Let's Invent a New Tribalism

As I see it, the argument in conservative nation is between "civic nationalism" and some sort of "ethno-nationalism," a white- or euro-nationalism. Here is the ZMan masticating over the problem.

As I understand the argument, civic nationalism defines a nation by its principles, derived from the European political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Ethno-nationalism defines the nation "by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry."

But it seems to me that both these notions of the nation are too cramped, too defensive. What we need is a nationalism that transcends the purely ideological basis of civic nationalism, which only a few people that have studied their political philosophy will ever understand, and also the ethnic basis of ethno-nationalism which assumes that everyone is a creature of their ethnic origin.

In other words, we need to create a new idea of the nation, manufacture a culture, fake up some traditions, and invite everyone in.

Just like President Trump.

Here is how I get here.

First of all, the last time we had real tribalism was in the stateless agricultural villages that started to get eliminated by big-state agriculture about 3,000 years ago. Your average village was truly a tribe of the kindred, people closely related to each other.

But with the birth of the state, notably in the great agricultural empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, the rulers obviously could not continue the old tribalism of the kindred, because the new state transcended the old kind of belonging.

So they made it up in order to bolster their right to rule. All tribalism since then has been what I call "fake tribalism," where a ruling class gets "the priests" or other cunning regime intellectuals to make up some fake tribe to which "we" all belong.

Since then there has been a continual problem around the practical size of the fake tribe. Take the UK. In our memory it has consisted of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. So-called "Great Britain" is the notion that all these sub-nations are really the one nation of the Brits. But the Irish didn't like that, mainly because they were mostly Catholics. And now the Scots are dithering about whether they want to be a separate nation. The concept of "nation" is clearly a movable feast.

Germany was for a millennium famously divided up into a patchwork of feudal states nominally joined together into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, but not really. It was the genius of Bismarck to figure out how to trick the Germans into giving up their local fake tribes, based partly on religion and partly on feudal loyalty, and join a new fake tribe, the German Reich. The way he did it was by uniting all Germans to fight a war against France. After that all Germans were "blood brothers" in the sense that they had all been blooded together in the war against France.

As political units became bigger, and transportation improvements allowed people to realize that there was a whole world out there beyond their own personal horizon, enterprising thinkers came up with new identities. You could be a loyal retainer to your feudal lord. Or you could identify with all the folks adhering to the same religion. Then some bright guy came up with the notion of "race."

You can see that race is a problematic concept, even if you are Elizabeth Warren trying to use race to get into Harvard Law School as a female person of color because your law degree was from second or third tier Rutgers. If we use the modern concept of categorization from lefty George Lakoff, "race" is several steps removed from the basic-level categorization that we humans use to understand our everyday world. (Basic level categories are things like dog, cat, house, family, chair.)

Put it this way. It is pretty obvious that our immediate family is definitely "people like us;" we can mostly trust them. People in our neighborhood are also familiar and safe. But as we start venturing further out into the world, the question of trust becomes more questionable. But if people belong to our nation, or our "race," then we can often be persuaded to trust them and stand by them when danger strikes. But what about "them," the people not of our nation or our race or our religion, or our culture?

It is inevitable that humans will divide the world into "us" and "them." The only question is: How? What kind of fake tribalism do we want to invent so that we can persuade people to imagine themselves in a nice safe community of people like them that can be trusted?

By 1800 everyone agreed that the "nation" was a good kind of tribe. It was able to unite people around a shared homeland, a shared language, a shared religion and a perception of shared heritage. But starting in 1850 the left has advanced a competing notion of tribe, initially with class. The idea was that the new industrial workers should develop an identity separate from their national homelands: "workers of the world, unite." So the workers would not just be another group within the nation that was bidding for a place at the table. Their loyalty would transcend national boundaries.

The point is that the left believes in a new kind of tribalism, one that does not center on homeland, language, religion, and heritage. So the left always finds itself in opposition to the identity of homeland, language, religion and heritage. Because Nazism.

After World War I the left invented, thanks to the Frankfurt School, new kinds of identity and tribe in addition to the classism of the workers. They decided to group people by race, by gender, and finally by sexual orientation. In other words, they decided to challenge the fake tribe of the nation with fake tribes of class, race, and sex. If you believe in a world that transcends nation, you are bound to do something like that.

But I think that the left's attempt to kill the nation state ain't gonna work. People are just not going to go for a supra-national identity, not unless they are upper-class professionals that imagine living and working anywhere in the world. If we do not have nations, then people that don't believe in supra-national identity will break up the nations into sub-national tribal entities based on other kinds of identity. I don't think that the globalist plan of a two-tier politics, with the elite as trans-national globalists and the rest as quarreling identity groups, is gonna fly. I think that once you have broken up the people in a nation state by race identity, typically with non-white races united against the white race, then you are going to end up with a civil war between the races.

And I think that the notion of civic nationalism and white nationalism are too weak and feeble to attract support from most average people.

No, the answer to our problem is to unite people by national enthusiasm, as belonging to the greatest nation ever, and to inspire them to make it greater. Let's cobble together a mess of everything -- economic, language, religion, and heritage -- and create a new American identity to which everyone can happily belong.

Even liberals can apply.

The Fourth Turn in Political Leadership

It's all very well to rail against the liberals and their unjust rule over culture, politics, education, entertainment and I know not what in the present age. But what can replace it as a ruling class? That's what I woke up with this morning.

The answer, of course, is obvious. But let us first examine the nature of the ruling classes thus far.

Reading How We Got Here by C.R. Hallpike, I get the impression that the hunter-gatherers really didn't have a ruling class. The hunter-gatherer bands were too spread out and unconnected with each other. And most significant, if people got into a tussle with the other folks in their band they just upped and left and joined another one. To use a military metaphor, desertion was normal and routine. Obviously it is very difficult to rule a power outfit where people can just up and quit. No ruling class to speak of.

The pre-state agricultural village was headed by a Big Man. But typically he was elected because of his leadership and military and speechifying and feasting skills. And his sons didn't get to inherit the title. Let's give the rulers the benefit of the doubt and say that the pre-state agriculturalists had a proto-ruling class and it was based on ability not class membership and inheritance.

But then comes the agricultural era that we know, with kings and warrior lords and temple priests. Here, I think, we can see the corruption of the village Big Man concept into a more ideological era, where there is a conscious cult of the Pharaoh or Son of Heaven that is consciously massaged by the ruler operatives with bylines in the temples.

In our era, I think it is fair to say, a new ruling class has replaced the old kings and lords. Really the new ruling class is the priests, but secularized into philosophers and intellectuals. What I am saying is that the heavy lifting to produce the modern age was done by thinkers that proposed limits on the political power of the old monarchs and aristocrats. When you think about it, there is no difference between the early thinkers, the Lockes and Humes and Voltaires and Kants, and the 19th century lefties like Marx and the Fabians. They were all proposing an era where military charisma would be replaced by ideological charisma.

And like the ruling class of military charisma, the kings and warrior lords, the new ruling class of ideological thinkers and revolutionaries saw that the ruling class should be composed of people like them. What a surprise!

So here we are, 200-odd years later, with a corrupt and failing ruling class. Its ideological concepts have all been bent and warped out of all recognition as it changed the rules to keep itself in power through various crises.

So what comes next?

It's obvious, innit. What comes next are successful businessmen like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Donald Trump in the US. And the reasons are many:

• Successful businessmen are men that have learned to survive in the topsy-turvy world of international business. They are battle-tested. Unlike most graduates of elite schools that have never really had to live and work in a high-stakes world like today's business world.
• Successful businessmen know how to navigate the world of politics. They have to deal with politicians, regulators, activists as part of their business. And most of them have to deal with foreign governments too.
• Successful businessmen already made a name for themselves. So the ego trip of high politics is not quite the aphrodisiac that it is for graduates of elite colleges for whom politics is the only way to get their name up in lights.
• Successful businessmen, like the bourgeoisie in general, are not that interested in power. Oh sure, they are quite happy to corrupt politicians and regulators and live a quiet life untroubled by new competitors. But power is not the be-all and end-all of their life. I think that this is not because they are better people than your average elite-college community organizer, but because the nature of business is that you don't make your bones as a power fanatic. You have to figure out how to serve the consumer.
• Etcetera.

Used to be that everyone agreed that businessmen just didn't have the right skills for politics. And I agree. But growing a big corporation requires a lot in the way of political skills, as the performance of Berlusconi and Trump prove. I am not talking about CEOs that inherit an existing big corporation and just keep it going. I am talking about guys that have built up a corporation and survived near death experiences on the way.

But here is another thing. Who are the guys that create jobs for the workers? Politicians? Ideologues? Activists? Yeah, right.

The chaps that create jobs are businessmen and entrepreneurs. The biggest lie in history was the left telling the workers "don't trust the boss." Well, sure, if the business tanks then the workers lose their jobs and the businessman and the bankers are all to blame. But the fact is that a modern economy without businessmen is an economy that doesn't do too well, as in Soviet Union, Maoist China, Venezuela. And if the politicians merely lift their dead hand for a moment you never know what kind of nobodies will come out of the woodwork and create an economic revolution that will spawn jobs all over.

So, given that the Big Thing in modern politics is how to keep the economic engine roaring, rather than how to keep the pirates and plunderers out of our grain stores or how to keep the kings and lords on a leash, you would think that we need chaps around that are good at sparking business growth.

So I say let's have more Trumps and Berlusconis and Jacob Rees-Moggs (Mogg used to run an investment bank).

Hey! We did all the ideological spadework for modern governance a couple centuries ago. Those guys told us how to do it. And then we had the Marxian turn that did the ideological work to show how not to do it. Today we don't need no stinkin' thinkers telling us how to do it and how not to do it. Their time has come and gone.

We just need guys that know how to get things done. Oh, and let the more nerdly billionaires figure out how to get to Mars.

Of Course the Left is a Mob

Apparently the Democratic operatives with bylines on CNN are a little miffed that evil right-wingers are calling their "peaceful protesters" a "mob."

Well, I would too if someone had the nerve to call people like me a "mob." How dare they! Because as everyone knows all progressive "peaceful protesters" are on the side of the angels. Er, make that the right side of history. So they can't be a mob. Because a mob is not "who we are." We are peaceful protesters, advocates and activists against historical injustice. So there, bigot!

But the truth is that every political gathering is a potential mob. That is to say that, according to settled science, when several people are gathered together they stop thinking and acting like individual humans and start picking up the vibe of the group. If sufficiently aroused by a speaker or by a a welling-up of emotion in the crowd, any group may turn into a street mob. That's the science, pal.

And of course the whole point of political meetings -- I am thinking of President Trump's very successful political rallies -- is to ignite a collective feeling, a feeling of belonging to something bigger than themselves, among the attendees.

So come on you CNN lefty operatives with bylines. Tell truth and shame the devil. Any political group is a potential "mob" and I'd say that real and actual groups like AntiFa that practice street violence are indeed actual "mobs."

Only, in my view, the word "mob" doesn't really describe what is going on. In my reading, I understand a "mob" to be an unfocused group made up of people from the lower orders who, prodded by real suffering such as a famine, strike out in the streets, rather as the proverbial cornered rat. That is why people used to talk about "bread riots."

But the "peaceful protesters" of today are not the desperate and the hungry. They are usually educated rich kids enacting street theater, and they are endorsed by their elders in the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, and funded by liberal billionaires like George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg. If you look at video or photos of the folks enacting the Kavanaugh protests, you can tell immediately that they are educated, fashionable scions of the ruling class.

Nothing wrong with that. The ruling class can send their stooges out into the streets must like anyone else. Indeed, down the ages, the rulers have not hesitated to send their retainers and supporters out into the streets to show the plebs a bit of ruling-class muscle. In the good old days every ruling-class grandee had his own army of peasants.

But I think that we need a better name for lefty street action than "mobs." We should certainly not use their language of "peaceful protesters." Remember that in the good old days lefties spoke in more military terms about "marches" and "demonstrations." Where "demonstration"  means show of force.

Back in the day the left used to talk about the street enforcers of Latin-American right-wing dictators as "death squads." We need something just as evocative for the lefty "peaceful protesters" that aren't peaceful and aren't so much protesting as demanding.

The basic problem is, of course, that lefties believe in politics as a saving faith, that politics is the way to bend the arc of history towards justice. Conservatives believe that government and politics are necessary evils that wise men and women will keep limited by constitutions and Bills of Rights.

Thus, you may say, lefty politics is always tending towards mobocracy, because any political movement is already a potential "mob," and only needs a little encouragement to become a real mob.

But I still think we need a better word for "mob" than "mob."

If You Believe in Politics You Believe in Tribalism

If the late great Kavanaugh nomination hasn't persuaded you, I am here to say that politics is all about tribalism. My tribe against your tribe. My good guys against your bad guys. My good citizens against your crazed rapists and drunkards.

Obviously the tribal impulse to rally together to face an existential peril is a basic human instinct. We see it in its less military aspect in the way that humans all band together and help each other in the aftermath of a natural disaster, like a hurricane. Think Cajun Navy: there are a bunch of guys out there that are longing for a chance to use their waterborne power equipment to help rescue their fellow man from watery disaster. And God Bless Them.

The problem is normal times. When there is no existential peril that requires All Good Men to join together to fight the foe. What are the great heroes going to do then?

The answer is obvious. They make it up.

Well, not the Cajun Navy. In between hurricanes hey just go about their regular business searching out the wily bass hiding out in the bayous.

Back to the "heroes." Remember back in the early 2000s after 9/11? I remember a thoughtful Bill Clinton regretting that there had been no war, no emergency, on his watch. He realized that without such an emergency there was no chance for him to be rated among the bestest of presidents. Great presidents are all associated with wars.

So, you can see that for the average politician or political activist there is a problem. Imagine the world chuntering away in peace, with 3 percent growth and no wars and no hurricanes and nothing threatening except the odd meteorite flashing across the Siberian sky.

Do you see the problem? In such a world there is no need for government. No need for armies. No need for activists. No need for "peaceful protests." No need for heroic figures rallying their people to face the existential peril.

Oh no!

But there must be existential peril! Otherwise ambitious young men and women that imagine themselves in an heroic pose are going to have to get a job.

And, let me tell you, that is much more difficult and challenging than getting money from billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer so you can do activism.

Hey, I know. How about we gussy up the existential peril of climate change. Let's fight climate change and let's send all the skeptics and deniers opposed to spending trillions of dollars on renewable energy to Coventry.

How about we all rally against toxic masculinity? There's a problem that has been festering throughout history and nobody has done anything about it.

Look, I don't doubt that there are real problems out there that cannot be solved but by politics and government.

But remember this. When you decide to solve a problem with politics and government you are going to get tribal. You are choosing a mode of action that requires you to divide people into Us and Them. You are going to call the people opposed to your initiative as wrong, and maybe as evil. Your supporters are likely to get a bit overexcited and characterize the people opposing you with vile pejoratives.

The question: Is the problem really that serious and that certain that only the moral equivalent of war can solve it? Is the social division that results from any political campaign really worth it? Is the additional taxation and regulation and law enforcement really worth it?

And suppose that your grand plan doesn't work? See the thing about the private sector is that, if you propose something that doesn't work then your project disappears beneath the waves into bankruptcy or liquidation. Or you get taken over by some other corporation for nickels and dimes. But what about your political project? Would you ever admit that you were wrong? Could you ever admit you were wrong? Would you ever consent to repealing your beneficial legislation? Or reversing the Supreme Court precedent? Or abolishing the government department you set up to fight the existential foe?

It all comes down to this. When you believe in the need for political action, you are calling for tribalism. You are forming a tribe of people calling for "action." That is what the supporters of Christine Blasey Ford did. They formed a tribe of people that demanded everyone believe her story. And, lo and behold, the supporters of Brett Kavanaugh mustered up into an opposing tribe, full of all kinds of reasons why Ford was not to be believed. And a jolly good time was had by all damning the other side to eternal perdition.

Is that the best we can be?

Now it is my belief that the last two centuries constitute an astonishing social experiment. In  this experiment the usual supremacy of the ruling class was diminished, more by accident than design, and all kinds of nobodies designed and marketed products and services that they offered up on the market for other people to buy. No, no, said young rich kids like Marx and Engels, it will all end in "immiseration." We must reassert the supremacy of political power -- with the right kind of people in charge, of course -- and beat back the social and economic disaster that is coming.

Only the disaster didn't come. Instead, wherever the price system obtained, and wherever a socialist ruling class did not obtain, real per capita income has increased by 30 times over the last 200 years.

You would think with such an unexpected and unsought result that people would be hesitant about proposing political and government solutions to social problems. In fact the opposite is true. Every young rich kid seems to have some sort of a social initiative that he or she is anxious to impress upon us.

The fact that people, especially ruling-class people, have not reduced their demands for government power is telling.

Could it be that anyone interested in politics is necessarily anti-market? And necessarily against letting people get on with their lives without intense ruling-class supervision? Could it be that anyone with political ambition necessarily is looking for some existential peril requiring government action, and that if they can't come up with an existential peril they will inevitably invent one?

You may well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Where Does Tribalism Come From?

OK. I was wrong.

I thought that tribalism was a hunter-gatherer thing. I thought that hunter-gatherers were tribal for millions of years. And I thought that tribalism, ever since the dawn of agriculture, was "fake" tribalism, with agricultural humans repurposing the tribalism-from-time-immemorial of the hunter-gatherers for the new world of agriculture.

But, in reading How We Got Here from C.R. Hallpike, he tells me that hunter-gatherers were not that tribal. In fact they were pretty individualistic, except when it came to sharing food. When people had a row with the other folks in their hunter-gatherer "band" they just upped and joined another band.

Oh dear! Oh no! That really mucks up my idea that hunter-gatherers practiced the tribe of the kindred and only beginning in the agricultural age did people start to practice "fake" tribalism.

Reading Hallpike it seems to be necessary to understand that the agricultural era should be divided into two. First came the pre-state agricultural age when people lived in fairly independent villages, and then came the state-dominated agricultural age when people were ruled by kings and priests and armies. It would seem that tribalism, as we understand it, flourished in the early pre-state agricultural era. In other words, in the era where people lived in more-or-less-fixed villages headed by a village Big Man but where there was no political organization subordinating the villages to an overall political overlordship. In other words, no state with its king, its army, its priests, and its taxes.

Oh dear. Bit of a sticky wicket, what? How do I bat out of this situation?

I think that the answer lies in the notion that humans will band together into a tribe over anything. We saw that in the recent Kavanaugh nomination process. Everyone lined up either into the pro-Kavanaugh tribe or the pro-Ford tribe. The pro-Kavanaugh tribe gave Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt and believed his story; the pro-Ford tribe gave Ford the benefit of the doubt and believed her story. Most people stayed with their previous right-wing or left-wing tribe, but a few people switched, primarily NeverTrump people that were forced to choose between giving up their NeverTrumpness or switching permanently to the progressives.

In other words, all the tribalisms we know about and experience are perfectly true and valid. We can have a loose hunter-gatherer tribalism, a agricultural village tribalism, an agricultural empire tribalism, a nation state tribalism, an ethnic tribalism, a race tribalism, an identity politics tribalism. You can have Star Wars fans tribalism. You can have urban gang tribalism between the Sharks and the Jets. Humans will rally to anything, as long as it is a tribe.

So this means, I would say, that it doesn't matter how you do it; the skilled political leader will rally people into his fake tribe.

So that means that the arguments on the right about the different kinds of nationalism, from white nationalism to cultural nationalism to Trump's Make-America-Great nationalism, or the different gradations of the left's identity politics tribalism, miss the point.

You can rally humans into any sort of tribe. Just gussy up some sacred narrative and put it out there and make like you are brimming with confidence that you have the way of the future -- or the arc of history -- and get out and sell, sell, sell. Don't complain about the other guy's tribalism; get out there and get the people to believe in your tribalism.

Everything is as fake as everything else: the tribe of the kindred, the tribe of the race, the tribe of the Aryans, the tribe of the gender, the tribe of the nation. Doesn't matter. It is all about the game. What you can put over on other people.

And that is all.

Kavanaugh: There's Nothing Like a War to Unite People

A while back I was thinking about our current divided nation, what with warring identity groups, wars on deplorables and Christians and men and whatnot. But then I thought that there is nothing new here. Today's America is just like the America of the first half of the 20th century, a seething brew of ethnicities. Only back then the seething brew was mostly from Europe.

So I asked myself: how come all the warring factions of yesteryear are not warring any more? And the answer was obvious: World War II.

In World War II the factions of the ruling class all came together and created a myth of united America. And it drafted all the kikes, the eyeties, the polaks, the hunks, the spics, and whatever other nasty words you can think of, and sent them all off to war and put them all in foxholes together (OK, except for African Americans: they had separate but equal foxholes).

What do you think happened? Why, all those fractious young men became brothers in arms, and came back from the war as 100-percent-Americans. It took until the Sixties for the ruling class to divide us all again.

So here is another of my brilliant aphorisms. "If you want to unite the country, start a war." Oh, it's not quite that simple, I grant. You have to get the whole ruling class on board, and that has been a problem since the end of World War II. Liberals weren't really down for the Cold War, and now, well, they are pretty well 100 percent Against America, because racism, sexist, xenophobia.

So we aren't going to get a United States again until we get into a war where liberals figure they better get aboard or suffer the consequences. Remember? They did get aboard for about six months after 9-11.

Now let us extend this notion to the fight over the Kavanaugh nomination.

The fact is that Donald Trump divided the Republican Party. The officer corps thought he was not officer material, but the rank and file loved him. And over the same issue. The GOP officers' mess thought that Trump was too vulgar to be accepted into the bar of the officers' mess (and anyway, he didn't drink). But the rank and file loved that, in the words of President Lincoln about Gen. Grant: "I can't spare this man: he fights." We rank-and-file were sick to death of Republicans caving to Democratic attacks; we wanted a fighter.

So we have had about three years of NeverTrumpers, and a Congress that wasn't at all sure about a President Trump,  probably because they feared that he would make them vulnerable to Democratic challengers. A party divided against itself cannot stand. Or something.

But the Kavanaugh nomination has changed all that. Because now the president and the Senate leadership and the GOP senators have all been blooded in the epic battle to approve the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh and fight against the monstrous neo-McCarthy tactics of the Democratic leaders.

You could see the result at the formal swearing-in of Justice Kavanaugh yesterday. Everyone was there, and Sens. McConnell and Grassley each got their standing ovation. The whole Supreme Court was there, from Chief Justice Roberts down to junior Justice Gorsuch. (Did you know that Justice Clarence Thomas is now the senior associate justice? Has is been that long?) President Trump gave a great speech; Justice Kavanaugh gave a great speech. And the Kavanaugh daughters were as cute as buttons.

So now the Republican Party is united. Its officers are now perfectly happy to have Trump in the mess. Its rank and file are all riled up for the midterms, and independents don't like what they saw of the character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh.

Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh for your courage. Thank you President Trump, for hanging in there. Thank you GOP senators for the win. And thank you ruling class progressives for uniting the Republican Party.

Here's what I wonder. How does the #MeToo movement help Democrats with lower-class blacks and Hispanics, the core of their vote? #MeToo is a liberal elite thing. Ditto LGBTQWTF. Ditto illegal aliens. Ditto Muslims. What has the Democratic Party done for its lower-class rank and file lately? And why should that lower-class rank and file come out to vote in November?

And by the way, why would any man -- white, black, or crazy rich Asian -- vote for the Democrats when any accusation by any woman has to be believed and could make him unemployed and unemployable by this very afternoon?

Honestly, I don't know. But maybe the cunning leaders of the Democratic Party know something that I don't know.

Rich Kid Protesters are Not the Cry of the Oppressed

One of the hoariest memes of left-wing politics is the notion of the "protest," the excluded and the oppressed taking to the streets to express their plight and the injustice of their suffering at the hands of the ruling class.

I had an epiphany on this a year or two ago when reading semi-lefty Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation about the 19th century. Once the workers got the vote, he explained, and found that the political system was responding to their needs, they stopped the marching and rioting. People only take to the streets as a last resort, and usually in a hopeless reaction to wage cuts, unemployment and famine.

Oh really, I thought. Who knew?

Because of course in our age we have all been carefully taught that the woods are full of helpless victims, excluded from representation, for whom "protest" is the only way to advertise their wretchedness.

But when you hear of women activists wailing in the Senate gallery, and women activists dressing up as a wall, and so forth, you are not hearing the cry of the oppressed. You are hearing the supporters of the ruling class. This fact is obvious when you look at photos of the protesters. I'm sorry, but I know the difference between lower-class single women working marginal jobs and educated women doing a bit of "creative protest."

In fact, the very creativity of much of modern protest, with people dressed up as polar bears to protest climate change, tells the story. People of the Creative Self are the kind of people that feel that one must do something to make a protest original and creative rather than just march.

It is a fact that 97.2 percent of the "protests" you see on TV or read about on social media are merely the political stage-shows of the educated ruling class.

Put it this way. How would a bunch of the genuinely oppressed get into the Senate gallery? Access to the gallery is through the senators. So any activist group wanting to "protest" the Kavanaugh vote in the Senate gallery would have to go through a friendly Democratic Senator; it would have to have "connections." Get it?

So I believe that the fundamental thing to understand about "activism" and "protest" in these latter days is that the chances are 97.2 percent that you are looking at people supported by powerful interests closely allied to the ruling class.

And of course, these days Good Little Girls, well-born damsels, go to college to learn the theory and practice of "activism" and "protest." So when you see twentysomething girls with their cute protest signs and their cute dress-ups, you are looking at the naive stooges of the ruling class. You might say they are nostalgic reenactors, reenacting the glorious marches and protests of the workers back in the 19th century.

That would make sense, given my notion of the left as a Great Reaction.

But really, these folks are the cadet battalions of the ruling class, doing a spell in the activist trenches before taking their inherited places in the corridors of power. They are like midshipmen in a Napoleonic War novel. Yes, they rough it a bit, and get knocked about a bit by the bullies in the midshipmen's mess and by the officers if they don't learn their navigation, but in due course they will get their commissions and take their wine in the wardroom. While the ordinary seamen still suffer under ruthless naval discipline and once against it is all hands to witness punishment.

As you know, I explain this ruling-class "fake protest" politics with my "little darlings" theory. The left, starting with rich-kids Marx and Engels, has created a politics out of advocating for the oppressed and the exploited. But every group they discover eventually gets enrolled in the "system" and ceases to be useful and political rank-and-file for marchin' and protestin'. Because the warrant for "activism" is always a marginalized group outside the system for whom street protest is the only way to get the attention of the rulers.

Thus, at present, our fake protesters are advocating for illegal aliens and Muslims, because right now they are outside the gates, and not represented within the political system.

Oh and women, because upscale and educated women are the most appallingly exploited and oppressed victims in human history.

But the interesting thing is that once a group gets inside the system, the cadet battalion commanders lose interest in them. Thus, in the United States, the liberal activists lost interest in the working class in the Sixties, and for 50 years the white working class wandered in the political wilderness without someone to advocate for them in the councils of power.

Until Donald Trump.

Note to ambitious youngsters: I dare say that in the coming decades the sweet spot for political careerists will be identifying and then leading former "little darlings" of the left, groups that the left used to lead when they were not franchised and not of interest to elected politicians but are now abandoned because they are no longer outside the system but merely neglected.

Put it this way. Activists represent people "outside the system," because only outsider status warrants street "protest" and marching. Politicians represent people "inside the system" who may be courted and bribed for their votes in the ordinary process of elective politics. But there is always a political middle ground of voters that are nominally within the system but that the elected politicians have tended to neglect over the years.

Meanwhile the one thing to understand is that 97.2 of the protesters you see on TV are fake. They are well-born scions of the ruling class and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.