Of Course the Left is All About Hate

Shelby Steele wonders about the left and hate in the Wall Street Journal. What's it all about, Alfie?

How did the American left--conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world--become so given to hate?

"It began in the 1960s," according to Steele, "when America finally decided that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings."

Allow me to differ.

You are going to find hate wherever you find politics. The whole point of politics is to rally your people and mobilize them against some existential threat. This is the basic situation of every hunter-gatherer band. It must mobilize its people, particularly its men, to fight against the neighboring tribe whenever necessary. The way this mobilization is achieved is through the hate of the "other."

The existential threat may be human or animal of vegetable or mineral. The same principle applies.

Now, it is my belief that the need for politics in our modern age is much diminished, due to the remarkable characteristics of what we call the price system, a notion of social cooperation that peacefully adjudicates the vast majority of differences between people.

(Of course, the "price system" is not in fact a system, which implies Newtonian mechanism, but an emerging phenomenon by which people adjust their expectations about products and services offered by humans to other humans.)

But our lefty friends believe that peace and justice can only be achieved through politics; it requires lefties to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth, seize the levers of political power, and impose a system of justice, wresting power away from the ruling class, and bestowing it upon the said wretched of the earth, and bending the arc of history towards justice.

In order to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth it is necessary to teach them to hate the perpetrators of injustice, exploitation, and oppression. Because that is how you organize and mobilize humans to struggle against an existential peril. People do not have to be "carefully taught / To hate and to fear." They don't really need to be taught at all. Hate and hear come naturally to humans once they have been introduced to an existential peril.

So of course the left is always ginning up hate.

The left believes that whatever injustice or whatever problem there might be in the world at this instant, the solution is organizing or activism or political action to force a change through a government program.

But that means teaching people to hate, because otherwise you won't get them riled up enough to vote for you, protest for you, and get in the face of the hated people that are standing in the way of peace and justice and emancipation and liberation.

Do you see the problem here? We are seeing it right now with the Kavanaugh nomination.

And this is something that I don't think the left thinks about too much. They get themselves all hated up and mobilized and the activists get out in the street and protest and get in the faces of GOP politicians and maybe shoot up the odd congressional baseball game.

But what if the rest of the community feels threatened by all the protest and the activism? What if they return the hate and the fear of the noble activists and protesters? What if they rally and organize politically against the lefty activists and community organizers?

This is something that I think our lefty friends don't think about. Probably because their activism and their protest is really a religion. And in a religion you don't think that, gee, maybe we should take it easy and not frighten the horses. Your faith is your truth, and the only way to save the world is to propagate the faith and bring everyone into the faith.

Well. I've been wondering for a while whether this latest evolution of the left is going to follow the arc of The Sixties. The Kidz and the activists and the media all thought they were going to change the world, but first thing that happened, the American people elected Richard Nixon to be president with a vice-president that purported to represent the Silent Majority and had speechwriters that composed speeches about "nattering nabobs of negativity."

Is that happening right now, with the Cold Anger being felt by chaps like Conservative Treehouse? Who knows? That's why we have elections.

But the bigger issue is my notion that -- with the advance of the price system and market relationships to negotiate differences and disagreements and lubricate human social cooperation -- we moderns need a lot less politics and a lot less force.

Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe politics and government and force and activism and protest really are the way to make the world work.

But I have a dream. That humans can and will submit their pride and conceit and rage to the market and its prices. And we will all live happily ever after.

Education: Burn It Down

A friend sent me the link to the liberal academic chaps describing how they scammed the "grievance studies" journals by getting a bunch of fake grievance studies research published in the grievance studies academic journals.

There is, I admit, an element of Animal House in this effort: rowdy guys getting a little too rowdy for the Miss Prisms of the world.

But it inspires me to say that the time has come to burn down our entire government education system from stem to stern and start over.

First, the Bill of Indictment.

1. Government schools tend to be tools of the ruling class. In Germany, the government school system was created during the Wars of German Liberation from Napoleonic France. The idea was to build a Germany that was powerful enough and united enough to keep the French on their side of the Rhine. That's where the German Realschule and Gymnasium came from. The Germans invented the research university, again, as a way to make Germany strong enough to beat the French. In the US the "common school" system was developed by chaps like Horace Mann. For chaps like Mann the idea was to defeat the Puritans; for Protestants the idea was to cure the Irish of their Catholicism.
   
   Obviously, this is worked only too well in the US where universities are now secular seminaries that churn out good little boys and good little girls that have been educated to a fare-thee-well to spout the ruling class Narrative and to sneer at deplorables as subhumans.
2. Government schools are almost impossible to reform. The K-12 system was set up a century ago, the university system has operated almost unchanged since the building boom of the 1960s. But what should education be like in the 21st century? What should university education be like? Should we all go to university? Or some of us? Or almost none of us? None of these questions are likely to get a good answer because the government education system is a $1.1 trillion a year monster. You try reforming or updating or improving it. It is impossible to reform because 1) parents of school children are getting it for "free" and nobody ever gives up on free stuff, and 2) the current incumbents, teachers, administrators, unions, and suppliers, are damned if their are going to give up a dime in their benefits.
3. Government-sponsored "research" is welfare for the educated class, and just like welfare for the poor, welfare for the educated is morally and ethically demoralizing. People should have to beg borrow and steal to get a chance to do original research. They shouldn't be on a gray train. Here is my argument, stemming from my reductive Three Peoples theory. The top dogs in my Three Peoples are the People of the Creative Self, people for whom just being responsible citizens is not enough. They long to create, to imagine and construct something original and pathbreaking. Very well. But the would-be creative folks should not be coddled and primped with government dollars and given life-time sinecures. Many all called to a creative life, but few are chosen; for most of us our creative dreams end in failure, or an acceptance of our ordinariness. Thus real creative people will be living on the border between order and chaos: the sacrificial hero. Such a person cannot be an employee of a government university.

My point is that the government education system is incapable of reform.  Indeed, the whole point of a government program is to set up something for the ages.

The only solutions is burn it down. But what will replace it?

Let us begin with education for children. In my imagination it will consist of:

1. Tony private schools for the professional classes. We have this already, only attenuated because many professional people can bend the public school system to provide them with what they want for their children at government expense, e.g., the selective high schools in New York City that are presently under attack from the left.
2. Home-schooling for the middle class. The original idea for government schools was to make the poor literate and numerate. But most moms are already literate and numerate so their children will naturally become literate and numerate because that is what kids are programmed to do: grow up to become their parents. And there is a whole universe of materials and support out there to back up the home-schooling mom, not to mention the Internet. But I do not see home-schooling as being a private thing but a neighborhood thing, with all the neighborhood moms getting together to home-school each other's children and band together for specialty items and field trips.
3. KIPP academies for the poor. What the poor need above all is to learn the cadences of middle-class life, to be responsible cooperative city people, and to "get with the program, Jenkins." That is what highly structured program like KIPP academy do. So who will pay for this? Billionaires, that's who. And I demand that they get medals and awards for their public service.
4. A whole new world of apprenticeships and internships, starting in the early teens. Yes, I believe it is time to kill the evil child-labor laws. After all, right now children are forced to attend government schools and work all day and then go home and do homework, and for this they are paid:__ Nothing! Can you spell INJUSTICE? Look, most people should not go to university. Tertiary education is the biggest scam in world history. Good little girls go to college and major in sociology and English. And then go work for Starbucks as a barista. For that they need to get $50,000 and more in debt? No. I say get kids into the workforce early and let employers pay for specialized and technical education, especially for youngsters with promise. Let there be a ton of easily obtained credentials, like the current certifications and competencies available in the tech world.

Really, how hard can this be? Burn the whole education system down and let a hundred flowers bloom.

And everybody will live happily ever after.

Great Reaction: Slavery and Scapegoating

I argue that our lefty friends are reactionaries; faced with the shocking changes of the industrial revolution, they want to return to the good old days. So we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation. And so on.

But let us simplify things. What the left is doing is returning us to the slavery of the agricultural age, and the mob justice of the tribal village.

Let us look at the fact of the great socialist governments, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro's Cuba. We are talking about slavery. And this is reactionary, because the great characteristic of the agricultural age is its slavery. Oh yeah. Sometimes it was merely feudalism. But the basic fact of the agricultural age was that the farmers needed the protection of their warrior aristocracies to keep pirates and Vikings out of town. And the warrior aristocrats took advantage of them. Big time. Right through the agricultural age the farmers were actual or nominal slaves.

In a way, I think the end of the agricultural age coincided with a kind of apotheosis of slavery in the sugar plantation. Slaves cultivated sugar cane, a fast-growing plant that uses C4 photosynthesis, and the masters fed them maize, also a fast-growing C4 plant. Very efficient!

But the market economy doesn't work with slavery. Not because we are highly advanced and ethical and moral. But because slaves just aren't as profitable as free labor, because you can make more money with workers that use their noggins, rather than just follow the orders of the slave-driver. In the same way, after World War I, the German General Staff decided that soldiers as cannon fodder didn't work; they needed resourceful, responsible soldiers that would know to do the right thing when isolated on the modern lethal battlefield.

But isn't it amazing that our lefty reactionary friends want to return to the top-down, orders-from-the-top culture of the agricultural age! In a word, slavery.

The good thing is that the slavery experiments in the Soviet Union and Maoist China turned out to be staggering failures: not just a failure to match the economic growth of the capitalist countries, but veritable death cultures that starved and enslaved tens of millions of people, and not the peoples of conquered countries, looted and put to the sword by neo-Conans, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" No, the people that suffered under Communism were the people that Communism was supposed to help, the workers! Imagine!

In my view, the resort to slavery is programmed into the left, because politics is war by other means, government is force, and therefore the combination leads to slavery, because the whole point of politics and government is to draft everyone into the political army of the ruling class and forced to live their lives in service to the power agenda of the ruling class. So the politics of the left inevitably drafts the whole nation into the political army of the rulers. And what are draftees but slaves by any other name?

The other thing that goes with the left like ham and eggs is the moral panic. Call it the witch hunt, the reign of terror, the purge, the scapegoat mechanism of René Girard, or whatever you like. We are seeing a classic instance of this all-to-human characteristic in the campaign of vicious slander against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

What has emerged in the moral panic over the nomination of Kavanaush is the purpose of all our legal traditions. The whole point of the law is to provide a replacement for the age-old method of dealing with intra-community conflict. The old way was for the community to gang up on a scapegoat and to invest that scapegoat with all its worries and hatreds and accusations and then kill to purge the conflict and the hatred. Maybe that worked in a small face-to-face community. But the whole point of law has been to provide a more peaceable alternative to the scapegoat culture.

Isn't it interesting that our liberal friends have completely demolished the cultural process of legal procedure in their conviction of Brett Kavanaugh by mass denunciation! And boy, do we now find ourselves reminded of what an amazing cultural miracle is our inherited culture of legal process.

I mean, what a concept! Instead of just fingering a suspect and slitting his throat, actually or metaphorically, we force the accusers to get their story straight, to submit to rules of evidence, to cross-examination of witnesses, to "beyond reasonable doubt" verdicts in the criminal law, and "preponderance of the evidence" verdicts in civil law. How blessed we are to live in this age where we benefit from these immensely civilized notions! We get to appreciate them all the more when our lefty friends gin up a periodic moral panic and demand to dispense with the law's delay.

My point is that when you decide that the price discovery system is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is slavery.

And when you decide that "due process" is not good enough for you, look out, because the next stop is a baying mob demanding the blood of a scapegoat, the gallows of the French Revolution and the Communist governments of the 20th century.

And that is why I call all lefties reactionaries, and their movement the Great Reaction. They want to return us to the slavery of the agricultural age and the scapegoating of the tribal village.

In Sports: How About Those NAFTAs!

I watched the video of the President's post USMCA agreement press conference, where President Trump presented his version of the new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.

It really is interesting to watch the president switch between reading his official speech text and ad-lib asides, between the "facts" and the "values." Is it a mistake or is it genius? Who knows?

All along, I have wondered if this new NAFTA was real substantive policy change or just atmospherics, good old bubba bait. So I went to the USTR handout.

Of course it is a long bureaucratic doodad, under the following major headings:

• Intellectual property, including drugs and copyright.
• Digital Trade, prohibiting customs duties on digital products distributed electronically (e-books, videos, music, software, games, etc.
• De Minimis, which means waiving bureaucratic flim-flam on small-value shipments.
• Financial Services, making sure that US financial services guys get the same treatment as the locals.
• Currency, discouraging exchange-rate shenanigans.
• Labor, including "rules of origin to drive higher wages by requiring that 40-45 percent of auto content be made by workers earning at least USD $16 per hour."
• Environment, "to combat [naughty] trafficking in wildlife, timber, and fish; ... and to address pressing environmental issues such as air quality and marine litter."

So that's all right.

There is also a provision to allow the US to intervene in trade agreements between Canada/Mexico and third-party countries. That is to stop the current scam where China gets to export products to Canada, do minimum value-adding, and then re-export to the US. That, I had understood, was the big issue with NAFTA, that it allowed, say, China, to have big tariffs on US exports to China, while getting China exports into the US with little of no tariffs because, hey, what could the US say about trade between, e.g., China and Canada?

It was interesting to watch President Trump, and the overall impression he gives of his trade strategy. Basically, it seems to be to raise tariffs to get peoples' attention. Then we negotiate. Another interesting meme: Trump said that his guys would go to, e.g., India, where they charge 100% tariffs on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and the Indian officials would be amazed. Nobody ever came and talked to us before, they said.

I suppose that the way to explain this is that the previous ruling-class policy was to avoid bilateral agreements and instead use multilateral agreements through the WTO and the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership. So you pass the agreement and leave it to the bureaucrats. Obviously, Trump prefers his one-on-one Art of the Deal approach, and it probably works well for him.

But will the new USMCA make a real difference? We shall see. Obviously the optics are that Trump cares for American workers, and judging by the turnout at Trump's rallies, the optics are working.

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.