their experience and their skills to help them in a new venture. But political creativity is problematic. That's because government is force, politics is the art of division, and administrative system is domination. When you create a new political project, by election or revolution, your supporters expect to benefit forever, and rebel and mutiny if their checks fail to arrive. Plus, despite the vision of "change" in the service of justice, the fact is that there no such thing as justice, only injustice. So if your vision of change imagines anything more than the reduction of a few egregious injustices, you are probably changing old injustices for new ones.

So the great problem of the modern age is creative political elites thinking they can design and implement some perfect plan to change society from a state of injustice to a new regime of justice -- for the workers, for women, for minorities, etc. All the great creative political projects of the last century have been disasters: communism, which turns out to be a sort of holy war against the bourgeoisie; the welfare state, which is really a neo-feudalism with the creative class strutting around as modern squires and barons of the bureaucracy;  fascism, which is a desperate populism against the previous failure of the creative class to provide a stable and prosperous society; globalism, which is a kind of monarchical absolutism, with a global elite perpetuating itself in power like a high-class crime family.

You can see that there is no easy solution to the problem of the competing political agendas of the Three Peoples. The People of the Subordinate Self are condemned to disappointment, because they cannot live forever as the serfs, the "little darlings" of some lord. Eventually the lord will discard them. The People of the Responsible Self cannot have their minimal state, because the People of the Subordinate Self want more protection than the minimal state affords. And the People of the Creative Self desperately want a starring role for themselves, forgetting that almost all creative projects end in failure, which is a big problem when the lives of millions of people are at stake.

There is a solution, of course: it is my Perfect Plan. Part One is that we should encourage the People of the Subordinate Self to become responsible, and reward them when they do. Part Two is for the People of the Creative Self to practice compassion and tolerance when it comes to the People of the Responsible Self. 

OK, my Perfect Plan is not really a perfect plan. It is just a couple of really sensible ideas that could help us move forward without descending further into a brawl of all against all.

Civil Rights Vs. the Right to Discriminate

As I understand it, in the dark days before the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, ordinary Americans could discriminate on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation. The government could too, although strictly speaking it was hindered by the Constitution and the post-Civil War Amendments. In the South, of course, Jim Crow laws required that ordinary Southerners discriminate on the basis of race, or the KKK would know the reason why.

Did you know? The main job of the KKK was not to lynch uppity blacks, but to intimidate whites that did not want to get with the Jim Crow program.

So we had an America with anti-Jewish covenants to keep the Jews of upscale WASP neighborhoods and country clubs, you had "Irish Need Not Apply," you had a Davis-Bacon Act to make it difficult for colored labor to compete with white labor, and a Harvard with a Jewish quota, and a South with Jim Crow laws to keep Negroes at the back of the bus, because you couldn't be sure that the bus companies would treat their black passengers like dirt without the sanction of law.

Then we got the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. What did they do? Well, they forbade government from discriminating on the basis of race and sex.

And the Civil Rights Acts also forbade individual Americans from discriminating on the basis of race and sex where a public accommodation was concerned. That is why Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) voted against the bill in the US Senate. As a libertarian he thought that while government should not be allowed to discriminate, a free person should be allowed to do so.

This is all very nice, what what has actually happened?

Well, it is perfectly clear that individuals are forbidden to discriminate on the basis or race or sex or particularly, sexual orientation, as the gay wedding cake issue proves.

But government, under the rubric of "protected classes" is back to its old Jim Crow tricks of discriminating on the basis of race and sex. Actually, its policy is more flexible than that. Today government discriminates on the basis of whatever liberals of the day want it to discriminate.

More than that, government applies considerable pressure on private institutions such as corporations and universities to discriminate in favor of "protected classes" under the notion of "diversity and inclusion." And it teaches little children to grow up and become "social justice warriors" so that they can go out into government and public institutions and implement the discriminatory policies of the ruling class.

That is why I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Injustice is the main product of government, and the more power you give government, the more injustice it will create because, after all, government is force.

But what do we do about it?

Right now, all we do is excoriate liberals left and right for their monstrous injustice and hypocrisy. These supposed Sir Launcelots or Parsifals, white knights of justice, are in fact the evil Sir Mordreds or Klingsors, black knights of injustice, they are bad people imagining they are good people. This is not the worst of the worst, for those are bad people posing as good people -- knowing they are bad. They really are the worst of the worst. In fact, of course, there are no bad people posing as good. The baddies all believe they are good. There are no Iagos in real life.

But what does Schopenhauer say? I am glad you asked. He says that "bad" refers to the individual that wills his own good without willing the "other's" good.

[S]uch a man does not merely assert the will to live as it appears in his own body, but in this assertion goes so far that he denies the will which appears in other individuals. This is shown by the fact that he desires their powers for the service of his own will, and seeks to destroy their existence when they stand in the way of its efforts.

It is interesting to me that the market economy requires every participant to think of others' needs and will, and forces him to balance other peoples' needs and will against his own needs and will. Yet our liberal friends think they have a better idea than the market economy: what is their problem?

You may not want to know what glorious vision of justice would conservatives want to enact when the liberal beast is finally slain and we all get to live in eternal sunlit uplands?

Well, the first thing is that we do not attempt to implement some glorious vision of conservative justice. All we do is attempt to remove the worst injustice, on the notion that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. So my Injustice (Liberal) Removal Act would simply forbid government from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, viewpoint, of any kind, whatever. And it would permit individuals to discriminate how they will. Large institutions would have limited rights to discriminate, but not much. In my world the hounds of hell would descend on the Apples and Googles that humiliated ordinary nerds on the spectrum.

Yes, but what about the poor black inner-city homeboy that nobody wants to hire, what about him? Would he not go to the wall? Actually, no. My point is that the right of the individual to discriminate helps that guy. He cannot compete one-on-one with a nice well-behaved white or Asian kid that wears pants that do not expose his butt crack. But what he can do is lower the asking price for his labor. In other words, on my view, each labor-market entrant gets evaluated solely on his overall value to the employer, not the idea of some lefty deep-state bureaucrat or some gender-studies adjunct professor. And if he gets with the program and abandons his low-rider pants and gets a good bourgeois attitude about treating customers and other employees, why then he becomes more valuable and may push for better terms of employment that might, in time, come to equal the remuneration of the lucky kids that got taught the ways of the market economy culture while still wee bairns.

My principle is simply this. Individuals should be allowed to discriminate, but governments should not be allowed to discriminate.

But what do we do about the miscreants in the deep state that continue to discriminate and invent new excuses for discrimination for which the term "protected class" seems like simple naïvété? I should think that the example of the Communist Manifesto should do the trick: "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels." Yay!

No, we are too soft-hearted for that. Maybe all we will do is suspend their Twitter accounts over the Christmas season, or, for the worst offenders, confiscate their blue checkmarks until after the end of the next Democratic presidency.

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.