Egalitarianism is Neo-Meat-Sharing

My idea of the Great Reaction is that the left represents a return to the past. The left is forced to mine the past because its faith in politics means that it has to ancient emotions and instincts to trigger people into wanting political solutions.

Now the basic fact of politics is survival, to mobilize your band or group to confront an existential peril, most obviously to deal with the band nearby that would like to take over your territory because more territory means more food. Humans are clearly wired to respond to the call to arms and then willingly sacrifice themselves for the survival of the group.

But what if there is no existential peril? Why, then humans just live day to day taking care of business and do not rally to the banner of their Big Man feudal lord or fascist Führer. So what do the political leaders do then, poor things?

Perfectly simple. The political leaders punch the button on the good old ways to get people all riled up and ready to surrender themselves for the greater good and the safety of the band. And if they have to make up an existential peril out of whole cloth, well, that is what it takes.

Thus I call socialism neo-slavery, because slavery in one form or another was a universal culture of the agricultural age. And the welfare state is neo-feudalism, where people subordinate themselves to the protection of a liege lord. And identity politics is neo-tribalism, because humans are groupish. My point is that humans seem to love to dominate others; they seem to be ever ready to snuggle up to a powerful leader; they are suckers for Us vs. Them warfare.

So if you want to exploit these human traits for your own power and profit, you go for it, because you will always find people eager to enslave others, or seek protection of powerful people, or get into a bar fight.

There is also the ancient culture of egalitarianism, the counter-movement against the universal hierarchy and pecking order by which social animals reduce the amount of violence in their communities. And the taboo against hoarding.

The culture of equality, sharing, and no hoarding made complete sense in the good old days when the main job for men was hunting for meat. Ancient humans did not share the food gathered by women, the fruits and vegetables and grubs they obtained. But they did share the meat that the men won from the hunt.

The reason for meat-sharing was pretty obvious. Hunting, especially hunting large prey, is much more iffy than gathering. An individual man is not going to land a big antelope every day. Or even every other day. And he is probably going to have much better success in cooperation with other men. Plus, meat spoils rapidly. If hunters don't share their meat then the meat is going to spoil. So that is another reason to share.

Plus, one of the big things for any person to do is establish a reputation for trust and generosity. If someone is wondering whether to trust you and do business with you, it really helps to have a reputation for trustworthiness and generosity. But hello lefties: if you are forced to trust lefty activists, and forced to be generous through the tax system, then maybe you will get a society with less trust and less generosity. You think?

Today things are a bit different from the good old days of the hunter gatherers and the agricultural age, because of the market economy and property, and the reason is that your wealth and income are not a result of hunting or hoarding, but of your contribution to the economy. If you have a billion-dollar fortune it is not because you have a hoard of gold down at the bank but because you built a corporation that makes products and services that people value and want to buy. As the World Bank wealth survey puts it, 80 percent of wealth in advanced industrial countries is "intangible" wealth. Not physical wealth like oil and coal, not produced wealth like factories and homes, but intellectual and process knowledge, ideas and techniques. And the point of intangible wealth is that it only has monetary value if it is shared and implemented so as to benefit other people. The science of quantum  mechanics is worth nothing until it is shared in LED lights and smartphones.

But when the left raises the banner of equality, and rails against the selfishness of great corporate chieftains, they are ignoring the fact that all wealth today is social. It would have no value if it were not benefiting other people.

So I say that by returning us to the old ways of equality and the taboo against hoarding, the left is embracing the atavism of neo-meat-sharing, as if intangible capital is likely to spoil like a pile of unshared elephant meat, as if intangible capital is not always shared every day in the marketplace.

I tell you. We gotta do something about these lefty reactionaries before they destroy us all with the catastrophic atavisms of their Great Reaction.

Nationalism is the Movement to Counter The Dictatorship of the Educated Class

Let us stipulate the cry of the globalists, that their agenda is the solution to all our problems: to subordinate our deplorable selves to educated, evolved leaders that will end forever the battle of race against race, of class against class, of religion against religion. Very well, to subordinate ourselves, in other words, to our all-wise and all-loving godly betters.

But that is not how the reality of the dictatorship of the educated class has worked out in practice. That's because our semi-divine rulers have had to rule just like every other sub-lunary ruler, by dividing the world into Us and Them: race against race, class against class, gender against gender.

But then what's the point? As I understand it, from the days of Marx, our educated class rulers have promised to lead us up from the dusty plains up to the mountain tops. Or as Trotsky wrote:

The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

This, of course, is the marching song of the People of the Creative Self, the beating hope within every creative breast that xe will be the One to light the world with their creative brilliance. And then go on to bigger and better things.

Now I say there is a right way and a wrong way to go about the creative process. The right way is to dream your creative dream and then offer it to the world, on your knees. The wrong way is to dream your creative dream and then ram it down the throat of the rest of the world.

So what in the world is a chap like Emmanuel Macron smoking? His idea is that wise educated men like him from the Grande Écoles will get together in Brussels and issue edicts to the ordinary people of Europe. That's the only safe way, you see because the one time we tried something different we got Hitler. Therefore globalism good, nationalism bad.

The only problem, globalists, is the objection of the hated racist sexist homophobe Enoch Powell, who said, inter alia, that Europe could not work because there is no European demos. That's Greek for "European people."

Now Michael Walsh proposes we think of our educated class overlords as the devotees of a cult:

Rather, the demons are the Marxist and other Socialist millenarians who, since the middle of the 19th century, have promulgated their pernicious one-worldism, first as the dictatorship of the proletariat, then as ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, the Soviet occupation and the fiction of the Warsaw Pact, and finally as the European Union—a kind of USSR-lite, but one centrally run from Brussels instead of Moscow, with an army of bureaucrats to keep its restive member states, farmers, workers, and peasantry in line.

Actually, the one-worlders do have a demos. It is people like them with advanced degrees and with sinecures in the universities and NGOs. For people like that the world is their oyster: they can always get the paperwork to live and work anywhere in the world. Hey, what's yer problem, deplorable?

But let us just think of the educated-class one-worlders as just another religion with a glorious vision of the world as it could be. Only thing is, that if their vision is a religion it almost always involves Us and Them. Matt Ridley in The Origins of Virtue:

[T]he universalism of the modern Christian message has tended to obscure the obvious fact about religious teaching -- that it almost always emphasizes the differences between the in-group and the out-group: us versus them; Israelite and Philistine; Jew and Gentile; saved and damned... Religion teaches its adherents that they are a chosen race and their nearest rivals are benighted fools or even subhumans. There is nothing especially surprising about this, given the origins of most religions as beleaguered cults in tribally divided, violent societies. [ p.191]

So, are we to understand that our progressive friends are a cult that is feeling rather beleaguered right now? But then the fact is that we deplorables are feeling rather beleaguered too, given the refusal of our lefty friends to let us dine in peace, go to college in peace, even elect a president in peace.

See I'd say that the sensible thing for our globalist friends to do would be to keep quiet, exchange their secret handshakes with their fellow globalists and get on with administering the world. We deplorables would never figure out what was going down until it was too late.

By launching their post-modern identity politics religion upon us they are crowding us into a corner, where the options are to submit or to create our own religion of beleaguered deplorability that can fight mano-a-mano with the cult of globalism.

And anyway, the globalists are wrong: they are fools, and maybe even subhuman. The One Big Thing of the last two centuries has been the Great Enrichment through capitalism that has taken us from $3 per person per day to $150 per person today, and our educated ruling-class has been fighting it all the way.

Because here is the amazing thing. If we all just keep our cotton-pickin' hands off politics and surrender to the market we all survive and prosper. Beyond our wildest dreams.

And all it takes is just two things. First, if you have a really cool creative idea you submit it to the verdict of the market; you do not go to your local politician and get him to force it on the rest of us. Second, if the market seems to be going against you, as in threatening your job or the salary you have become accustomed to, then the right thing to do is figure out another way to contribute to society; you do not go to your local politician and get him to keep your company or salary going by government subsidy or regulation.

But you know what? It is the hardest thing in the world for the People of the Creative Self not to force their brilliant ideas on the rest of us, and the hardest thing in the world for the People of the Subordinate Self not to follow some man on a white horse that promises to protect them from the market.

But meanwhile, what kind of a religion can we gen up to oppose the cruel and unjust religion of the educated ruling class, and "the priests" of the ruling class like Emmanuel Macron.

OK. It  obviously involves nationalism. What what else? Que más?

Emotion Rules the World, Scientists Say

One of the universals of our time is that both sides of the political battlefront insist that they are on the side of reason and logic, while the other guys are for feelings and emotion.

For instance conservatives offer the constitution and limited government as the acme of logic and reason, while the left with their "living constitution" are just trying to legislate their feelings. But liberals regard "nationalism" as a tribal atavism that appeals to clan loyalty, while ignoring the reality of centuries, millennia, of patriarchal and racial hegemony and domination.

In reality there has been a two-century-long argument about reason vs. emotion that is best represented by the two intellectual movements we call the Age of Reason and the Romantic Rebellion.

Crudely, the Age of Reason argued that wouldn't it be nice if we could all get together and discuss things rationally rather than through religious fanaticism, and the Romantics argued that all the important things come not from reason but creative inspiration.

Very good, you reply. But what do "scientists say?" Thank you senator. I'm glad you asked.

I am presently reading Matt Ridley's 1996 book The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. In it he assembles a ton of science on cooperation, starting with the question of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the development of the winning Tit-For-Tat strategy for iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Well, it turns out that there is something better than Tit-for-Tat, which assumes you know nothing about the other person beyond their actions in the game. In fact when humans are acting in the world they are not going blind, but know the other person's reputation. And humans are very good at looking at another person's face and judging their honesty and reliability.

In other words, interpersonal relations are not just a question of the rational interplay of actions, but are guided by emotional and instinctive judgements.

The point of all this is that cultural values like the reputation for honesty and virtue are not just the detritus of the age of superstition or leftovers from Newtonian mechanics, but real, ongoing cultural goods that make human life better, both materially and spiritually, and also reduce the negative stuff of conflict and mayhem. Successful societies feature these cultural values and habits.

So, to get straight to the political point, the left's attack on all these so-called "bourgeois virtues" is something that goes against "science." But you knew that.

OK. So what is the bottom line here? I think that it is to change the basic world-view of our time and illuminate that the problem we are called to solve is not to battle against hegemony and injustice but to promote trust and virtue. The "science" of human behavior seems to suggest that, once you have rolled back gross domination and hegemony then you can dial back the force and allow a hundred flowers of trust and virtue to bloom, because trust and virtue are incredibly beneficial to humans, both individually and collectively.

And we need to look again at "who benefits." When the problem to be solved is hegemony and domination then, of course, the key problem is "who rules," who brings the right force to bear so that hegemony and domination are rolled back. But when the problem is to give space and opportunity to trust and virtue then the question of "who rules" recedes into the background and the individual development of character and virtue comes to the forefront. The culture of "who rules" obviously is the culture of a group that wants to be a ruling class. The culture of character and virtue is the culture of people that want to contribute individually to the whole, not as master, nor as slave, but as a responsible or creative person devoted to contribution and competence rather than dominance.

The point of the culture of competence, of trust and virtue, is that it is not necessarily logical and reasonable, but emotional. For whatever we determine by intellect and by reason we implement by habit and training so that it becomes "second nature."

Only, of course, it is reason and consciousness that is "second nature" and instinct and emotion and the unconsciousness that are the first nature.

Nietzsche Railed Against "The Priests." But Now "The Priests" are Wealthy Liberals

It's no secret that our lefty friends think that by importing tons of non-white immigrants to the US they will eventually turn America into a "majority-minority" country, where dead-white males no longer rule from the grave. Yesterday I proposed that probably the future won't be that simple, mainly because the old black-white binary is being complicated by yellows and browns -- who often identify as white, or non-black. Today Edward Ring at American Greatness writes that majority-minority will never happen.

Who knows? My view is that tribalism is a movable feast. "Race" used to mean the English race, the German race, etc. But then the Europeans became nations, as in the British nation. And race became Africans vs. the rest.

OK. So all these races and nations are what I call fake-tribalisms. Humans are tribal, so if you are going to do politics you need to enlist your supporters into some sort of fake tribe: fake because the original meaning of a tribe was a tribe of the kindred, people pretty closely related to each other. Then you lead your fake tribe to victory, or maybe oblivion.

But after World War II our global ruling class decided that Nation was a Bad Thing, because Hitler. So therefore "patriotism" good; "nationalism"  bad. The dull French president Macron is the latest to croak this ruling-class notion. What the ruling class is saying is that politics and tribalism are fine if the ruling class controls the narrative, but if a chap from the wrong side of the tracks shows up and creates a fake tribe that challenges the divine order of the educated ruling class, well, that is Bad.

Yeah, you gotta point there, Manny (short for Emmanuel). You are telling me that if we deplorables mean to overthrow the rule of the educated ruling class we need to change the tune. We have to send the globalist narrative into the basement and also blow up the globalists' identity politics that provides the ruling class with useful idiots to harass the ordinary non-victim folks that just want to get a job, get married and raise children.

In fact, what we need is a religious Reformation featuring some Luther chap with the balls to tack his "95 Theses" to the university doors and challenge "the priests" of the academy right where they live.

Oh wait. Someone is already doing this with "It's OK to be White" posters and t-shirts triggering our beloved academic bureau-cats something fierce.

But I think that is the whole point. We need to attack our ruling class and its "priests" in the academy and the media and the culture, and make complete fools of them. We need  to call out their corruption, their hypocrisy, and above all their vile system of indulgences.

Yes, you too can go to college and cleanse your white and male guilt by appropriate and generous contributions to the Holy Catholic Church of Left-liberalism. But if we catch you pasting up "It's OK to be Male/White" posters then we will hurl you headlong to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains who durst defy th'omnipotent to arms. Or something.

I'm reading Nietzsche at the moment, and he has nothing but bad things to say about "the priests" who get to order us around. Here is Nietzsche fulminating against "the priests" in The Anti-Christ. Who gets to define the "moral world-order", he asks? Who gets to be "everywhere indispensable... at birth, marriage, sickness, death, not to speak of 'sacrifice' (meal-times)[:]" the priest.

Supreme Law: 'God forgives him who repents' -- in plain language: who subjects himself to the priest. --

Are not our liberal and lefty friends now "the priests" at whom Nietzsche railed? Do they not everywhere interpose themselves in our lives, forcing us to pay tithes and obtain indulgences and support them in the manner to which they wish to become accustomed in divers offices and sinecures?

Here's a notion. The reason that e.g. wealthy neighborhoods are trending Democratic is that wealthy educated people are predominantly enrolled in the secular priesthood, as teachers, professors, government bureaucrats, government regulators, earning good money and lifetime tenure and paid from the public purse. Much easier than going out and failing with a couple of business startups: because that is hard.

Why do you think that 97 percent of climate scientists believe in global warming? It's because it pays their lunch ticket. More research is needed. And how!

But the thing about cloistered priesthoods and ruling classes and aristocracies is that their sons and daughters revert to the mean. The follow-on generations really don't have the talent and the drive of their founder ancestors. And so ambitious youngsters outside the magic circle start to challenge the eternal truths of the rulers and their priests.

And one fine day, when the rulers find themselves running short of cash...

So all I have to say is let's challenge the elite narrative, and enlist the deplorables in a new fake tribe that includes everyone except illegals and Muslims and the hoity-toity in their wealthy neighborhoods.

Let's call ourselves "Americans."

Suppose It's Liberals That Created Angry White Shooters

I know we are all supposed to join in the liberal group hate on angry white men that pop up all the time to commit mass shootings, in Las Vegas, in bars, and synagogues.

And the only solution is to ban all guns.

But what if liberals are to blame for the anger of angry white men?

I mean, if you spend your whole life nattering on about the patriarchy, white nationalism, toxic masculinity, And if you decide to blame all white men for the crime of slavery, and if you force young white male college students to go to lefty reeducation camp as part of their college orientation, and if you reserve police and fire slots for diversity, and if you empower the good little girls at Google to come out and peacefully protest the toxic masculinity at Google, and if...

Well, I don't  know what the liberal psychologists say, but I am sure that if we were talking about People of Color then our liberal masters would be telling us that the reason these same People of Color were erupting onto the streets in mostly peaceful protest was because they could no longer contain their "anger" at the oppression and injustice visited on them by the cruel and unjust white patriarchy.

So it could be that the anger among gun-toting white males might have been created out of whole cloth by liberals.

Right now, liberals are starting to amp up a campaign against white women who vote Republican. Can you believe it? A majority of white women voting for the Trump  Republicans? So we have the new memes coming out, of "Becky," of "basic white bitch," and other notions that are intended, I suppose, to shame white women into voting Democrat. But what if it has the opposite effect?

See, I think that at the moment we are at a critical inflection point in the arc of identity politics. Up to now white liberals have been pursuing identity politics for fun and profit to gin up anger and votes among minority voters, particularly blacks who vote about 90-10 for Democrats. And then there are the feminists and the LBGTQs. But the major liberal leaders are all white and over 68: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer as of November 23, Hillary Clinton. But the next rank, and much younger, are Kamala Harris, Cory "Spartacus" Booker, and even Keith Ellison. And they are non-white.

I don't know what you think, but I believe that the next generation of Democrats are going to find it harder to get the votes of white women, and I think that the reason is fairly simple.

It is one thing for white liberals to descant upon the wonders of diversity and inclusion, walking, as they do, the privileged corridors of liberal power. But if you are an basic white male or a basic white bitch just trying to make a living you experience a different world. You experience a world in which you can lose your job for saying the wrong thing. You know that, when it comes to the lineup for lifer government jobs you go to the back of the line. You think that people like that are going to vote Democratic? If you do, I gotta bridge to sell you.

Oh I know. The liberal grand strategy is that whites will soon become the minority and that Democrats will rule forever after. Maybe. But there is nothing that says that the current coalition of the ascendant: the educated, the non-white, will stay together. Whatabout Latinos? They seem to be curiously non-political, just trying to get ahead doing the construction and restaurant jobs that working-class white did a generation ago. Are they really going to vote Democratic forever? And whatabout the various Asians? Plus there is another rather tricky question. Will the "browns" want to be in the same party as the "blacks?" In the last half-century the politics of race guilt has worked pretty well on middle-class whites and not so well on working-class whites. But how will it work on non-black non-whites?

And here is another question? Does the educated class, white and brown, continue forever as the party of big government and using the lower orders as their political cats-paws? Who knows? All we know is that humans are tribal, but that all modern forms of tribalism like "race" and "gender" and "class" are fake tribalisms, invented by political entrepreneurs to enlist people into their political armies and use them as political pawns. But, for sure, today's successful tribalisms will be replaced, in due time, by new tribalisms invented by new political entrepreneurs. And the purpose of the new tribalisms will be  to combine and divide the electorate in new ways with the simple goal of figuring out how to get to 51 percent.

Look, I'm no genius. All I know is that things won't turn out quite like the self-proclaimed political geniuses imagine.

Why Don't We Fix the Deficit? Part Two

A few days ago I proposed that fixing the deficit was impossible, because governments cannot cut spending, not until the Mongols appear on the horizon.

But suppose there really is an Easter Bunny, and we really could cut spending. What should we do?

I'm glad you asked. First of all, we should understand that we are starting in a currency or inflationary crisis. Despite what you have hears, it is quite easy to end an inflationary spiral. Just go look at Germany in 1923. At some point in 1923 the Weimar government appointed a chap to replace the currency with a new one "backed" by new debt, and there would be no unlimited printing of money. Bang. End of hyperinflation. Who knew it could be so easy? Venezuela, please copy. By the way, if you had your money in stocks or gold in  the post-WWI period in Germany, you did OK.

But then what? Here's what I propose:

1. No government pension plan. In a nation with not just Fidelity, but Vanguard, there is no need for a government Social Security plan costing about a trillion a year. And government employee pension plans that are bankrupting the states. If you insist on compulsion, then force people to save 10 percent of their wages, each in their own Personal Wealth Account at Fidelity. Or Vanguard. But what happens if there is a crash and people can't afford to retire? Good question. People have to put off their retirement for a few years, that's all. Which means that they are contributing to the economy by working and creating products and services. But what about people that fall through the cracks? I have one word: billionaires.
2. No government health care. Do you know what would happen? The girls would make sure that the man in their life had a decent health-insurance plan. Or they would just present themselves as helpless victims when they got sick and get some billionaire charity to take care of them. At end of life?  Well, it would depend on the daughters. But here is what I wonder. I wonder what health care would look like if it was run by Wal-Mart -- or Jeff Bezos -- instead of by rich-bitch doctors and political hacks.
3. No government schooling. I tell you, if the government schools were run by and for conservatives our liberal  friends would be screaming the house down. But hey, if just about every teacher and every professor and every administrator is a Democrat: no problem. But, you ask, how could we afford to educate our own children when student debt is already ruining our young adults? Perfectly simple. We would reintroduce paid child labor. We already have unpaid child labor as children are forced to work every day in Government Child Custodial Facilities -- for nothing. I would have most kids leaving school before high school and entering employer-paid apprenticeship programs. And before that? Most mothers are up to the challenge of home-schooling. And for those that can't I recommend billionaires. By the way, don't forget that the poor  helpless Irish in the Catholic Church organized a complete education system for Catholics in the 19th century when Catholics in the US were the poorest kind. And then there are billionaires.
4. No government welfare. In the 19th century "everyone" belonged to a mutual-aid society, whether a labor-union, the Masons, the Elks, or the Oddfellows. If you insist on compulsion, I suggest that people be forced, at the point of a government gun, to belong to a mutual-aid society. The thing about mutual-aid societies is that they have a way of dealing with the grifters and scam artists that want to take but not give. But what about people that have fallen into poverty through no fault of their own? I have two words for you: family and billionaires.

Yes I know I am being a bit naughty about billionaires stepping in to help the folks that have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. But really, wouldn't Tom Steyer and George Soros and the Koch Brothers and Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates and Beto O'Rourke's wife and Uncle Tom Moneybags be doing more for The People if they eased up a bit on politics and malaria in India and helped more people here at home?

If we did all what would it really save? I'm glad you asked that. Here are the US government spending numbers for 2016, the last year for which we have state and local data, from our good friends at usgovernmentspending.com. The numbers are for total spending: federal, state  and local.

Function	2016 Spending Percent GDP
Pensions	6.87
Health Care	8.14
Education	5.60
Welfare	2.44
TOTAL	23.05

Now, since total spending in 2016 was 35.98 percent of GDP you can see that government spending would reduce to 12.93 percent of GDP if we cut out all the programs that people could easily do for themselves.

Wow! Imagine government spending at 13 percent of GDP. Imagine what it would be like living in an America like that!

The only problem is that it could never happen. Because Milton Friedman wrote many years ago that government always taxes up to the maximum that the people will tolerate. So the problem would be that even if we did "privatize" (actually "socialize," because "society," as in each on of us, will pay for pensions, health care, etc., instead of  government) all  the programs I propose the ruling class would still find ways to buy the support of the voters at election time and would still end up taxing us up the ying-yang.

What Will It Take to End the Progressive "Great Reaction?"

I suppose that the split decision of the midterms is the best outcome, although as a racist, sexist homophobe, I'd have preferred a GOP House. Our progressive friends really need to understand that their politics-is-everything schtick is a no-go. And the only way to do that is to give them the stage so that the American people can honestly and fairly decide if that is what they want.

Yeah! Imagine a 2020 election with a reelected Trump and a GOP Congress and the Notorious RBG replaced by another teenage rapist.

The dispiriting thing about the current progressive wave for me is the realization that this is what they  teach kids at school. When the girls at Google all come out on a protest it is not some desperate cry of the oppressed. It is good little professional-class girls acting out what they have been taught in school and university: activism, peaceful protest, demands. And professional-class liberal women are not victims. They are part of the ruling class, pal.

But this is all rubbish. There has never been a time in human history like the present. I am talking about the reality that today most people are able to satisfy their needs without kowtowing to their political lord and relying on his grace and favor. That's because of the market economy, which does not care about lords and ladies and the nobility of their grace and favor.

The problem with the market economy is that it doesn't provide the ego-stroking that the scions of the ruling class demand and expect. Time was when you had to stroke the pride of your lord because it was he that protected you from pirates and plunderers, and you paid for your protection with a bit of droit de seigneur. But now your average person can with modest effort acquire competences that free him from the need to attach to a powerful patron. So there are millions of people in the modern world living and going about their business having cut the humiliating bonds to the better sort.

But what will the better sort do then, poor things?

That is what the left is all about, glomming onto people that haven't yet learned the culture of the city and the market economy, people who still "know" that the way to get on is to connect into the power structure. That is why I call the left's welfare state "neo-feudalism." Back in the 19th century ordinary people developed their own welfare state through the huge culture of mutual-aid societies: everything from labor unions to Masons, Elks, and Odd Fellows. But then along came the left and the progressives with the need among those they called the "best men" to supervise the ordinary folk. They took the working class and diverted it off the road to the middle class and taught them to subordinate themselves to political parties and government programs.

Was that really a good idea for the working class? It seemed to look good for a while, until the factories and corporate bureaucracies started to hollow out with the rise of Japan, China and India and the global competition that put an end to the monopoly rents that, for a season, made worker aristocrats out of labor-union members.

In the last 50 years progressives have made blacks and women their special charge. How has that been working out? Perhaps the great benefit of Barack Obama, the First Black President, is for blacks in America to realize that, contra the wild enthusiasm of 2009, politics is not the answer. Certainly, we understand, blacks are disappointed with the results of the Obama presidency.

The situation of women, in my view, is similar but different, with attempts to mobilize women on the issue of pay parity and to push women towards the mechanical arts of STEM, and indeed that women should have "careers" just like men. I suspect that when women free themselves from the baleful influence of "the priests" of progressivism we will discover that "What Women Want" is very different from what "the priests" have been carefully teaching them.

At some point all of this "Great Reaction" foisted upon us by the rich kids of the left is going to collapse in moral and cultural bankruptcy, and then we can build cultural movements in genuine exploration of the market-economy world, and end the forced marches of political armies that are all about the glorious vision of entitled rich kids (Marx through Marcuse) where ordinary people are just  foot-soldiers rather than independent agents exploring the fascinating modern world on their own account.

I suspect that the inflection point in the modern era will be the moment when educated-class white women finally realize they have been had, and that the artificial attempt to elbow into the man's world of career and hierarchical status ends in nothing but tears for most women.

The problem is that the inflection point will not be the end of the Great Reaction, but perhaps the end of the beginning. Because there are going to be a lot of angry women on the day after they wake up from the Big Sleep of progressivism, and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

And we are going to have to get through all that anger before we can start to build the future.

Building the future? What will that look like?

I am here to tell you that Rule One is: nobody knows nuttin' about the future.