Reds Under the Bed. Again.

The current liberal campaign on Russian Collusion would be all fun and frolic, if it weren't for this.

Back in the day, liberals were absolutely enraged by Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his accusations about Communists in the State Department. Thus "McCarthyism" is to this day almost as important a liberal pejorative as "racism."

Only, of course, there really were Communists in the State Department. Hello Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.

Now we have liberals from coast to coast fainting in the aisles over the issue of Russian Collusion in the late presidential election.

Earth to liberals: of course there was Russian Collusion in the election. That's what Russians do, starting back back in the good old days of the early Bolshevik Revolution. Mainly, of course, the Russians want to sow conflict and distrust in the fields of American politics, so that the US will be less of a global hegemon. I guess they know what they are doing.

Also, any presidential campaign worth its salt is going to have contacts with foreign powers. Moreover, any businessman like Trump with international interests is going to have foreign contacts, and some of them are likely to be unsavory, because the borderland between government and business is not for the neophyte. After all, government is an agent that gets its money by intimidation and force, kinda like the Mob. You need to be really careful dealing with outfits like that; you need to have intermediaries and deniability.

Anyway, there is nothing that has come up thus far that indicates Russian Collusion in the Trump campaign.

But, of course, there is ample evidence of Russian Collusion in the Clinton campaign. The whole point of the Steele Dossier is that Christopher Steele got his information from Russian contacts, and that the whole Steele Dossier was a operation funded by the Democratic Party and/or the Democratic National Committee.

Wow. Think of that. Dirt on Trump obtained from nameless Russian officials. Imagine! No Collusion there, no sir, not no how.

What is stunning to me in this whole Russian Collusion storm and its corollary, the suborning of the Department of Justice and the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign, is that Democratic partisans -- including the Democratic partisans in the media -- cannot see what is in plain sight.

Hello liberals! The Obama administration was spying on the Trump campaign, using the FBI's counterintelligence apparatus to do it.

Hello liberals! When the government spies on the campaign of the opposing party, it is really bad news.

Hello liberals! Remember Watergate? That issued from a burglary of the Democratic National Committee by a bunch of campaign operatives. But at least they were campaign operatives and not actual government employees. When the Nixon people tried to suborn the FBI and the CIA to cover up their misdeeds the FBI and the CIA refused.

Hello liberals! Do you not see the problem? In 1972 the intelligence community refused to assist the Nixon administration in spying on the opposition. Everyone agreed it was the worst thing since sliced bread. In 2016 the FBI was perfectly willing to assist the party in power with spying on the party out of power. Yet today there seems not to be a liberal in the land that is willing to agree that this is really a problem.

I am reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning right now and he is in the middle of explaining the basic human response, that of reacting when you bump into something unexpected. His line is that we run along in our accustomed paths, not paying much attention, just living our lives, until something unexpected happens. But when something unexpected happens then we have to stop our life and reassess the situation. Is the situation nothing in particular, such as bumping into a chair in the hallway, or it is serious, such as: the elevator is out of commission and the door to the stairway is locked and there is no way out of the building?

Right now it seems that my liberal friends have not even realized that something unexpected has happened, let alone that we are facing perhaps the biggest government scandal of our lifetimes.

The point that Jordan B. Peterson is making is that the whole of life really hangs on making a good decision, a good adaption, when something in your life goes wrong, whether it is the trivial business of bumping into a chair in the hallway or the deadly serious experience of losing your job because you have completely misread your role and your relationship with your fellow workers.

The lesson of Trump, and Brexit, and now the Italian election is that something has changed. But the ruling class all over the world is still doing its thing of identity politics and the administrative state as though nothing had changed.

It would be really, really nice if you ruling class chaps and you dutiful liberals raised your eyes from the vital task of hunting down hate speech and look up to see that something is seriously going wrong with your glorious administrative state dynasty.

Because if you don't then I am afraid that things are going to get really mean and nasty.

Dear China: Are You Sure You Want an Emperor?

I don't pay too much attention to China, but, you might say, I find that sometimes China is paying attention to me. First, we had China announcing its "One Belt One Road" initiative. This initiative aims to upgrade infrastructure linking China to its neighbors, particularly to the west.

Then there is President Xi Jinping deciding to make himself president-for-life.

This seems to mean that China is returning to its pre-Mao traditions. Used to be that China had an Emperor, or Son of Heaven, that ruled until he died. And his heir ruled until the dynasty was removed at the start of a Time of Troubles. And it used to be that China operated as a kind of spider in the middle of a tributary web, maintaining its integrity with tributary neighboring states that acknowledged Chinese supremacy in return for a quiet life.

I suppose that, after the turmoil of the last two centuries, it is natural for China to return to its roots, but I wonder if it is really such a good idea.

Here's what I think.

I think that a government-centered infrastructure push like the One Belt One Road initiative is likely to be an incredibly wasteful and corrupt operation rather like the West's policy of foreign aid to Africa. It won't help the target countries, but it will solidify the power of the local tin-horn dictators as US cold war policy managed to do.

And I don't think that China needs a president-for-life. I don't think anyone needs a president-for-life. Imagine if Barack Obama had become president-for-life. That would have meant that all of his foolish and unjust notions of "fundamental transformation" would have stayed in place. It would have meant that the campus rape panic would have been intensified, the snowflake campus culture would have ended in an Ice Age, the Obamacare nationalization of healthcare would have intensified, net-neutrality would have intensified, and the slow economic growth consequent on the politicizing of everything would have continued. And above all, the natural intensification of injustice resulting from any clique remaining in political power would have continued.

Look, I'm not a particular fan of democracy. I think the voters are idiots, and I believe the politicians are worse. But with regular elections you get periodic change elections where the voters throw out the current rascals and replace them with new rascals. Also, you get the chance for the people to tell its ruling class that it is really screwing up, as with Trump and Brexit and the populist surge in Europe.

The regular changing of the guard weakens the corruption and injustice of the incumbent party and provides an interregnum where the new government undoes some of the previous injustices before proceeding inevitably to create new injustices. China has had the same gang in power for the last 70 years, and it has got to be hurting.

Now I don't know if alternation in power using the model of western-style democracy would work in China. I respect the Chinese people and their ability to figure out what would work. I just believe in the concept that you need to alternate political power between contending parties. If you don't there is no way for the people to register their grievances and petition for redress short of open rebellion and revolution, and who needs that?

Now there is one interesting aspect of the One Belt One Road initiative that you may not have thought of. It comes from Jesus in Beijing, a report on Christianity in China by David Aikman. One of his key themes in the belief of Chinese Christians in the Return to Jerusalem.

In the Chinese Christian narrative, Christianity has migrated westward across the world, from the Levant to Europe and then to the Americas, and thence to East Asia. Chinese Christians believe it is their destiny to complete the westward march of Christianity with a return to Jerusalem. Hmm. Now what would that mean to all the Islamic -stans that presently exist between China and Jerusalem? Is the real meaning of the One Belt One Road the Christianizing of the Muslim belt by the westward venturing Chinese?

You may very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

The Cure for Administrative-State-itis

While our more emotional friends are wailing about "assault rifles" and "bump stocks" it is pretty clear that the problem with America is the ruling class and its bureaucracy.

What is it about school shooters? Well, they are almost all fatherless, thanks to the sexual revolution and the welfare state that enables fatherlessness.

Why wasn't the Parkland school shooter restrained? Well, one main reason is the Broward County policy of not arresting school children that commit crimes, because racism.

Why didn't the Broward County deputies enter the Parkland school? Well, because in this post-Ferguson world the way for a policeman to stay out of trouble is not to engage the perp.

Let us make the problem bigger.

What in the world were the bureaucrats at the DOJ and the FBI doing in getting the FISA court to enable spying on the Trump campaign? Well, most likely the ambitious folks in those bureaucracies saw advancement in helping the Next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton, and turning a blind eye to her monstrous Clinton Corruption.

OK, here's an even bigger question.

Why in the world are we still doing this bureaucratic administrative state thing when the science clearly shows that bureaucracy is a mess?

Science #1: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.
Science #2: A thousand bureaucrats in Washington DC cannot outperform millions of consumers and producers.
Science #3: Any regulatory scheme fails because of regulatory capture.

So why do we continue with the administrative state? Is it just that the sons and daughters of the educated professional class get lots of jobs in it? Is it that we the people are really quite content to be ordered around by politicians and bureaucrats, because it makes our lives less stressful? Is it just that the ruling class has fooled us, cunningly undermining our authentic social institutions, from churches to fraternal organizations to rights organizations while we weren't looking, and replacing them with a bureaucratic, administrative hierarchy that is responsible only to the ruling class? Or is it just the stupidity of the ruling class that, having invested itself in the administrative state model a century ago, has now found itself unable to admit its error and help us transition to a more effective and more just model?

Of course, my preferred understanding is that the ruling class are idiots, they don't really know what they are doing, they have opted for the administrative state model because they don't know any better, and because the administrative state model gives them the illusion of control. And, of course, once you have set up a bureaucratic system it becomes almost impossible to reform or update it because the folks in the system will raise holy hell against anyone that tries to change it. And thus the ruling class, like any ageing dynasty, is just lurching from crisis to crisis and ruling in total reactive mode.

Or let us listen to my interpretation of Jordan B. Peterson to understand the position of our ruling class and its instrument, the administrative state.

Our current "story" is the domain of the known and the predictable. But what happens if something unexpected happens, or what happens if things aren't turning out the way we expected? Well, the normal thing to do is to cling to what we understand anyway. But that might lead to disaster. However, if we try to interpret the unexpected and make a radical change that might lead to disaster too.

The two disaster scenarios are the only thing that politics understands. The one is to keep with the current narrative and pretend that nothing is wrong, as the ancien régime did in France in the 18th century. The other is reckless revolution, as per lefty activists. Thus politics.

In the real world, that we see in the market economy, actors are endlessly making adjustments to their understanding of the world and to their actions. Some actors do nothing; other actors try to completely change. But in the middle there are actors that, by luck or by cunning, understand the tenor of the times, develop a understanding of the situation that turns out to be confirmed by events, act upon their understanding, and get it right. And so the ship of state manages to continue on its way.

We humans desperately want to avoid a sudden irruption of the unknown and its chaos. So we "will go to almost any length to ensure that [our] protective cultural 'stories' remain intact." The nature of politics and the actions of ruling classes is to act to prevent almost all adjustments to our cultural "stories" until it is too late. This is what we are seeing in Venezuela, where the socialist government cannot admit that its Bolivarian narrative is horribly, disastrously wrong. That is what we see in the United States where the ruling class and its supporters cannot bear to admit that their whole plan is tearing the country apart, and cannot afford to inconvenience their supporters with genuine reform. Reform the sexual revolution? Roll back single-parenthood? Get the cops out on the beat harassing gang-bangers? Actually tell the Clintons to clean up their act? You must be kidding!

But there is another way.

But when you limit the power of government and the administrative state, then you allow the knowledge of actors outside the charmed circle of ruling class notables and their bribed apologists to evaluate the situation and then propose and start to implement a whole range of solutions -- for which each will pay if they are wrong and for which they and society as a whole will benefit if they are right.

Imagine that.

Maps of Meaning: The Why and Who of Jordan B. Peterson

I finally got my copy of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief and I've finished the Preface. So now I am completely qualified to start writing about it!

Actually, the Preface is disarmingly frank and appealing. Simply, Peterson tells us why he has written the book.

First, after being brought up by a church-going mom, he broke with Christianity during his confirmation process. Then he became a lefty and an activist and became a student representative on the board of his local community college.

Then he has a crisis of faith, because while he disagreed with all the local notables on the board, he "could not but help admire them, even though [he] did not share their political stance." However, he could not say the same of the low-level lefty activists he interacted with in leftist politics.

They seemed to live to complain. They had no career, frequently, no family, no completed education -- nothing but ideology. They were peevish, irritable, and little, in every sense of the word.

How to deal with the contradiction: disagreeing with the worthy notables on the college board while agreeing with the moral midgets in lefty politics?

Then something curious happened. He discovered a critical voice in his head that would say "you don't believe that" when he was spouting off on something. This was confusing and embarrassing and would cause him to stop in the middle of a sentence. He realized that he could not go on repeating other peoples' ideas from books, not unless he could actually believe them to be true.

Peterson found that Jung's idea of the persona explained this, that we each put on a mask to present to society as a compromise between the real "me" and what society expects.

Then Peterson started having terrible dreams, two or three times a week. He read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and then remembered that Jung had done a lot of work at the intersection of dreams and myth, and he read this from Jung:

It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.

It is telling that Jung himself went through a long period of terrible dreams after his break with Freud.

Peterson's study of "comparative mythological material" made his terrible dreams disappear. But it also transformed what he believed about the world. He used to believe in the modern disenchanted world, but now believed that "beliefs make the world," that "beliefs are the world."

So let us set forth his manifesto at the end of the Preface, which, I think, brilliantly captures our current human dilemma -- and opportunity.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however -- myth, literature and drama -- portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed  a picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former [i.e., science] is the objective world -- what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter [i.e., myth] is the world of value -- what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.

Now the point is that, until the rise of science in the last millennium we humans had only the perspective of the world as a "forum for action" and the myths and narratives and dramas that try to make sense of it all. Many modern people now think that the world as a place of things, of reason and science, completely negates the old world of myth and meaning. But the flagrant failure of communism and fascism in the last century, not  to mention the unsatisfactory experience of the market system as a mechanical process, put the lie to this.

We cannot do without narrative and meaning. Science and the knowledge of objects may be very useful, but they do not tell us what life means and what we ought to do about it. The meaning of life, the universe and everything is what we should do about ourselves and the rest of the world, and what it all means, not what we know about things.

Peterson argues that we need to balance our old knowledge of narrative and meaning with our new knowledge of places and things, and that is the way to understand and to live in the world. He dramatizes this balance with the notion of a baby girl reaching up to touch "a fragile and expensive glass sculpture... Suddenly her mother interferes... tells to not to ever touch that object."

But why? What is so special about that object to mother? What does it mean? That is exactly the point, according to Peterson. "Everything is something, and means something --  and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn."

Indeed even today the distinction between thingness and meaning is very often not drawn; it is just stated and woe betide the fool that dares to challenge the generally accepted narrative about meaning. And this is not necessarily a fault. Life must go on, using what knowledge we have, and we cannot often afford the luxury of working out all angles of a particular issue before acting, any more than a mother can spend half an hour explaining what makes a sculpture is so special and meaningful that little Suzy may not touch it, ever.

One point. I don't think I agree that communism and fascism are merely applications of thingness to the human condition. I think they are attempts, after the demolition of meaning, to rebuild the cathedral of meaning in too much of a hurry. The world that Peterson proposes, working out the boundaries of thingness and meaning, is a gigantic project, a reformulation of everything we humans have been and hope to be.

Figuring it all out ain't gonna be easy. It is going to take a while to figure out. But, what a wonderful moment to be alive!

Yeah, Why Not Arm Teachers?

Apparently our liberal friends are shocked, shocked that we NRA gun nuts think that one way of protecting "our children" is by arming teachers. "I can't believe they said that."

But there is a very good reason why arming teachers wouldn't work. The reason is that teachers and school administrators are mostly women and women don't do violence. OK, Dana Loesch excepted.

And we have a perfect illustration of that: Donald Trump. In remarks after the Parkland shooting he said that had he been there he might well have charged into the school. Today, of course, all our liberal friends are sneering at the president.

But in fact there is history on this, from Mother Jones (disputed by Snopes.com). It's 1991 and Trump is riding in the Trump limo to a concert in New York City with Marla Maples, his main squeeze at the time. Trump saw a man being beaten with a baseball bat, and stopped the car. Despite the pleading of Marla Maples (according to Rush Limbaugh) Trump got out and confronted the bat-wielder.

Get it? Marla Maples said: Don't! Alpha male Trump:

The guy with the bat looked at me, and I said, ‘Look, you’ve gotta stop this. Put down the bat,'” Trump told the New York Daily News. “I guess he recognized me because he said, ‘Mr. Trump, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I said, ‘How could you not do anything wrong when you’re whacking a guy with a bat?’ Then he ran away.”

Others at the scene have a different story.

But I had a similar experience, although nothing like as brave and noble as Trump. Lady Marjorie and I were at a jazz club and getting ready to leave. But the musicians were having an argument with the management, right in our way. Lady Marjorie wanted to avoid the crush, but I was damned if I was going to cringe before these hoodlums, so I led her right through the scrum. And we survived.

This is the way of all flesh.

Hunter-gatherers? Once there weren't enough men to maintain a tribal territory the tribe disbanded and the women were taken up by neighboring tribes.

Greeks in 1000BC? They sacked cities on their way to Troy, killed the men, but took the princess Briseis to become a concubine. That's what the row between Achilles and Agamemnon was all about: who got the babe.

Cleopatra in 0000? Well, she killed herself with an asp, but previously, as the tail end of the Ptolemaic dynasty, had been shacking up first with Gaius Julius Caesar and then with Mark Anthony, realizing that Ptolemaic Egypt and she were doomed to Roman suzerainty.

Vikings in 1000AD? They sailed up the rivers of Britland in the fall, killed the men, stole the grain, and took the women to sell them in the slave market in Dublin, Ireland.

Berlin in May 1945? The German women were left defenseless in Berlin, and made the best deal they could with the invading Red Army. The best thing was to become the mistress of a Captain or a Major, and steer clear of the enlisted men. But the women hid the teenage virgins in the attic.

Liberal colleges in 2017? Post sexual revolution, nice girls submit to the hookup culture, and then complain about it afterwards.

See, here's the thing. Men are expected to march toward the sound of the guns, and indeed a lot of men instinctively do it. Because millennia of hunter-gatherer tribal warfare. But women don't. Men are fighters; women are carers.

But the thing is that education from K thru graduate school is becoming more and more completely dominated by women, and this means that education is bound to become dominated by a "feminine sensibility." Women complain, but they don't march to the sound of the guns, looking for trouble. If it comes to a fight, then women submit. And frankly, judging from the German women in Berlin in 1945, I gotta say it works for them.

Yes, but what do we do about school shooters, now that school shooting has become a "thing" that even the dullest, laziest teenager knows about? Well, according to David Cole we could ramp up security just like they did in LA during the gang warfare of the crack epidemic, with the head of security packing heat.

But I think that the answer is to take down the whole government school system. Maybe it had a point, back in the 19th century when the working class wanted free education so their kids didn't have to go down the mine. But today I think that all the neighborhood women should get together and educate their kids with each other. That way kids would not be assembled in strategic concentration where they are sitting targets, both for liberal indoctrination and for drugged, crazed male school shooters.

Don't Forget the Big Picture on Russia/FISA

If you are interested in a big picture look at the whole collusion-opposition-spying thing, a good place to get it is from Sharyl Attkisson's time line -- that starts in 2011.

Because the point of the whole thing is not really whether or not the application to the FISA court to access the electronic communications of Carter Page dotted all the 'i's and crossed all the 't's as is implied in the Battle of the Memos.

The bigger point is: what in the world did the Obama administration think it was doing sniffing around the Trump campaign? I would have thought, naive fool that I am, that the Obamis would want to take a Caesar's Wife approach to surveillance on the opposition party. They would naturally, as American patriots, want not just to have clean hands, but demonstrably so.

As in: we here at the FBI think there might be some tricky stuff going on, but we at the FBI have to make the assumption that the campaign of a duly nominated major-party presidential candidate has the best interests of America at heart. Best thing is just to send someone around to Trump Tower and say, hey fellahs, word to the wise: you should know this chap over here has some rather unsavory associations, and you wouldn't want to get tangled up with him.

But in the event it seemed that the higher ups at the FBI got themselves invested in the Democrat narrative about Trump being totally unqualified and unsuited to be president. Of course, once you start down that road you can get yourself tangled up in utter folly, as it seems that the FBI and the DOJ did and are still doing.

This is why I maintain that they are all idiots.

Presumably, the Clinton e-mail fiasco intersects with this. The foolish and corrupt Hillary Clinton was in a tricky situation with her illegal private e-mail server. Who knew about it? And what about President Obama, who e-mailed with her through her private server? What kind of trouble could he get into from having done nothing about an illegal email arrangement? You can see that everyone at the DOJ and the FBI would have been up to their necks in this utter mess, wondering how much they could help cover up their bosses' mess without exposing themselves to administrative or criminal process.

The e-mail scandal shows the utter foolishness of Hillary Clinton, and it shows why she should not be elected or appointed to any office of responsibility for anything. The whole point about being some big honcho is that you can't know the details of your job. You are the big honcho calling the big shots. So, the absolute crux of your job is getting good advice from trusted advisers. Now, any advisor with half a brain about tech would tell Hillary Clinton: Don't go there with your own private email server. Don't do it. You are a high-value target; everyone in the world would love to hack into your email. If you have your own private email server then you will just never be able to keep up with the latest security issues and keep your email server safe. Heck, even the big boys, the Googles and the Amazons, are racing to keep up.

Now, in my view, any big honcho with the kind of judgement you need in a big honcho would respond to her tech adviser by saying: wow, better not go anywhere near that; it sounds like an accident waiting to happen.  But Hillary Clinton didn't do that. What does that say about Hillary Clinton and her judgement?

And now let us return to the big picture. What is the real story behind all this shenanigans? Was it just that the Obamis wanted to help Hillary Clinton's campaign? Or was it that they had something to hide so they needed to know what the Trump people knew? Or what?

I think that when the whole episode is over we will find out that the whole thing is a Keystone Kops mess that started over some minor issue that some big honcho wanted to hide.

But good help is hard to find, and so the little honchos that were trying to clean up for the big honchos probably got in deeper than they realized and so were torn between continuing to try to clean up the big honcho's mess and cleaning up the mess for themselves that they had created by trying to clean up the big honcho's mess.

I think that a basic understanding of American politics starts with the fact that, if you are a Republican, you are always afraid that you will find the most innocent political deal blown up into a huge scandal on the nightly news. But if you are a Democrat you assume that your shenanigans will never see the light of day. And if your shenanigans do see the light of day, why then your willing accomplices in the media will kick sand all over it so that nobody remembers what it was all about.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in my American Thinker piece this week, suppose this:

Suppose all the Russia Collusion stuff and all the "I can't believe he tweeted that" noise actually plays to President Trump's advantage? Here's why.

The thing about the media is that it only has a limited bandwidth. It is like a political campaign, which I say can only handle about one and a half issues at once. If the mainstream media is doing wall-to-wall coverage on the Russia Collusion scandal that means they are not doing wall-to-wall coverage on the Trump deregulation executive orders and the Trump Obamacare demolition process. And that is why the Trump executive orders are going through without much pushback. The Trump Collusion effort has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and so that means that the awful things Trump is doing to education and the environment and welfare and food stamps and Obamacare, in which minorities and women are hardest hit, just don't get the Two Minute Hate treatment they deserve. We are already doing Two Minute Hate non-stop on Russia.

Look, I don't know what will happen on all this, whether the Deep State catches Trump after all, or whether Trump goes from strength to strength, whether the Dems recapture Congress this fall or whether all their confident predictions turn out to be hot air.

I just think that the basic fact is this. Our present educated-class dynasty is now something over 100 years old. That means we are several generations down from the original hard-assed operators that, e.g., created the Federal Reserve and passed those Progressive Era constitutional amendments like direct election of senators and federal income tax. Imagine our present progressive leaders being able to pull off stuff like that! As they say about the children of brilliant parents: eventually you regress to the mean. Eventually you get a federal government run by a bunch of people with the right connections rather than outrageous talent. Eventually you get the Parkland shooting in which government at all levels failed to act. Think of the difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Or think of the difference between Elon Musk and whoever is the CEO of Clorox. Not that there is anything wrong with Clorox.

There is a yearning in all of us to get past all the sound and fury of Democrats contesting the last election. But maybe the sound and fury is a good thing, because it prevents the cool heads at Democrat Central from getting down to the really important stuff: what with Trump and Brexit and all the white liberals ageing out, whither the Democratic Party?

That's the real big picture.

Protection in an Age of "Feminine Sensibility"

In the aftermath of the Parkland school massacre we are experiencing what, for conservatives, is a curious disconnect. On the one hand we have the usual liberal suspects clamoring for gun control. On the other hand we have the evidence of major governmental failure: failure to follow up on multiple opportunities to deal with the accused mass murderer before he struck; failure of the armed police guard at the school to intervene, and general government incompetence up and down the line.

What is going on here?

I return once again to my Georg Simmel line, that in the modern era with the emergence of women into the public square we are going to see women move the public square into a direction that conforms with a "more feminine sensibility."

One of the forms of feminine sensibility is that every woman expects, as of ancient and immemorial instinct, that she should be protected.

In the bad old days of the patriarchy every woman was protected by living in a household that was headed by a man. That man was responsible for the woman's protection. Today we find many women -- independent women, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir -- that do not live in a household headed by a man. But all women still expect to be protected.

You can see how this plays into the whole gun-control issue.

Obviously, if the proverbial patriarchal male no longer provides protection to our independent woman; someone else must step in to provide protection. Obviously there is only one agent that can do that: the government's police force.

And just as obviously, it makes sense to disarm all men so that our independent woman would be free from attack by a deadly weapon, and thus protected. Thus, the feminine sensibility would affirm, with the disarmament of men and the enabling of the police, women are once more safe.

I believe this is what is called magical thinking.

In the first place, the banning of deadly weapons is not going to protect women. There are ways of violating women other than with guns: there are knives; there are blunt objects; there are fists; there are threats.

In the second place, government is not going to protect women. This is obvious from the actual record of government failure in the Parkland school massacres. It is obvious from the science of bureaucracy, that predicts, after a brave beginning, that every bureaucracy will devolve into utter immobility. This is because the logic of bureaucracy is that is almost always more sensible to do nothing than to do something. No doubt this is why Dickens calls his stereotypical bureaucrats at the Circumlocution Office: Barnacles and Stiltstockings. He does not call them Braveheart or Producer.

In reality governments across the world and down the ages have promised protection but delivered oppression. The cost of protection is usually servitude.

Our age is notable, for its Great Enrichment has freed both men and women from the necessities of immediate survival. In the old days you either got with the program or you died. And often you died anyway. But in our age we can experiment and not immediately experience the penalty of failure. This has its good side and its bad side. The ability to experiment has produced both the Great Enrichment of global capitalism and also the Great Massacres of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Maoist China.

I suspect that in the great and glorious future, as all the bright ideas and the silly failures shake themselves out, we will find that women still expect to be protected, and that the most efficacious way for a woman to be protected is through the agency of some man.

There is no mystery about this. Men are fighters and women are lovers. For men the complications of caring and relationships cut into the simple life of fighting, whether against the next-door tribe or the next-door market competitor.  For women the existential perils of the fight cut into the necessary complications of loving and caring.

And so, I predict, at the end of the Age of Feminine Sensibility we will find that women will want to be feminine and leave the masculine stuff for the men. Because Darwin, or evolution, or something.