Probably Not a Dark Age, But Still...

Over at American Greatness Victor Davis Hanson prophesies a looming Dark Age. That's if, as he writes, we throw out our hard-won culture that diverts accusations of wrongdoing into a rule-driven process. For what the Kavanaugh process is signaling is that

• The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser...
• The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused...
• Hearsay will be a valuable narrative...
• Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power...
• Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes...
• Etc.

This, of course, is the culture of the village, where everybody knows everything, and the women control the narrative. It is only when you get a city-based culture and city anonymity that you need laws and rules of procedure and all the rest of "due process."

By the way, my study of "witch hunts" is that they tend to occur on the borderlands where central political authority barely extends. (E.g., Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692). They tend to be about women ganging up on some low-status woman. Then the thing gets out of hand as the girls start accusing everyone of witchery. The process only stops when the accusations start to name high-status women. Then the high-status men step in and put a stop to it.

But let us look on the bright side. This whole witch hunt with its echoes of the village community of women is an eddication for all of us.

Golly, fellahs, now I see why due process is such a good idea. Now I see why the statute of limitations is such a good idea. Now I see why corroboration and cross-examination of witnesses is such a good idea.

Because if we didn't have that boring male lawyerly stuff then any crazed totalitarian political/cultural movement could launch a Reign of Terror and ruin anyone that didn't mouth the correct pieties. Imagine that!

Up till now I just believed that the Common Law was a Good Thing, and that due process was a Good Thing. But now that I see what can happen in a naked political brawl with all the rules suspended, wow, those Dead White Males of olden times really knew a thing or two! And I thought that they were all nothing but patriarchal rapist oppressors.

So could it be that everything our lefty activists say is a lie, including "and" and "the?"

Like I say. the way to understand the left is as a Great Reaction, a cultural movement whose response to the industrial revolution and the citification of everything is to return to the Garden of Eden, when people lived in perfect community. Before Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

Hmm. Reading Genesis 3 about the Fall, it seems to be describing the dawn of agriculture, for God is telling Adam that now he is thrown out of the Garden of Eden "thou shall eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."

It is the most natural thing in the world to want to return to the womb, to imagine golden mists in olden times, to long for a simpler, less stressful age.

And it is most natural that women, thrown into the public square in the last century, are finding that its dangers and humiliations are often unendurable, and that the old community of women and its reality-defining gossip network, and its complete separation between the world of women and the world of men, had its comforts.

But, ladies. There is no going back to the Garden of Eden, even if it was a vile patriarchal oppressive garden. You are in the public square now, and you need to figure out how to make it work for you.

That means, among other things, that you need to learn why and how the men of the patriarchy set up the rules for the public square centuries ago. You need to understand the problems they were trying to solve. No doubt those rules are human and fallible. But you have the responsibility, if you want to change those rules to suit a more feminine sensibility, to make sure that you are not sending us back to a Dark Age.

Because I tell you, the last Dark Age had lovely stuff like Vikings sailing up the rivers of England every fall to kill the men, take the food, and sell the women and children into slavery over in Dublin, Ireland.

Or we could go back to Homer, with Agamemnon and Achilles arguing over which of them gets to bonk the captured princess Briseis.

You girls wouldn't like that.

A Test of My Culture of Complaint Theory

It is my belief that men have a Culture of Insult, that derives from the sense that honor in men is about the reputation for courage under fire. So a male insult is asking another man whether he really has the courage to stand and fight.

But women have a Culture of Complaint, that derives from the sense that honor in women is the reputation for chastity. (Chastity goes beyond mere sex to the general reputation for never having put a foot wrong.) So a female complaint is about another woman whose chastity is in question or about a man that threatened her chastity.

The central pillar of the Culture of Complaint is "sharing," where a woman shares her experience of some violation of her chastity. That is what all the talk about #BelieveAllWomen is about. A woman, any woman, must be allowed to "tell her story." And told she is a good little girl. And given a knowing and understanding look. And cheered up by an occasional "I can't believe he/she said/did that."

It is frequently said that men need to understand that when a woman "tells her story" she does not necessarily want anything done about it. She just wants to share, to reestablish, I suppose, her innocence and her chastity.

Is this the case with the liberal activist Christine Blasey Ford? Is all she wanted just the chance to "tell her story?" Who knows?

But also, what about all the enraged feminists? Are they satisfied and fulfilled now that the rape victim has had a chance to "tell her story?" Will their righteous rage now dissipate in the next few weeks now that Ford has "told her story" and the Republicans let a female rape prosecutor gently interrogate her instead of a bunch of judgmental white males?

According to my theory the fact that Ford was allowed to tell her story and was treated non-judgmentally by the Senate committee should in fact give the feminists what they wanted, and it should in fact result in reduced turnout for Democrats in November.

We shall see.

But think of the bigger picture. Is it not completely obvious now that the Victorians were right and that women want and expect a big strong patriarch to protect them and care for them and send unsuitable suitors away and listen indulgently when they "share" some outrageous indignity and attack on their innocence and purity.

So away with the sexual revolution, away with co-ed dorms, away with hook-up culture, away with abortion on demand, away with the horrid danger of the corporate workplace, away with unchaperoned teenagers, away with sexting. And hey, how about away with leggings that encourage foolish young women to shake their booties at undeserving men.

Right girls?

But I still maintain that the bigger question is: what about lower-class women. Everything about the current controversy and everything about the feminist agenda is really all about well-born women and the height of their pedestals. Earth to feminists: well-born women have always been treated with care and respect. Obviously, because they are protected by powerful men.

What about the checker at the supermarket? What about lower-class women tangled in the welfare culture? What about working-class mothers? What about married Christian women with children?

What Republicans and conservatives should understand is that there is nothing in all the current blatheroo that speaks to anyone except well-born women that went to exclusive private schools and went on to get sociology and psychology degrees and ended up as therapists.

What about real women in the real world? There's a huge opportunity out there for some Trump-type character.

Because lower-class women are just as neglected by the ruling class as the famous white working class of which we've heard tell.

Spineless Cowards and Performing Seals

If the GOP in Congress are a bunch of "spineless cowards," as proposed by Eric Lendrum, for cringing before the lefty feminist activists, what does that make the Democratic senators?

See, I think that the Democratic Party has been just as badly deformed by the current Feminist Awakening as the Republican Party. No, the Dems have been hardest hit.

See, whereas the GOP RINOs have merely failed to defend the ordinary deplorables of America from the well-born left-wing activists of the activism culture, the Democrats have to make like the activists playing dress-up in polar bear suits and Handmaid costumes.

Let us not forget that all these folks are elected politicians. Getting elected is what they do, and what they know best.

Evidently, for a GOPer, the best way to get reelected is not to rock too many boats, and especially to avoid a media feeding frenzy over some protected class of helpless victims. That is why the Dems keep returning to the tactic of stirring up feminist abortion activists when a GOP president sends a Supreme Court nominee up to the Hill. It's pretty easy to rile up those well-born women into a witch-hunt frenzy over abortion. They have been carefully taught to believe that without abortion the world as we know it will end. And most women believe what they have been carefully taught: I think it is in the genes.

For a Democrat the rules are different. Unless they completely support the activists and recite their #BelieveAllWomen lines, they are dead meat at the next election, or might be. It is said that 85-year-old Diane Feinstein needs to up her activist game to win against lefty Kevin de León in her Senate reelection in November.

Never mind the question of what an 85-year-old that has been in the Senate since 1993 is doing running for reelection, given that she will be over 90 when her term is over. I mean, come on!

So I'd say that both GOP and Dem elected politicians are chained to the mast. GOPers must play moderate or lose mushy moderate voters in their reelection fights. Dems must seem to be brave souls telling truth to power like the true activists they are, some activistier politician will beat them in a primary. And this must go on until the current left-wing wave crashes on the beach and dissipates.

Remember this: The left has got pretty well everything it every wanted. Workers have their benefits; women have their abortion; blacks have their government jobs; gays have their marriage. The only chaps that don't yet have what they want are Muslims and illegal aliens.

So really, all the Dem activist groups could close up shop and go home. But political groups never do that. So what are they to do? The answer is obvious: what they have always done, which is to whip up rage and hysteria and insist that the world is ending, unless!

When does an activist group fold up and go home?

I suppose that the answer in our time is when the group becomes an embarrassment to the ruling class and helps elect the opposition. Again and again. That's how the Democrats purged themselves of the Sixties activists, when Republican had won 5 presidential elections out of 6 in a row. Then it was the world-historical role of Barack Obama to restart the whole process with his encouragement of 21st century progressives.

Hmm. That leads right into my "little darlings" theory. That eventually all the identity groups that the ruling class has loved and cherished end up cast away like any ageing mistress. The score so far: the workers cast aside in 1971 when All in the Family made Archie Bunker into a racist sexist bigot; blacks cast aside by Barack Obama who did nothing for blacks but everything for well-born lefty activists like him.

I'd say that women are next. Maybe ordinary middle-class women will find that the feminism of well-born women does nothing for them. Seriously. Suppose you are a woman deep in the bowels of the health-care world with hard-earned qualifications allowing you a fairly secure job as a nurse's aide. What do you think about the tender sensibilities of prep-school women recovering memories after 30 years?

And on to the bigger question? What does politics -- and secular religion -- become when all the current crop of victims have passed their sell-by dates?

I have to admit that I have no idea.

Leftism is a Religion

I was talking with a friend that remarked about a guy that got to be all religious in middle age. Yes, I said, but what about his sister, who is a solid lefty? Leftism is a religion, too.

And how, Brett Kavanaugh.

If you understand that leftism is a religion, just like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, the Roman gods, the Greek gods, and the gods and spirits of the hunter-gatherers, then everything over the past couple of months makes sense.

It helps if you understand that politics and religion have a natural tendency to dance with each other. Put it this way: if religion is about the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, then it is natural for religion to enlist the help of politics -- the protection of the community from existential perils -- in the fight against evil that threatens the life of the community.

Except that the fight against evil can sometimes get a bit out of hand. Our Founders were among those that felt so, and the reason was that in the Reformation, which extended, let us say, from Luther's 95 Theses in 1517 to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the argument over good and evil resulted in a war in Germany that occasioned the death of about one-third of the population. Oh and don't forget the English Civil War from 1642-1651. Not Good.

As the dust settled, a bunch of smart folks set to work to make sure that, as we would say, "this never happens again." There was Thomas Hobbes that argued for a strong central authority to stop people squabbling. But then there was John Locke that argued for a separation between Church and State to stop religion from using state power to enforce its truth and politicians from using religious truth to stop the mouths of the opposition. And Montesquieu that developed the idea of separating the power of government into three branches each with equal but different powers.

These were the notions swirling in the minds of our Founders. They wanted a government powerful enough to protect people from other governments, but not so powerful that it would harness religion into a religious war like the wars of the previous century. If you read the Federalist Papers you will read men who had studied all the "issues" of the time and who were arguing that the proposed US Constitution was justified in that it created a federal government powerful enough to stand against the Powers of Europe but not so powerful that it would repeat the terrors of the religious wars of the Reformation.

The US Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1789. But guess what. The French Revolution commenced just a few weeks later, on July 14, 1789, climaxing in the Reign of Terror and Virtue from September 1793 to July 1794.

The French Revolution inaugurated the great counterargument against the notion of limited government, separation of powers and of church and state. It proposed a new (or rather old) doctrine that the only way to effect justice in this world is through the power of politics and government.

That is why I call the Leftist movement the Great Reaction that wants to roll back the Lessons Learned from the Reformation and unite once more the power of government and religion, to unite force and truth. Only this time the religion would be the secular religion of leftism consequent upon the Death of God.

The main Lesson Learned from the Reformation, as I understand it, is that the admixture of government and church is a poisonous brew that leads to death and disaster every time it is tried. And I think it is fair to note that the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Maoist Revolution, etc., were notable for death and misery and starvation, because they combined government and the new secular religion of leftism.

Back in the day our liberal friends were gloriously confident of their wisdom and evolution. They celebrated plays like The Crucible about the Salem Witch Trials from which we were to understand the danger of Puritanism run amok. And then they taught us to understand the evil of the McCarthy witch hunts from which we were to understand that the wild accusations of Communists in the State Department were not to be countenanced in an enlightened country. And of course Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale published in 1985 at the height of the Religious Right in the US is supposed to remind us what happens when the religious nutcases get into power.

Yet today we have our liberal friends hip-deep in a conspiracy theory of Russian Collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Putin government in Russia. We have our liberal friends perfectly content to anathematize a nominee to the US Supreme Court based on questionable accusations about an event alleged to have occurred 35 years ago. We have our liberal friends insisting we #BelieveAllWomen. We have a woman US Senator telling men to shut up. We have our Silicon Valley friends routinely de-platforming all manner of people for committing what the left considers Hate Speech.

All without the slightest trace of irony.

But of course. Because our liberal friends are idiots. They know nothing, have read nothing, have thought about nothing except what they have been carefully taught in schools, universities, and the mainstream media.

So here we drag in the usual squibs, that "those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And "that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."

So let me just say this to my liberal friends.

You may think that you are the helpless victims of the world and that well-born women that went to college are most grievously sinned against. But I would say that you need to analyze power this way. If a liberal says the wrong thing, do they get humiliated and fired? If a black person insults a white person at work, do they get fired? If a gay fires a straight at work for "bigotry" does it become a national scandal?

You see, the purpose of electoral politics is not to help the powerful pursue their dreams of justice, liberals. Instead it is to provide the opposition with a way to organize against perceived injustice by means short of civil war. For it is a rule of life that the ruling class usually has no clue and little interest in how its rule is experienced by people on the receiving end of its religious truths and its government force.

What do men think right now about well-born liberal women and their accusations? Has any liberal asked them? What do ordinary mothers think about what might happen to their husband or son if some well-born liberal woman decides to launch an accusation against them? Has a liberal ever asked them?

Maybe the men of America don't have a problem with the current feminist #MeToo movement. Maybe mothers are first of all concerned about women's rights rather than the rights of their husbands and sons.

All I know is that 50 years ago liberals had the bit in their teeth in The Sixties, and were then staggered to find that the Silent Majority didn't like the New Politics one bit.

In due course we will find out what the Americans of today think about all this. And I have to say that right now I don't have a clue what they think and how they will vote about it.

However, I would advise my liberal friends to think very carefully about what is coming down. And the beginning of wisdom is to understand that progressive political beliefs are a secular religion.

For, after Roy Rappaport: “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion[.]”

And that means you, liberals. You are just as religious as any religious nutcase on the Sawdust Trail. Only you chaps don't call your beliefs and your "values" religion. You think you are above all that.

Let me just say this. When you run down the catchphrases on the #WeBelieve yardsigns,
what you are reading is a set of Theses of Belief: religious beliefs.

#WeBelieve is what liberal women believe. It is their religious faith. Until you understand that you do not understand what is going on here in these United States in these last days of September 2018.

How Do You Get Voters to End the Habits of a Lifetime?

The point about politics, I think, is that the meaning of "revolution" is not what the left thinks, the brave activists getting in the face of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) at a Washington DC restaurant. It has more to do with this:

I grew up in a small town in rural New England, which has long been a stronghold for Democrats. My grandfather was a carpenter, and for many years as a boy, my father was, too. Several of my family members are or used to be members of labor unions, and many of them have for years consistently and exclusively voted for Democratic candidates.

Democrats showed that they were not longer the party of the working man in 1971 when Archie Bunker debuted on TV. Archie was no longer the salt of the earth, as we had been taught, but a racist, sexist bigot.

For much of my young life, their commitment to the Democratic Party had puzzled me... And the older I get, the greater the divide grows between what Democratic voters in small towns and cities across the country think they’re getting from the politicians they vote for and the actual policies being proposed and implemented by Democrats.

Yes, why do people keep voting for people that have stopped representing their values?

The answer is pretty simple. Most people don't pay much attention to politics. They acquire a party loyalty at some point in their life because of a major event -- such as the Great Depression, or The Sixties -- and they don't really change unless confronted by catastrophe.

Thus, in the small New England towns, people kept voting Democrat because that is what people like them did. After all, the Democrats were the party of the working man, right?

In fact, of course, people are tribal, and their loyalty is to their tribe. In the old days, tribes were tribes of the kindred, people related by blood, but ever since the dawn of agriculture, and more so since the industrial revolutions, people have been joined together by "fake" tribalism, an imaginary tribe unified by some notion other than close blood relationship.

In our day there are many fake tribalisms on offer, from the tribe of nation to the tribe of language to the left's preferred cocktail of race, gender, and class tribalism.

The reason that Donald Trump got to be president is that he broke through the stasis in the Rust Belt in which people voted their class status as members of the worker tribe, and called people over to a national US tribe, as in Make America Great Again.

Now I see a lot of people on the Right proposing a "white" nationalism, or a cultural nationalism, or some other way of creating a new fake tribe. But I don't see any notion better than Trump's American nationalism, which is nothing more than appealing to the great ordinary middle class that really doesn't identify with anything other than America.

The power of the Trump idea is that it fits today's political alignment. The Democrats represent the educated class that believes itself way above the tawdry idea of "nation." And it represents the newcomers to the city that identify with their ethnic or racial group rather than with the nation itself.

But obviously there is a borderland between the educated globalist elite and the ordinary middle class on the one hand, and the ordinary middle class and the ethnic enclaves on the other hand. The job of a politician like Trump is to advance the border between the educated and the ordinary on the one hand, and the ordinary and the ethnic on the other.

Now, I would say -- OK, I hope -- that the antics of the feminist #MeToos and the folks that ambushed Sen. Cruz would be expanding the border of the ordinary into the educated class. I would say that the ordinary middle class person, even including folks in the professions, really does not cotton to the activist culture of the left.

And I would say that you can expand the border of the ordinary into the ethnic enclaves by expanding economic opportunity and getting them solidly into the middle-class economy.

So I argue that people will vote for the same party forever, unless something comes along and jolts them.

Has anyone got a better idea?

Can't We All Just Get Along?

In a piece defending Kavanaugh, Schrab Ahman writes:

I wish I could say that the way out of this impasse is for the right to double down on the gentle conservatism represented by Romney, the Bush dynasty, and the late John McCain. Perhaps that is the right course in the long term. But for now, it is imperative for the health of American democracy to resist the liberal ruthlessness that is on display in the halls of the Senate.

And then we can get back to normal government, defending the law and helping Americans live their lives productively.

But actually this hope is a dead letter. It is as false as the idea that "we" are in favor of facts and reason and "they" are just acting out their feelings.

In fact all of us, from "we" to "they" see the world through our feelings, or rather, our values. And that gets to be a problem as soon as we get to government, because the natural thing to do is to write the law to give expression to our values, or to be more specific, our religion.

Here in the United States we have decreed a separation between church and state. But of course everyone still presses their religious view and tries to get the government to confirm their values with force. I quoted Robert Heinlein a few days ago.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it up by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, and driving underground all heretics.

Right now, it is a truism that our lefty friends have acquired the power to "legislate its creed into law" thanks to the notion of the "living Constitution" and liberal justices that believe in enacting liberal values into law using the court.

And of course the whole circus around Supreme Court nominations reflects the huge investment that our liberal friends have made in the power to legislate their creed into law, and the frightening prospect that what the Supreme gives the Supreme Court can take away. Living Constitutions, baby.

Even if the conservative "originalist" movement should succeed in returning the Court to a traditional notion of legal review, the problem is still there. People want their values to reign not just in their household, not just in their neighborhood, but everywhere.

Back in the day, liberals felt themselves to be a minority, culturally, and they used to complain bitterly about the religious right "legislating morality." Well, now we have #WeBelieve yardsigns all over my liberal Seattle neighborhood, expressing liberal values and implicitly demanding their instantiation in legislation. For instance, the slogan "No human is illegal" is a moral statement that demands unlimited immigration. In other words, liberals want to legislate morality.

The whole liberal agenda, from gay marriage to climate change, is really a sect of secular religion attempting to "legislate its creed into law." And, of course the sect is busy "seiz[ing] the minds of the young" in the schools and in the culture.

The fact is that we can never go back to the "gentle conservatism" of Romney, Bush and McCain. Because everyone wants their moral universe, at the very least, to be respected by the political power, and preferably, endorsed by the political power. And that includes conservatives and deplorables.

The Founders of this country attempted, by the separation of powers of government, and what I call the Greater Separation of Powers between the political, the economic and the moral/cultural sectors, to restrain the enthusiasm of everyone to legislate their creed into law. But at the same time as they were writing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the French Revolution broke out and inaugurated the totalitarian impulse to combine all sectors of society into the political. We know that this is a bad idea, because it brought us the murderous Soviet Union, Communist China, not to mention Hitler's Reich and Mussolini's Fascism: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

You would think that everyone would have got the message about the evil of combining all powers, cultural, political, and economic, into the government. But people still want to enact our own vision of Heaven here on Earth. Of course we do, because we are the good guys.

So conservatives and other similarly inclined folk need to combine into a new, muscular cultural movement and push back against the left's secular religion with our own secular religion that pushes pretty firmly for our moral agenda, and rallies a coalition of Americans to the polls to elect politicians that agree to stand up for us and protect us. There is no alternative.

Making Sense of Lefty Craziness

My whole life is devoted to exposing and explaining the phenomenon of the Left. After all, in the last two centuries, humans in the US have increased their per capita income by 30 times. And right now the folks in the historically dominant cultures of China and India are catching as as fast as they know how. See my Great Enrichment page. Scroll down to the bottom and look at India and China.

But what did it? The evidence is pretty clear. It is the social cooperation of the market and its prices that did it.

But why now? Why the last 200 years and not a millennium earlier? My judgement is that the industrial revolution represents an absolute watershed in human social cooperation. Before the industrial revolution only one thing mattered: food-growing land, and the ability to defend it from predators. So the most important thing in the world was the ability to have armed men to defend and protect that land and its people from all the world.

Thus village Big Men, warrior aristocracies, patriarchy, armies, marcher lords and their glorification in palaces and temples and jewel-encrusted magnificence. Because they were absolutely needed.

Of course these warrior elites monstrously abused their roles: hey, who doesn't. But they were vital. And you can see why, from my justification of government power.

Every warrant for government power requires the existence of an existential peril for which force is the only solution.

When the whole world depends on keeping its food-growing land from pirates and plunderers, then it is pretty obvious that the only thing that matters is an armed defense.

But suppose the day came when the existential peril of someone snitching our food-growing land went away? Without an "existential peril" there is no need for government power; people can just go about their business. If anyone has a problem, they can go to the courts, or get together with other people and work out an agreement to solve the problem.

Now that land doesn't matter any more, because food is cheap and being transported across the world in huge grain-ships, now there is a lot less "existential peril" to worry about.

So what should the robin do then, poor thing? What are warrior elites and government leaders and would-be saviors going to do? The answer is obvious: make it up; think up some existential peril that needs the application of force, make it up out of whole cloth if you have to, and then go out and terrify the populace into supporting some new expansion of government power, and provide work for desk warriors and left-wing activists.

Of course, not all existential perils are fake. Here's one that is real: urban gangs. The growth of cities in the wake of the industrial revolution brought a lot of people to the city who had not yet learned the bourgeois ethos of buying and selling and live and let live. So they settled into ethnic enclaves in city slums and the young men formed criminal gangs to protect the ethnic turf, just as they had from time immemorial. But to the rest of society these ethnic enclaves and their gang defenders looked (and look to this day) as an existential threat to the peace of the city. That's how the Brits came to legislate the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 for London. You can understand why Sir Robert Peel brought this legislation to the House of Commons just by reading a bit of Dickens and learning about Bill Sykes and Fagin and other colorful urban characters.

These ethnic enclaves of recently arrived immigrants to the city and their associated gangs have persisted up to the present moment, because humans are still moving off the land into the city. In the US we now have the notorious Salvadorean gang MS-13 that  goes along with immigrant Salvadorean enclaves. In London they now have Muslim gangs operating out of the East End slums that used to by Cockney slums and are now Muslims enclaves. Ordinary middle-class people want protection from these newly-arrived immigrants to the city whose culture is, from the middle-class point of view, atavistic.

By the way, there is nothing remarkable about urban criminal gangs. They operate just like any other "armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants to reward their supporters." The only irregular thing about them is that they are rival governments operating inside the boundaries of nation states. Clearly, in many urban areas, the traditional politicians have developed a modus operandi with the criminal gangs about which we are not supposed to inquire.

OK, so city policing is warranted because criminal gangs are an existential peril, not to mention an insult to the traditional government. But what about everything else?

I think that "everything else" is pretty well a ginned up fake "existential peril."

And the thing is that once you have persuaded people of one existential peril then you pretty soon find out that you need another existential peril to get the punters to the voting booth. The obvious way to do this is to raise ordinary day-to-day problems to the level of a National Crisis. If you don't do this crisis mongering then pretty soon people don't think that they really need quite so much government -- or at least quite so much taxes.

This is why I characterize the Left as a Great Reaction. It is a cultural movement that cannot get its arms around the fact that we live in a pretty safe and secure world and we don't need government force to solve all our problems. Yes, but. We humans are programmed to know that the world is full of existential problems. Any hunter-gatherer tribe can tell you about the creepy-crawlies in the rain forest, and the dangerous predatory animals, and then there is the dangerous predatory tribe next door.

Ask yourself: how do we humans learn how to live in a peaceable world in which we do not have to be on our guard every moment against the dawn raid from the neighboring tribe. Answer: it's going to take a while.

And in the period of transition we are going to be assailed by would-be noble warriors insisting that the world is going to end unless we all come together to Save the Planet.

Here is my big beef about government today. Many government programs amount to cultural barriers to learning how to live as an independent responsible citizen in the city.

Government pension programs discourage people from learning how to save and take advantage of the capital markets to start a business or build wealth.

Government healthcare programs discourage people from deciding just how much they want to save for end-of-life and how much they are prepared to let nature take its course.

Government education programs sidestep the question of just what each of us wants to do and/or should do to prepare our children for the adult world. For instance, home-schooling seems  to encourage children to find their own way to adulthood. Private schools for the professional class are all about preparing children of the professional class for entry to selective colleges and careers in the professional class. But public government schools? You tell me what they are all about today.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that most government social programs are interventions that prevent the poor and the immigrant from learning the script of the middle-class city.

And I think that is a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, the left serves up existential panics, from day to day. Women suffering from sexual harassment! Gays from homophobia! Women earning less than men! Transgenders without the right bathroom! Carbon dioxide going to fry the Earth!

The whole point of the left's helpless victims is to create a sense of existential peril and a warrant for government action. Because if there is no existential peril there is no warrant for government action.

And maybe there isn't even a need for an educated, evolved national or global elite.