The Sexist Folly of First Woman President

Well, well well. So now it can be told, way after the news had any salience. Hillary Clinton is not, and never was, a people person. That's the takeaway for me on reading about Amy Chozick's Chasing Hillary through two presidential campaigns.

Yeah, all the rubbish about Hillary Clinton being a great person in private seems to be rubbish. Hillary Clinton simply is not a people person, and she really does not like interacting with people. And "everybody" always knew it. Only they never told us.

Really Hillary Clinton. If you are not a people person, the sort that cannot exist for a moment without pressing the flesh and meeting people, then for God's sake don't run for political office.

I once asked a Seattle city bureaucrat about this, about how politicians can keep it up, day after day. He replied that in his experience, unlike ordinary people that find public events very draining, the real politician gets energy from being out in public and interacting with people.

And so now we finally get the unvarnished truth about Hillary Clinton. She absolutely hates being out in public. She even thought that the admiring fan club of female journalists would be hard on her. Really.

Chozick and the other reporters covering Clinton in 2015–16 were pulling for her. You could hear it in the questions they asked. Chozick makes it obvious in her new book. Yet Clinton was convinced this gaggle of liberal women was somehow out to take her down, and she barricaded herself off from them. 

“She told aides she knew women reporters would be harder on her. We’d be jealous and catty and more spiteful than men. We’d be impervious to her flirting.”

Oh please. In fact writes Amy,

“I still felt some kind of feminine bond with Hillary then,” she writes of her early months on the beat, and later describes her coverage as “neutral to positive, with plenty of wet kisses thrown in.” 

I think that Rule One of life is that you really do not want to go into a field for which you are signally unsuited. It will make you compensate with excessive amounts of Chardonnay.

So is it sexism that Hillary Clinton did not get elected president? Who knows? But all the girls on the bus were all invested in America's First Woman President. I imagine because that is what they were taught in school and in college. And women  tend to believe what they are taught, much more than men who, like me, tend to think that teachers are full of it.

Is that sexism, or one of the Universal Truths of Life? You decide.

The funny thing is that all this fainting and hugging and "you go girl" and "breaking glass ceilings" stuff is silly mean-girl high-school stuff. And it is sexist to assume that any proportion of any particular profession of executive suite should be female. Or black, or Asian, or anything else.

And it is stupid. For instance, the political leader of a country preeminently needs to be a person that will protect the people from existential perils. Sexism or no  sexism, women have a steeper hill to climb on this than men. In fact, women aspiring to executive political office practically have to re-invent themselves as men: see Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir. Yeah, it didn't hurt Margaret Thatcher that she led the UK into the Falklands War.

But nobody ever suggested that politics and feminism and intersectionalism and the whole culture of the left is anything other than really dumb and stupid. Really dumb and stupid because it has spent the best part of 150 years railing against the very thing that has brought the majority of humans out of the indigent poverty and utter subjection of the ages. How dumb do you have to be not to see what is right in front of your eyes?

OK, I know. Really, nearly all of us all of the time and all of us nearly all of the time are still pre-modern tribesmen and women. So we, like all humans, don't even notice what is right in front of our eyes.

This present era is a remarkable one for women: the energy revolution and the health revolution have liberated women from lives shortened by death from childbirth, and their children saved by the radical improvement in life expectancy. It means that women can do things other than get pregnant and struggle mightily to have one or two children survive into adulthood.

But this freedom means that women now have the opportunity to make complete fools of themselves. This is the meaning of freedom: the freedom to make mistakes, and beyond that, courtesy of the left, forcing the rest of us into saying nothing while they insist on making complete fools of themselves.

I was talking to a lefty friend about lesbianism, and said that he and I were both People of the Creative Self. We believe in being creative. Lesbianism, I said, amounts to women getting creative with sex.

But, I said, what we forget to remember is that the creative life is incredibly hard. Chances are that if you try to live a creative life you will fail miserably, because you don't have the talent or your don't have the luck, or you don't have the grit, or something. Most of us are better advised just to go with the flow and be good sensible People of the Responsible Self.

So, girls. Don't forget that your "you go girl" culture is bound to be a total failure for most of the women that try it. And the reason for the failure is the fact that going against nature, going against instinct, going against your strongest abilities, and just trying something new is almost sure to be a disappointment.

Now I think that in a hundred years women will have discovered new and better ways of living in the era of abundance, when women don't die in childbirth, when women can control their fertility, when women can be whatever they want to be. But first women -- and the rest of us -- are going to have to go through what a sci-fi author a called the Great Ravine.

And one of the bodies in the Great Ravine is Hillary Clinton.

But First, Humans are Tribal

Jonah Goldberg's new book, The Suicide of the West, is out this week, and I haven't ordered my copy. I'm not exactly sure of his argument, but it seems to include at least Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment, because I hear him talking about $3 per day, which is the daily income of Brits, Indians, Chinese, USians in 1800. Jonah calls it the "Miracle" of getting from $3 per day to $100 per day.

From the blurb on Amazon:

As Americans we are doubly blessed that those radical ideas were written into the Constitution, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society:

• Our rights come from God not from the government.
• The government belongs to us; we do not belong to the government.
• The individual is sovereign. We are all captains of our own souls.
• The fruits of our labors belong to us.

In the last few decades, these political virtues have been turned into vices. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation and “white privilege,” the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right.

Time was, I would have agreed completely with Jonah. But now I don't. That's because, since July 2016 with the accession of Trump to head the Republican Party, I have had to face the fact that the capitalist/libertarian world view that I held is not good enough.

The reason, I have come to believe, is that the notion of the material world understood by science and the notion of the rational actor that is understood by post Enlightenment theory misunderstands the nature of man the animal.

Yes, reason and science are the amazing developments that have enabled the "Miracle" but we are still 90 percent the social animals that survive because we live in groups and we conform to the world-view of the group. And we act not on a rational analysis of the situation but from emotion, or "affect."

I have been able to come to a reasonable understanding of all this by reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. In that book Peterson runs us through myth, religion, alchemy, Jung and Nietzsche to try and make sense of it all.

And the most important thing he says is that we do not go through life as rational actors, deciding every moment what to do based on a scientific analysis of alternatives. Not at all.

What we do is go unthinkingly, unconsciously, from moment to moment in our "known world," which is known to us partly from our own experience and mostly from the socialization we get from the group, through its myths, religion, and its menu of "things we believe." Anyone that disagrees with the norm is typically labeled as a madman, if relatively harmless, or a dangerous heretic, if not relatively harmless. Thus our life in the "known world" is partly just unconscious life on auto, and partly an unconscious subordination to the culture of the group we belong to.

Thus it makes complete sense that lefty mobs combine to anathematize anyone that dares to diverge from the liberal line. That is what humans do. It is the way we preserve our human groups and keep everyone safe in the "known world" and its best practices, and keep klueless klots from bashing into the guardrails and killing themselves. The punishment of dissenters and heretics is how we preserve our group way of life, the way of life that has brought us successfully to the present moment.

But what happens if suddenly our unconscious life lived moment to moment in the "known world" bumps into something unexpected? What happens right away is Fear. Here is what rats do when they encounter something unexpected. They stop, freeze in Fear for a while, and then tentatively start exploring around them, in an attempt to understand what has happened, and how they should adapt to the unexpected, whether it is dangerous or useful or what.

We humans do the same thing. When we come upon something unexpected, we freeze in Fear. Then, after a while, we start to figure out what went wrong, and what to do about it. But this sort of thing happens not just to individuals but to groups as well. The bulk of Peterson's book is about the social process of adapting to the new and unexpected at the group level, the irruption of the "unknown world" into the known world of the group and the way in which the group responds to the chaotic challenge of the unknown.

In Peterson's view, the agent of adaption is the creative, sacrificial, revolutionary hero, the Christ figure, that explores the frightening unknown and proposes, and suffers, for his solution to society's problem. He suffers, of course, because society never wants to change. Even as the world is collapsing in ruins, people still want to go on in the old way, and they still want to punish heretics that propose a new world view.

Now in my view the Axial Age religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- are astonishing ways of adapting the received "way of life" from a small tribal group to a larger agricultural-plus-city group. It proposes the brilliant notion of divine justice to deal with the problem that, in a society larger than the village, we do not know what everyone is doing, and who has done what to whom, and therefore cannot mete out justice to all the malefactors.

In my view the nation state is an astonishing way of replacing the actual tribe of the kindred, people actually related to me by blood, with the totally fake and artificial and much larger tribe of the nation, united by a centrally imposed language and a totally fake and artificial glorious history.

But we are now in a place where the old Axial Age religions are no longer meaningful to educated people in the West. And we are now in a place where the nation state is no longer meaningful to educated people in the West.

In my view the Axial Age religions were responsibility religions, with a God that spelled out a vision of divine justice that people were expected to follow on their own -- with a bit of help from priests and churches and Inquisitions. But our new educated class is in the process of replacing the old responsibility religion with a religion of creativity. In their view what is best in life is to be creative; everything else is deplorable. Nietzsche is the guy that is really starting to face up to this, with his "Beyond Good and Evil" and his "we free spirits." What does a culture of creativity look like? That is what Nietzsche is trying to do.

Very nice: I am all in favor of the culture of creativity. But I doubt if the overwhelming majority of humans are ready for this. So a culture of creativity has to account for the fact that most people are not ready for it.

In my view the nation state is an astonishing human and cultural and political achievement, even though its birth has everywhere been the work of some dominatory and conquering elite. But our educated elite has determined that the nation state is the cause of all wars, and that the nation state must be replaced by supra-national institutions like the EU and the UN. Ordinary people cannot be trusted because they are all proto-fascists, so educated experts must rule. However, the educated elite still needs to use politics in order to gain the support of ordinary people for their elite agenda. In the nation state era they would appeal to the national idea, through notions like "British is best," the "American way of life." The Germans, of course, developed the idea of the national "Volk." But what were the elite to to do if nationalism was a bad word and Volk is nothing more than genocide? Well, what the educated class has done is revive the tribalisms of old. Instead of the nation they are using what we now call "identity politics" to rally people. First it was the identity of class, in the Communist Manifesto. The workers belonged to no nation, but would join in a Communist International across national borders. Then the educated class started to appeal to people on the basis of gender and race within nation states -- all this to achieve equality of gender and race.

This is all very well, but I doubt if turning the clock back to the smaller identities of class and race and gender is really a better fake tribalism than the fake tribe of the nation.

So here we are in a chaos of warring cultures and tribalisms. What is the solution?

The solution is marked out in Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. We need a new sacrifical creative hero to lead us to a Promised Land with a new understanding of the confusing world situation that will, in time, harden into a new religious and group orthodoxy. And this new orthodoxy will convert the rational ideas of modern science and the economic "Miracle" into a new system of religious and cultural "affect" that ordinary people will pick up with the air they breathe.

In my view the new religion must combine several features that serve the "Miracle" and are notably absent from the thinking of the global educated elite.

• First, we must all serve the market as we once served our feudal lords. This is a very difficult concept for most people to accept, and a lot needs to be done to assist people when the market leaves them by the side of the road. We need to make a cult out of serving the market, and make it ordinary and natural for people to pick themselves up and find a new way to serve when their old job no longer serves. Right now we have a chaos between "free trade" and "jobs for life" and everyone feels betrayed.
• Second, we must revive the nation state or some other artificial tribal notion which almost all people can support. Now the point of a tribe is protection from the neighboring tribe, because the land the tribe occupies is its source of food, and must be defended if the tribe is to continue. This old point has lost its salience because food can be bought and transported from anywhere to anywhere in the world. So the nation state is no longer in the business of protecting the food supply. And yet humans still need protection and the group is what provides protection. So the nation state must provide protection. But from what? Obviously, the terrors of the market, not to mention robbers and mass murderers, and natural disasters. But here is the thing. We should not protect people from the market with gigantic entitlement programs that completely insulate them from the world. Government is here to protect us from existential perils, not to hide us away from day-to-day annoyances.

But the key is that these two things must be done not as rational, sensible programs, but as religion, as the dividing line between good and bad. They must partake of the fundamental nature of human life, which is not reason but emotion.

Our problem, the problem of the non-left, is that we profess the futile notion that we are rational whereas the left is all about feelings. Sorry chum, but the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all about feelings. The trick is to use feelings in the service of rationally acquired knowledge, to realize that religion is upstream of culture is upstream from politics, but that behind the scenes is knowledge and reason.

It is my belief that the whole arc of the left, from Marx to Marcuse to McKinnon, is a religion upstream from culture upstream from politics that is a Great Reaction against the findings of modern knowledge and reason. I mean, what idiots would set themselves against the ideas that have released billions of humans from hunger and bondage?

Really, this is not that hard!

Which is Best: Excellence or Average?

Today my fellow ex-Brit John Derbyshire is complaining about James Comey. What a dreadful thing it is, he writes, for a dullard like Comey to become Director of the FBI. Chaps like him are "Outer Party" types:

They are the obedient, unquestioning enforcers of ideological orthodoxy: schoolteachers, college lecturers, local TV newsreaders, the Human Resources staff at big corporations, and so on.

What we need, says Derb, is not a George Orwell 1984 banal Outer Party type, but a smart Inner Party type. Head of the FBI is an Inner Party job.

For Inner Party I want people super-smart and canny—clued in and up-to-date with social and cultural issues.

No you don't Derb. You want dumb-as-a-post. If Comey had been smarter maybe he and he minions would have succeeded in entangling Trump in their attempt, first, to neuter him with Russia-salted oppo. research and, second, by trapping him in the coils of their Russia Collusion narrative.

But fortunately, they are all idiots at the Deep State. They can play at leaking state secrets to the media, but really can't get the job done. Any Deep State worth its salt would have dispatched Trump. Instead all their dirty laundry is showing up in the wash, and some of them may go to jail.

Here is the Z-man complaining about the tendency of democracies to have the worst rise to the top.

The main issue in our politics is that our system attracts the worst people. It is nearly impossible to find an elected official who has ever done honest work. Most are phenomenally stupid, outside their reptilian ability to fool voters and cozy up to the billionaires that bankroll them.

And this is a problem? If they were really smart they would probably lead us into the most appalling messes. Think of really smart political leaders: Lenin, Mao, Castro, Chávez. They were so smart that they managed to lead their countries into poverty and still keep their jobs!

No, I think that we need brilliance in the individual entrepreneur, and stupidity in the politician. My kind of guy is Freeman Dyson, reviewing a book, Scale by Geoffrey West, that praises the big urban city and its cross-connections. Because Grand Unified Theory and Sustainability. Writes Dyson:

The last time humans invented a grand unified theory to make our existence sustainable was when Karl Marx came up with dialectical materialism. The theory had great success in changing human behavior over large areas of our planet. But the changes did not prove to be sustainable, and the theory did not remain unified.

I suspect that Grand Unified Theories always tend toward sameness and enforced conformity, a resistance to organic change and adaptation. Says Dyson:

The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste. West chooses sustainability as the goal and the Grand Unified Theory as the means to achieve it. My taste is the opposite. I see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to achieve it. Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents. 

My kinda guy. But Dyson presents another idea, which I hadn't thought about. It concerns the notion of "genetic drift." See there are two things driving evolution: natural selection and genetic drift.

Genetic drift is the change in the average composition of a population due to random mutations of individual genes. Genetic drift causes species to evolve even in the absence of selection. Genetic drift and natural selection work together to drive evolution, selection being dominant when populations are large, genetic drift being dominant when populations are small.

On this theory you get occasional outbursts of genius in small, isolated, populations. Which is the handmaid of the kind of imagined future that I like: isolated geniuses inventing crazy things that turn out to transform the world. Think Ashkenazi Jews, isolated in small communities for centuries, who combine genius with troubling genetic anomalies like Tay-Sachs disease.

All this folds back on the issue of creative and sacrificial heroes, the chaps that redeem a sick society that finds itself in a box canyon with no apparent way out. Society does not advance in a straight evolutionary, sustainable line. It goes on doing the same thing, kept on the straight line by religion and convention, until the brain-dead culture reaches a crisis where the good old ways cannot continue.

Call it creativity if you like. But here is the problem, upon which I and a lefty acquaintance recently agreed. We People of the Creative Self tend to think of creativity as the natural and sensible way to live. But we are wrong. Creativity is hard, and  nearly everyone that tries it fails miserably, partly due to a lack of genius and partly due to a lack of courage.

The fact is that change is fraught with peril. And so is keeping on keeping on in the same old way. As Freeman Dyson relates, the last time someone came up with a Grand Unified Theory of change it was Marx, and his idea was a bloody failure.

On the other hand we have the 200 years of the Great Enrichment, through individual mad geniuses bringing us one technological revolution after another that the Powers That Be failed to stop before each revolution took over the world. Lefty Greens say that this Great Enrichment is going to kill the planet, and they may be right.

So what happens next? Well, the truth is that we don't know. We will blunder into the future, following various geniuses and plenty of idiots, and whatever happens, a ton of people will pay the price. Here is Dyson again.

[T]he life expectancy of a company at any age is about ten years. The short lifetime of companies is an essential feature of capitalist economics, with good and bad consequences. The good effect is to get rid of failed enterprises, which in socialist economies are difficult to kill and continue to eat up resources. The bad effect is to remove incentives for foresight and long-range planning.

Now, the question is: should the "foresight and long-range planning" be conducted by geniuses or by dull banalities like James Comey? It's a good question. 

Collusion? Schlemusion, says the Deep State

Rush Limbaugh was more than usually upbeat this morning as he spake through my car radio. Because it looks like the Deep State has got to the point where it is abandoning its Russia Collusion attack on President Trump. He quoted Mara Liasson from one of the weekend shows saying that she didn't think "Russia is a voting issue." And another Deep State creature Josh Dawsey, said it was all too hard for the voters to understand: "it’s a complicated storyline."

In other words, the Deep Staters realize that the Russia Collusion game ain't gonna fly. Apparently they thought that their full court press would demoralize President Trump and cause him to resign.

Really? Like I said a white back: Donald Trump has been in a room with 40-odd bankers that had the power to shut his Trump Organization down and send him back to Queens unless he persuaded them otherwise. Compared to the holy terror of that experience what are a few Deep State bureaucrats and campaign operatives?

But here is the utter stupidity of the Deep Staters. They started this. If they hadn't gone after Trump then we wouldn't be in the position that now we are going to be investigating all the top DOJ and FBI officials of the late Obama administration, and going back to the Clinton emails, and the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One.

Because otherwise, in a spirit of gentlemanly honor, the Trump administration would never have reopened the Clinton email case or even taken any interest in the pay-for-play operations of the Clinton Foundation. OK, scratch that. In a spirit of honor among thieves, the Trump people would have let sleeping dogs lie, and if they didn't the Deep Staters would have kicked up a huge fuss about using government to persecute their opponents. McCarthyism! Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!

And, what makes it worse for the Democrats, this whole DOJ-FBI suborning issue is going to play out for years, as we go through the grinding of the legal gears on the whole thing.

And all along the way, President Trump is going to be tweeting about it. Hey, I wouldn't be surprised if, by October 15, he is the only person to the right of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) whose Twitter account isn't suspended.

I mean. Think about it. President Trump will have the right and the bounden duty to say at every turn: "They weaponized the government against me and my campaign. This is the worst political scandal in American history, and we have to do something about it to save America." And who could disagree?

I put the whole thing down to the notion of revolutionary activism that has moved the left ever since The Communist Manifesto. Things are so bad that only revolutionary violence can cure it. So the rule of law means nothing; so peaceable change of power means nothing. The only thing that matter is Justice! Even if we have to burn the place down to get there.

And this in an era when capitalism has increased the per-capita income of everyone in the West by 30 times.

No, lefties, you are clueless. What matters is to avoid civil war. And the way you do that, as Greek American philosopher George Maroutsos explained to me 40 years ago, is that the only thing that matters in a democracy is that the right-wing governing party allows the left-wing opposition to beat it in the next election and peaceably surrender power to its lefty opponents. And then, eight years later, the lefty party allows the right-wing opposition to win the election and peaceably surrender power to its right-wing opponents.

That is the way you avoid Venezuela. It could be a good idea. Maybe they should try it in Cuba.

That is what really matters, and the big problem right now in America is that at the last two change elections in the US, in 2000 and 2016, where  the left lost to the right, the left has not conceded the election.

This is not just playing with fire, it is playing with nukes.

And the left doesn't have a clue about this, because arc of history.

Powell 50 Years Later: Migration and Invasion

The standard liberal line about racism in housing is that, as soon as a black family shows up on the street, the white people start to head for the exits. Raacism!

But Enoch Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech now enjoying its 50th anniversary, shows how the game really works. He tells the story of a WWII war widow that turned her house into a boarding house as widows have done since time immemorial.

She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

But the widow was not willing to rent rooms out to black immigrants. So her house stayed empty, and she started to experience aggression and hostility from her new neighbors. We do not know her eventual fate. We do know there are now rape gangs in Rotherham and Telford in England, and the authorities are hesitant to act, because racism.

Let us convert this into the US experience. Every wave of immigrants establishes itself in an urban neighborhood that has seen its best days, and is starting to decline. Or maybe the neighborhood is ageing, and all the ambitious young people have already moved out to fancier neighborhoods leaving their ageing parents in the old family home. The immigrant new wave, being as yet unadapted to city life and city skills, uses physical aggression to establish itself, and of course usually has a gang component, as in Irish, Jewish, Italian, black, Mexican, and now Salvadorean gangs. So anyone with half a clue gets the hell out while they still have equity in their homes. The last to leave are widows, because.

Of course, this is the way that wars and migration have always operated, since the dawn of time. I am reading today about the expansion of the Bantu tribes out of West Africa.

When the Bantu first expanded out of west-central Africa several thousand years ago, they had a profound influence on the indigenous rainforest hunter-gatherer populations they encountered … Even today, the overwhelming pattern is that Bantu men mix with pygmy women …

This aligns with my own reading, about hunter-gatherer tribes, in War Before Cilivization. A tribe existed as long as it had men to defend the border; after that the women got distributed into neighboring tribes. Then there were the Vikings sailing up the rivers of Britain 1,000 years ago. They took the food, killed the men, and sold the women and children into slavery in the regional slave market  in Dublin, Ireland. Until 1066 and all that. But the Normans were Vikings!

Today, the black LA suburb of Compton is fast transforming into a Latino community, and the Latino gangs are helping to intimidate the black women householders into getting out of town.

Of course, it's easy for a rich bitch like me to take a lordly view of all this. I left Britland fifty years ago for the greener pastures of the US and Seattle. And what with one thing and another, Seattle has transformed itself from a Boeing and Weyerhauser town to booming Amazon City, via Microsoft. So, if you are already a resident, your boat gets lifted by the rising tide. That makes life easy.

But what about the folks on the wrong side of the curve? Hey, maybe for a season the ruling class makes a fuss about them. Like it did for the working class. Like it did for blacks. For women.

But politics is a moveable feast. Yesterday the working class was worthy and deserving; today it is racist and bigoted and deserves to die. For a hundred years Democrats held the line for the white racist South. Now it agitates for the northern black racists. Tomorrow?

Rule One about life, the universe, race, class, gender, and everything is that the politicians and the culture warriors don't care about you. They only care about your vote. And they only care about your vote if it will help them to win this November.

I like to say that all stories are survivor stories. That's because the stories of the dead die with them. I realize that the story of my own family is also a survivor story. My father's family got out of Russia in 1918. So what would have happened if they had stayed? My mother's family was in Japan up until 1940 and got out to Australia. My own parents married and had their children in India, and then migrated to Britain in 1948 after Indian independence. All this seems unexceptional and anodyne, but only because my family always had the sense, or received sensible advice, or the pure luck to get out while the going was good.

So here am I, in Seattle in 2018, as the murder rate in London, England starts to surge about the murder rate in New York City.

All in all, I think I am the luckiest guy in the world. But other people are not so lucky. And the truth is that the unlucky people just slide below the waves and are never heard from again.

The Problem is not just the Tyranny of Experts

I think all of us except Bill Gates and the World Bank can agree that the post WWII global development shtick has been a mixed blessing. At the very least it has signally failed to raise its beloved beneficiaries out of poverty.

So William Easterly's The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor is a good way to stroll through the efforts throughout the last century to bring less-developed countries into the modern era with the help of experts and development banks and government programs.

Today, anyone can tell that the combination of liberal experts, charitable foundations, international organizations, free money, and local dictators is bound to end it tears every time it is tried.

But Easterly introduces us to a few wrinkles in the story that I did now know. For instance, back in the 1920s a group of Yalies, YMCAers, and the Rockefeller Foundation got together to have a conference about race relations between the US and the Orient in the wake of the US Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924. But the US government didn't want a lot of negative publicity about race so when the Institute for Pacific Relations opened its first conference in Honolulu on June 30, 1925, the US side was committed to lowering the rhetoric on race, not to mention the extraterritorial rights of the white man in Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. that the Chinese wanted to talk about.

So in the end they settled on development. Rather than talk about racism the western elitists would form a condominium with the local power structure and plan technological improvements directed from above and, after World War II, financed by international organizations like the World Bank.

After World War II there was a new reason not to talk about race. The US agreed not to talk about colonialism if the Europeans agreed not to talk about segregation. Everyone could agree on more jobs for experts and more development loans for the Third World. Very civilized.

But since the development plans were executed through the local post-colonial power structure they got hopelessly tangled up in the tribal politics of the former colonies. For instance in Ghana the cocoa planters were mostly from the inland Ashanti tribe while President Nkrumah was from the coastal Akan tribe. Hey kids! How about we fund the development plan with a tax on cocoa growers! Oh by the way, back in the old days:

The Ashanti were among the African kingdoms that sold slaves to the Europeans; the coastal Akan people were among their victims.

So the Ashanti deserved to be taxed into oblivion.

But what about the people? Easterly returns again and again to the "rights of the poor" that the experts and the local dictators blithely ignored as they divvied up the world between them.

Sorry chum. The rights of the poor have nothing to do with the case. That's because in tribal and/or agricultural societies there is no such thing as "the rights of the poor." In a tribe you sit somewhere in the local tribal hierarchy and you are completely defined by that and by traditional ideas of what anyone is owed by the tribe. In agriculture you are the creature of your feudal lord, and enjoy "rights" only in an informal way: you accept the suzerainty of your feudal lord, and he observes when convenient the customary rights such as grazing rights on the so-called "commons" that you have gradually obtained through his inattention.

The problem of "development," of helping the folks that have not yet made the transition from an income of $3 per day to the present US $140 per day, all in today's dollars, it not a problem of expert technique or of rights. It is a question of culture.

Simply put, if you want to wive and thrive in the modern economy you must transform your culture utterly from the normal subordinate culture of the agricultural age and the simple hierarchy of the tribal culture into the responsibility culture of the city. Instead of working to grow food on a patch of land you will work for wages in the market economy. Instead of marrying if you get to inherit someone's land or get some land from the feudal lord, you will need to establish yourself in some job in order to attract the babes. Instead of just following traditional folkways you will need to be able to buy and sell, rent and borrow in the market economy of the city. And you will have to transition from the old rights of membership to the new rights under law.

This is a huge transition, the biggest transition that humans have ever encountered. The marvel is not that billions are still living at $3 per day. The miracle is that, in 200 years, the people of Europe managed to go from $3 to $140 without blowing up and failing utterly. Really, a couple of world wars was a small price to pay.

Now, I have some interest in this. I wrote a book The Road to the Middle Class which argues that if you want to make the transition from country to city in double-quick-time you need to acquire the culture of modern religion, education, mutual aid, and law. If you get propped up by the neo-feudal welfare state you get stuck in limbo and don't really become a "citizen," one who has acquired the culture of the city. Hello African Americans.

My book is brilliant, of course, and you should read it. But the truth is that what most people do when they migrate to the city is to congregate in ethnic ghettos in the city where they can live in the comfort of their own while they learn how to make it in the city. And they gravitate to the neo-tribal politics of the big city political machine with its tasty garnish of criminal gang. Only after a generation or two in the tribal ghetto do people emerge into the great global upper-middle class of the university degree and the life-long career. At which point they are now ready to become tyrannical experts and tell the newbies how to do it.

The welfare state is a prettied-up version of the big-city machine. You may think of it as a friendly takeover of the machine by administrative experts with elite educations and credentials.

Notice that the welfare state is really the global development expert model executed in one country.

But the welfare state is hopeless, because government cannot reform. Government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters. And the funny thing about supporters is that the one thing not to be endured is any reduction in their rewards. I have written a book, An American Manifesto, that proposes a political arrangement to replace the welfare state, based on the notion of Michael Novak, proposed in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, of what I call the Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. But is doesn't have a hope until we the people are lying dazed and helpless on the ground, finally willing to give up our sacred right to Social Security, Medicare, and free education.

Yep. There is no doubt that experts are easily persuaded into tyranny. But that is only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that we humans, all of us, want free stuff rather than do the hard work of adapting to the new facts on the ground. And we are perfectly happy to elect politicians who will empower the IRS to take the money for the free stuff out of the other guy's pocket so we don't have to change. We call it bending the arc of history towards justice.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Is This Peak Activism?

A couple black guys get all riled up because the Starbucks manager called the cops on them: for using the rest room and sitting around without buying anything.

And then, of course, the black guys called BLM on Starbucks.

As conservatives, we think this is all pretty funny, because Starbucks is a lefty place that usually likes to lecture the rest of us on race and gender. Now they are hoist with their own petard. (Hmm. Who knew that was a Hamlet quote?)

Anyway, our fury over St. David's Media-Matters-directed war on conservative media figures is moderated now that Laura Ingraham is getting a bigger audience after the Hogg boycott. And Ace Hardware is going to advertise on Laura's show after all.

(Good show, Ace Hardware. Because home improvement is such a white guy thing. You really don't want to rile up the white guys that are the core of your business.)

And what about the utter confusion of the "activists" at Duke shocked, shocked that the alumni booed them when they peacefully protested the Duke University president's speech.

Do you not realize, Duke University peaceful protesters, that there are millions of deplorables out there absolutely slobbering for the chance to stick it to you insufferable lefty protesters, but because they have jobs and children and all, know that they need the comfortable anonymity of a big gathering in order to safely vent their "hate speech" on you?

I got an email from a reader today, responding to my AT piece asking "Why Don't WE Turn Populist" and start throwing our weight around at peaceful protests? He agreed, and fantasized about 50 million of  us "emailing protests" making life difficult for the ruling class at "county seats, city halls, congressional and senatorial district offices."

The problem is, of course, that we deplorables don't really believe in politics. We are not like the "mob" that knows nothing but to follow some leader into the streets. And we are not like the college-trained "activists" learning activism at their college seminaries the way that an earlier generation learned how to become Christian ministers.

That is understood in my reductive Three Peoples theory. Sure, the People of the Subordinate Self are going to follow some leader, some powerful patron, that promises them a mess of pottage. Sure the People of the Creative Self see the percentage in getting into the leadership side of politics and leading workers and peasants along a glorious arc of history towards justice. But if you are a Person of the Responsible Self then your whole world view is centered around your individual responsibility to attend to the challenges of your own life, to live, as Jordan B. Peterson writes, at the borderland between the comforting known and the terrifying unknown, and bravely explore the unknown and bring it into the known world.

For the People of the Responsible Self it makes no sense to sit there railing against the bosses and corporate greed. Because there is work to do at the office and a family to attend to at home.

For the People of the Responsible Self it makes no sense to organize the people in "peaceful protests" to fight for justice. Long term, it doesn't help subordinate people to herd them into a neo-feudal estate as "little darlings" of the ruling class. They are no more than soldiers in a political army that will be eventually abandoned, sick and wounded, by the side of the route of march.

But I gotta say that the current febrile moment, where the Good Little Girls and Boys from the activism seminaries are protesting anything and everything, has the feeling of Peak Activism. Their problem is that politics has a very narrow bandwidth. As I like to say, there is only enough bandwidth in a political season for about one and a half issues before you overwhelm the public airwaves and confuse the punters. This is a problem for the activists, because the whole point of activism is to transfix the nation, to stop the clocks for a moment as everyone is overwhelmed for a transformative epiphany of political drama. So, how long can you keep it up at Peak Activism before everyone gets jaded and moves on to the next political attraction?

Hey liberals! Don't forget that the issue of the century is supposed to be the once-in-a-thousand-years tragedy of Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016. And the horror of Trump-Russia collusion.

I am afraid for our liberal friends. What happens over the next few months when the DOJ IG reports dribble out and show that the problem was not Trump-Russia collusion but Obama-Clinton conspiracy to spy on the Trump campaign and gussie up a Steele Dossier on Trump dirt with help from the Russians? I am afraid that the IG reports will demolish the liberal determination to #Resist the Trump administration and throw the rascals out at the midterms.

And what will the Activists do then, poor things?