I Bring You the Coolidge-Mellon Show

Back in the day, after President Harding died in office on August 2, 1923, we Yanks got a couple of chaps in government that you don't see nowadays.

There was President Coolidge, weaned on a pickle according to Alice Longworth Roosevelt. What with the new budget law and all, Coolidge set to work with his budget director, Gen. Lord, to cut the federal budget. His notion was to get it down to $3 billion a year, but as you can see, he never got there.

The reason is that as soon as President Coolidge announced, in the summer of 1927, that he was not going to run again, it was Katy bar the door as congress-critters all converged to Spend More Money, particularly on dams and flood relief.

The other chappie in charge of the nation's finances in those days was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and he believed in "scientific taxation." From our point of view, this might be considered to be nothing more than cutting tax rates, particularly high surtax rates on high incomes. So, with President Coolidge helping, particularly on the spending front, cut is what Mellon did. Here is what happened.

You can see what happened. Despite the swingeing tax rate cuts, tax revenue actually went up by FY 1927. Imagine that. So what happened to the Deficit? Here is what happened.

Golly. Imagine. Surpluses of up to a billion dollars in an age when federal spending was in the $3 billion to $4 billion range.

Well, it was all over pretty soon. Because all those surpluses infected everyone with itchy palms. For you don't get elected to watch the national debt shrink. You get elected to make the good times roll, baby.

And so the feds got into flood control -- after monstrous floods on the Mississippi -- and good old dam building. Hence the Hoover Dam on the Colorado.

The point is, it doesn't matter what the money is spent on. In our era the mania is to spend money on bullet trains and light rail. Oh, and wonderful wind farms. But spend we must.

I guess the point is that Pharaohs, ever since the days of the pyramids, have just loved spending money on gigantic monuments.

But I rather like the government style of the Mellons and the Coolidges. To just sit there and cut spending and taxes. Whatever the beautiful people say.

A Fish Rots from the Head Down

So now, with the first installment of the DOJ inspector general report, the one on former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, we are reminded that the problem all along was the Hillary Clinton private email problem. Presumably, the word from the top was that the FBI was not to treat her like an ordinary violator of classified information rules. And so the top echelons of the DOJ got twisted up like pretzels in order to avoid doing their jobs and prosecuting her violation of the law. There are all kinds of tags about this: Oh what a tangled web we weave... A fish rots from the head. Honesty is the best policy. They all tell us about the difficulty that humans get into once they start to depart from the straight and narrow.

You can see what is going on here. Chicago Rules.

Government, as St. Augustine understood, is the same as a criminal gang, only with the "addition of impunity," for government is, as we say, "sovereign:" nobody gets to boss it around. So the question for any government is how much it approximates to a real criminal gang, and how much it tries to run itself according to the fantasy we all have of a government of laws, not of men. Chicago, the city that wafted Barack Obama aloft, is about as close as you get to government by criminal gang.

It was obvious, from an early time, that government under President Obama was not going to make much effort to be a government of laws. And why should it? The mainstream media would give it the benefit of the doubt, and everybody knew that the opposition was just a bunch of racist, sexist homophobes.

So whenever there was a scandal, of incompetence or of venality, the Obama guys got a pass. You would have to be a saint not to take advantage of that situation and the truth is that President Obama was not a saint. Sorry about that. Anyway, he knows that he and his are on the right side of history, bending the arc towards justice, so the rules are for other people.

Of course the essence of politics is that, as with armies, it is the rank-and-file that take the bullets, not the generals. And so when the word comes down that Hillary Clinton is not to be prosecuted for gross violations of the laws and regulations on classified information, it is the poor saps like Andrew McCabe that get left with the actual dirty work for which people may go to jail. So we have meetings between the Attorney General Loretta Lynch, McCabe, and others trying to figure out what to do about, e.g., the emails on the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner laptop.

By the way, there seems to me to be a common trait among the Comeys, the McCabes, the Lynches, the Abedins, the Weiners: weaklings. You don't get the feeling they are cut out for noble deeds. Fixers, maybe, and not very good ones.

See, if the Obama guys down the line knew that, as far as the boss was concerned, the law was the law, and they had to go where the evidence led, then we would never have had Hillary Clinton get away with her private email system, the email scandal, the attempt to spy on the Trump campaign, and the need for a whole tissue of lies to make it look like there really was a Trump Russia connection. Because the word would have gone out from the Oval Office: no private emails: here we follow the law.

Oh well. It's obvious now what Obama should have done, but then, Obama is a weakling too.

But the fact of the IG investigation and the rollouts of its reports seems to suggest that there are folk in the Deep State that think the Obama guys crossed a line. Maybe they have some sort of institutional pride; or maybe they have a kind of elite snobbery, that regards the Obama people as not quite out of the top drawer, old chap. Otherwise everyone would just clam up and let the crooks do their thing and avert their eyes.

The larger truth is that the Liberal Hour is reaching its conclusion, the Emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and we are heading into a Time of Troubles. And so the rats are scrambling around biting off each others' tails. Whether or not the Trump Russia thing dissolves into chaos and whether the IG report gets better than Page A21 in The New York Times you can see fin de siècle written all over our liberal friends.

But they will be the last to know. Because a fish rots from the head down, and the rot hasn't reached them yet.

Hey, most of my liberal friends are good people. But they would rather stay plugged into NPR and MSNBC and not know the nasty details. People are like that.

When a Lefty Comes to Visit

We have a friend of Lady Marjorie visiting next week: a really nice guy, but a lefty from way back.

The question is: what is the one thing I should communicate to this guy?

I think that the one thing would be my brilliant notion that the whole of left's world view is found in the justification of the left's revolutionary praxis.

My idea is that every new generation of well-born lefties, starting not later than son-of-a-lawyer Marx and son-of-a-businessman Engels, is looking for a reason, a justification, for revolution.

But how? What can justify bloody revolution, or at least "peaceful protest," accusing visiting conservatives of "hate speech" and condemning them to the seventh hell of racism, sexism, and homophobia?

The answer came to me while reading a center-left history of the 19th century, The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. Polanyi wrote that, once the working class in England had got the vote in the latter decades of the 19th century, they stopped rioting and demonstrating. Now, they understood, with the vote, they were inside the system, and the political system was paying attention to their political agenda. No need to take to the streets.

Do you see the point here? If you are a traditionally marginalized group, but you have the vote, then you don't need to riot in the streets, because politicians are interested in serving your interests to get your vote. In that case, there is no need  for "activism" and "peaceful protest," enacting a proposed revolution. The politicians will take care of everything.

Oh no! What will the activists do then, poor things? The answer is simple. They will find a group that is still outside the system, and do activism and peaceful protest on its behalf. That is what the Frankfurt School realized back in the 1920s, when they recast Marxism as a movement not just to bring about a perfect world for workers, but for women and minorities. Thank goodness! The millennarian movement of the left could continue!

And so it goes. After blacks and women, Latinos. And gays, and transgender, and any gender non-binary. But the problem is that, even with transgenders, the left is getting its agenda through; that's because the average western citizen  is really not  that interested in politics. If someone feels aggrieved, maybe they have a point.

So who  is left, outside the system? The answer is right before our eyes. Illegal immigrants and Muslims! Brilliant!

So that is what all the peaceful protesting and activism is about today.

But you can see that there is a bit of a problem where illegal immigrants are concerned. They take jobs away from the white working class, and lower the wages of everyone. Oh yeah! The working class! Whatever happened to those guys?

Well we know. Liberals did a number on the white working class back in the 1970s by showing, in Archie Bunker, that they were all racist, sexist bigots. Thanks Norman Lear!

The question for us normals and deplorables is: do we just fold like we did for workers, for women, for minorities, for gays, for transgenders. Or do we cry Enough?

That is the great question of our time, and that is what I will try to explore with my lefty visitor.

And the bigger question, after 200 years of attending to the grievances of just about everyone -- except fundamentalist Christians -- is it not time to say that the western world has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it listens, through normal political channels, to the grievances of the people. And the problem is really the activists that think that anything in this world can by solved by political power.

Is it not time to admit that the whole question of "activism" is more about the need for well-born lefties to explore the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- for themselves -- and that the "little darlings" they constantly throw in our faces are doing just fine.

Except that the "little darlings" are not in such great shape these days: white working class dying of despair, women reporting less happiness than back in the 1950s.

Why I am a US Nationalist

Probably the No.1 reason I am not a liberal globalist is that I never went to a selective US college, so I never got the indoctrination and the initiation into the educated globalist elite secret society. Instead I got a Civil Engineering degree at what was then called a "red-brick" university in England. There was no liberal arts curriculum at Brit universities back then to produce well-rounded, i.e., liberalized, STEM graduates as there would be in the United States.

This means that I am an autodidact, one who has educated himself. Indeed, the only time I have taken a course at a university since I graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1968 was a few years ago  when I audited four philosophy courses at the University of Washington: one each in Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Hume. I took them so I could know the official received version on these greats.

Even without an official government-sponsored minor in ruling-class apologetics I still had conventional liberal ideas when I arrived in the United States. I remember going to a Democratic presidential rally at the Seattle Arena in 1968. And in 1972 I remember watching PBS as they lovingly visited George McGovern at the family ranch in July.

I suppose that my wake-up call was the 60-40 Nixon win in 1972. What was going on when all the right people were for McGovern and the negative income tax?

Eight years later I went to a presidential caucus in Kent, Washington and discovered the folks we would now call the "deplorables," ordinary middle-class Americans, technicians and whatnot, who were alive to Ronald Reagan.

But meanwhile, through reading the Wall Street Journal that was available at the office and its Bob Bartley editorial page, I had learned about Austrian economics and Mises and Hayek.

Did you know that Ronald Reagan, the amiable dunce, left behind him well-annotated editions of Mises and Hayek? Imagine that!

So, ever since, I have been most of the way to being libertarian. But over the years I have slowly grown to appreciate that the thing about the price system and the free market is that there are no safe spaces. Capitalism makes clear, what religion and politics do not, is that we get to thrive in the free market economy only so long as we offer a service that other people want. There is no way that most people are going to be able to graduate from high school, get a job at the plant down the road, and work there for the rest of their lives.

But government is in the protection business, mainly to protect from pirates and plunderers. It doesn't take too much imagination to extend this idea to economic protection, to protect me -- and maybe you -- from the economic hurricane that might appear one day out of a clear blue sky. And people want safe spaces.

The very idea that government could protect from economic vicissitude is new. In the old days, when nature delivered a drought or a flood there was nothing to be done: people starved. It wasn't until the 19th century that it became possible, with steamships and railroads, to move grain in quantity from the abundant to the starving areas of the world.

But there is another reason for government to provide economic protection. It is that most financial crises and panics are a precipitate of government economic policy. Crash of 1873: result of deflation after the civil war. Panic of 1907: result of Alaska gold rush supplying gold (and thus credit) during the time of the Gold Standard. Deflation of 1920s and 1929 Crash: result of governments deflating after World War I and clumsily trying to fix the problem. Crash of 2008: result of government forcing mortgage issuers to lend to bad credit risks. So yeah. Given how government economic policy can ruin peoples' lives, there oughta be a safe space.

In general, governments don't have a clue what they are doing. They are, indeed, armed minorities occupying territory, taxing the people to reward their supporters and borrowing to fund their wars. So when they make a mistake, as they usually do, they have a duty of care, to look after the people whose lives they ruined.

At least, in say the United States, when the people get pissed off with the follies of the current lot they can throw the rascals out and let the other guys have a go.

But with supra-national organizations that option is not available. This has two bad effects. The first problem is that the bureaucrats and failed politicians that run them are not looking over their shoulders to wonder what the political backlash is likely to be. The second problem is that, when things go wrong, the bureaucrats and time servers do not really represent anyone but themselves. This last fact was illuminated by the classical scholar and politician Enoch Powell when he said that the European Union could not work because there was no European demos, no European people.

Powell was saying, in other words, that  a government must be associated with a people, and feel itself responsible to that people, and look to that people for its support, and its cannon fodder in time of war. Now, if you are part of the global elite you do in fact experience the EU bureaucrats as representing you. I  remember attending an engineering conference in Davos, Switzerland, in 1990. It was telling that all the European scientists there seemed to have grants from the EU: their kind of people.

Now, in the good old days of tribalism, and even of feudalism,  the Big Man of the tribe and the feudal lord indeed did lead a people. But feudalism fell to the absolute monarchs, who learned how to disarm their nobles, make them into courtiers, and fund their states not on the revenue from the royal estates but by taxing commerce. They learned to fund their wars by borrowing from a commercial sector anchored by a central bank.

In nationalizing their nobles, the absolute monarchs also nationalized their peoples. It was, of course, a cultural aggression. England colonized and nationalized Wales and Scotland, but failed to nationalize Ireland. The Île de France around Paris colonized and nationalized the rest of France. The Prussians manipulated the rest of the German princes into wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, and unified the German Nation as a result. With Italy, the folks around Tuscany colonized the rest of Italy and Sicily, and the southerners are still not too happy about that.

What with a war or two, here and there, most people in Europe came to identify with their nations more than their old region. Look at Germany the other way up. It is astonishing that Hitler was able to lead the Germans, unified into a single nation for only 65 years, into a war to end all wars in 1939. How did he do it? He persuaded the German people that they were a German people rather than Prussians and Bavarians and Rhine-Palatinatians.

Now in my view the globalist agenda to denormalize the nation state and replace it with global governance and identity politics is a bad idea. First of all, the only globalist demos is the upper class that swims across the world between corporate and academic NGO gigs. Everyone else is a deplorable, and need not apply for full citizenship.

Secondly, I think that the identity politics of class and race and gender and large-scale immigration promoted by the global elite is a deadly virus that is killing the nation state. Well, you may say, and a good thing too, given the record of aggressive nationalism, fascism, and wars between nation states.

And what is your cunning plan to replace the nation state, Baldrick? Global governance? Gender politics? Safe spaces? A global ban on cultural appropriation?

Let us merely remember Winston Churchill's dictum:

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Let us merely adapt this dictum. The nation state is the worst form of state organization, except for all the others.

The astonishing success of the nation state consists in this: it has successfully engaged peoples' loyalty away from their family, race or tribe, which is the natural way in which humans identify themselves, and directed it towards a totally artificial and fake abstract concept: the nation, which is unified by its language.

Of course, the nation state is a shameful thing, born in aggressive conquest of neighboring principalities, completed in cultural linguistic domination over regional dialects and cultures. And its economic hegemony over its people, by commandeering up to 50 percent of their income for use in buying the loyalty of its supporters, is monstrous.

But the alternatives! Our big problem these days is that, in its campaign to weaken the idea of the nation state the educated ruling class has strengthened the idea of race and region, encouraging people to identify with smaller cultural units than the nation state.

In my view, all the proposed alternatives to the nation state are roads to ruin. And that is why I am a US Nationalist.

And that is not to say anything about our national heroes: Washington, the man on the white horse that went home rather that appointing himself president-for-life; Hamilton, the man that founded the US economy and inspired a musical; Lincoln, the reluctant warrior; Coolidge, the mild man from hard-scrabble Vermont; Reagan, the amiable dunce that won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Sorry if your hero didn't get a mention.

The Three Forms of Social Control

The biggest takeaway in Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is the lobster story. Even the lefty Cathy Newman had to take a rest from her "so what you are saying..." shtick and its mis-characterization of Peterson's ideas to ask about that. It is an argument against the fantasy of equality. Lobsters, he relates, have a hierarchy. It is built into their DNA (or their brain stem or something) and it works with the chemical serotonin.

And what is the purpose of this hierarchy in lobsters? It is to prevent violence among the lobsters.

The point that Peterson wants to make is that inequality, hierarchy, pecking order, are not just oppressive, exploitative, and evil. They really have a purpose, even way down the animal kingdom with primitive animals like lobsters.

The point, I suppose, is that if you are going to impose equality it is going to take force. So, Kemosabe, your equality program is going to replace a concept that is universal in the animal kingdom, because it reduces the resort to force, with a forcible imposition of equality from the top? How does that compute? And how, anyway, do you get equality when some monarch at the top, with his pure and devoted henchmen, is going to have the power to impose equality on everyone except himself and the henchmen? Sounds like good old lobsterian hierarchy to me.

So I take away from this the notion that all politics and culture and social cooperation is a means of reducing force, starting with the most  primitive of all culture, the pecking order.

Obviously, the simple pecking order is not the answer to all our social cooperation problems. In his Why God? Rodney Stark provides two improvements on the simple hierarchy. One is "informal social control;" the other is "formal social control." His line is that informal social control is appropriate for the small face-to-face community, but that when humans started assembling in larger communities we needed something else. Enter the monotheistic religions with their doctrines of good and evil, gods with their divine law, and rulers and priests that dispense formal justice.

But also, I realize, informal social control continues in a condominium with formal social control. I realize this from James M. Ault's Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Ault reports that in the fundamentalist church he researched all the offices were held by men but the whole religious community was run by the wives of said men, because of their influence in the women's gossip network that gets to define  "a common grid of 'what everybody sees' and 'what everybody knows.'" This, in my opinion, is the good old informal social control now integrated with the formal social control institutionalized in the fundamentalist church and its rigid rules and roles.

My point here is to realize to myself that informal social control and formal social control are not separate; it is not the case that formal social control, required because of the growth in size of human communities, has replaced informal social control. Instead the patriarchal formal social control sits on top of the older informal social control and augments it. In fact, I would guess, under normal circumstances the informal social control network pretty well runs things. Only when some big issue arises, or some rupture of the normal women's common grid occurs, does the formal social control network swing into action. One of the ways in which this occurs is when there is a critical mass of young men in a city not yet assimilated to the city culture that forms criminal gangs and requires a countervailing force of city policemen.

Note that our liberal friends are also invested in the formal social control concept. Their model seems to be for the formal social control structure to completely take over society, replacing family, church, and also the market with a single total political and administrative structure. Run by them.

But what do we call the market relationship? I propose that we call this "indirect social control." Let us suppose that informal social control is the women's gossip network that regulates ordinary face-to-face social relations. Let us say that formal social control is a patriarchal hierarchy that defines good and bad and takes care of egregious bad actors that are not amenable to the influence of the women's network. But the operation of the market system is obviously something else again. And yet it involves both face-to-face relationships of the informal social control culture and also the rules and regulations of the patriarchal formal social control culture.

And something more. This something more is the influence of the price system which is an independent influence in addition to the relationships of face-to-face and the rules of commercial law. I would say that it is a third level that sits on top of the rules of formal social control that sits on top of the relationships of informal social control. The influence of the price system is indirect. It is a moment to moment commentary on transactions; it is constantly nudging everyone to serve each other; and it is constantly issuing balance sheets that tell us what is working and what is not working in the moment to moment pecuniary transactions of life.

Let us now take a further step and say that we humans have a tendency to plump for one or other of these cultures of social control and "privilege" it over the others.

Right now we have the educated women of the world that are intent on privileging the informal social control culture of women: they want to anathematize "microaggressions" and provide "safe spaces." This is such a girl thing! Then we have the lefties of the world that want to privilege the formal social control of the educated expert in top down government and administrative bureaucracy then reorders the world in accordance with the lefty vision of equality, liberation, and emancipation. Such a boy thing! Finally we have the libertarians that want a market-only regulation of society with the price system determining everything.

But I am better, higher than all this flat-earth fol-der-ol. Well, of course.

I see above the dusty plain to the mountains and above them to ridges higher still! What is needed is all three of these methods of social control, with the patriarchal formal control incorporating and extending the matriarchal relational social control, and the market's indirect social control incorporating and extending the patriarchal formal social control system. And beyond that, who knows what some genius is presently cooking up to amaze us all with a fourth system, higher and better than anything we can presently understand.

Now, in my view this Three Cultures notion dovetails brilliantly into my reductive Three Peoples concept. Of course it does. But that is a question for another post.

Who Will Be the Angriest of All?

I get that the whole point of politics is to get your side angried up so that they will all go out to the polls and vote.

That, I presume, was the whole point of Al Gore not conceding the 2000 election and the subsequent Redefeat Bush bumper stickers on the backs of Subarus everywhere for the next few years.

And that, obviously, is the plan with Hillary Clinton's Russia Collusion excuse for losing the 2016 election.

But I thought that the candidate's lawyers were off-limits. That's so that all shady deals can be run through the candidate's lawyer's office. See the Steele Dossier, for which the financing was run through Hillary Clinton's lawyer.

But with the raid on Donald Trump's lawyer I'd say that the good old rules are finished. Apparently, a special team will go through all the documents to determine which are covered by attorney-client privilege. Perfectly fair and just. But I doubt if Hillary Clinton would like any government  team rummaging through her attorney's files on such a mission. After all, it's nothing to exempt evidence because of attorney-client privilege if your gum-shoes have already been through it all and understand what has been going on and where the bodies are buried.

But the question that I have about all of this is: who will get the angriest? Will it be Trump supporters enraged that, yet again, the Deep State gets to do what it wants when it wants and how it wants? Or will it be educated women confirmed once again in their outrage that Trump has been #MeToo-ing around when everybody knows that the Harvey Weinstein era is over?

Or do the Trump supporters, content with the good-jobs regime of the Trump economy stay home while the woke SJWs all flock to the polls?

The simple answer is: we don't know. All I know is that I put out a substantial contribution to Dino Rossi, who's running for the open Republican toss-up WA-08 district. The last time I got that engaged, and put up real money, was in 1994 in the great mid-term that elected the first Republican Congress in 40 years. And what got me all riled up was the hypocrisy of the 1992 Year of the Woman.

So the question in 2018 is: who is angriest? Is it the lefty liberals, outraged at the inexplicable election of Trump when everyone agreed it was time for the First Woman President? Or is it the deplorables, enraged at the manifold injustices and indignities that they receive every day at the hand of the their local liberal?

You call it.

Sure We Fight, But Then What?

Right now the mad-caps on the conservative right are all singing the same tune. First the liberals want to take our guns and then they want to take our free-speech rights. #1A and #2A.

OK, so we fight. We fight for our gun rights, and the right of self-defense. And we fight for free speech rights; the right to publish our ideas, right and wrong, and petition the government for a redress of grievances, right or wrong.

But then what?

See, my Big Thing is that we conservatives really don't have an answer to the left's program.

The left, as I see it, is filling the hole left by the death of God in the 19th century. But its program is totalitarian: we will bend the arc of history towards justice with a condominium of secular religion and government power and economic power.

The verdict on that is the mass graves of the 20th century. When ideology, government, and economic power are condensed into one entity the result is disaster.

But people still want the consolation of religious hope; they still want government to protect them from pirates and predators, and they still want economic security. And that is the package deal that the left keeps offering. And that is the attraction of "activism" for the well-born crusader. He can be the agent to bring hope and safety and security to the eternally marginalized.

In his Maps of Meaning Jordan B. Peterson tells us exactly what this is about. We live in the Unbearable Present; our constant need is to formulate a solution to this misery, to heal the gaping wound in our society and advance to an Ideal Future.

You will notice that the left has exactly formulated its program on this axis whether with the unbearable exploitation of labor or minorities or women. And they formulate a vision of an ideal future, liberated and emancipated from oppression and exploitation.

Only the left always leads to the silence of the mass grave. So something is wrong.

Peterson symbolizes the problem of redemption from the unbearable present to an ideal future as the opposition between two Hostile Brothers: the Hero and the Adversary.

[The hero] stands on the border between order and chaos, and serves the group as creator and agent of renewal... The hero rejects identification with the group as the ideal of life, preferring to follow the dictates of his conscience and his heart. His identification with meaning--and his refusal to sacrifice meaning for security--renders existence acceptable, despite its tragedy.

But then there is the Adversary. He comes in two forms, the fascist and the decadent.

The fascist wants to crush everything different, and then everything. The decadent immolates himself, and then builds the fascist from his ashes. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century, manifest most evidently in the concentration camp, stand as testimony to the desires of the adversary and as monument to his power.

The problem is, of course, that every self-styled savior represents himself as the true hero, and the other guy as the fascist, decadent adversary. So how is a mother to tell the difference? How do we identify the false hero, who is really a fascist in disguise? How do we see the heroism in the man that "everyone" calls a fascist?

In our current world we have the globalists, who see themselves as arching above the fascist tendencies of the nation state. Then we have the nationalists that see themselves as representing the only practical form of large-scale human representation, because, to paraphrase Enoch Powell, globalism cannot work because there is no global demos, no global people: thus all current attempts at supra-nationalism must fail. Then we have the left that experiences itself as the voice from below, giving voice to the silenced, the oppressed and the exploited.

Which of these is the hero, and which the adversary?

That is the great question of our time.