The Ruling Class and Art

I am in Philadelphia over the weekend and I am doing the culture thing, including the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, which has been a cultural presence in downtown Philly since 1805.

Naturally the Academy has exhibition space, that nods to all the current cultural trends in the Arts. But there is also a corner of the exhibition space with portraits of the Founders. There are a couple of portraits of George Washington, and a huge painting of William Penn and his treaty with the Indians.

And over in a corner is this little gem, "Colonialism and its Legacies."



Ah yes,  the "Colonial Gallery" with "portraits that celebrated wealthy white colonial elites" and "highlighting their class status." Then we get down to business. The narrative thread of "global trade" and the "traumas" it inflicted.

That thread also connects these images to the long history of traumas wrought by colonizers on the communities they controlled, though those darker histories often lie hidden behind myths and mahogany furniture.

Yes, and one of the portraits in the Colonial Gallery is of the richest slave trader in America. But you will be glad to know this.

Contemporary artists, on view in conversation with these works from from hundreds of years ago, challenge us to unravel these threads, to consider the legacy of empire, slavery, and colonialism in the 21st century.

Not quite, kiddo. The right narrative would be that "We have selected contemporary artists that we believe best challenge the white patriarchal narrative of the colonial era and throw a proper light on the crimes of the fathers."

There is a delicious, mindless conceit in the art world, indeed in liberal world in general, that "we" have attained to a higher, nobler truth that the money-grubbing, slave-holding, racist, sexist elite of olden times.

In fact, then and now, the art world is the mouthpiece of the ruling class. If yesterday artists painted portraits of plump, benevolent slave traders today they paint patronizing pictures of a diverse America or worse, patronizingly patronize artists from diverse communities, pick them out of the crowd and make their name for them.

If yesterday the ruling class built marble monuments to the Founding Fathers, today it builds Holocaust and African American Museums. Because that is the story it wants to tell us, and we'd all better know what is good for us.

But it is all, then and now, mere ruling class propaganda, representing the ruling class, then and now, as benevolent and wise rulers always concerned with bending the arc of history towards justice.

Here is what I think.

I think that ruling classes, then and now, are mostly idiots. Obviously, because they are rulers, they believe in the beneficence of political power. But political power to do what? Tame the frontier? Enable, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Right the wrongs of the workers? Celebrate the diversity of our communities while being careful to avoid cultural appropriation? Teach us about the sins of slavery? Make American Great Again?

I  think that the important thing to know is that nobody knows what they are doing. Five hundred years ago Europeans began sailing and trading and dominating all over the world. As a Chinese Christian put it, if you were on the receiving end of this, you kept wondering: is it the guns? The  science? The political ideas?  Christianity? Who knew?

But was there any white European grand plan to conquer the world?  Not at all, or at least, not much.

Then, a century ago and more, some people got the idea of transforming the world  to a new vision of  brotherhood, socialism, guided by an avant-garde elite.  More recently our  political and business  elites have coalesced around a vision of globalism --  under their continuing benevolent hegemony.

But the truth is that any regime, political or economic, picks winners and losers, and the losers don't like it. I mean really don't like it. And really, in advance, nobody knows what will happen, what the result of any political or economic regime will be, just as nobody knows, in advance, which businesses will succeed and which will fail.

For instance, the socialist experiment of the last century, the product of the best minds and the best and the brightest, has been a monstrous and tragic failure. Yet the fumbling and bumbling of business innovators, from slave traders to tech start-up wizards, has produced the most astonishing increase in human welfare ever. Is there really any notion of what went right, and what went wrong, and why? Are there majestic narratives in all the world's art galleries examining what happened and why? Not really.

What we have, and what we have always had, are ruling class apologists spinning facile narratives. At one time we celebrated mahogany furniture. Now we celebrate bike lanes.

The only thing we know for sure is that it is all rubbish.

Women and Agency

Back in the bad old days of the patriarchy, you may remember, women were notoriously lacking in agency. In the Victorian Era (which seems to have extended mysteriously beyond the boundaries of realm of the Queen and Empress of that name) women were put on pedestals and were worshiped as goddesses. But not allowed to have a bank account. Or something.

Now, of course, with women fully liberated, they are insisting on protection from microaggression and demanding safe spaces from "hate."

The consequence is that little Bari Weiss of Squirrel Hill and The New York Times can tell media sensation Jordan B. Peterson that she just doesn't go along with his Jungian association of women with Chaos. Well, I suppose that if you have been protected in safe spaces all your life, it would be easy to think that.

But Bari Weiss should read The Summer Wives, the latest by my daughter Beatriz Williams. There she will find plenty of female agency and also plenty of women and Chaos. Where you been all this time, Bari? And don't worry. In this tale of sex and class and murder, you get high-class women and Chaos and low-class women and Chaos. And cross-class women and Chaos too, I dare say.

Now, just in case you haven't quite got with the program, the main character in Summer Wives complains at one point about the problem of men writing most of the movie scripts: their women are unconvincing because men just don't get women. That is supposed to be a clue, Bari, that in this book, we are going to run the gamut of womanly behavior from the sweet innocence of virginal youth, to the ruthless use of sex by a woman to take a man away from a step-sister, to the usual thing of women not talking to each other for years at a time.

Did you see that that US Navy destroyer that collided with a container ship featured two women officers on duty that night that were not talking to each other?

I think the point here is that women are different than men. Their agency is a different kind of agency than the typical warrior agency of men, and it is not as visible. And, of course, women's agency is inextricable from that curious aspect of women's lives: the children that they bear and birth and raise.

In our age activist women and their supporters reduce the agency of women down to women and careers. Are enough women represented in certain professions, in corporate hierarchies, and in politics? And are women heroes in movies kicking ass like men heroes?

But this is to miss the point entirely.

The whole  point of  life, the universe, and everything is not who gets to be CEO or President. The whole point is who gets to create posterity. Babies, and stuff.

And that is why it is a monstrous perversion that the be all and end all of educated and evolved womanly politics appears to be abortion, as we see in the current mob politics around the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Put it this way. In the author not on the back flap of The Summer Wives Beatriz Williams notes that

She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

Ah yes. Laundry. A lot of energy, down the ages, has been devoted to off-loading the hum-drum chores of life onto servants, or, in our own time, onto baby sitters and government child-custodial facilities.

But that is odd, for what is more important in life than making the dinner, washing the clothes, and raising the children?

Why do we spend so much of our lives and agency figuring out ways not to do the basics?

And why is it that the philosophers have devoted so little of their incandescent wisdom to this important topic?

That feels like the topic for a novel.

Does #WalkAway Mean Anything?

We righties are getting a little excited about the #WalkAway thing, of supposed Democrats walking away from the ideological plantation. Is it just hype, or is it Something?

The answer is: wait until November, and then wait until President Trump wins reelection with 55-45 in the popular vote. Otherwise it ain't nothing.

Of course, I get what is  going on. Despite the ideological frenzy of Democrats and the usual abortion and gay suspects, most Americans are really not ideologically motivated. They just want to get on and wive and thrive.

And, most important of all, there is the market economy.

I think that we all profoundly underestimate what the market economy teaches people. In a way it is the polar opposite of the political culture. Politics is all about division, of heightening differences, of finding a way to damning the Other to a well-deserved hell. But the market economy teaches you to work with people and to trust them. Other people are not the Other, but potential customers, suppliers, and business partners.

Now the simple fact is that success in politics comes to those that are expert in the art of division, of motivating your side to turn out on election day and  demoralizing the Other so that they barely dare to show their heads above the parapet.

But success in business is different. To succeed in business you want the whole world to come to your door, and you want to expand your world so that everyone likes you and trusts you.

So if you are an ordinary person that is not ideologically motivated you are being tugged in two different directions. The question is: which of the two cultures tugging at you is going to win out? Are you going to be most influenced by the Us-vs-Them culture of politics that wants to divide and conquer? Or are you most influenced by the team culture of business and the market economy, where cooperation and working with everyone is most important?

My feeling is that for most people they are most influenced by the workplace culture where the primary focus is getting along and cooperating with other people.

And, of course, there is the settled science. Put Americans in a room to solve a problem and they will  do it, trying to accommodate everyone. But put Americans into silos supervised by politicians, and they will dutifully carry their protest signs and learn to hate and to fear.

Now, notice what President Trump is doing. His Make America Great Again is not a foolish and embarrassing ploy but a cunning political strategy that proposes to unify all Americans into celebrating and working for America. Of course it is cunning also in a conventional political way by identifying as Other anyone that thinks that "America was never great."

Hey, kid! What side are you on?  Are you for America or against it?

And really,  if you are an ordinary American which door do you choose? Pitch in and Make America Great Again or whine and complain and carry protest signs? If the market economy moves the needle for you then you choose the door that celebrates working with people and trusting them and helping Make America Great.

So, if the folks that were carefully taught to hate and to fear the Other start to feel that maybe they can't get quite as excited as their teachers and their diversity administrators want them to be because, well, outside of politics the culture is that you get on with people and stuff -- if they do -- then they will be experiencing something like that the #WalkAway folks are feeling.

But the thing about life is that you only know the answer after it's all over, and it is perfectly obvious that, e.g., #WalkAway, is the biggest thing since whenever.

Live by the Supreme Court, Die by the Court

President Trump had barely announced his pick for the United States Supreme Court last night before lefty peaceful protesters were protesting at the Supreme Court. They had "STOP XXX" protest signs already printed up for any of the four leading contenders for the nomination.

So. Whichever of the candidates it is, the lefties are going to be out in the streets, protesting.

Do you see the insanity in this? The idea of street protest, as I understand it, is for the unrepresented, the un-listened-to to get the attention of the ruling class. But the people demonstrating in front of the Supreme Court are not those kind of people at all. Indeed, their agenda: abortion, civil rights, gay marriage, are all supported by the ruling class. No need to protest, kids. It is the little people that have a problem with abortion, because of their adherence to traditional Christian teaching. It is the white working class that has a problem with the "civil rights" of affirmative action, diversity and inclusion, because they are its victims. It is the ordinary middle class that wonders what on earth all the fuss is about, pretending that gays and trans are helpless victims rather than scions of the educated class out for a bit of sexual creativity.

The problem is this: if you use the Supreme Court to implement your agenda because you do not want to take the trouble of persuading other Americans to support your agenda, then your opponents can use the Supreme Court to undo your agenda.

See Barack Obama and his "phone and pen" strategy after Democrats lost their majorities in Congress. If you use the administrative state to implement your agenda by executive orders, then your opponents can undo your executive orders as soon as their side wins the presidency, as President Trump's nominees have done. Hey, not such a good tactic!

The wisdom of the Founders was to erect a political system where it was difficult to pass any measure, because you needed to get both Houses of Congress and the President to approve it. But, on the other hand once you had passed a measure it became hard to repeal it, because repeal takes the vote of two Houses of Congress and the President.

So, in the system of the Founders, it is very difficult, say, to pass an abortion law. Maybe thirty years of advocacy and working to form coalitions with other interests. But if you submit to that kind of discipline the end result is worth it. You have a law passed by a majority of the representatives, and you spent all those years working with people to form a broad coalition. And once the law is passed the issue goes to sleep and disappears.

But look what happens when you use elite opinion to fight an ideological battle, and you eventually win your case in the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision with all the liberal justices in lock-step and a wavering conservative added in to make the majority. Why, then you have to stay ideologically mobilized forever, because you never know when a President TrumpHitler will nominate a justice to sweep away your pet issue with the stroke of a pen. And notice this: in the Supreme Court strategy you create enemies rather than friends.

So is it really such a great idea to implement your agenda through the Supreme Court?

So why do liberals do it?

Well, let us start with philosopher William James's "Moral Equivalent of War" article back in 1910. The idea was that since we weren't going to have any wars anymore(!) we needed to elevate the minds and lives of our young people with campaigns to raise their consciousness from the humdrum to the elevated. You can see where this leads: from military campaigns to political campaigns, yea, even to moral campaigns. Thus the scions of the ruling class would not grow up to be great military leaders, but great political leaders, or as we now say: "activists."

Hey, but James had a point. First of all, humans crave meaning in their lives.

The problem with this plan is that it naturally merges the state, which is charged with our physical security, with the church, which is charged with our moral welfare. But, as the Founders determined, a state church was not such a good idea, because it would tend to create a moral monopoly backed by the armed might of the state's monopoly of force.

My feeling is that lefties do not see this, not at all. What matters is the moral imperative of building a truly just society. That is all.

This was brought home to me recently from reading Leon Trotsky by Irving Howe. It is 1917 and all the various political factions are holding tumultuous meetings at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. Then one day Trotsky gets up and announces that the Bolsheviks have seized power. Discussion over. Well, of course. How else would we Bolsheviks build the perfect society to create justice for the workers and peasants?

In other words, most people were trying to work out their differences in the Soviet. But then the Bolsheviks just upped and seized some government offices and said: discussion over. That meant, we now understand, that discussion was over forever, because any return to discussion would surely have meant that the Lenin or the Trotsky or Stalin in power would have had to surrender power to another politician.

By the way, Soviet, or Совет, is a perfectly anodyne Russian word, meaning, as a noun, "council" and, as a verb, to "counsel." But the Bolsheviks turned it into something completely different. That's because, right at the start, they smothered the democratic baby in its cradle, and the normal consultations in meetings of representatives of various interests became rubber stamps that knew to bow the knee to Bolshevik power, or else.

Do you see the problem with the liberal "discussion over" strategy with their rule by Supreme Court? It puts them in the same position as the Russian Bolsheviks. Once you have seized power you have started on the path of no return. You are permanently at ideological war, because you have opted for a policy of force: it is our way, and anyone that opposes us is Hitler. No issue is ever laid to rest, because every issue has been decided by force of ideology.

This, to me, is the explanation of the Democratic effort to derail the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Robert Bork was a known "originalist" who did not believe in deciding cases by discovering a right to privacy in "penumbras" and "emanations" in the Bill of Rights. In plain terms, he did not agree with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. Liberals decided they had to demolish Bork as a candidate; otherwise all their pet Supreme Court decisions would be struck down by a return to the "original" meaning  of the Constitution. But conservatives have responded by teaching all conservative judges never to admit their political and moral opinions against the day that they will be up for confirmation in the US Senate and liable to a Borking.

Again, do you see the problem? Once you have started rule by Supreme Court and force marched your agenda through the court every Supreme Court nomination is a life-and-death matter. That is not the way that politics and representation and constitutions are meant to work.  The idea is to resolve differences and put them to bed so that they cease to become  a source of conflict.

Unless, of course, you believe in keeping moral issues alive forever. Because you like the smell of political gunpowder.

I come back to the science. Someone did a study and found that if you took a bunch of Americans and put them in a room to solve a problem they would do it, and they would do it by giving each person a piece of the solution. In other words, they threw a crumb out to the losers, so they would get something out of the meeting and own a part of the decision.

The whole point of liberal "activism" is that the losers are moral defectives: racists, sexists, homophobes, and they don't even deserve to eat in restaurants in peace.

The problem with that kind of politics is that it gives the moral defectives no alternative but to push back. And that, I think, is the way to understand the Trump phenomenon.

But liberals just don't get it.

I Vote for Amy Coney Barrett

I guess that President Trump will be announcing his Supreme Court pick any moment now. But I want to get my word in first.

I want him to nominate Appeals Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. I realize that she may not be the most conservative candidate in Illyria, but that's OK.

I want Barrett on the Court because I want a conservative women to set the three liberal Mean Girls a-buzzin'.

I want those liberal women judges to be saying to each other "I can't believe she has 7 children." Well, of course, they will, what with Ginsburg (2), Kagan (0), and Sotomayer (0) on the court.

Now, Nietzsche in Zarathustra says that women don't know friendship, only love. I'm not sure about that. But it is certainly true that women don't have buddies. It is certainly true, however, that women are manipulative and vengeful.

So when an Associate Justice Barrett would come on the Court she would face a whispering campaign from the other girls using all the highly developed cultural memes of the high-school clique.

But I believe that Barrett will end up teaching the liberal go-along girls a lesson.

See, it is my belief that women are more inclined than men to go with the program. Girls are good students and they dutifully learn and internalize all that they are taught. Men, in my view, are different. Any man worth his salt always has in the back of his mind, whenever he is in a subordinate student situation, some plan to show the teacher up as an idiot, and to expose everything the teacher is putting out as bullsh*t.

But here's the thing. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Corollary: hell hath no resentment like a woman who wakes up in her 50s and discovers that she has been lied to.

Again, it is my belief that anyone getting the left-liberal stuff in college is being lied to. Socialism is not the wave of the future, it is a Great Reaction back to pre-industrial religion and culture. If you drink the liberal KoolAid you are being taught how not to wive and thrive in the industrial era.

Here, in my view, are the lies that lefties are teaching today's Good Little Girls.

1. Get a career, before marriage. This is all wrong. First of all, the purpose of a career is a male thing, a need to become some sort of a provider so that women will be attracted to you according to the settled science of hypergamy. So, for most women, career is kinda acting. And when women actually get children on the ground they want nothing more than a part-time job that gets them out of the house. Science.
2. Live together before marriage. Trouble is that this is exactly what men like about the Sexual Revolution: get laid without getting hitched. In my view, for a woman to go through her 20s having "relationships" is soul-destroying (and resentment creating).
3. Pro-choice. This is just going with the male excuse: get rid of it, honey. Whether or not abortion is legal, young people need to live believing that any child conceived in their "wild-oats" period gets to live. Otherwise, girls, you are just... well, never mind. As Peterson says, meaning comes before facts, and the meaning of sex is children.
4. The patriarchy. Remember back in the bad old days of the patriarchy when they put women on pedestals as too weak and sensitive to be allowed out in the cold cruel world? So what is the difference with today's "microaggression" and "safe spaces" world advocated by women in the academy? So, just what is so toxic about that "toxic masculinity?"

In other words, everything the left says is a lie, including "and" and "the." Now, I don't know how much of this Any Coney Barrett believes, if any of it. But I am pretty sure, with 7 children under her belt, that she has a bunch of stuff to tell the mind-numbed liberal girl robots on the Court something to teach them a lesson.

And don't forget, all those women know, deep in their hearts even if they can't admit it to themselves, that they have been lied to. Big Time.

Of course, if I had those liberal women on my knee I would certainly be saying at every opportunity: "I can't believe that you believe that!" Here is my Perfect Plan for women.

1. They get to go to school all their lives. They get to audit anything, anywhere, for a modest fee.
2. They get serious about looking for a life partner at about 20, don't go to bed with anyone unless they have practically proposed marriage, get married at 25 and get kids started before 30.
3. They don't send their kids to school, but home-school with the other women in the neighborhood. As for women that send their kids to government child-custodial facility: "I can't believe she did that."
4. As the kids approach double-digits women start thinking about what they want to do after the kids leave home. They start to prepare for a post-kid "career." But most likely this career will involve some sort of community building with the community of women that they have bonded with as they educated their children in common.
5. After the kids grow up women move out into the community to manage and maintain community institutions. Higher status women gravitate more to roles that involve "Lady Bountiful" activity.
6. Then women look after their end-of-life parents and then their end-of-life husbands. In between they do a lot of traveling, including to married daughters and grandchildren.
7. Then they place themselves in the hands of their adult daughters, and make their lives a living hell with their demands and needs until the end of life surrounded with pictures of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
8. Of course, any woman, anywhere can get off this track, and be a doctor, a lawyer, a STEM, a teacher, professor, activist, lesbian, trans, have multiple sex partners, multiple abortions, multiple tattoos, whatever. You Go Girl. But for most of us, getting of the main line ends in tears. Just so everyone knows that.

But what about men? Men, we all know, are expendable. And that is all.

The Downside of Activism -- for Its Advocates

The resignation of Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has thrown our lefty friends into a tizzy. And no wonder.

Their problem is that a change in the Supreme Court puts their whole bookshelf of pro-progressive Supreme Court decisions up for grabs. Abortion! Gay Marriage! Oh no! Fill the streets with rage! Remind the world, as Sen. Diane Feinstein did a while back, that Amy Coney Barrett belongs to a weird cultish Catholic group called People of Praise. Hey Diane! Can you spell anti-Catholic bigotry, kiddo?

I don't suppose a single liberal will get this, but here it is anyway.

It is really not a good strategic idea to implement your agenda through 5-4 Supreme Court decisions. Or regulatory decisions of the administrative state. Because there is no ballast there. There is no drag, no big political effort needed to overturn it. Because another president, another decision.

Take Obama. After the House of Representatives turned Republican in 2010 Obama began "legislating" with a phone and a pen. Great going, Barry! Only now Trump appointees have swept away bushels of administrative decisions with their own phones and pens. Including this week a reversal of all the administrative diversity and inclusion "Dear Colleague" letters in the Obama years that were happily kicking men out of college on the mere accusation of a woman. Because "rape culture."

But when an issue, your issue, is encoded in a Congress-approved law, then the Other Guys have a real problem overturning it.

But just about every liberal in the US believes in activism, using street action and pressure groups to force administrative action on the liberal agenda. Because? Because that is what good little girls are taught in college.

The problem is that when you do that you do not achieve a "deal," in the words of President Trump where all parties get a piece of the action. You surprise the opposition and roll over them. And people on the receiving end don't like that.

So I believe that government shouldn't be able to do regulatory quick fixes, and the Supreme Court shouldn't be able to decide social questions like abortion and gay marriage. That is what we have elections and legislatures for.

Yes but! Justice! And my reply is that, if we are talking about a question of justice then we need to change the hearts and minds of Americans; we need  to debate the issue fairly and squarely, and we need to come to a decision by the elected representatives of the people. Then, and only then, in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "it is final." Let me tell you how this works.

In Washington State, back in the 1980s, the newly energized Religious Right put Initiative 471 on the ballot to ban public funding of abortion. It went down 53-47. Since then, abortion has not really been an issue in Washington State. The people had voted, and that was final.

Here is another idea. We need alternation in office. In other words, at the presidential level, we need a couple of terms of a Democrat in the White House followed by a couple of terms of a Republican. Rinse and repeat. I learned this incandescent truth from a Greek-American, who schooled me about the Greek colonels leaving office in 1974 for a democratic government. What Greece needed, said my friend, was for the newly elected center-right government to get defeated in the next election and surrender power to the lefties. Then what was needed was for the elected center-left government to get defeated in its turn and surrender power to the righties.

Do you see the incandescent importance of this? Every time there is a peaceable transfer of power it defuses, for a while, the deep dark suspicion in the heart of every partisan that the other guys will just kick over the election results and say, you're outta here. The other deep dark suspicion in the heart of every partisan is that when our side loses an election, then we was robbed!

Let me illustrate. Back in Febuary 1950, one Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) began what we now call "McCarthyism" with the accusation that there were Communist spies in the State Department. It turned into the notorious witch hunt for Communists in government about which liberals remind us to this very day. But do you know the key thing to remember? It was that in 1950, in the year of the 1950 midterms, Republicans had lost the presidential election five times in a row. Imagine what Republicans were feeling back then!

Now imagine for a moment, that our liberal friends, here in the midterm year of 2018 two years after losing a presidential election after winning two in a row, had not won a presidential  election since 1992. How do you think they would feel? They would feel that the system was rigged. That the Russians were colluding with the Republicans, that right wing hate groups were everywhere, that the only thing to do was to Resist.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that even if Trump stole the election, even if the Russians were colluding, never mind. The Dems had won two in a row, and now it was time for a change. Because what is more important than election trickery and Russian collusion is that the opposition party gets its turn in power and the governing party goes quietly into opposition. And says "wait until next time."

The trouble with the activism culture is that this profound truth about government gets completely lost and forgotten, because in the activism culture politics becomes all about the Issue and the Peaceful Protest, and the Arc of History, and Justice. The idea that the Other Guys might have a right to exist gets completely lost in the rightness of our cause.

Well, sure. But there is something more important that having your way, and forcing your moral code upon other people, what liberals used to call "legislating morality." It is that we avoid civil war. And that is what elections are all about. Elections are a sham fight, a civil war by other means. Without killing, without rape, without plunder, without Marches Through Georgia. Without a generation of young men sent to their deaths.

You tell me which is more important.

Anyway, my Greek friend persuaded me. Starting in 1992, voting for Clinton, I have always voted for the party that has been out of power for two terms. Thus I voted for Clinton, for Bush, for Obama, and for Trump. And I am utterly convinced it was the right thing to do.

And if Trump wins reelection in 2020 this racist sexist homophobe will hold his nose and vote for the Democrat in 2024. So there.

Dems and Gangs: From KKK to AntiFa

Have you noticed something about our Democratic friends? They seem to be real relaxed about gangs. And that is odd because it is Democratic voters, as in inner cities, that suffer most from gangs. What is going on here?

Let us start with a text from St. Augustine:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made of of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it hold places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.

I think it is worth thinking for a moment about the saint's words. I would say that they could be improved. I would say that the "addition of impunity" is a necessary but not a sufficient part of the definition. I would add the the notion of "the assumption of benevolence" is usual for the leader of a kingdom, for he is normally someone that "cares about people like me." The robber lord revels in his fearsome and evil reputation, but the kindly king wants to be loved by the people he rules and plunders. This is shown in the experience of Mao Zedong in his Red Base in China in the 1930s. He ruled then only by terror. After he became the emperor of China he began to take on the aura of a benevolent demi-god, a Son of Heaven. And when he leveled the country with the Great Leap Forward and purged it with his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was just trying to do the right thing. Right, lefties?

Let us not forget my definition of government:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the people thereof to reward its supporters.

Notice that my definition includes a criminal gang that more-or-less occupies territory and more-or-less taxes the people by its "nice little business you got here, pity if something should happen to it" policy of extracting protection money from people within its territory.

So the point about governments and gangs in that they are in the same business. Now, you may observe that governments very often sign treaties of alliance with other governments. Or they might fight wars with other governments, as the mood takes them.

So it would not be surprising to learn that governments can form alliances with gangs, particularly if we accept my definition of a gang as a government merely lacking "the addition of impunity and the assumption of benevolence." In fact, you might easily come to the conclusion that it is convenient for a government to have a gang hanging around, to do the dirty work with what we now call "deniability" for the kindly king or president. Good cop, bad cop, and all that.

Now let us pass in review the gangs or paramilitary forces with which our Democratic friends have treated over the years. I suppose we should start with Boss Tweed, a Democratic politician of Scots-Irish descent who entered public life in 1848 when he organized Engine Company No.6 in Manhattan. All very harmless, no doubt, just handing out a few bennies to the helpless Irish tumbling off the coffin ships onto the Manhattan docks.

But let it be said that our Democratic friends had a relaxed attitude towards political looting and plundering, right at the start of the modern age.

Then comes the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the South the resistance to the Republican Reconstruction was a Democratic Party thing, and the armed wing of the Democrats -- what in Latin America our lefty friends call "death squads" and on the campus of University of Missouri Professor Melissa Click called "muscle" -- was the Ku Klux Klan. Hey! Call them "peaceful protesters!" They didn't really mean any harm, not unless they had to frighten someone. But the point is that when you are conducting a guerrilla war or an insurrection or a counter-revolution or whatever, you need an armed wing that is not too closely identified with the local notables. But it sure doesn't hurt to have those fearsome gang-landers in the background.

And what about labor unions? Back in the day, labor unions were illegal because they were regarded in common law as "conspiracies in restraint of trade." Which is, of course, what they are. We now permit labor unions because the workers wanted them and the workers have the vote. The power of a labor union is its ability to intimidate the workers at a place of work, to intimidate them not to be "scabs" or strikebreakers. Democrats have had a close relationship with labor unions since the late 19th century, and derive much of their money and organizational muscle from the unions. But really, a labor union is a gang of looters and plunderers. And the interesting thing about a labor union is that it usually gets to be the most motivated in the aftermath of a recession when employers are trying to cut wages in order to adapt to the new market conditions just to stay in business, and the workers are desperate to hang onto their jobs. I would say that this sort of thing is counter-productive, but what do I know.

All through the modern era Democrats have seemed to have a curious relationship with urban criminal gangs. We had Irish gangs, then Jewish gangs, then the Italian mafia. And who can forget the Prohibition era gangs in the 1920s and 1930s? All these gangs seemed to coexist rather comfortably with the Democrats running the big cities? How could this be? I couldn't possibly say.

Now here is an interesting thing: in the Kennedy administration, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy started a war on Organized Crime. How about that? Or was this just the newly respectable Irish beating up on the rather less respectable Eye-talians?

But in the post civil-rights era Democrats seemed to lose interest in fighting gangs. For instance, every big city with a large African American population seems to have a gang problem. And yet the Democratic politicians don't seem to want to "do something" about the problem. Why is this? And now we have Latin gangs and the fearsome MS-13 which, I understand, is a Salvadorean gang.

Today, I understand, the problem of the US border is intimately involved with the problem of gangs. Gangs bring drugs and people over the border; they are intimately intertwined because the people are used to carry drugs. Not only that, but it seems that the drug cartels amount to a de facto government in huge parts of Mexico outside Mexico City. You may have noticed that our Democratic friends want to disband ICE, and open the border. Hello?

Let us assume that the gangs and cartels are predominantly lower-class outfits, doing the dirty work of trafficking in drugs and people that more perfumed people are reluctant to do. But then we come to "activism" and "peaceful protest" which is an activity of the best and brightest. Here there is a whole universe of political activity from environmental groups to race-based activist organizations like Black Lives Matter and La Raza.

What then do you call the Occupy Movement, the Black-bloc, and AntiFa? These groups are obviously condoned by Democrats as "peaceful protesters" and activists whose hearts are in the right place. Unlike the truly peaceful protesters of the Tea Party that were deliberately harassed by the Obama administration acting through the IRS. Imagine the IRS harassing AntiFa!

So how do you make sense of this brief history of Democrats and gangs? I think the simple thing to understand is that Democrats and the left believe in the saving truth of political power, and political power spans the whole spectrum from upper-class politicians from Ivy League schools to the election-day muscle in the inner city, whether we are talking about the Irish carving out a place for themselves in the Gangs of New York period, or the KKK taking back the South from the Yankees, or the gangs that help organize and pacify the inner cities for the pols at City Hall. On this view I think that Occupy and AntiFa are just upper-class conceits, pretty boys and good little girls playing at "activism" while the dirty work is done by others lower down in the activism hierarchy.

See, if you are a middle-class professional, a businessman, or even a white working-class deplorable, you are really not interested in political power, because your life is mostly defined by your work in the market economy, and your family and work relations, and you can live pretty well the life you want by going along with the market and its prices and its trust. So, for you, there really is not point to intimidation and street action. Hey, let's work it out and make a deal. But our lefty friends believe in political power.

Here's the thing, expressed by a couple of folk today. We are going to be at war with Mexico, which is going to fail worse than usual under newly-elected AMLO. That means more gang action. And more Mexicans fleeing the violence to the US. And more violence at the border. What do we do about it? Invasion? Occupation? Exporting democracy that worked so well for Iraq? Special Forces hunting down gangs like ISIS? Yet the Democrats want to open the border and shut down ICE.

Here's the big thing that I think is coming down in the next few years. Do you notice that the law does not apply to Democrats? Hey, Occupy and AntiFa are just mostly peaceful protesters. Illegal aliens are to be protected from federal law enforcement. Hispanics in the Central Valley can strew garbage around, but don't you dare use a plastic straw. The homeless get to camp out in the cities against the law. Labor unions get to muscle workers, and it's OK. Hillary Clinton gets to expose national security secrets with her illegal emailing of classified documents, and hey, she was just careless. Oh, and diversity and inclusion administrators get to administer colleges and corporations according to race and sex in violation of the spirit of our civil rights laws.

I don't think that this lawlessness is going to end well for Democrats. And that is why I have created my maxim to explain it: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice." See, liberals think that justice is something that their political action is going to create, and I think they have it backward. Government doesn't create justice. On the contrary, the primary product of government is injustice. Of course it is, because government is force: you want to work, to sell a product, to drive a car? First you gotta pay the government so it can reward its supporters.

And this injustice machine often needs the help from its informal "muscle," the chaps at the KKK or its modern instantiation AntiFa.