Great Reaction: The Left's Neo-Tyranny

I am continuing to develop my idea of the left as a Great Reaction, a movement against the radical Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that seeks to return to the good old days of exploitation and oppression.

Because what else can you call a movement that stands against a culture that has increased per-capita income from $1-3 per day in today's dollars to the current $150 per day in the US? Why would anyone argue, except in the details, against a phenomenon that has transformed the world from hunger to abundance?

To me, the key thing about the Great Enrichment is that its cultural carriers, the businessmen and middle class of the modern era, are not that interested in power.

But our lefty friends very definitely are interested in power. And they naturally assume that everybody else is interested in power as well. For them, the transformation from the present hellhole of racism, sexism, and homophobia to the sunny upland of liberation and emancipation can only by midwifed by political power. The result is that, wherever leftism has been tried, in small utopian communities or the campuses of government universities or actual governments, it has implemented old-style tyranny, in the manner of Genghis Khan and other historical notables, where the government rules by intimidation and oppression, and you keep your head down and get with the program if you want to know what is good for you.

So the Great Reaction is a movement of neo-tyranny. It believes that tyranny, top-down political force, is necessary to implement its vision of a better world.

Let us give our lefty friends their due. At first look, it would seem that only overwhelming force would be equal to the task of rooting out oppression, exploitation, othering, slavery, serfdom, marginalization, and subordination in human society. And indeed there is something in every man that is tempted by the Last Temptation of Christ, where Satan tempts Christ with dominion over all the kingdoms of the world, to do evil that good would come.

And I have conceded that in hunter-gatherer society the need for defense of the tribal territory against the neighboring tribes is elemental. Without the means and the will to defend the territory there is no tribe and no community. Every hunter-gatherer tribe must be armed and ready against its neighbors.

And the agricultural community also requires particular protection by armed force, else the Mongols or the Vikings or the pirates of the Spanish Main will descend and rape and pillage.

So it stands to reason that force is needed in the world to protect the innocent from the spoilation of the guilty.

But how much force is needed? And against whom? Who whom: That is the eternal question.

The left is unequivocal. Force is needed, transformative political power, in order to battle against the forces of evil. What's more, it makes sense that as humans have developed greater and greater material powers, using the energy in chemical combustion and perhaps nuclear reactions to multiply the material force of human and animal power, then it would be necessary for the right people to apply extreme preventative force to keep the new powers from bursting their banks and destroying everything in their path like a flood.

The list of potential evils that leftist thinkers and activists have identified, against which they judged political power was necessary and against which they mobilized in ideological war, is long.

First there were the absolute monarchs, the target of the French Revolution. Their unjust rule had to be destroyed and everything associated with it. Of course, in the event the French aristocracy had been defanged by the absolute monarchs centuries before, according to Tocqueville in his Old Regime and the French Revolution. And the regime of Louis XVI was mild and progressive compared to what came after it. Plus, it was broke. Of course, no regime goes out into the good night without encouragement. Nevertheless, the French Revolution unleashed the monsters of the Terror, and several coups and revolutions throughout the 19th century. Maybe the evils of the absolute monarchs were not so deep as to require the neo-tyranny of regicide and the wholesale slaughter of the old aristocracy and the bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

Then there were the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, the target of the Communist Manifesto. It was obvious to any young head full of mush in the 1840s that the rising bourgeoisie and its Dark Satanic Mills were embarked upon a massive power project that would enslave the workers and make feudalism look like a walk in the park. These exploiters had to be stopped before they immiserated the entire working class and the petite bourgeoisie. In the event, the bourgeoisie did not oppress the world, because it was not that interested in power. The great capitalists, whether they liked it or not, were mewed into a system that rewarded them for actions that created products and services for the consumer. And the capitalist market exchange system put such a large premium on trust and faithful performance of promises that the capitalists probably could not have brought themselves to dominate the world with force, even if they had wanted to. Instead, the inventors of machine textiles clothed the world, the inventors of steam power gave ordinary people the means to travel the world. The ones that suffered were those eclipsed by the latest technical and market revolution that marginalized their once proud "buggy-whip" industry. It must be said that the prophesies of Marx and Engels represent the most utterly failed prediction in human history and the followers of their vision have unleashed unimaginable horrors upon ordinary people with deaths in the millions in the mania to stop the exploiters before they strike again with a new technological revolution, some invention to make, say, the smartphone look like the Ford Edsel. Maybe the neo-tyranny of a government-owned economy directed by political activists is not the solution to the hypothetical danger of worker immiseration.

The world is still unwinding the horrors perpetrated upon the human race by the dedicated followers of Marx. But every political elite with half a brain now knows that, whatever its appetite for power, it cannot strut upon the world stage unless it fosters a vibrant market economy at home. But the idea of well-born political activists deciding that all the world's a stage and that the rest of the world is the captive audience for its activist struts and frets, its peaceful protests and its non-negotiable demands against the depredations of the monster du jour, has gone from strength to strength. The notion of a class of helpless victims, not so much of capitalism, but of patriarchy, or racism, or homophobia, cowering in cold fright waiting for the noble band of activists to liberate them into emancipation, has proved to be irresistible to a certain class of well-born youth. But each of these activist movements is a mere neo-tyranny, franchised by noble intentions with the right to dominate and humiliate the objects of their righteous rage.

I stumbled across a piece on discrimination today that belies the lefty assumption that all monsters are evil. Ben Shapiro writes:

Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute is fond of citing a 1934 study about discrimination against Chinese-Americans. The study followed a Chinese couple as they visited hotels and restaurants across the country. They were denied service a grand total of one time. Then, study author Richard LaPiere sent questionnaires to the various establishments asking whether they'd serve a Chinese couple. All but one that responded said no.

You can see that's why the South needed Jim Crow laws to make sure that people discriminated in proper fashion. Otherwise those Southrons might have proved to be way too soft-hearted to administer the tough and necessary agenda of their leaders.

The Great Reaction is a movement primed by the faith that the average human deplorable must be humiliated before he strikes again. And in the service of this witchhunt the movement has dug deep into the arsenal of pre-modern cultures that it likes to stigmatize as ignorant and superstitious. So we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-sacrifice of the environmental movement, and the neo-guilt of the modern Torquemadas.

And behind it all is the great temptation of neo-tyranny, the use of force to force the world to be good.

I don't think so.

Great Reaction: Plus Neo-Guilt

I was describing my concept of the Great Reaction to a friend, the idea that it is not surprising, given the astonishing Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, that a Great Reaction -- the left -- would have emerged to try and return to the good old ways.

There is the neo-tribalism that we experience with identity politics. There is neo-feudalism that we experience in the welfare state.

And then I said that we now have neo-sacrifice, the return to the sacrifice of the scapegoat to propitiate the gods, and also to redirect social conflict at a designated victim.

But then this friend mentioned guilt. Yes indeed. Another notch to the bedpost. Guilt is built into the Christian tradition to make people worry about divine justice. Divine justice is the clever idea that evil people may be able to get away with evil deeds, but God is not mocked. So you better be guilty about your evil deeds and seek absolution, because if you put it off you will find yourself at the Last Judgement facing you know who.

Well, in the secularization of the last century we were going to do away with guilt. Except now we have neo-guilt. Whites are supposed to feel guilt about white privilege. Men are supposed to feel guilt about the patriarchy. We are all supposed to feel guilt about environmental degradation. And now we are supposed to feel guilt about using fossil fuels.

So it turns out that our new masters have decided that we do need guilt after all. And the neo-guilt cannot be absolved by confession or by a personal apology. It can only be assuaged by sacrifice, by abasing oneself before the idol of equality, or diversity and inclusion, or recycling, or using mass transit.

Some day, we may suppose, we humans will assemble a new religion that makes its peace with the astonishing transformation of the last two centuries, and turn away the wrath of the Great Reaction that is attempting to return to the tried and true social culture of the agricultural and the hunter-gatherer age.

There is no doubt that human are tribal; but the question is how to build a society that challenges this tribal level instinct to enable people to live in the larger social units of today. So the left's neo-tribalism is not a solution.

There is no doubt that many people want to live as subordinates, relieved of responsibility for their lives, and push that responsibility onto bosses, patrons, politicians, union leaders. But the modern era needs the dominant culture to accept individual responsibility as a Good Thing; we cannot all live as subordinate victims. So the left's neo-feudalism is not a solution.

There is no doubt that there lives in every one of us a vindictive punisher that wants to sacrifice others at the altar of our rage. But sacrifice as a way to propitiate the gods or the mob goes against our modern culture of law, which is designed to limit the appetite for sacrificial scapegoating.So the left's neo-sacrifice is not a solution.

There is no doubt that every one of us feels guilt about not being the person we should be. But using guilt as a political weapon is a perversion of the purpose of guilt and the social institution of divine judgement, having God decide who is naughty or nice so that human judges don't have to, except in extreme circumstances. So the left's neo-guilt is not a solution.

It's curious how the radical modernizers of the left, that determined to build a perfect society with political power, and drive out all the superstitions of the past, have instead created a Great Reaction that brings all the old superstitions in the back door.

I wonder what that could be telling us.

"Victoria" Series Celebrates Bourgeoisification of British Monarchy

I've been watching Series 2 of the Brit Victoria TV show, starring Jenna Coleman as the young Queen Victoria, and I have to say that my overwhelming takeaway is this.

Queen Victoria and her husband Albert, Prince Consort, are represented, in episode after episode, as celebrating faithful, companionate bourgeois marriage, and that this is a Good Thing.

Over and over, we see the older generation -- from Albert's father, Duke of Coburg, to King Leopold of the Belgians, to King Louis-Philippe of France -- as immoral cynical corrupt immoralists. And the young generation -- Victoria, Albert, Prince Ernest -- as earnest, if human, moral improvers. They exemplify, in other words, the bourgeois ethos, that I suppose we may think to have dominated western Europe culturally in the mid 19th century.

And this is clearly represented on the screen as good and noble, a cleaning of the Augean stables of all the old feudal culture of power and corruption and droit de seigneur.

So, does this mean that the worm has turned and that the Victorian era, excoriated for the last century as stuffy and narrow-minded and bigoted, and patriarchal, is now to experience a re-evaluation and celebration as an era of high moral purpose?

I must say that I hope so. In my view the 19th century was a century of wonders and miracles, starting with the industrial revolution that rescued from starvation the free proletarians that had been "hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers" 200 years previously, as Marx so eloquently put it. You have the phenomenon of young entrepreneurs and adventurers from out of northwest Europe spreading out all over the world. And in the unprecedented Great Enrichment all kinds of flowers bloomed, from the rising working class to the middle class to emancipated women to earnest young aristocrats like Victoria and Albert. To represent the Victorian age as hide-bound and regressive, as our lefty friends like to do, is an epic mischaracterization. And the Victoria production is right there with its show and tell.

It is remarkable, is it not, that "Victorian Age" is made to stand for the whole global phenomenon of the rising bourgeoisie, whether nor not it happened in Britain, or North America, or elsewhere.

Now I, of course, am biased on this, because my two grandfathers were small businessmen at the end of the Victorian era in the years just before World War I: one of them in Russia and one in Japan. And the Great Reaction to the capitalist expansion that we saw in the two World Wars and socialist experiments was not kind to my family.

On the other hand we may perhaps seriously indict these TV programs, from Downton Abbey to Victoria to the constant redos of Pride and Prejudice as shameless nostaglia for an era of hierarchy and manners and camera-friendly sets and clothing.

Here's my take. I think that our modern women are going to be taking a serious look at what the  iconoclasts, the critics of the middle class, have pushed over the last century. The emancipation of women, the normalization of divorce, the sexual revolution, the cult of career, the notion of the "independent woman" have tumbled over one another over the last century in a narrative of women's liberation and emancipation.

But the question remains, as it is bound to do, as to what is the meaning of life for a woman, as compared to men and to humanity in general. We are now far enough down the road to wonder whether easy divorce is a liberation or an enslavement for women, whether the sexual revolution frees women or enslaves them to the male appetite, whether career opens up opportunity for women or warps them to the wage slavery of corporate cubicle-hood. And over all is the question of the protection of women from sexual and other predation.

Here's my take. The idolization of political power promoted by the left is a problem for women and other living things. The justification for political power is that the world is full of pirates and plunderers, and that human communities need protection from aggression.

But the left has taken this common-sense and built an idol to political power, building a faith on the notion that political power can deliver a world free of aggressions, political, economic, social, cultural, and sexual. This, I would argue, is a lie. We know that it is a lie in the political and economic sector, as political regimes and economies inspired by the left's power worship have delivered nothing but death and misery.

Now, I think, we are going to be digesting the next stage in this process, that the use of political power to enforce women's equality is just as cruel and unjust as the use of political power to enforce political and economy equality.

And it seems perfectly natural to me that the first step in this process is a revaluation of the Victorian Era, to discover what has really going on 100-200 years ago and to discover what golden nuggets might be recovered from the tailings of that revolutionary era to benefit us here today.

Now It's the Emerging Republican Majority

I just did a Google search to check the name of the Judis and Teixeira Emerging Democratic Majority, the book that told Democrats back in 2004 that they were going to own the future with minorities, women, the educated and young people.

But a funny thing happened with the auto-complete when I typed in "judis ". It auto-completed to "judis emerging republican majority." OK, now it doesn't. Not any more. Not after I forced it to "emerging democratic majority."

Because now any fool can see that there is a real good chance that Republicans will own the future, by appealing to a middle-middle constituency of the ordinary American middle class: people without fancy educations, but that have worked to rise above the subordinate working class and that have started to identify as Americans rather than hyphenated-Americans. The people I call the People of the Responsible Self.

And that is why all the human props that President Trump called out in his first State of the Union speech were demonstrably middle-middle kinds of people. And they noticed. The parents of the two murdered girls were noticeably affected. One mother observed how moving it was for the president to notice a nobody like her, and how he kissed her on the forehead. Well, yeah. There's one born every minute. The president was using all the folks in the gallery as human props, and they better understand that. But he was also sending a message to all the middle-middle people in America: I care about people like you.

Earth to Democrats. If you are a middle-middle American then for the last decade you have probably been starting to think that the Democrats don't care about people like you. In the olden days, Democrats used to win the "cares about people like me" question hands down. But now Democrats care about people that put out #WeBelieve yardsigns and the identity politics victims. Not the middle-middle people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

Notice that, if you are a liberal then you don't have to follow the rules, you either don't work or your work is special, and your clients don't have to obey the law, as in the homeless and illegal aliens in sanctuary cities and "peaceful protesters." People notice this. Middle-middle people notice this. They noticed it fifty years ago when The Kids were tearing it up in the Sixties. That's why President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew were able to mobilize the Silent Majority into a 60-40 blowout in the 1972 election. In those days, of course, the Democrats owned the Congress, so they were able to kick President Nixon out of office for shenanigans that would be regarded just as boys-will-be-boys when the Obama administration did it. But I don't think today's Republicans will be the pushovers that the 1970s Republicans were.

The astonishing thing about Donald Trump, for me, is that he has run as a populist nationalist, but governed as a conservative libertarian. Nobody could have expected, when Charles Murray published By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission in 2015, that the next president of the United States would spend his first year sending a wrecking crew to dismantle the regulations of the administrative state. That's why Murray's book proposed a kind of guerrilla war on the administrative state. He didn't expect to see a president in the near future that would execute on his anti-administrative state agenda; he thought it would take a bottom-up insurgency dedicated to making life difficult for the bureaucrats that just wanted to get through to their pensions.

But here is the thing. No Republican since Ronald Reagan has been able the play the populist card and also bring the ordinary middle class and the white working class with him. But in Trump the white working class trusts. Strictly speaking, the white working class is supposed to be suspicious of the big corporations. But here Trump has cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. OK, the middle-middle started out thinking that the tax cut wouldn't benefit them, as taught by the mainstream media. But now we seem to be seeing an economic breakout on the corporate front. Corporations seem to think that the future is so bright they gotta wear shades. And the middle-middle is noticing.

Who knew? Well, we green eye-shade guys kinda hoped. Because we muttered to ourselves about marginal tax rates and blah-blah-blah. But we didn't really expect the staggering response of the corporations to the tax rate cut. Yeah. Remember back in 2012 or 2013? Obama said that he would go for a corporate tax rate cut. So he coulda been a contender, and perked up the economy and got Hillary Clinton elected. Much better than siccing the FBI on the opposition.

OK, I know. All this talk of emerging permanent majorities is pure folly, partly because people start to believe it. Sean Trende is right. Party strength tends to fluctuate about the middle, and when parties lose badly they course-correct. And it is rare for a party to win more than two presidential elections in a row.

But I dare say that the Democrats are facing a reappraisal in the next few years, rather like the awful experience from 1972 to 1988 when they lost four out of five presidential elections. I wonder how long it will take them to get the message.

We Have Nationalism Because Humans are Tribal

Today Jonah Goldberg does a piece where he can inveigh both against the left's idea of nationalism and the Trump idea of populist nationalism. Jonah dislikes "nationalism and populism of the Left and the Right, regardless of the brand names they hide behind."

Jonah takes off against liberal Elizabeth Bruenig, who argues against nationalism thusly:

America simply isn’t a nation-state; it was neither conceived to nor can it foster the “organic” nationalism Trumpish conservatives now seem fixated on. Nations are made up of people who claim to share certain unchosen characteristics: language, ethnicity, historic religion, mystical destiny. In America, not only is it the factual case that we do not share such things, but it’s rather the point of our existence as a country — or was, once. Liberal democracies prize freedom and self-determination, so it follows that Americans are made by beliefs and choices, not by blood and tongue. American nationalism can shatter lives and breed violence, but it won’t ever amount to the creation of an American nation. Such a thing does not exist. 

But nationalism has been central to liberalism, according to Jonah, from the original Progressives and their "moral equivalent of war" to the nationalism of the New Deal to President Obama gushing over "Seal Team Six as a model for domestic life."

If we have to have some form of nationalism, Jonah would prefer the "benign nationalism" offered by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.

I would argue, of course, that all these folks are wet behind the ears. Here's how.

Humans are tribal social animals. The reason for this is simple. In the hunter-gatherer era, that only began to end when agriculture was invented in China and/or the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, humans were organized in small tribes that defended their patch of land from all the world. So the humans had the attitude of Seal Team Six, defending the tribe's land to the death. We may say that tribalism is deeply encoded in our DNA.

OK, so then came the agricultural era, gradually displacing hunter-gatherer tribes over the last 5,000 years. There is less need for tribalism, except in the fierce marcher lords that defended the frontiers of agricultural empire. Everyone else could just be a nice subordinate peasant. In Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays we see the last hurrah of England's marcher lords as Harry Percy, marcher lord on the border between England and Scotland, and Worcester, marcher lord on the border between England and Wales, made war against the King of England. The larger political unit of England may make a lot of sense, but your marcher lord still had a lot of tribal leader left in him, and he made a lot of trouble.

The nation state is a solution to the marcher lord problem. In England the nation state began with Henrty VIII disarming the nobles and creating a national army. So now marcher lords were no longer leaders of potential rebel armies; the king was the only guy with an army. Instead the nobles began to "improve" their lands and make more money so they could afford to cut a dash in the court of the capital city.

But if you are not going to have tribes any more, but instead a nation, how do you inspire tribal humans to feel like they belong to the nation state instead of their ancient local loyalties?

The answer is that you create a national myth. This is an ancient practice. In the olden times, described by Mircea Eliade in books like Rites and Symbols of Initiation, you had a tribal history compressed into a sacred story of the founding of the tribe, by founders that were really gods. And the sacred story was taught to the youngsters at puberty in rites of initiation.

In Britain they have a national myth about Britain being an indivisible nation going all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. In France they believe in Charlemagne as the founder. In Germany they believe in Karl der Große, which is German for Charlemagne. The Germans also had the cult of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which creates a history of the Germans as the true heirs of both the Roman Empire and Christianity, which is something of a joke since the Germans were never part of the Roman Empire. All these nationalisms are really remarkably ingenious efforts to create a tribal myth, a cult of the nation, using the concepts and tropes used back in tribal times when humans really were organized into real tribes where everyone was related by blood. In all these myths, the notion is developed that we are all descended from the same stock going back into the mists of time. Even though we aren't.

Now let us invoke the shade of Enoch Powell, the notorious British politician that first raised the spectre of immigration in his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968. He was basically saying that immigration would dissolve the notion of Britain as a nation state with its special sacred history, and that could lead to civil war. Although Powell was branded as a racist and a bigot, he was in fact a classical scholar that rose from private to brigadier in World War II working in military intelligence, and then became a Conservative member of Parliament.

Powell also said that the European Union could never work because there was no such thing as a European demos or people that thought of themselves as Europeans.

Actually Powell was not quite right on that. In Europe, the educated elite does think of itself as European. But the average German, or Frenchman, or Brit, does not. The broad mass of the average middle class still identifies with the nation, not the continent. And that is a problem for the European project; it is the reason why Brexit and Marine Le Pen and the AfD exist.

The bottom line is this. Every government, when it wants to embark on some national project, will find that it has to appeal to some sort of collective identity, some sort of notion of the tribe writ large. That is why Jonah Goldberg got to write a critique of our Progressive rulers in Liberal Fascism as semi-fascists wrapping themselves in the American flag when they wanted to unite the nation in World War I and the New Deal and then World War II.

But the leaders do that not because they are fascist villains, but because they have to find a way to unite the people when they want to get them to consent to some great collective project. Thus  the lefty and anti-war Barack Obama discovers the virtues of Seal Team Six, the special forces warriors that winkled out Osama bin Laden.

Now, the ruling class in the US, like the ruling class in Europe, has felt itself in the last few decades rising above the surly bonds of nation into the ethereal heights of globalism. And most educated people go along with this. Thus my liberal neighborhood is plastered with #WeBelieve and Hate has No Home Here yardsigns. That takes care of the educated elite. For the lower orders, the ruling class practices identity politics, which I call neo-tribalism. In other words, the ruling class must use some way of uniting its supporters into a collective identity. If it doesn't want to invoke the notion of the nation, then it has to use something else, and that something else has turned out  to be racist and sexist and gender-non-conforming identity politics, with all opponents branded as racists, sexists, and homophobes. Go figure!

The problem with the ruling class's globalism combined with race and gender identity politics is that it leaves out the ordinary broad middle class, people that are neither educated nor immigrant nor race-identifying. You can see that this could create a bit of a problem if, say, the ruling class wanted to lead the nation to war against some existential threat. What gods to you invoke? What ancestors? What national unity?

Into this hole have stepped Donald Trump and the neo-nationalists in Europe, to the consternation of the globalist educated ruling class and the identity politicians representing racial or gender subcultures. Who are these gate-crashers? Are they fascists, or ethno-nationalists, or populists, or white nationalists, or what?

The answer is: none of these. They are politicians, opportunists. They are trying to create a new approach to the virtual community of the nation. We humans do not live in small enough communities where we can be unified by appeals to actual tribal and kindred loyalties, so we have to be mobilized and unified by a fancy of belonging, to the national flag, to the idea of the nation as family, to the idea of the American people. Really, to anything that stirs the chords of memory, the instincts of the tribe, in modern people.

Donald Trump in his State of the Union Speech on January 30 was trying to birth a new form of unity, the unity of all the ordinary Americans overcoming their private challenges: the guy with a small manufacturing firm hiring and training a black welder, the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans, the families devastated by criminal immigrant gangs, the couple adopting the child of a drug addict. Do you see the genius of this? The fact is that the great majority of Americans are not educated liberals with their #WeBelieve signs advocating climate change and gay marriage. They are not tribal immigrants that have not yet assimilated into the city culture of the exchange economy. They are ordinary people that just want to wive and thrive, get a good job, find a house they can afford and raise a family. And they want to believe that their way of life is good and worthy. President Trump is trying to create a sense of community in these ordinary people, that they are the real "America" and that Trump is trying to "Make America Great Again" for people like them.

I think that the argument over nationalism, from the proposition nation to benign nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, to the awkward elite combination of globalism and identity politics misses the point.

The point is how to unite modern citified people working in the exchange economy into some fancy of a collective identity that makes them feel they belong, as hunter-gatherers once belonged to their little tribe. Our liberal friends don't like Trump's approach for obvious reasons. If the Trump approach  succeeds it puts their globalist/identity politics model on the scrap heap of history.

The question is: do our liberal friends have a better idea? Watching our Democratic friends sitting on their hands as President Trump made a pedal-to-the-metal appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans, honoring their modest, but sincere, achievements, I would say that they are out of ideas, out of gas, and out of joint.

And then there is Jonah Goldberg, who is comfortably against the nationalism of both left and right, although open to some kind of benign nationalism. OK, Jonah, where is your cunning plan to find a better, nobler way to create some sort of cultural myth that people can believe in and unite around? 'Cos yer cain't beat something with nothing.

SOTU: Trump Celebrates Middle America

I understand the rage and the confusion that our liberal friends are feeling this morning. Last night President Trump gave a State of the Union speech that had absolutely no shout-outs to the liberal agenda. Nothing about protecting gays from Christian bakers; nothing about transgender bathrooms, nothing about the innocence of the Dreamers.

I agree with the liberals: what was advertised as a unifying speech was in fact a clever and cunning attempt to divide the American people.

Let us analyze the speech in the light of my reductive Three Peoples theory. Was there a word for People of the Creative Self, artists and writers and activists? No there was not. Was there a word for People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants and victims? No there was not.

Instead the whole speech from beginning to end was a riotous celebration of the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the laws.

If you are a well-born white liberal living in some urban ideopolis, Trump doesn't care about you. If you are a helpless illegal immigrant brought here as a child, Trump doesn't care about you. But if you are an ordinary middle-class American, with a job and a house and a family, then Trump absolutely loooves you.

Oh, and if you are a legal immigrant, that went through the process step by complicated step, then Trump is speaking to you.

Trump's love was made manifest in the call-outs to the human props in the gallery, the tradition that Ronald Reagan started in the 1980s. Everyone of his props, from the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans to the black parents of two girls killed by MS-13 to the couple that adopted the baby of a drug addict to the North Korean defector with the crutches, everyone of these people were and are ordinary middle-class people doing the right thing, and they were, of course, every color of the rainbow. There were no "activists" and no "victims." And, of course, Trump finished with his memorable celebration of the Capitol itself, which stands under a statue, standing atop the Dome, of Freedom.

Wow. I didn't know that. But now I do.

So what Trump was doing was encouraging more Americans to identify as good ordinary Americans doing the right thing, rather than identify as specials, whether special snowflakes or special activists or special victims, which is what you get night and day from the mainstream media and the Hollywood media.

So no wonder the usual suspects were flummoxed last night, and no wonder Joy Reid complained.

Church ... family ... police ... military ... the national anthem ... Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for. #SOTU

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 31, 2018

Well, exactly. The whole point of the Sixties and political correctness and identity politics is to marginalize and eventually eliminate the tropes and the culture of the middle-class nation state. The whole point of what Donald Trump is trying to do is re-valorize the middle-class culture that most non-elite Americans identify with and that "we" want lower-class Americans to aspire to.

And let us now mention my Perfect Plan, which is a set of marching orders for the Ruling Class, people like Joy Reid.

Part One of the Perfect Plan is for Joy Reid to help and encourage the lower-class to rise up into the middle class, on the notion that to live a happy life in a nation state of the exchange economy you need to get with the bourgeois culture or you are going to be miserable. In fact, of course, Joy Reid does the opposite.

Part Two of the Perfect Plan is for elitists like Joy Reid to act with compassion and understanding towards the ordinary middle class, like the folks that the president called out in the gallery. In fact, of course, Joy Reid sneers at people like that as evidenced by her tweet.

See what I mean? President Trump's speech was completely aligned with my Perfect Plan. Strategically he is trying to put the Joy Reids of the world on the back foot, by encouraging all Americans to identify as patriotic responsible middle class Americans, the People of the Responsible Self, and by giving to ordinary middle-class American identity and dignity and respect that the liberal elite is determined to deny it.

The liberal ruling-class strategy is designed to marginalize and demean the ordinary middle class, by celebrating the upper-class creative culture of artists, writers, and activists, and by celebrating the world of the victims. This was brought out by the Democratic response to the SOTU by Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA), who talked about marching and protesting in support of the Dreamers. And about transgenders.

Yeah. Marchin' and protestin'. Not a word about that in Trump's speech.

Here's my bottom line. Trump is obviously making a mega-play for the ordinary middle class, the people we saw in the gallery in the House chamber. Will he succeed in bringing the ordinary middle class, the "working families" that the Democrats talk about, into the Republican tent?

The answer is: We Don't Know. That's why we have elections.

The Great Reaction Also Includes Neo-sacrifice

I've been quietly minding my business developing my ideas of the modern Double Revolution, in physics and in the market economy, and the Great Reaction, in the left's return to the old world, pre-revolution, in reaction to the unbearable force of the Double Revolution.

But this morning I happened on a piece by David Gornoski, who reports on his YouTube interview with Jordan B. Peterson. Gornoski raises the issue of sacrifice, specifically the Christian abolition of sacrifice, the culmination of a process that begins in the Old Testament with the substitution of a ram in the place of Isaac in a sacrifice that Abraham makes to God.

In other words, it used to be that humans would sacrifice their most precious possession, the son or the livestock, in order to propitiate the gods. But now God sacrifices his own Son, so we don't have to.

The concept of innocent sacrifice is developed by René Girard in his concept of the scapegoat. The idea is that human communities avoid the descent into the chaos of the war of all against all by picking out an innocent scapegoat, and in sacrificing that innocent scapegoat they end the war of all against all by collectively turning their rage against the scapegoat.

It is this that Christianity attempts to end, but only tentatively, as we can see in the eruptions of witch-hunts down the ages. It is this that the left has returned to in its scapegoating first of the bourgeoisie in which the rage of of working class is to be resolved, and in the demonization of racists, sexists, and homophobes to resolve the rage of the traditionally marginalized.

Of course I have been writing about this for years, as in "The Left Returns to Sacrifice" back in 2004. I said:

The lefty twentieth century exhibited a return not just to real sacrifice but human sacrifice, the kind that went out when God told Abraham to sacrifice that ram instead of his first-born son.  Wherever left-wing regimes held sway, whether in a socialism-in-one-country version or in a national-socialist-German-worker version, millions of humans were sacrificed to atone for the sins of the world in the most gruesome manner imaginable.

Then, in March of 2016 I wrote that "The White Working Class is the Designated Scapegoat of the Ruling Elites." Yeah, and that was way before Hillary Clinton had spoken about "deplorables." Here is what I said:

Let us turn to René Girard and his Violence and the Sacred. On his theory humans have learned to end escalating violence between factions by sacrificing a victim, a scapegoat. All of the hate and the rage of a divided community is diverted from hating each other and onto the newly selected victim. Somehow, at the civil rights revolution of the Sixties, the white working class got selected as sacrificial victim. Thus the necessity of Archie Bunker, racist, sexist, and bigot, that Norman Lear wanted to teach us all to hate.

Actually, now I think of it, the scapegoating by the left is a tactic to avoid internal violence between factions on the left and directing all their rage on an external scapegoat: the white working class, the patriarchy, racists, sexists, homophobes.

Here's a Google Ngram chart to make the point.

Notice that all these lefty insults took off after the civil rights revolution? Hey kids! Surely 75 percent of the problem of racism and sexism would have been solved by the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And yet there was a mere ripple of "racism" before 1965, and almost nothing about "sexism" and the "patriarchy."

How could this be? Well, I don't know. But it all makes sense if you think of the left as a Great Reaction, and a reactionary return to scapegoating and witch-hunts in a movement of neo-sacrifice.

So, as of right now, we can say that the left represents a Great Reaction characterized by the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

Because that is what the sacrifice of the scapegoat is all about, it is the clarification of all social and tribal rivalries into the fascist dictum of "all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." To make that work, to totalize everything into the state, you have to unite the mob against a sacrificial scapegoat.

Notice how Donald Trump is completely against the Great Reaction. Is he a feminist? No. He is for women, he is for men, he is for everyone. Is he a racist? No, he is for the American nation state, to make America Great Again. And he is removing the stake from the heart of the white working class.

It is obvious, in retrospect, to realize that the astonishing Double Revolution of our era, in physics and in the Great Enrichment, should have provoked a Great Reaction in the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, and the neo-sacrifice of totalitarianism.

The point is that the exchange economy removes the need for bloodthirsty tribalism, because the means of existence no longer depend of the food-growing land that must be protected against all odds, because the need for a great lord to shelter us from the Vikings no longer applies, because the society that interacts through the exchange economy no longer needs to vent its rage on designated scapegoats.

But it takes a while for everyone to learn the new ways and get with the program.

And that is why I propose my Perfect Plan for the ruling class. First, it should gently teach the workers and peasants how to wive and thrive in the market economy and learn its ways. Second, it should treat the ordinary middle class with compassion and understanding rather than contempt and marginalization.