Suppose It's the Democrats That are Behind the 8-Ball

One of the stumbling blocks to an undistorted understanding of US politics is the default elite conventional wisdom that Republicans and conservatives are barely legitimate. Thus our liberal friends and their willing accomplices in the media are always just one step away from saying: Now those GOP yahoos have done it! This latest screw-up should finish them!

But now that Trump has won the government shutdown another possibility emerges. It is the Democrats that are the ones in a tight spot.

Take the fabled DACA issue. It has been the focus of the immigration debate for over a year, ever since President Obama issued an illegal edict to suspend deportation of the foreign-born children of illegal aliens. We have been told, again and again, that these young people are veritable American "Dreamers" and their legal uncertainty is monstrous and unjust.

But the situation right now is that Congress has until March to "do something" about the Dreamers; otherwise normal law respecting illegal aliens resumes. It is the Democrats that have raised the Dreamer issue, and it is they that are the targets of Dreamer rage now that the shutdown failed, and it is they that are in a weak position; they must do anything to get their beloved Dreamers safe to shore.

In other words, Democrats have been promising something to the Dreamers and it is starting to look as if the Democrats can't deliver on their promise. Not good. It's the reason why the Republican base has been so angry for the last several years: they elected a Republican Congress and nothing changed. Democrats promised the Dreamers the moon and stars, and they haven't delivered.

Now, in my view, elite liberals have a basic world view that they are the world. They are in charge; their faith is the faith that should guide us; their agenda is the one that matters. For the last 15 months they have been, as the liberal psychologists say, in "denial." It can't be true that the deplorables actually elected Donald Trump! Look under the sofa cushions! There must be some skulduggery there, or at least Russians under the bed.

But in the last couple of months it is starting to look as if Trump is getting his stride. He has won a notable tax-cut victory; he has won a government shutdown fight. And now Democrats are going to be under the gun to ink a deal with Trump that will pacify their left-wing activist base. Remember. On DACA, Trump has the whip hand. He doesn't care if the suspension of actual law-enforcement action on the children of illegal aliens in March expires without Congressional legislation to replace it. It is the Democrats that care.

Democrats are running around chanting "we are the lions, we are the chosen," when it is starting to look as if the opposite is true.

The left has always insisted that its "activism" of the last 200 years is the Voice of the People, and that the left represents the Forgotten Man, the exploited, the marginalized. In reality, a lot of left-wing activism is AstroTurf, well-born youths financed by billionaires that are in fact the running dogs of the ruling class. They are organizing the lower orders in fake grass-roots movements in order to bolster the power of the progressive ruling class.

On this view the unexpected rise of the Tea Party in 2009, the extraordinary emergence of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential nomination process in 2016, the rise of nationalist political parties in Europe, are something like the Jungian "collective unconscious," of something happening politically beneath the level of human consciousness, and beyond the horizon of ruling-class understanding: a sort of hive mind that is responding to an existential peril.

There is a profound change in our western culture a-building, and we ain't seen nothing yet.

Here's another thing that I want to blend into this: the phenomenon of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. Of course, he is in the middle of his 15 minutes of fame because of a stunning interview on BBC Channel 4 with mainstream feminist journalist Cathy Newman. Almost more interesting is his take on the interview, where he marvels that 80 percent of the on-line reaction was anti-Newman. This, he says is almost unheard-of.

Now the thing about Jordan B. Peterson is that he is a Jungian. That means that he views the issue of good and evil through the lens of Jung's persona and Shadow. And he sees the good life for a man as the Hero's Journey, including the journey through the underworld. He says that maybe the point of evil is that it creates a reason to be good. Peterson has also produced a series on the Christian Bible, available on YouTube, which answers Jung's desire to reconcile modern psychology with ancient myth and the Axial Age religions in a unified faith and worldview that would reset Christianity on a new foundation. Then, as Cathy Newman complained, Peterson is having an extraordinary impact on young men in the West. I wonder why. Could his Jungian hero-myth approach be exactly what young men need and want in order to become strong and worthy and good?

But back to the surly bonds of Earth. We are starting to see a veritable Hegelian antithesis:  FBI corruption and collusion with the Clinton campaign that is starting to compete with the ruling-class thesis of Russia collusion in the Trump campaign. Who knows what the synthesis will be? We deplorables would like to see the scandal brought out into the light of day right now, but I am starting to wonder if Trump and the Congressional investigators are smarter than we are. If you were a political pro, you would want the scandals of gross Obama administration malfeasance in the intelligence community to come out when they would have maximum influence on the mid-term elections.

And if that happens, then Ronald Reagan might be right, that you ain't seen nothing yet.

Lefty Activist Groups are Really, Really Angry About #ChuckUp

I think that the only appropriate reaction to the Donald latest #Winning on the failure of the Democrats' ploy to shut down the federal government over the DACA immigration issue is the Instapundit post.

WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE, DONALD? “To pass a tax bill, to stop a shutdown, to see the Schumers driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.” link

That Glenn Reynolds sure has talent.

But it appears that all the lefty activist groups are really, really angry that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) threw in the towel. Of course, conservative activists were livid after the GOP lost the last two (or was it three) government shutdowns.

Look, fellahs: Chuck did what you wanted: he took your pet issue (which does not have broad support among average people) and bet the whole Democratic Party on a government shutdown. Then, presumably, he looked at the polls and decided to break off the battle before his troops suffered a rout.

Let's admit it. Immigration is a huge issue, and it is one on which the ruling class and average people are divided.

The ruling class wants immigration, because it is doing the right thing, because nationalism leads to Hitler, because it's a global economy, because we need to keep US wages from increasing enough to make US products non-competitive, because American women aren't having enough babies, because Democrats understand that they need  to import more Democratic voters to keep it fair.

But the fact is that the immigration wave of the last half century has been pretty rough on below-average American workers, in particular I suspect, African Americans. Also, recently arrived immigrants tend to separate themselves into ethnic ghettoes for a generation or two, which increases the divisions in society.

So immigration is a big issue, and it needs to be resolved in a way that gives the broad majority of the American people what it wants and what it voted for. That is the meaning of democracy: the people get to choose their rulers, and the rulers accommodate the views of the voters as far as possible. The American people in 2016 elected a candidate that promised to "build a wall" to keep illegal aliens south of the border.

In other words, we have come to a point in American history where "something must be done" about immigration. But what?

I will tell you. We apply the Moynihan Rule. Here it is, according to David Frum:

In 1993, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned President Clinton against trying to ram his healthcare proposals through Congress on a party-line vote. "Anything that big and important," Moynihan predicted, "will pass the Senate 70-30 - or not at all."

Let me propose a corollary. If your issue can't get a 70-30 vote in the Senate then it isn't "big and important" enough.

In other words, it is not a good idea to try to cram through an issue like DACA on an ordinary funding bill and then hold up the whole country. DACA is a big thing only for lefty immigration activist groups.

If you want to pass a Big Thing then you must assemble enough bipartisan support that the measure passes 70-30 in the Senate.

Why is that? It's because the point of democracy is that it is not just civil war by other means, but a method of avoiding civil war. That means that democracy should not be winner-takes-all -- hello Obamacare -- but that when you pass legislation you try to sweeten it enough so that the losers do not pick up their dollies and go home in a huff.

On this theory you pass an immigration bill that stops chain migration, that mandates E-verify, that restricts immigration to well-educated people that are not going to form a new underclass, and then, at the last minute, you throw in a few sweeteners like giving residency to "Dreamers," kids brought to the US by their illegal alien parents. Hopefully, that gets you to 70-30 in the Senate.

And, need I remind my liberal friends, Donald Trump was elected on a platform of restricting immigration. To block his mandate by procedural shenanigans is to nullify the votes of the people, to spit in their faces, and to set up a shop of horrors.

So why did we get to this pass, and why are the lefty activist groups besides themselves?

Naturally, I can explain the whole procedure with my critique of lefty "activism culture." You can get the full story here in "A General Theory of Leftist Politics." The point is that the left's activism culture is young well-born kids looking  for an excuse for revolution, and the only excuse for revolution is the injustice experienced by people "outside the system." In 1850 the schtick was to riot for the unfranchised working class. But  pretty soon the bourgeoisie gave the working class the vote, and  the workers were inside the system. So now what? Votes for Women! Civil Rights for blacks! Marriage for gays! And now legalization of illegal aliens. See, once people have the vote and are inside the system then their concerns are naturally and inevitably accounted for in the two-and-fro of elections and legislation. Thus,  if you want to be an activist then you must find a group "outside the system" and be their shining knight fighting against the system for Justice. Otherwise  you are nothing.

Lefty activism culture is a conceit, the conceit of well-born sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie that want to put some relevance into their hum-drum little lives -- starting with the well-born Marx and Engels. It is the fantasy that in this age, which attempts to look after ordinary people and redress their grievances like never before in history, we need the extreme resort to force, to riots in the streets, and the silly rhetoric of Skip Marley:

We are the lions, we are the chosen
We gonna shine out the dark
We are the movement, this generation
You better know who we are, who we are

Yeah, yeah. Except the truth is that after 1850 the dreaded bourgeoisie did not keep the working class  in the dark, but let it into the system where its grievances could be redressed. Ditto African Americans after 1965.

I wonder if it is part of God's plan to use Donald Trump as His instrument to deflate the conceit of the lefty activism culture, and to drive the Schumers before him, and hear the lamentation of the pussy-hat women? 

Stranger things have happened.

Real Critical Theory: How About a Critique of Leftism

In a review of Jordan B. Peterson's interview with Cathy Newman on BBC Channel 4, Uri Harris makes a point that drove home with me.

We need a Critical Theory of leftism, he proposes, on the same principle as the left's Critical Theory of the bourgeoisie. Following Marx, the left has conducted a nearly two-century critique of capitalism's claim to universalism.

Critical Theory draws heavily on Karl Marx’s notion of ideology. Because the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, Marx suggested, they controlled the culture. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie. And importantly, people were unaware that this was the case. In other words, capitalism created a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who controlled society—were made to appear to be universal truths and values, when in fact they were not.

I think that this is an excellent point. It's all very well for the comfortable middle class to think that everyone should be like them, hard-working, responsible, assuming that the market economy that is so good to the bourgeoisie is also good for, e.g., the working class. The argument at the center of Marxism and now identity politics is that the market economy and "middle-class morality" is not good for the traditionally marginalized, and not good for creative types that want to live a live higher and better than mere responsibility and service. The market exploits the working class and constricts the creative class.

So I say, go for it, lefties. Critique capitalism and the middle class all you like.

But there is this. It turned out that the market economy, that Marx said would "immiserate" the working class, did nothing of the kind. The capitalistic economy, in the event, lifted all boats, and lifted the working class into the middle class. So maybe the claim of universal truth was not far off the mark. Nor was the market economy the enemy of traditionally marginalized groups. There is no doubt that white males have done best with the market economy; but everyone else has benefited too. If you wanted to keep blacks and women down you had to write laws to do so, because the market economy doesn't care who you are, it just cares what you can produce. And there is the bottom line to the market economy, the Great Enrichment. Per-capita income in the capitalist countries has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years.

But now let us do a bit of Critical Theory on the left. Let's call it Real Critical Theory, and let us rephrase Uri Harris's words quoted above.

Real Critical Theory turns Karl Marx’s notion of ideology on its head. The problem is no longer the ideological superstructure of the capitalistic productive forces, but the ideological structure of the educated ruling class that not surprisingly privileges the creative pursuits and the power project of the educated class, from the arts to sexual experimentation to identity politics, as the highest and best form of life. Because the educated class controls the arts, the media, and education, we propose that they unjustly control the culture and marginalize all voices that might oppose their agenda. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflects the class interests of the educated class. Increasingly, people are becoming profoundly aware that this is the case. In other words, progressivism creates a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who control the public square of ideas and approved thought—represent their selfish and unjust class interests as universal truths and values, when in fact they are not.

Of course my entire work and world view are intended as a critique of the left's world view and its selfish and unjust power project.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to show how the educated class, the People of the Creative Self, stand in relation to the other main experiential groups in society, the People of the Responsible Self, and the People of the Subordinate Self, and how their whole project is designed to oppress and exploit the People of the Responsible Self.

My critique of the left's activism culture is intended to show the bankruptcy of activism, always searching for a reason to apply political force and "peaceful protest" to a society that really does not enforce injustice and can be easily persuaded to reduce injustice by the ordinary political process of elections and legislation and a peaceful discussion of the issues.

My notion of "little darlings" is intended to publicize the dead end in store for those that are today's beneficiaries of progressive identity politics. Like the white working class, the educated ruling class may loove you today. But the day will come when the ruling class casts you aside, like wounded soldiers have ever been cast aside by armies on the march.

My "left's errors" is a catalog of the errors and the human misery that left-wing and progressive ideas have caused in the last 200 years. 

My Perfect Plan is a solution to the murrain of leftism, for it proposes solutions to the two main evils of leftism. Against the policy of encouraging pre-urban cultural norms in its little darlings -- first the working class and now women and minorities -- I propose that our society should encourage, by all kind and gentle means, the traditionally marginalized to acquire the middle class culture of individual responsibility that is the key to a productive and meaningful life in the exchange economy and the urban society. Against he left's culture war on the middle class I propose a culture of compassion and tolerance in the People of the Creative Self towards the People of the Responsible Self lately anathematized as "deplorables."

And failing all else, there is always my Communism Week, a blow by blow critique of the left and everything it stands for.

The big thing is this. You can criticize capitalism and the mean and narrow-minded bourgeoisie all you like. But the middle-class culture has produced the Great Enrichment, a 3,000 percent increase in real individual income in the last 200 years. The fact is that leftism, communism, socialism, progressivism has failed every time it was tried. Most tragically it was tried and it failed in Russia, in China, and in India, by educated elites that thought that Marx's ideas were the secret ingredient to the west's dominance. Over a hundred million human deaths later, each of these great nations has realized that the opposite is true. Communism, Marxism, socialism, progressivism is the fastest route to national ruin ever devised by a canting intellectual. Hello Venezuela.

The reason that capitalism has worked is this. It extends the truth of social cooperation one step further. In the old days, animals and humans learned that social cooperation is beneficial, indeed, necessary for successful life on Earth, because it reduces the incidence and crippling costs of violence. In both animal and human society this social cooperation was achieved by a status and hierarchy culture that reduced the incidence of costly and destructive violence substituting force with shows of force. But we moderns have discovered another dimension to social cooperation: private property and the price system. These remarkable inventions allow social cooperation to proceed without the cost and pain of hierarchy systems, but simply through the daily fluctuations of prices in the exchange economy that tell everyone what to do, and more particularly, what not to do. It is the most astonishing discovery ever.

And yet our educated ruling class wants to return to the good old days: a neo-tribalism with identity politics, and neo-feudalism with the welfare state.

What is wrong with these people that a Real Critical Theory that exposes their errors and self-satisfied assumptions won't set right?

What Do #MeToo Want?

The eternal plaint of men is "what do women want?" I think the answer is easy. Women want to be protected so that they can do their work of caring.

But in the last half century or so women have entertained a fantasy of something different, the notion of "the independent woman" advocated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Look, everyone does stupid stuff, and imagines things that can never be. So Simone de Beauvoir was a fool. So are we all.

There is no such thing as an "independent woman." Not no how.

But women believe what they have been carefully taught, more so than men, in my sexist imaginings. An example is the BBC interview of BadThinker Jordan B. Peterson by Cathy Newman, where she castigates him for 40 minutes for not having received opinions on women and transgenders as approved by North London luvvies.

Right through the interview, I felt that Cathy Newman never deviated a millimeter from the received left-wing party line on men and women and women in the workplace and transphobia and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I thought to myself, this woman has never read a book. Because if she had, she would deviate, somehow, somewhere, from the narrative. Her natural conceit as a Someone who reads books would lead her willy-nilly to parade that in front the eevil transphobic interviewee Jordan B. Peterson. But she did not. So I assume that she is an idiot that knows nothing: only what she picks up from the lefty mean girls clique at the BBC.

But women are troubled. Because they are Good Little Girls that learn their lessons well they get to college, or into their careers, or into the twenty-something dating scene and it doesn't compute. Or rather, it feels all wrong.

Well, yes, it would, girls. Because what we -- or rather I should say you lefties -- have cooked up is your fantasy of the "independent woman," who maybe does not get married, maybe does not have children, lives as though she were a man battling through life as a sexual and/or economic predator.

But women are not like that, or at least the vast majority of them. And so that is why poor "Grace" feels shame and distress that when she signed up for a date with comic Aziz Ansari and found out that all he wanted was sex, and that he didn't want a relationship etc. So nothing has changed since Monica Lewinsky wanted Bill Clinton to tell her that their dalliances were about something more than sex. Or since Hollywood invented the casting couch.

People-that-don't-read-books like Cathy Newman may believe that the "patriarchy" has kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time, and they may be right. But I rather prefer to learn from the haunting message of A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous about the two months in Berlin in the spring of 1945 when Berlin was occupied by Soviet troops of the Red Army and there were no German men to protect German women from the sexual aggressions of the Red Army soldiers. Or there's the message from The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger. Back then the Vikings would sail up the rivers of Britain every autumn, kill all the men, take all the grain and the women and children and sell the women and children at the main slave market in northwest Europe in Dublin.

Women need to be protected from sexual aggression: indeed they expect it. And a society has failed that fails to protect its women from sexual aggression. And that is why Good Little Girls like "Grace" are feeling betrayed and abandoned that nasty cruel men out there seem to regard them as booty.

Obviously the solution to the current problem is to reassemble a culture from the ruins of bourgeois culture trashed over the last century by the left. In this culture it will be accepted once more that the default answer from women is No. In this culture cads and bounders and the like will once more be marginalized and named and shamed.

But the solution is not to write more laws. The criminal law is a very blunt instrument. Of course it is, because government is force, men with guns. The whole point of humans as social animals is to resolve 99 percent of problems by cultural norms that every young person learns as a child rather than by police action.

So we have to build a new culture around sex. Unfortunately the social and cultural world is dominated right now by lefty never-read-a-book people spouting lefty talking points as though they know what they are talking about. What is needed is for a gentle, thoughtful culture of the middle to arise that gently revises the common culture of America to revive courtship and respect and banish the sexual revolution's assumption that women are just like men when it comes to sex, that there can ever be such a thing as "just sex."

Oh and we need to revise the notion that the highest and best course for a woman's life is a career. No. The center of a woman's life is her relationships, her marriage, her children, her role as the center of social life, and above all her devotion to caring for those nearest and dearest to her.

I like to remind my readers that "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. It's a perfectly sensible way to socialize men away from war and loot and plunder and into the harmless work of business. But women don't need to be run around a racetrack. They are already socialized to the work of daily life, and it is an insult to treat women as though they are aggressive, testosterone infused men.

Honestly, I don't know how we get to the sunlit uplands of the new culture. Because if there is one thing obvious to me it is that the left-wing cultural elite, the present ruling class, are the last people on Earth that should have anything to do with this project.

What I hope for is that a spontaneous movement will arise among women to move towards this sadder, wiser culture. But I do not expect it in my lifetime.

Politics is Not About Issues, But Status

Why have Republicans and conservatives failed to reverse the tide of leftism? The answer is simple, according to Joe Katzman. Politics is not about ideas, or issues, or justice. Politics is about status.

Analysis: Leftism is a status machine. A very, very successful status machine. Conservatives have lost status battle after status battle, often because they fought it as a policy battle. It rarely is.

In other words, if you parrot left-wing talking points you gain status. If you try to argue the merits of an issue, you lose status. But if you are sensible you read The New York Times or any women's magazine. These are all about communicating status clues to the status conscious.

That brings us immediately to Donald Trump. Trump's whole shtick is to humiliate "Chuck and Nancy" and the Fake News media. In other words, his game is to lower their status in the eyes of his supporters and possible supporters.

Status and hierarchy are chemical and go all the way back to lobsters, or rather the common ancestor of humans and lobsters. You could say it is part of the basic equipment of social animals, the reduction of conflict by status and hierarchy negotiation.

So that means that status is upstream of religion is upstream of culture is upstream of politics.

Now do you understand why Donald Trump won the support of the white working class and other deplorables? He proposed to raise their/our status by attacking the status of liberals, lefties, Democrats, and the mainstream media.

Yes, I suppose that's a corollary of the lobster status argument. You may not be able to play the status game yourself, but you sure can vote for a guy that does, or at least support the lobster that has high status.

This forthright argument, put forward by Joe Katzman, helps me understand what I am trying to do with my writing. I want to put everything lefty and liberal in a bad light by insulting it, i.e., reducing its status.

(Hmm. So the male Culture of Insult is really a status game, reducing the other guys status by a sham fight of words. And is Trump good at insults. But, of course, women hate it, because their status game is the woman's Culture of Complaint.)

So when I deploy my catchphrases, from Government is Force, to Politics is Division, to System is Domination, to Identity Politics is Neo-Tribalism, to the Welfare State is Neo-Feudalism, all I am trying to do is to reduce the status of government, politics, and lefties on all the ships at sea, by insulting their ideas and their sacred objects as cheap tricks and second-rate rubbish: false idols.

But to get to the bottom line: is Trump's campaign working? Well, according to Katzman,

American belief in the credibility of their news media is now at about 32 percent. That’s the lowest ever polled, and an 8 percent drop from the lowest point of the 2008-2015 period. The media has lost audience, and a lot of power. 

And even noble Facebook has taken note.

Facebook has tried to fight these trend lines by flagging items as “fake news.” Recently, the social media giant decided to stop. Too many people sought out flagged articles. 

Notice an interesting thing here? Back in the day, liberals were the spunky outsiders speaking truth to the establishment. But now that they own the media, the universities, the schools, the culture, they are the establishment, and so plucky outsiders are now the ones that speak truth to liberals.

And they don't like it.

OK, so why didn't anyone think of this before? Well, they did.

In fairness, Newt Gingrich had some success in the 2012 primaries, and Ted Cruz has also tried. But they lacked the full array of tools. Worse, they didn’t understand how to make the media their enemy.

In other words, they weren't good enough at the game of insult.

And that leads directly back to my catchphrase Politics is Division. The art of politics is to find your enemy, and rally the people behind you to attack the enemy and reduce their status by beating them in an election. Hey, you could use a Rule or two from Saul Alinsky.

Rule 5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Rule 13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." 

Just saying. 

Solving the Immigration Problem

America needs about 1.1 million immigrants a year, experts say, because American women aren't having enough children. Thus we have a labor shortage on the one hand and too many people needing end-of-life entitlements on the other.

However, writes Kay Hymowitz, whereas a century ago America could use millions of unskilled immigrants, today it ain't so.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920.

 Today, she writes,

Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs... Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States.

That's why other countries, like Canada and Australia, have implemented a skills-based immigration system. It is much harder for low-skilled immigrants from sh*thole countries to make it in First World countries than it used to be.

However, I know a Haitian immigrant, a health-care aide, who is raising two boys to go straight into the professional middle class. But she's insulted that Trump calls her homeland a sh*thole.

The problem is, of course, the population problem. What is wrong with American women that they are not having enough children to replace our population?

There is nothing wrong with American women; they have been doing what they were told to do.

American women have been told to get and education and a career.

American women have been told to approach sex the way that men do.

American women have been taught to abort an inconvenient child.

American women have been taught to divorce annoying husbands instead of nagging them into obedience.

American women have been taught to devalue suburban housewifery.

American women have been taught to experiment with lesbianism.

All these things may be wonderful and progressive but you can see that each one of them tends to reduce the number of children born into the world. And each of the items that women have been carefully taught are cultural trends that happen to appeal to the educated class that aspires to a higher, more creative life than mere childbearing and childraising.

Hey, if American women average 2.5 children per lifetime then we could start exporting a few folks as immigrants to other countries and see if they like it.

Actually, I am not totally against immigration. I feel that if a country does not experience a certain influx of foreigners then it gets old and staid. Or it descends into childlessness like the Roman Empire.

And really, civilizations rise and fall all the time. In their youth they are brash and expansionary. In their prime they bestride the world. In their decline they get overrun by barbarians.

I just don't want the barbarian invasion on my watch. Or my children's watch. Or my grandchildren's watch.

We talk grandly about assimilating immigrants even as our liberal friends celebrate diversity and divide the races with identity politics. Anyway, we none of us agree on what immigrants should be assimilating to. The descendants of the 1900 wave of immigration are still significantly different from each other in political and cultural orientation.

Meanwhile there is the underrated influence of the market economy, which has its own culture of service and of getting along with anyone that is trustworthy.

But I tell you what. The stories that are coming out of the #metoo movement show that women really don't want agency; they don't want responsibility. They want to be princesses in a world that just understands their needs and provides them. Hey, they might decide they don't like the meat market of the sexual revolution. They might decide they don't like a life in a cubicle. And so they might start a movement back to hearth and home.

They might even decide that everything that liberals taught them was a lie, including "and" and "the." But I think that women are too trusting for that. Only guys, and few enough of us, understand that everything we are taught is "bullsh*t."

Oh yeah. I wonder what men could do to help get more children on the ground and solve the immigration problem.

Understanding Initiation from the Ancients

I was down in the Bay Area last week and got out alive with my skin and a book from Copperfield's in Petaluma. The book was Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation.

Very good, but the whole book revolved, for me, around the Introduction, where Eliade asserts the basic difference between us and the ancients. Why is it, he asks, that we do not practice "initiation" into adulthood, whereas all the ancients did? The answer:

Modern man's originality... lies precisely in his determination to regard himself as a purely historical being, in his wish to live in a basically desacralized cosmos.

You could say that we moderns orient ourselves by reading history, by gradually building up a knowledge of the world, by the gradual accumulation of innovation and discovery over the decades and the centuries. But ancient man had no history, no libraries of knowledge and sacred books. And yet ancient man needed to know the meaning of life, the universe and everything just as we do.

So ancient man devised the initiation, a process whereby the youth was indoctrinated in all the tribe's knowledge of the world. Ancient peoples do not have a history, but a "sacred history" in which all events are projected back into a primordial time of gods and heroes. Let us put this out in long form:

[T]raditional societies tend to project every new acquisition [of knowledge or history] into the primordial Time, to telescope all events in the same atemporal horizon of the mythical beginnings.

Thus the point of initiation of boys into manhood:

It is to this traditional knowledge that the novices gain access. They receive protracted instruction from their teachers, witness secret ceremonies, undergo a series of ordeals. And it is primarily these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation -- the encounter with the sacred. 

You can see that for a traditional, preliterate society the transmission of the Knowledge to the new generation is a vital task, intimately connected with the survival of the tribe. Indeed, the smaller the tribal unit the more critical is the transmission of knowledge, because if any one young man or woman fails to get the message it may mean the end of the tribe. In our larger societies, this urgency is not so immediate. A significant fraction of a generation can twirl away into folly without bringing the survival of society into question. These fools will just fail to wive and thrive, and drain away into the sand. Or perhaps, occasionally, some one or two of them will discover something transformational, and the new knowledge will be incorporated into the sum of society's understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Of course, the idea that we have abandoned intiation is crazy. We still have initiation, only we call it "school" "university" and "education." That is how we teach the young the Knowledge, the right ways of thought and action, all the right things approved by our ruling class. So nothing has changed. And as for "ordeal," we now have mandatory classes for the young in diversity and inclusion and white privilege.

Naturally, I want to use this information in my quest to understand and demolish the reactionary culture of the left, where I identify identity politics as neo-tribalism and the welfare state as neo-feudalism. It seems to me that the culture of activism, against which I rail with frequency, is a process of initiation, similar to the ancient practice, that teaches the young the left-wing knowledge, and all the correct faith and action in connection with the ancients like Marx and Engels, particularly the faith in the sacred practice, the "ordeal" of "peaceful protest."

Yes, because public protest is not something that people naturally do. The good old "riot" much feared by our bourgeois ancestors was, or tended to be, an instinctive outbreak of madness in response to hard times. But our lefty friends have institutionalized the riot into the sacred observance of the peaceful protest with its very well developed chants, responses, liturgies and processions.

We are, after all, not so very different from our ancestors. Evolution and genetic changes are measured over millennia, according to scientists, and the agricultural age is no more than several thousands of years old, whereas our modern era is no more than hundreds of years old.

And that is why I maintain that our modern lefty reaction is as natural as the birds and the bees. Of course the modern era, with its call to abandon tribe and subordination, has inspired a vast movement of rejection. We are still tribal, feudal, and need to be initiated into the Knowledge in order to take our places as adults.

But for us radicals and revolutionaries that want to introduce our fellow humans, ever so gently, to the new ways and ideas, the lefty reactionaries are a heavy burden to bear.