Values not Facts Make the World Go Round

The great notion of the Enlightenment is the idea of Facts, Facts, Facts, and reason over emotion. But the thrust of the psychological revolution that starts, let us say, with the Romantic rebellion and takes over the world in the work of Freud and Jung, is that the unconscious rules over all.

This is very hard for conservatives and libertarians to deal with, because our world view is that it is reason and science that rules overall. Ignore reason and science and you descend into the depths, we insist. Chaps like alt-rightist Vox Day are deeply into the reason and science thing.

But the truth is that we humans view the world through the lens of our values. YouTube sensation Jordan B. Peterson insists on that -- and he gets it from Nietzsche, Jung and Co. What I call the German Turn.

Even a nice liberal like Jonathan Haidt understands this, when he refers in The Righteous Mind to French thinkers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning has having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasions, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.(p.89)

Here are a couple of conservative types suggesting the same. Christopher DeGroot, who says, apropos AntiFa and Black Lives Matter:

[Men and women] have certain internal moral values and, though they don’t realize it, constantly read them into external phenomena. This is not a rational but an affective affair, so though we may wish to correct people’s mistaken beliefs, and though we should try to do so, just as we should try to avoid violent conflict, it must often happen that reason is ineffective at this endeavor, and violence the only recourse.

I think it is fair to say that AntiFa and Black Lives have values, an "affective" view of the world rather different from Trump-supporting "deplorables,"Right, the #Resistance chaps on the left seem to think that violence is the only recourse.

And then there is Scott Adams, whose present line is "persuasion." And he's thinking that the mid-term election in November will see the biggest turnout by Republicans, ever. Because:

My hypothesis is that humans are primed by whatever they’ve already seen. So if they’ve seen a pattern, they’ve already fallen into it. And one of the patterns Republicans enjoyed in 2016 was having the other side be surprised. And they really enjoyed it — I’m talking about the kind of joy you can talk about over the course of your lifetime. And the Republican personality — I realize this is a gross generalization — is that it’s not always about the talk, it’s about the showing up.

Gosh, and I thought it was liberal Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of life is just showing up.

See what Adams is saying? You see a pattern because you are already looking for it. That is what Peterson says. Now all this is pure emotion: no reason in sight. And like the old commercial says, when Scott Adams talks, people listen. A week or so ago Adams suggested that a good persuader for Republicans would be "jobs not mobs." Well, whaddya know, pretty soon President Trump was tweeting #JobsNotMobs.

Yes, the whole point of Twitter is not facts but values, memes, and to spread your meme and get Twitter to ban the other guy's memes.

Yes, how is that working out when the Kavanaugh affair seems to have woken up the GOP faithful from the sleep of the ages?

One thing about our present moment is that our lefty friends seem to be doing a full-court press to drive right-wing memes out of the public square as "hate speech." And it is very angrifying, if you are a conservative, to read every day about another mild-mannered conservative getting  de-platformed by the SJWs working at Social Media Central.

Something to think about, SJWs: Some people say that the point of the First Amendment is to make sure that the subhuman haters, that all good people know deserve to be driven into Hell, actually get to say their stuff. Because, after all, we rulers want to keep an eye on them, and that gets really hard if we drive them underground. Right SJWs?

Now, I think that our lefty friends are knaves and fools, engaged in a Great Reaction to take the world back to the Stone Age or at least, in its socialist state version, back to neo-slavery, and in its milder welfare state version, to neo-feudalism. In any case, they are trying to force to world into a cramped and narrow template which is notable for its faith in political power and government. That's what I think.

I think that the fundamental lesson of our modern age is that the way we get the world to work for us is to submit ourselves to the will of the market rather than the will of the lord as in the agricultural age and its slavery and serfdom. Of course, our lefty friends think that submission to the market is the worst slavery ever.

And that really demonstrates the two values lenses through which today's contending parties view the world. Some of us think that subordination to political lords is the worst thing in the world, and some of us think that subordination to the invisible lords of the market is the worst thing in the world.

It all depends which of my reductive Three Peoples you belong to. Do you belong to the People of the Subordinate Self? Then you believe that the best thing to do is to subordinate yourself to your loving lord that cares about people like you. The last thing you want is to be subordinated to the wild and crazy market system.

But if you are a People of the Responsible Self you think it is perfect freedom to subordinate yourself to the market and responsibly navigate its storm-tossed seas. The worst thing in the world is to tie yourself to some pompous political chieftain that doesn't care about you, but only about your vote.

Now what about the People of the Creative Self? See, I think there are two kinds of creative people. There are the Progressive Activists that believe in new creative political memes and government programs. And there are the people like Peter Thiel that believe in Zero to One, the creation of something new in the market economy. One these two is not like the other. For me, the first kind is really dumb and stupid; the second has really got the world by the tail. But your mileage may vary.

Of course, although we all start with values, there are still the facts hiding behind the values, and the theories of the world that people deploy in the service of their values and which they use to make sense of the facts. Some theories work and some theories do not.

It's always a good idea to try and make sure that your values align with the facts and that your facts align with good settled science about how the world works.

Of course, all settled science works. Until it doesn't.

Pick Your Tribalism: Nationalism vs. What?

Here's a naughty piece from the American Spectator. It's the observance of the 25th anniversary of the divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Remember? Czechoslovakia was one of the brilliant ideas of the WWI peacemakers, and the Slovaks hated it. Turns out that the Czechs and the Slovaks are as happy as clams with each other, now that the Czechs (64% of Czechia) run the Czech Republic and the Slovaks (80% of Slovakia) run Slovakia.

Throughout 2018, diplomats from both countries have come together at countless ceremonies to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Czecho-Slovakia — and the 25th anniversary of the “divorce.” One would be hard-pressed to find such harmony and good will between any other two peoples. “Today,” says Radio Prague, “they say they have no closer partner in Europe, or beyond.”

So that's all right.

The point about politics and power is: choose your poison. There are really three poison options on offer these days. There is nationalism, which is the fake tribalism of the nation: homeland, language, culture and history. There is globalism, which is the fake tribalism of the educated class: the educated get to run around the world going to meetings and regulating and ruling the plebs from places like Brussels. Then there is identity politics, which is the fake tribalism of the victims. But really identity politics is an invention of the educated class so that they can use the victims as a cats-paw against the nation.

Yes, but Hitler! How can anyone support nationalism if it produces a Trump or a Hitler? To which my answer is that Hitler (or Trump) is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

Yes. Go back and read that again. Hitler is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up. Remember? The usual idiots did screw up in the post-WWI era. They gave us the Great Depression. What kind of idiot would do that?

Notice that my notion is opposite to the view of the global educated class. The globalists say: Never Again. We must never allow the nationalist beast out of its lair again. Because Hitler. That has been the whole point of the European Union: to keep the German Nation (and other nationalisms) from dominating and destroying Europe.

But actually, right now, the German Nation is in a bit of turmoil because its leaders haven't really been doing their job for the German people, and the German people know it. So, is the German educated class going to get its act together or is it going to be driven out by the "far-right" Alternativ für Deutschland? Or is the German educated class just a bunch of idiots like the chaps that ran the Weimar Republic?

See, I think that the tribalism of the globalists is a vile and divisive one. Its strategy, that attempts to normalize supra-national institutions like the EU and the UN, has to focus on delegitimize the nation state, because that is the alternative on offer. And how do they do that? Perfectly simple: with a politics that divides the nation, using the identity politics of race, gender, and secular-religious bigotry.

Anyway, the result of the globalists is to reconstitute our old friends, the supra-national empires. Remember how the last lot of supra-national empires ended up? The British sensibly dissolved their supra-national empire after World War II. The Soviet Union broke up into its constituent national republics after 1990.

And then there was the Austro-Hungarian Empire which broke up into its constituent nations after World War I. Only not completely, as the Czech-Slovak divorce and the Yugoslavia wars remind us.

Did you know that Hitler's nationalism grew out of the problem of ethnic Germans being a minority in the Austro-Hungarian Empire? See, young Adolf in pre-WWI Vienna was all bent out of shape because the Hapsburg monarchs were so busy playing identity politics and trying to placate the non-German-speaking peoples of their empire, while the ethnic Germans, on his view, got the shaft. So Adolf reckoned that the solution was to join all Germans into a German-speaking nation, where German speakers wouldn't be outnumbered by non-Germans.

It's a universal aspiration. Like wants to live with like, and be ruled by like. That's why when immigrants come to America they immediately settle in urban ethnic enclaves, like with like.

And of course, the globalists do this too. They all like to settle, like with like, in yeasty gentrifying neighborhoods where everyone is a Progressive Activist wearing artistical black and drinking artisanal coffee and buying groceries at organic food cooperatives and driving Priuses and Subaru Outbacks. And one thing all Progressive Activists agree: the worst thing is the world is to be ruled by non-progressive Trump. See, our liberal friends are just like everyone else. They think they are special.

But I think that the best thing, as of now, is to develop and deepen the nation-state idea. If I were king I would invite all Americans to cherish and honor America. I would invite all Americans to enthusiastically appropriate all the constituent cultures of Americans and merge them into the American culture.

Of course, I would know that the only way to unite humans is by uniting them against a common enemy. That's why Progressive Activist globalists have to do their identity politics and unite their victims against white national patriarchal supremacy. Otherwise their voters would default to ordinary nation-state Americanism.

So I think that the best way to unite Americans is to make the globalists the enemy. Why not? The alternative would be to make Muslims, or Putin, or Xi the enemy, and we don't want that.

Yep. My tribalism would be anti-global elitist tribalism. And I think that, all things considered, they had it coming.

Tribalism: The Empty Middle

So, yesterday I proposed a new tribalism based upon the idea that the ideological age was reaching its sell-by date. And I thought that maybe Trump is telling us something with his appeal to the non-ideological middle.

Now comes David Brooks in The New York Times reporting on a new study of ruling-class ideologies, "The Rich White Civil War."

The report, “Hidden Tribes,” breaks Americans into seven groups, from left to right, with names like Traditional Liberals, Moderates, Politically Disengaged and so on. It won’t surprise you to learn that the most active groups are on the extremes — Progressive Activists on the left (8 percent of Americans) and Devoted Conservatives on the right (6 percent).

The two extreme tribes, Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives, are the richest kind. And they really disagree:

Ninety percent of Devoted Conservatives think immigration is bad, while 99 percent of Progressive Activists think it is good. Seventy-six percent of Devoted Conservatives think Islam is more violent than other religions; only 3 percent of Progressive Activists agree. Eighty-six percent of Devoted Conservatives think it’s more important for children to be well behaved than creative. Only 13 percent of Progressive Activists agree.

 Do you see how these two groups fit into my reductive Three Peoples theory? Devoted Conservatives think that kids should be well-behaved, conforming to traditional ideas of Good and Evil. Progressive Activists think that children should be creative. I disagree.

I say that first you need to learn to be well-behaved and responsible, as in People of the Responsible Self, and then, building on top of your culture of responsibility, you learn to become creative.

So why, you ask, do our liberal friends want to burn down the bourgeois culture of responsibility? Perfectly simple. They do this because we humans tend to take for granted whatever it is we know, and it is a real eye-opener when, from time to time, we encounter someone struggling with something that we have mastered.

I experience this with respect to computer skills. I find it easy to navigate unfamiliar websites, but I find that other people struggle. There is even a real skill in choosing the keywords for a Google search. Hmm, I think, maybe I know a thing or two that other people do not know.

So it is easy for Progressive Activists to down-rank the importance of the bourgeois menu of good behavior and responsibility. If you are an educated American you pick that stuff up with your mother's milk: no big deal. But if you are a recent immigrant to the city, you have to learn all that stuff, and it is hard.

Sorry, liberals. Responsibility is a Very Big Deal. In fact, I argue that the whole set of religions that begin with the Axial Age of the millennium before Christ are all about learning how to make it in the city as a responsible individual, learning precisely how to live in a world where "the priests" actually specify Good and Evil for us (pace Nietzsche).

The whole point about Nietzsche, in my view, is to explore the world that opens up Beyond Good and Evil, in other words, the world of the Creative Self. After you have mastered the bourgeois culture of responsibility and trust.

Nietzsche calls the person living beyond good and evil as the Übermensch, variously described as the Superman, Overman, etc. I interpret the Úbermensch as the creative person, trying to get beyond the familiar world of good behavior and responsibility. Nietzsche says that this person has to be hard. I assume he means that the creative life is hard, and you better not think that any Special Snowflake in need of Safe Spaces is ready for the creative life. Anyone that needs a safe space is not ready to be creative. Not yet, and maybe not ever.

See, I think that Progressive Activists are missing the point when they divide the world into Creative Activists and Helpless Victims on the one hand, and evil Racist Sexist Homophobes on the other. The thing to do is to teach the Helpless Victims how to wive and thrive in the city, and that means mastering the bourgeois menu of responsibility and trust.

But I also think that Devoted Conservatives miss the point. There is life Beyond Good and Evil and that life is the creative life, trying new stuff and learning from your mistakes. Devoted Conservatives ought to know this since the story of the last 200 years and the Great Enrichment is the astonishing successive creative revolutions in the market economy.

But I take the point of David Brooks' piece to be that there are a whole lotta people in the middle to whom the current Cold Civil War does not speak. And I think that the guy that has figured this out is none other than the much-maligned Donald Trump.

You will notice that Trump's appeal to the non-ideological middle is very non-ideological. And that drives the lefty Progressive Activists crazy. And also the #NeverTrump Devoted Conservative right-wingers.

So maybe Donald Trump is the wave of the future and will transcend the Cold Civil War between Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives. Or maybe not.

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.