Two Economies: Remember Charles Murray

Joel Kotkin has a good piece today about "One Nation, Two Economies" right here in the good old USA. About how the Obama era benefited the post-industrial economy in the Blue States and how the Trump era is benefiting the industrial economy of manufacturing and energy in the Red States.

A point that he makes is that the new post-industrial economy is very hard for the lesser-educated to navigate. But I had already been thinking, in my early hours brain-dump, that I need to rehearse the work of Charles Murray, he who is too much of a hater for the tender Special Snowflakes at privileged Middlebury College to tolerate.

Because, taken as a whole, Charles Murray's big books are a devastating takedown of today's liberals and everything they stand for.

First, Murray wrote Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980. It was first published in 1984. The argument is that Great Society liberals fully instrumented the Great Society social programs of the Sixties, fully expecting to report on their triumphant success and make the triumphant liberal social scientist researchers and reporters into household names. Only the research showed that the social programs weren't working. They were making things worse. So what did liberals do? They said nothing and did nothing and let the disastrous programs continue to this day.

Then Murray wrote, with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It was first published in 1994. The argument is that the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future means that there is a real danger of America becoming a two class society, with the intelligent ones on top and the less intelligent ones on bottom. But Wait! said liberals. This is flat out Racism. Go and stand in the corner, Charles Murray, you eevil racist. (See the problem is that black people right now have lower IQs than whites).

OK. So Murray came back with Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. It was first published in 2012. The argument is that white America was sorting into three classes. The top 25 percent -- the sort of people that live in Belmont, Mass. where Mitt Romney lived -- were doing fine with education, great careers and merger marriages. The middle 45 percent were doing so-so, with rather too much divorce and employment problems. The bottom 35 percent -- the sort of lower-class whites that live in Philadelphia's Fishtown -- were not doing well at all. Basically the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now, if you are a right-wing nutcase like me you say that, while it is probable that the folks that will wive and thrive in the new world order will be the people with good cognitive skills, the kind of people that do well in school and in tech bureaucracies, there are other people in this world, and we are social animals. So what should we lordly cognitives do to help the cognitively challenged?

Never mind that. What should we definitely NOT do? Well that is easy. I'd say that we want to throw out the entire welfare state from free education to welfare-on-demand.

What we SHOULD do is encourage the SJW chaps to bully billionaires and centi-millionaires with social media to sponsor bourgeois-boot-camp schools and get-back-into-the-game job-retraining camps.

What we should NOT do is encourage the artistical-black twentysomething culture and the gang-celebrating hip-hop culture.

What we SHOULD do is change the culture from top to bottom -- from TV to music videos -- to encourage marriage and children and stigmatize easy sex and divorce and abortion.

As they say: if you finish high school, get married before you have children, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, you will almost certainly live a useful life.

In my view, there is no hope of implementing this program without absolutely delegitimizing liberals and lefties and the whole ruling-class culture that supports the welfare state and identity politics. I've been reading a book on "revolution" lately and found it unsatisfactory. What is revolution? Well, if you ask me, it is a big social turning, when by means hardly understood a society changes direction, probably including the ejection of the Old Regime.

In other words, we should understand that the French Revolution could not have happened without the discrediting of the Old Regime of monarchical absolutism by a rising middle class that wasn't getting no respect.

We should understand that the New Deal could not have happened without the various lefties succeeding in discrediting the Coolidge-Hoover era as hopelessly out-of-date and uncaring.

We should expect that, if we are to change America from its globalist/identity-politics present course we have to discredit the current crop of lefties and everything they stand for. We have to persuade ordinary middle Americans that the left does not care about people like them. It shouldn't be that hard, because it's true, you deplorables and bitter clingers.

This isn't hard. But it will be difficult.

How Do Democrats Return to the Middle?

Over at Steve Sailer, there's a chart showing that Democrat belief that "racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead these days" has gone from 28% in 2010 to 64% in 2017. Really, what planet are these people on? So racial injustice has gone up in the Obama era?

Or what about the Kavanaugh nomination, where crowds of educated white women were ululating in misery when nominee Kavanaugh was approved by the United States Senate? Really, what planet do these women live on? Are packs of men really preying on innocent helpless women?

I mean, has there ever been a society in history that has shown more concern for a minority population than the United States has shown for black people? Or more concern for women than the United States has shown for educated white women?

So why are Democrats all wigged out about racism? And why do well-born educated white women think that it is the end of the world if the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade?

The answer, of course, is religion. It is an error to think of Democrats, especially educated Democrats, as merely supporters of a political party. Anti-racism is their religion. Anti-sexism is their religion. And the point of post-Axial Age religion is to keep the Good vs. Evil opposition at white heat.

No matter that civil-rights laws were passed 50 years ago. Racist Satan is still a threat! No matter that well-born women have been educated to a fare-thee-well for the last generation and now represent up to two-thirds of youngsters in higher education. The forces of evil are still there. Sexual harassers are out there in the bushes; glass ceilings are stopping women from succeeding in their careers; a world without abortion on demand is unthinkable.

My point is that what we see about us today tells us more about the religious needs of well-born educated Americans than the real facts on the ground.

You see the problem at its clearest in millennarian cults that are predicting the end of the world. End-of-the-world is what you need to keep your members energized and committed. It is a question of morale. You keep morale up, in an army or a religious cult, by reminding your members that they are special, members of an exclusive elite, people with a special insight on "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything," and that they must stay mobilized and alert, anxious to stay the course and win their way to Heaven and/or the perfect society. And when the predicted millennium fails to appear? Well, there is only one thing for the leaders to do, and that is to double down.

This fits into the Reign of Terror notion in the analysis of political revolution. Political revolutions are messy and ultimately failed endeavors. Because, after all the speechifying and organizing and revolutionizing and promising and all, we all still have to get up in the morning and go to work. And so, as a revolution proceeds, and the promised heaven on earth fails to appear, the revolutionary leaders have to amp up their rhetoric to keep their supporters mobilized. Until the day of Thermidor and inevitable reaction.

So is that where we are today? With the promise of the civil-rights revolution and its heavenly justice receding inevitably into a messy everyday existence? With the promise of heaven on earth for educated women -- where wages would be equal, where women would move comfortably up the corporate ladder, where sexuality would be safe and predictable -- all dissolving into the truth of life as uncertain and imperfect and contingent?

Don't worry. If today's millennarian hopes collapse, there will come a new religious awakening and the whole process will start all over again. Maybe they will be on the right this time.

Meanwhile Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is warning Democrats that they have gone too far leftr. But will anyone listen to him?

Oh No! Trump Uses "N" Word

OK. Now President Trump has gone and done it. He's uttered the N-Word. You know what I am talking about. It was at the notorious Houston rally on October 22, where the president called Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) "Texas Ted." (The noive!)

“You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK,” he said to “USA!” chants. “I’m a nationalist. Use that word.”

Yes. I can't believe he said that. The President of the United States said he was a "nationalist." Oh no! The Huff Post reacted with proper alarm:

To many, the comments were a dog whistle evoking both racism and anti-Semitism[.]

Oh I get it. If Trump says he's a nationalist it must mean he's a Nazi. Cut to tweets:

Robert Reich: "The stakes of this elections couldn't be higher for democracy."
Amy Siskind: "This is a big admission which should terrify us all."
Justin Gibson: "This was said seconds after he used the anti-Semitic dogwhistle term 'globalist' to denigrate Democrats."
Imran Siddiqi: "*white nationalist."

As they say down South: "Bless Their Hearts."

Of course, in fact this is a stroke of genius, because Trump takes the word "nationalist" out of the basement where it has been languishing in quarantine, say, ever since World War II because of the "H" word.

Yes, you see, because of Hitler and the Nazi horror we must never ever allow the banner of "nationalism" to rise again. We must keep the people quiet and subordinate and we globalists must rule wisely and well over them. Because the people can't be trusted. They might create another Hitler.

To which I say, again, that Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have failed. I am looking at you, globalists.

Never mind that your Communism, your Socialism, your identity politics is designed to rile up the natives and get them to hate on the "other." Never mind all that vile stuff for which at least 100 million humans have died. Never mind that. Just stop Nationalism before it, it... Well Nationalism is bad. And racist. And sexist. And anti-semitic. Oh, and xenophobic.

Wait. Trumpian nationalism is anti-semitic? You mean the chap that moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem? That chap?

And our lefty friends get all worked up that we call them NPCs. Because you don't think, lefties, do you. You just mouth the peaceful-protest slogans you learned at your teacher's knee.

See here is what I want. I don't want civic-nationalism, or white-nationalism, or posterity-nationalism, or anything like that.

I want just straight-up all-American nationalism, for which anyone and everyone can apply. I want everyone in the United States to glory in the wonder of America: its founding, its Constitution, its economy open to talents. Its ability to turn its immigrants into rock-ribbed Americans.

See, I want African-Americans to stop their defensive crouch in their ethnic enclave, obsessing about their injuries and their sufferings. I want them to come out into the public square and put their shoulders to the wheel and Make America Great Again.

I want Latinos and Hispanics to come right out and enjoy the prosperity they are earning every day in these United States and turn themselves into good red-blooded Americans, albeit that bring mariachi music right into the mainstream.

I want East Asians to knock down the vile Asian quota at our favorite colleges, and I want them to bring the particular talents of 4,000 years of Chinese civilization to bear on the fruited plain and I want them to Make America Great Again.

I want South Asians to stop their current plan of sucking up to the liberal agenda, like Cong. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Seattle's irrepressible Kshama Sawant, and flat out bring the wonders of 3,000 years of Indian civilization to Make America Great Again.

And so on.

Now, I'm a little worried about the East Asians. I'm worried that the basic culture of East Asians is the Mandarin culture of getting good marks in your national examinations so you can be a Mandarin bureaucrat and take your place in the ruling-class's administrative state. I hope that our East Asian friends see their way to something higher and better than the dead end of bureaucracy.

I'm a little worried about South Asians. I'm worried by the class division of the caste system, with the Brahmins cunningly staying on top for 3,000 years by whispering into the ears of the powerful and cunningly setting up a culture that puts them on top forever. I'd like my Brahmin friends to mix it up a bit with that notorious "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," my guy Alexander Hamilton.

But hey. After a possible 8 years of Trumpian nationalism, who knows where America will be. Hopefully we will all be rambunctious All Americans and the rest of the world will be sick to death of that horror of the ages, the loud American tourist in his dreadful MAGA hat.

And yeah. I'd like someone to gin up a Cinderella movie called Crazy Rich Americans that makes delicious fun of all the ethnic groups in America mixing it up and making fun of liberal conceits and making HuffPo readers and writers apoplectic.

Wouldn't that be fun!

How Do You Measure Hope?

Like everybody else I want to know what is going to happen in the mid-terms. Hey, I even have a website, usmidtermelections.com, to prove it.

A year ago the Democrats and their Democratic operatives in the media were telling us about a blue wave this November, where Democrats would take back everything they lost in 8 years of Obama. But then, as the Brits say, they would say that, wouldn't they?

Still, it's hard relying on opinion polls to clear the fog. Dov Fischer at The American Spectator goes through all the Senate polls in 2016, and how they consistently underestimated the GOP vote. In the Senate races with GOP Toomey (R-PA), Young (R-IN), Johnson (R-WI) and so on, the polls either had the Dem winning or the Rep by a whisker. But the GOPers outperformed the polls by about 4 percent.

Which is a lot. Or maybe not. Because, presumably it is hard to measure enthusiasm and anger and all the passion and emotion that enter into politics. But how do you measure these non-rational factors? Today there's piece on Breitbart about people camping out 24 hours in advance of President Trump's rally tonight, October 22, in Houston, Texas. These people are really enthused about Trump. How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand, as the song goes.

Before the days of opinion polls we had veteran politicians who talked to people who talked to people and they used to come up with their gut feeling about how the nation, or the state, or the district was going to go. I wonder how they would stack up against today's pollsters?

The point is, of course, that politics is not a rational thing, or a scientific process. It is tribal. It is pre-rational; it is humans clinging to each other for mutual protection. And the purpose of elections, in my mind, is to allow that ancient tribal mind to be measured and accommodated to our modern world.

Salena Zito, a hard-working journalist, that seems to have found a good way to talk to the heartland folks that nobody cares about on the Coasts, got to interview President Trump before one of his rallies. Said he, in almost a throwaway line:

"It really is all about hope," he says as his aides take him toward [the] stage. Seconds later, the arena shudders as the crowd welcomes the president of the United States.

Of course that is what Barack Obama said: "Hope and Change." The question is whether politics is always a betrayal of hope. Every politician is in the business of raising hope, of getting voters to identify him with their hope for the future and invest that hope in him with their votes.

The question is whether any politician ever really delivers on that hope. President Trump, for instance, has sown a lot of hope by his promise to renegotiate trade treaties and bring jobs back. What he is really doing, I reckon, is sparking the economy with tax cuts and regulatory roll-backs. So  you can see that he is really playing Three Card Monte with the voters: promising one thing and delivering another which is close to what he is promising, but no cigar. And yet. Republicans have been trying and failing for years to sell voters on "orthodox" economics. What voters understand is "bring our jobs back." So you could say that Trump is not really hoodwinking the voters but practicing the art of the possible.

Will Trump disappoint the voters and eventually slink off the stage after the next recession? The simple answer is, of course, yes, because every eight years we almost always get a "change" election where the voters express their disgust with the past and their desire for a fresh start.

But here is another interpretation of history. In the Kennedy tax cut, the Reagan tax cut, and now the Trump tax cut, a leader proposed a reckless idea that all the safe people said would never work. And after a few years politics resumed its normal zero-sum assumptions, and it seemed that nothing had changed.

But the fact is that the Kennedy-Reagan-Trump tax cuts have all stirred the US economy out of the doldrums for a season. And that is a cause for hope.

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.