The Question is: What Us and Them Works for Us?

I've been writing recently about tribalism, and what I call "fake tribalism." I started out with the conventional notion that, in the old days, people were organized in tribes of the kindred, people related to each other by blood. I proposed that everything since then -- empires, nations, class politics, modern identity politics -- is fake tribalism, the transfer of the old idea of belonging from the tribe of the kindred to artificial tribes based on completely new ideas of belonging on a larger scale.

But then, reading C.R. Hallpike's How We Got Here, I realized that tribalism has always been a movable feast. Yes, the hunter-gatherer bands were defined by bands of the kindred, but if you got in a row with your band you could take off and join another one. Ditto with pre-state agricultural villages. Tribes were not cast in concrete, but merely sticky like porridge.

On Hallpike's narrative it was only with the invention of state-based agricultural empires that we get a rigidification of identity, and the mobilization of the various inhabitants of a region into a self-conscious people around whom arbitrary boundaries are set and from whom there is no exit. The boundaries were important, I suspect, because because most of the people in the agricultural era were serfs or slaves, a pretty universal characteristic of agricultural age culture.

Oh dear. That means that full-on tribalism only developed when it had already become fake, the various artificial creations of kings and Nietzsche's pals "the priests" of the great agricultural empires that were inventing fake tribes to match their glorious empires. Back to the drawing board. Now what?

Now what is the "minimal group paradigm" developed by Henri Tajfel. Tajfel discovered that you can set up any kind of artificial group -- say in a research project -- and the people in each group will immediately identify with and favor their in-group. That explains why, e.g., liberals all believe everything they read in the New York Times and NPR and know that everything in conservative land is racist sexist homophobic "hate" and conservative believe what they read on right-wing websites and know that all mainstream media news  is "fake news." Liberals know that people like them are outraged by Trump tear-gassing migrants at the border, and conservatives know that without a defended border you don't have a nation. Both groups define themselves in terms of the unconsciously agreed agenda among people like them.

I found this immensely liberating. For it means that you can create identity with anything. Identity doesn't have to be race or gender or class as we have been carefully taught. Identity can be anything. It is up to the founder of the identity to find people willing to identify with the new identity that he just created out of whole cloth. This happens most obviously with the founders of religious cults, a St. Paul or a Luther or a Calvin or a Joseph Smith. It also happens in politics with Marx inventing the new idea of "the workers."

It also happens with  the idea of "nation." Liah Greenfield proposes that the idea of the English nation began after Henry VII won the battle of Bosworth Field and created a bunch of nobles from the common folk. Used to be, in the "society of orders," that there were the higher orders like kings and nobles who defined the nation, and then there were the "people" in the lower orders. With Henry VII "people" and "nation" were merged. To put in in terms of my "fake tribalism" notion, Henry VII needed a new kind of fake tribalism to symbolize his new regime, and to define the boundaries of the in-group. He defined his fake tribe as the nation of England. Shortly thereafter Henry VIII completed the job of nation-building by disarming the nobles and creating a national army. Ever since, the national army in a nation has symbolized the nation.

In our time the global educated class wants to define identity as anything-but-nation. So they have invented a new "society of orders" with the educated ruling class as the savior activists, the middle class as the deplorable bigots, and the lower orders as helpless victims who the savior activists are called to save from racism, sexism, and homophobia.

If you want to dish the global educated ruling class you have to come up with something better, a political movement to which you can rally enough people to overpower the global educated ruling class. It is pretty obvious that this is going to be "nation." The only question is whether some damn politician can rally the middle-class deplorables beyond its base of the white male deplorables known for their racism, sexism, and homophobia by hiving off enough women and minorities into a larger identity of nation.

You can see that Donald Trump is trying to appeal to voters on  the basis of an identity politics of American nationalism while his opponents want to claim that his American identity politics is really the evil and divisive racist sexist bigotry of which you've heard tell.

The point that I get from the nationalism analysis of Liah Greenfield and the minimal group paradigm of Henri Tajfel is that you can create identity out of anything. Just get a bunch of people together and bind them together with a set of group identifiers. There is nothing that establishes for all time that kindred, or race, or sex, or nation is the natural form of identity. Humans are groupish and it is up to would-be group leaders to define the parameters of the group and create and grow that group.

Simply stated, all politics is tribal, and all politics is about "us" and "them." Humans are designed so that a leader can organize any group of them into a group of "us" and lead  them to war against the evil  "them." The only question is what works.

There are Two Kinds of Liberal Programs

Way back in the dim and distant past Irving Kristol, the father of the one we know, wrote that if you want to help the poor with government programs, you have to deal in the middle class. Unfortunately, that piece of wisdom doesn't appear on Google Search, so everyone has forgotten about it. Except me.

The idea is that if you want to help the poor in old age with a pension program then you'd better make the pension program include the middle class, as Social Security did. Otherwise no-go.

The corollary of this theorem is that it is impossible to reform entitlement programs because doing so will negatively impact the middle class.

Armed with this vital knowledge I remember in 1993-94 thinking that HillaryCare would never fly because the middle class already had health insurance. In other words, there was no way that the Dems could deal in the middle class with their program to beef up health care delivery to the poor, because the middle class had already got what they wanted. I remember the day I heard on NPR the liberal women reporters marveling that ordinary Americans didn't like HillaryCare, because they didn't see how it would benefit them. In fact I remember exactly where my car was at that moment: it was on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge in North Seattle.

Thus, in 2009-10, President Obama had to lie his head off about Obamacare promising that the average person would benefit and that they could keep their doctor. And Nancy Pelosi had to frog-march the moderate Dems through the lobbies to get them to vote for it. And the Dems had to do some shenanigans in the Senate to get it through. And then the Republicans won back the House  in  2010 with the biggest "wave" in decades and nearly all those moderate Dems lost their seats.

Now to the present time. Do you notice that almost all the stuff liberals are pushing is stuff that benefits some liberal identity group but that does not deal in the middle class?

There is illegal immigration and open borders. Almost no average American citizen, white, black, or Hispanic supports this. Really, only lefty activists and their billionaire supporters favor Open Borders.

There is Muslims. Ask any non-Muslim in America, and I bet they'd tell you that Muslims should get with the program. But all the liberals are running around expostulating about Islamophobia.

There is LGBTQ. Really, nobody outside the educated class has a clue what all the fuss is about. As I say, LGBTQ is about getting creative about sex (because we are all creative, right?) and the only people into that are the People of the Creative Self of my reductive Three Peoples theory. And now, according to Ben Shapiro, a transgender has insisting on joining a gym -- would that be Curves? -- that caters for women that prefer not to have men floating around. Of course the trans man-to-woman wants to change in the women's changing room. Of course. Ask any woman in America what she thinks of that!

There is climate change. This is yet another elite plan to kick the middle class out of their cars and force them into buses and trains. Who benefits?  All the scientists and regulators in the educated class that get grants and lifetime employment out of the scam, and also crony capitalists that know how to play the subsidy game for electric cars, wind and solar. But ordinary Americans get screwed.

See, I think that our liberal friends think that they got their pensions and health care and education programs enacted because of their glorious virtue, because justice and the arc of history. But really their programs were just bribes paid to the middle class. So our liberal friends don't really get that today's lefty agenda has a fatal flaw: it doesn't benefit the middle class.

Notice the left's response to their quandary: to deplatform anyone that disagrees with them and banish them from the public square as a racist, sexist homophobe. This strategy shows that instinctively, liberals understand that their agenda is unpopular and that the only way to advance it is by totalitarian oppression of the opposition. It may work for a while, but I predict that in the end it will create a huge movement of rejection, boiling with a sense of injustice, that overwhelms the left in a vast realignment of politics.

Yeah. There are two kinds of liberal programs: the ones that deal in the middle class and the ones that don't. And I think that a clever politician ought to be able to figure out how to take that all the way to the White House and a fundamental realignment of the electorate.

Understanding World History Through the Lens of Nationalism

Just as the foolish and superficial Emmanuel Macron of France declares nationalism bad, patriotism good, Liah Greenfield writes "The World That Nationalism Made" in American Affairs. "Nationalism is the cultural framework of modernity," she writes.

She also wrote a book about it: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992) and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001). Maybe I should take a look.

How did nationalism start, Greenfield asks? With Henry VII in England after the Wars of the Roses.

The [Wars of the Roses] was protracted, but it is enough to mention that, by the time it ended in 1485, both branches lost all their males, and the English feudal aristocracy was physically destroyed. A very distant relation of the Lancaster branch took the throne as the Tudor king Henry VII. In need of an upper class, he soon recruited a new aristocracy from the common people.

So, the old ideology of the "society of orders," of blue-blooded aristocrats versus the "lower orders," got ditched. Here were all those newly minted aristocrats, who just yesterday were just commoners. What did it all mean? The world demanded an answer.

Nationalism was the answer to this demand. It resulted from a linguistic-semantic innovation: the equation of two terms that had previously belonged to two unconnected semantic fields: people and nation. The specific meaning of the word “people,” as discussed above, was “commoners,” the lower classes. The word “nation,” meanwhile, meant an elite, representatives of cultural and political authority.

So in Britland "people" and "nation" became the same thing, because the people, the commoners, had become part of the elite, "representatives of cultural and political authority."

Jolly good fun for the Brits, but in due course other peoples got to feel resentful, because they were not organized as nations and they felt depraved on account of they were deprived: French, Germans, Russians, and now, of course, Arabs.

Want to understand the problems of the world for the last 200 years? It is about folks wanting to be nations and hating the world that don't give them no respect.

But what about China? China, writes Greenfield, is finally defining itself as a nation.

In the last three decades, nationalism has finally taken root within China’s giant population, animating this previously inert, enormous mass of humanity with competitive, nationalist motivation. For the first time in its long history, China demands from the world the dignity due to it, and insists on being recognized by all as the Middle Kingdom.

But China is not filled with Nietzschean ressentiment.

China, however, is different from most other participants in this competition: it belongs to another civilization. Unlike Russia, unlike Arab countries, it has never seen the West as a model. It does not envy the West, and so, ultimately, could never consider itself inferior to it. Its identity is self-sufficient, and its internal dignity does not depend on the respect accorded by the West. For this reason, it can borrow from the West piecemeal, customizing its imports in the process.

Well. That's encouraging. And what about India? My experience of Indians is that they are untroubled by comparison with the West. They seemed to shuck off British rule with remarkable sang-froid, inventing their own Indian National Movement that successfully threw off the British Raj with astonishingly little violence.

The problem is the western elite, which does not understand the national idea -- and the resentments felt by those playing catch-up -- and imagines itself high above such mean and pitiful things.

The spark that ignites the mixture of inferiority, envy, and desire for recognition, which feeds ethnic nationalism, is being lit by the delusional thinking of Western elites. These elites, ignorant of and unwilling to learn from history, refuse to understand nationalism, disregard the psychological dynamics behind it, and continue to rationalize their existence via a belief in a History with a grand purpose. 

So our western elite doesn't have a clue. But we knew that.

The Liberal Ladies Can't Believe What Trump Said About Obama Judges

You may be surprised to learn that the liberal Jewish ladies at Thanksgiving dinner were outraged at President Trump's comment about "Obama judges."

Hey, I told 'em. I told them that the reason Donald Trump is president today is precisely because he talks back to the liberal Zeitgeist. They were not impressed.

And of course my riposte was nothing compared to the brilliant social-media comments, like the one countering Chief Justice Roberts. If there are no Obama judges, no Trump judges, no Bush judges, let all the judges appointed by President Obama resign to be replaced by judges appointed by President Trump.

Exactly.

But it illustrated for me my universal Law of the Incoming Rounds. Liberals are outraged, outraged, by President Trump's dirty mouth, but the liberal non-white lady writers at The New York Times prattle away endlessly about racism and white privilege, with not a care in the world about how this "feels" when you are on the receiving end.

What it "feels" like, liberals, is that someone just lobbed a mortar round into your fire base and half your buddies are now dead or dying.

After all, liberals go about their lives every day, without a care in the world, accusing other people of being racist, sexist homophobes, perfectly oblivious to the fact that a mere accusation can result in loss of job or career. Hello Brendan Eich. Of course they don't have a care in the world about accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia. Because you are not allowed to do that to liberals.

That is why liberal ladies get to be shocked, shocked, when President Trump lobs a mortar round into the liberal fire base. Why, you have no idea how hard Judge Woke von Liberal worked to become an accomplished ACLU lawyer and eventually get nominated to a federal district court judgeship. They can't believe Trump would say that about a guy with a #WeBelieve sign in front of his house.

Anyway, this all got me to thinking.

Everybody is talking about the day when whites become a minority in the good old USA. And how that will change the domination of the white race forever.

But what people are assuming is that the fake tribalism of 2018 will be the same in 2048. And you know what? I doubt it.

My reason is this. All tribalism is fake tribalism, ginned up by ambitious political activists. It has always been fake, always ginned up by the powerful. Because humans are groupish. They clump together into  groups, and the groups can be founded on any notion of membership or affinity. Anything.

In the hunter-gatherer era, tribalism was between individual bands of hunter-gatherers. In the pre-state agricultural era, between villages. OK. Maybe that is true tribalism, but I no longer think so. I think that all tribalism is made up to fit the groupishness of the time.

I am now beginning to think that real pedal-to-the-metal tribalism didn't get in the saddle until the dawn of the agricultural state, when tribalism was amplified and massaged by the kings and the priests. You can see why. In the pre-state era, people attached themselves to small groupings of humans that were mostly related by blood, and they naturally fought for their tribe in the border raids and massacres of the era. But the leaders of agricultural states needed to build identity on the larger and less closely related states that they built by conquest and domination. So they invented fake tribalism, with fake state-based tribes and fake state enemies. Because that is how you do politics, then and now. And it worked. Rulers have never lacked soldiers to go and fight their fake tribal wars.

In the pre-nation-state era in Europe identity was managed by the feudal monarch, and his enemies were your enemies. Sorta. On the ground the "feudal retainers" -- to use Marx's words -- actually owed loyalty to their immediate feudal lords, not to the king. Hello Wars of the Roses. So really, if you were a feudal retainer, a serf or whatnot, your "tribe" was you and the other feudal retainers of the duke or earl that ruled the countryside in which you lived. You were the duke's men, not the king's men.

When the nation state arose, in part due to the suppression of the nobility by the absolute monarchs, the basic tribe was the nation state: the Brits against the French, the French against the Germans. And the bribed apologists of the monarchs would write about the British "race." I propose that our modern notion of "race" didn't really start to develop until European navigators started exploring the world, and a new tribalism of us and them was needed to support the power narrative of global empires like Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, and the Brits. That's when the bribed apologists of the European states really started writing and talking about the "white" race, the Negro race, the "red" Indians of North America, and the "yellow" races of East Asia.

And so here we are, and every good little girl is writing articles for The New York Times that takes for granted the race tribalism that developed in the last half-millennium and maybe peaked with the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights revolution. And they have taken like ducks to water as they broadcast the identity-politics tribalism launched by the Frankfurt School a century ago.

Let me emphasize. I think that all talk about racism, of nationalism, communism vs. free world: all political division is fake tribalism ginned up by ruling classes and would-be ruling classes in their pursuit of political power.

Now when you are a political entrepreneur bidding for power through the electoral process the obvious thing to do is to alter the configuration of tribal loyalties, to redivide the population in new ways, to get people to think of themselves in new ways that will get them to think again about their natural tribal home.

Used to be, for instance, that blacks voted Republican, because it was Republicans that freed the slaves. But starting with FDR, blacks became Democrats, because Democrats offered them loot -- even though the Democrats were also the party of Jim Crow!

Used to be that working people voted for Democrats, starting with the Irish in the mid-19th century that voted for Democrats because most British-born Americans voted Republican. So it was with the white working class until Ronald Reagan picked up the Reagan Democrats in 1980. Why was that? Because Democrats no longer cared about the white working class and no longer offered white workers any loot, preferring to bid for the votes of single women and blacks.

Today, we are all taught to believe that the Democrats will inherit the earth because whites will become a minority, and non-whites plus educated whites will be a majority. But that assumes that current loyalties are maintained.

What the conventional wisdom does not grasp is that political tribal membership changes, and usually because some political entrepreneur manages to assemble a political coalition based on some novel tribal grouping. Sure as eggs is eggs, this new tribal grouping will be based on some new sense of grievance and injustice experienced by some strategic sub-set of voters.

How about this? At some point a movement arises that is seething with resentment against the educated class for its ruthless and corrupt spoils system, that shovels billions and billions to the educated class for universities, for research, for grants, for climate change, for electric cars, for light rail, for bike lanes, etc. While "we," the new oppressed, get nothing.

If I were an average middle-class man or woman in a not-very-upscale suburb in America, I would be asking "when do I get my share of this loot?" But your average liberal lady doesn't have a clue about this. Because she is perfectly satisfied with things as they are, and feeling comfortably virtuous about all the wonderful things that liberal activists are doing for the traditionally marginalized.

I don't know how the political future will work out; I only know that it will go on being the same until it changes. And about half an hour after it changes, and the political world is organized by a new fake tribalism, everyone will realize that it was inevitable, and how could the liberal educated class possibly have been so blind -- and bigoted -- as not to see it.

No, Critical Theorists, Creativity is Not The Only Thing

In a Thanksgiving Day piece, Michael Walsh accuses the Critical Theory chaps of "nihilism." If, by nihilism he means: "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless," then I don't think so. The Critical Theorists do believe in something. They believe in the world-historical destiny of the creative individual -- the artist, the writer, the intellectual, the activist -- to change the world.

And crucially, as the Brit academics say, the Critical Theorists believe that the only way for a creative age to dawn is by destroying the bourgeois Christian European capitalist civilization of which we've heard tell.

Now I believe that this notion is worse than a blunder, worse than a crime, worse than a tragedy, worse than a disaster. It is, I would say, cosmically wrong; it leads to cultural extinction. This is because the creative individual stands on the shoulders of his former self, the middle-class responsible bourgeois. That is why, almost to a man, lefty Critical Theory intellectuals are children of the middle class. You have to be born middle-class to aspire to creative apotheosis.

So if your program is that to usher in a world of creative freedom you need to first destroy the responsible culture of the middle class I am here to tell you that you will destroy everything, because the creative culture is founded upon the rock of the middle-class culture.

I don't know when this creative cult got started. Was it with Descartes, and "I think, therefore I am?" Or Kant, who proposed that our minds are busy processing sense impressions into mental impressions and theories about the thing-in-itself? Or Hegel with his dialectic? Certainly by the time we get to Nietzsche we are definitely trying to understand who or what the creative individual is and how he should live. And Freud's Ego, das Ich, is clearly a creative ego trying to elbow its way past the unconscious Id and the cramping moral instincts of the Superego. In Jung we are trying to balance personal unconscious, collective unconscious with self-consciousness, and combining all the memes of cultural history into a meta-theory of existence, featuring a sacrificial hero exploring the boundary between order and chaos.

Now, it is my belief, drawing on my study of developmental psychology, that a good way to understand the world we humans live in today is with my reductive Three Peoples theory. Of course, the world isn't really that simple; but all theories of the world are simplifications of some kind or another. The question is: does the theory help me understand the world?

My Three Peoples theory begins with the idea that all peoples across the world are dealing with the challenge of living in the city, after millennia of "rural idiocy" as slaves or serfs in the agricultural age. When people arrive in the city as migrants from the countryside -- one of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman, another was a maltster -- we are People of the Subordinate Self, subordinate to some rural lord or squire. We are defined by our caste or rural role, and we are conservative in that we observe the traditional rules of farming, knowing that not to plant at the right time, not to rotate crops, not to preserve food with the traditional methods is to invite starvation and famine. But once we come to the city we have to learn personal responsibility and submission not to a lord but to the prices of the market, including the labor market. Then, after a struggle, we enter the world of the People of the Responsible Self; we become middle-class bourgeois, citizens rather than country folk.

The necessity of this journey, for every migrant to the city, is what the Marxist left denies, and they are wrong, cosmically wrong, and they have visited extinction upon the urban working class. That is why the white working class in the US is reportedly "dying of despair." Because the left led them into a cultural, economic, and political ditch.

But remember, for your average lefty sporting a #WeBelieve sign in the front yard, the question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is no longer the question of adapting to the wrenching cultural challenge of making it in the city. Been there, done that, in your parents' or grandparents' generation. The challenge now is to find something creative, something original to do with your life.

Hey, I know! Champion the rights of women! The rights of minorities! Advocate for migrants! Fight the hate of xenophobes and Islamophobes! That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theorists: they adapted Marxism from advocating for the working class to advocating for every other victim class arriving at the gates of the city.

But the problem is that, as with the working class, the left is teaching these new migrants to the city culture and its public square not to adapt to bourgeois and middle-class norms but to maintain a separation; not to become Americans, but Feminist-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans. And I believe that just as the left drove the white working class into the ditch of cultural despair, the left will do the same for its current clients.

In fact, I believe that the current female-driven movement of special snowflakes that object to microaggressions and insist on safe spaces and seeing sexual harassment everywhere are a harvest of the left's war on the bourgeoisie and the culture of the People of the Responsible Self. These women are saying that they do not want to become responsible individuals armed with the culture of the middle-class; they just want to be protected from scary things and scary people.

Right now I am reading Nietzsche, and what he is trying to do is to imagine what it means to be a creative individual and what it takes to become one. How do you make yourself into a person with the courage and the fortitude to do scary, original things? It is notable that Nietzsche was not very good at that. He had what we would now call "mental health issues." He could write about being a creative Übermensch -- just barely -- but lost his mind actually trying to be that sort of person. The truth is that being a true creative individual is a very hard thing to do, day to day, and most of us don't have the intestinal fortitude to do it, to live it day to day.

Really, when you think of it, this dreadful error of the left is nothing remarkable. You think that we humans would sally forth into the Creative Age without so much as a single glitch? I gotta bridge to sell you, for that is not the way of the world, which advances through the debris of disaster and failure.

The truth of the creative life is the truth demonstrated to us by Nietzsche, who said that the creative person needs to he hard, and Jung's hero whose personality only develops through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. It is only after the creative hero descends into the underworld of his unconscious and confronts his personal demons and learns some wisdom from the encounter that he can return to the world of society and contribute to its welfare.

That is just to say that you don't get to be a creative hero and bend the arc of history towards justice and get your ticket to the People of the Creative Self until you have learned discipline and responsibility among the People of the Responsible Self.

Every Survivor Should Be Thankful

The older I get the more I realize that every story is a survivor story. I was walking with a friend today and he mentioned the time he was standing behind a donkey and it kicked him. Only he jumped out of the way just enough that the kick went right between his legs, and not his family jewels.

So for me, the center of my thankfulness is the appreciation of near-misses. I think Winston Churchill said that nothing is so exhilarating as being shot at without effect. Maybe so, although I would salt his remark with the old saw about the three stages of war experience. First you that it's never going to happen to you; then you accept that it is going to happen to you; finally you ask why it hasn't happened to you.

Never mind the question of deserts; that way lies what we now call mental-health problems and used to call madness.

The two most obvious dodges with death for me occurred to my parents: my father successfully getting out of Russia in 1918 and dodging the Germans on the way out, and my mother getting out of Japan in 1940.

I am deeply conscious and thankful that things did not go the other way, so that I would not be here. Of course, I was doubly blessed because I never doubted for a moment that both my parents loved me. I am sure that is a priceless gift, although it is for me just the way it was.

I have only defied death once in my life, when I was flying a primary glider as a teenager and they gave me an extra pull on the bungee cord and I stalled the glider and came down with a bump. I remember thinking quite coolly that this might be "it" for me, what Bugs Bunny calls "coi-tuns." But everything turned out all right, except that the glider was a bit bent after the landing.

Otherwise my life has been "nominal" as they used to say at NASA: the love of women, two amazing daughters, six thriving grandchildren, and a life remarkably free of employment and health problems.

A lot to be thankful for.

And a lot more: to have the fortune and the opportunity to come to the United States, the most remarkable country in all history, and to have experienced nothing but kindness from the world. (Well, there was a guy once that called me a racist, but hey...)

We are, of course, living in the most remarkable era in all history, the abrupt transition out of the agricultural age and its slavery into an age of unimaginable ease and prosperity.

The only thing that bothers me is that the billionaires won't have got us to Mars in my lifetime. I would be interested to see what the economics of interplanetary and interstellar life will be. Will humans escape the gravity well and live up among the stars or will we leave it to the machines?

This is a time when everyone is complaining about the "other" and quaking with fear that the other guys will bring down the end of civilization as we know it. No doubt, but the last 25 years has lifted a billion people out of extreme poverty.

Well, once we get out of absolute poverty we humans start to worry about relative poverty. And when we no longer have to worry about a bad harvest starving us all to death we start to worry about greenhouse gases heating us all to death.

Of course we do, and what gets us up in the morning is the need to go and work in the garden.

The Right to be Nationalist

One of the few things for which I honor the left was their defense of the working class back in the 19th century. Viewed charitably, the left's advocacy for the working class was to defend its right not to become bourgeois and middle class overnight, to remain within a tribal culture of the working man and his trade, a reality in which the working man experienced himself dignified by his work, defended by his labor union and exploited by his employer.

There is a good argument that, in the triumph of the bourgeoisie after the Napoleonic Wars, there was a tendency for the new middle class to legislate for and on behalf of the bourgeois view of the world, or as we would say, from inside the bourgeois bubble: markets, comparative advantage, anti-mercantilist, and anti all combinations in restraint of trade such as merchant guilds and labor unions. It's the science!

To put the left's critique of capitalism in the best light, we can argue that, whatever the economics of the case, most people shrink from offering themselves as naked individuals to the gods of the market. They want protection from the cold winds of economic fortune.

So the left made the point, in its critique of the bourgeois, that the bourgeoisie should not denigrate and demonize the natural instinct of working people to protect themselves from the hurricane winds of the market by forming into various collective organizations, and that it was perfectly natural and reasonable for them to prefer their working-class culture to the middle-class culture of the bourgeoisie.

Let us generalize this point, that people have a right to live according to their lights, and that it is cruel and unjust for fully enlightened people to demand that less-enlightened people abandon their modest inherited culture and accept the fully enlightened culture of the fully enlightened, on pain of marginalization as superstitious bigots and haters.

So. Today we have the fully enlightened class becoming impatient with, not to say contemptuous of, ordinary middle-class people that want to live in a middle-class culture of marriage, children, career, nation, and Christianity. These deplorables are racists, bigots, homophobes, haters, and xenophobes, and they should be thrown off social media and lose their jobs for expressing their hateful beliefs.

Hey kids! Remember when it was wrong, wrong, to penalize the working class for their somewhat less than enlightened and evolved beliefs? Back in the good old days? And wrong, wrong, to fire Communist school-teachers and to Hollywood-blacklist Communist movie directors?

That's the point about tolerance. It's about the right to be wrong, to live and believe in a benighted way universally condemned by all the best and brightest.

What upsets me is the way that the educated class is now voting for Democrats, i.e., the social-justice radical left. Do my educated and credentialed friends not understand that, after the left has finished dispatching the deplorables to Outer Slobbovia, it will then start to demonize anyone in the educated class that doesn't conform in all respects to the latest talking points from lefty central?

There's a piece today from Commentary laying out all the foolish identity politics pronouncements on the Kavanaugh nomination from all the usual MSM suspects. You wonder: do they really believe all that rubbish or are they tactically trimming their sails to the political wind?

The answer is that they are fools and cowards. Only when they themselves are the targets of the SJW mob will they begin to get a glimmer of understanding about the whole corpus of western wisdom such as due process, and presumption of innocence, and individual rights. And the right to be wrong.

The natural thing for social animals is to fly as a flock, just like birds do. Why does a flock of birds suddenly change direction? Who knows? It's instinctive. The conceit of humans is that we can act, not just on the basis of instinct or the unconscious, but also on the basis of reason and logic, not just on the accumulation of unconscious cultural practice, but conscious deliberation and judgment.

That is the whole point of law. When something goes wrong in the public square then we call up judges first to tease out the facts of the case from conflicting testimony, and then determine, after the fact, what should have happened, and who has been damaged and has the right to redress. It's all terribly boring and toxically masculine. It's much more fun, and emotionally satisfying, to get up a mob and have a witch hunt. Back in the day, everyone agreed that lynching, stringing people up without benefit of a trial, was monstrous and barbarous. But when it came to Clarence Thomas, his "high-tech lynching" by lefty activists was A-OK.

Anyone that goes along with the new witchcraft is a fool. Because sooner or later -- whether you are a man, woman or non-binary -- the witches are going to come for you.

But these days you won't have to suffer a ḧigh-tech lynching. That's for the birds. These days we prefer "social-media" lynching.