The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition

The marvelous thing, to me, about the  whole Trump-Russia thing is that our liberal friends don't see what is sitting there right in front of us.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

In 2016 the Obama administration decided to spy on the opposition party's presidential campaign. And when it went to the FISA court to get permission for spying it justified this surveillance on the basis of cooked-up opposition research paid for by the Hillary campaign.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Can you spell police state? Do you liberals not understand what was done? Using the national police force -- the FBI -- and intelligence agencies -- CIA etc. -- to spy on the opposition? Hello liberals! That is what F-A-S-C-I-S-T-S do! Not to mention right-wing authoritarians, totalitarians, communists, tin-pot dictators, caudillos, etc. Let's replay this in words of one syllable.

In 2016 the Obama administration spied on the opposition's presidential campaign, using the government police force and the government's spy agencies.

And what did they use to justify this oppressive and illegal action? Cooked up oppo. research paid for by the Hillary campaign.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

And then, for the last two years, the FBIs and DOJs and ruling-class media have been kicking sand in our eyes to cover up what was done. That's what that Friday night New York Times piece about the FBI investigating Trump for possible illegal motives in firing James Comey was all about. Way down in the article it comes out that the FBI did't really have any evidence of wrongdoing: just a suspicion. Yeah! Round up the usual suspects, as the saying goes.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Way to go FBIs and DOJs and CIAs. Just open an investigation on anyone, based on a suspicion! Hey, why not the president? Just defending our national honor, or national morality, or whatever it is you chaps are defending today.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Hello liberals! This is as bad as bad can be! Remember Watergate? That was about some campaign operatives, ex-intelligence employees, doing a bit of freelancing to place a bug in headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Why, that was innocent joy-riding in the family car compared to actual spying, by actual government agencies, on the political campaign of the opposition party.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Oh I know why you liberals don't get it. It's because you live in the ruling-class media's walled garden, where you never get to hear a discouraging word about the ruling class and its governance. And even if you did accidentally hear some bird trilling outside the garden, you still know not to believe a word, because racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, or whatever.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Now I know that there are people out there saying that, if you liberals get away with it this time, then the way is open for Republicans to return the favor and spy on the opposition.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Won't happen, because the moment that any liberal gets word of some eevil Trumpist using the FBI or intelligence agency to massage the opposition the whole sky will explode in a fireworks display. Every gorgeous big-breasted newsreader from Nome to San Antonio, from San Diego to Bangor, Maine, will be expiring on a fainting couch wailing "I Can't Believe Trump Did That!" And as for the Soros-funded activist groups! Imagine their fury!

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

So we are left with trying to explain to the two or three liberals in late-stage administrative-state America with half a brain why it is not a good idea to use the government to spy on the opposition.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

It is because when the government, any government, uses the police and intelligence agencies to spy on the opposition then the opposition starts to realize that, in the words of Shakespeare's Cassius, "speak, hands for me." The opposition starts to think that there is no way it is going to get a fair shake, and that the only option is armed resistance.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

And you know, liberals, you  really don't want to go there. You know why? Because you chaps are soft, scions of the regime, wafted aloft because of your well-connected parents, and tutored in left-wing folly at the university, but knowing nothing else. If things start to go south you will discover that, out of the bushes, a whole generation of hard men will appear that will eat you chaps for breakfast.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Back in the day, young men of ruling-class family went to Oxford to study "Greats," or Greek and Roman classics and philosophy in the original language. The idea was to educate the young skulls full of mush in the great political and philosophical issues of governance as experienced in the days of Ancient Greece and Rome so that they would enter Parliament with
half a brain.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Then rather later, young men of ruling-class family went to Oxford to study "Modern Greats," or philosophy, politics, and economics, so that when they went into Parliament or the Civil Service they would have half a clue about how to govern a modern state.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

When Calvin Coolidge went to Amherst in 1890ish, it was understood that graduates of Amherst needed to be prepared for careers in politics and government. La Wik:

While at Amherst, Coolidge was profoundly influenced by philosophy professor Charles Edward Garman, a Congregational mystic, with a neo-Hegelian philosophy.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to college at Boston University, it seems that the only thing she learned was activism. So that is what our ruling class thinks that young skulls full of mush need to know to prepare them for a life of politics and governance.

The Obama Administration Spied on the Opposition.

Do I make myself clear?

Is China' s President Xi Dumb or Something?

I've been wondering about China lately; well doesn't everyone. Because it seemed to me that President Xi's promotion to President-for-life seems to indicate that the rulers of China don't get it.

Then I wondered about the Belt and Road initiative, which seemed to me to be a return to the ancient Silk Road and imperial China's policy of having tributary states. And given that it is a big government infrastructure initiative, I figured it was bound to be a bottomless pit of waste and fraud. Like all government programs.

Now I  read that under President Xi, who gained power in 2012, Chinese domestic lending has switched from mostly private sector to mostly state sector.

In 2013, 57 percent of loans went to private firms and 35 percent to state-controlled firms. By 2016, there had been a stunning reversal; state firms received 83 percent of loans, compared with 11 percent for private firms. Much of this lending came from state-owned banks.

There are reports that Chinese growth is declining rapidly, maybe to zero. And I recently saw a graph showing Chinese energy consumption flatlining since 2013.

I wonder what President Xi is thinking.

Well, obviously he is thinking about his power. Maybe he thinks that his power depends on maintaining the state-owned companies and their jobs because otherwise he will face too much opposition from disappointed lifers in the state industries. Maybe he thinks that state economic power translates into regime power.

Maybe widespread unrest and the 5,000 or so annual violent protests that we sorta hear about have taught the Chinese Communist Party to hunker down and stick to regime defense.

Maybe the stock market decline in third quarter 2018 was about factoring in economic decline in China.

Maybe the political hunkering down by the Xi regime may have the reverse effect and provoke anti-regime protests.

Maybe the Belt and Road initiative is turning out to be a staggering mess that is bleeding Chinese wealth into stupid boondoggles that don't have a hope of profitability.

Maybe the next big challenge for the US President is to bail out China from a Xi-provoked nose-dive.

OK, I know that my view of this is colored by my maxim, that

government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the people to reward its supporters.

In my view what this maxim tells us is that you can't expect a damn politician to understand anything more than getting power and keeping it by plundering the people to reward the supporters. Given how long loot and plunder has been going on in human history it would be naive to expect that your average politician would grasp that to head up a big and powerful world-conquering state today requires first of all a world-conquering economy, and you don't get a world-conquering economy unless the state keeps its cotton-picking debt-drenched hands off the private sector.

And it would be even more naive to expect lefty politicians to grasp such a notion, when they have been carefully taught to hate and to fear the market-based economy since they graduated out of their red diapers.

It's a wonder. In the last 200 years we have seen a Great Enrichment all across the world whereever the market has been allowed to work its magic. And 97.2 percent -- my crude estimate -- of people in the richest countries don't have a clue about that.

All across the USA we are shaming people for not being sufficiently lefty and woke. When we should be shaming them for not knowing where their prosperity comes from.

And it would be a global tragedy if China's present rulers dump its excellent people back into the toilet, back to the days of the genius Mao Zedong.

The Liberal Equivalent of Fancy Cars

If you are a upper-middle-class political professional these days, you need to be something other than white. That's what Victor Davis Hanson argues in "The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity." It's like cars for successful guys:

Minority identity has become a brand for the upper middle class in the manner of a luxury car. One strives to drive a Mercedes or Jaguar not because it is more reliable or even all that much more drivable than a Toyota or Honda, but because it signals a particular cachet. And so too wealthy suburbanites often find emphasizing non-white identities useful even if it means occasionally constructing them.

Hey Victor! Whatabout Hyundai drivers? I mean, there is a sense in which Toyota and Honda drivers consider themselves a cut above Hyundai drivers -- not to mention, er, Kia.

But when you think about it, it all makes sense. We all use ways to sort ourselves into the hierarchy to demonstrate "where we are" -- as opposed to "who we are" -- and just as rising corporate stars seem to gravitate to Audis and BMWs it seems eminently sensible for rising political and academic stars to emphasize their specialness with ethnic identity, as everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Beto O'Rourke does.

But my claim to specialness is the conceit to see around the corner, to be wise to epiphenomena like rich kids appropriating minority status -- or luxury car brands, but seeing beyond all that to the real data. I remember, years ago a colleague at work winking that his father, an accountant, reckoned that 90 percent of Mercedes owners couldn't afford it. On the other hand The Millionaire Next Door that owns a few small businesses probably lives in an unexceptional house and drives an unexceptional car. So, if you look at the Mercedes driver, you are probably looking at a faker. I wonder what car Jeff Bezos drives.

The fact that ambitious liberals in politics are faking minority identity is nothing new. I am reading Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn and the truth is that Henry VII made it all up. He was an upstart that got lucky and won the Battle of Bosworth, and then set about creating the notion that the Tudors squared the circle between Lancaster and York to create a new, glorious Tudor dynasty. Actually what Henry did was root out and eliminate all possible claimants to the throne of England and repress anyone that dared to challenge him.

I had known before that Henry VIII nationalized the armed forces of England and thus disarmed the nobles. But it is clear that his father started the process of, shall we say, neutering the power of possible noble rivals. Also, it is clear that Henry VII understood that in England the City of London was where the money was.

What I am interested in is digging up true narratives that lie buried beneath the fake narratives of the ruling class. Obviously, the rise of populist nativists in the US and Europe is one such. The ruling class lost interest in the working class/lower middle class fifty years ago, and has inadvertently, through its celebration of minority rights, visited injustice upon the old working class for whom the welfare state was built. And now, finally, the old working class is revolting, probably too late.

Then just today I read iconoclast Ron Unz declaring that illegal immigration is a lot less of a problem that we are all led to believe, and thus that The Wall is a pseudo-issue. Moreover, Hispanic crime is a lot lower than people think, almost indistinguishable from white crime if you allow for the fact that the overall population of Hispanic males is younger (and thus more criminal) that the population of white males.

Which means..

Which means that probably Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) is right, that a politician should aim to win the support of any and all voters on the premise that all voters want a job, an education for their children, and a safe community.

And that if a politician works hard on that angle, it doesn't matter what car he drives, or what ethnic identity he impersonates.

However, there is this. People don't go into politics to watch the grass grow. The whole point of politics is to rally the people against an existential threat. And if there isn't a genuine existential threat, we can invent one, can't we, climate change activists?

And maybe this is a requirement for a successful Homo Sapiens. For maybe if we all got our wish, and got jobs, and good education for the kids, and safe communities, we would all get weak and flabby, and then, when a true existential threat appeared, we wouldn't have the cojones to deal with it.

On this notion, we need to have troublemakers stirring us up to action and inventing fake existential threats. Just as an army needs to train for war in peacetime, maybe we humans need to live as if Armagedon was just around the corner.

"I Refuse to Answer, Senator, on the Grounds that Your Question is a Religious Test"

In the good old days, Commie lefties hauled up before Congressional committees to confess their commie-ness used to refused to testify. First they refused to testify on the grounds of the First Amendment, but when the Supreme Court didn't back them up they switched to refusing to testify on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.

All educated evolved people agreed that these Commies and Hollywood lefties, particularly including the Hollywood Ten, were taking it to The Man, or what would become The Man a couple of meme cycles later. And their names ought to be up in lights.

Because, Oh My, the horror of it! McCarthyite witch-hunts! Reds Under the Bed! Nobody in McCarthyite America was safe to express unpopular opinions! Oh! the Hollywood scriptwriters that suffered under the Hollywood Blacklist! Never again! Never, never again would America descend to the low it reached during the McCarthy Era!

Only now you are not allowed to speak a word that liberals dislike on America's college campi. You are not allowed to text a word that activist groups dislike on Twitter. And good luck with an academic career if you are to the right of Hillary Clinton. You are blacklisted, because of your racist sexist homophobic bigotry. And serve you right. Hanging is too good for some people, as Captain Hastings once said when some thug damaged his Lagonda.

The latest stop on this neo-McCarthy tour is the religious test for judicial nominees. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked nominee Brian Buescher about his membership in the Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.

"Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization?" and "Have you ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women's reproductive rights?"

Buescher "replied that he joined the Knights when he was 18 years old; that his involvement includes charitable work; and that his job as a judge is to apply the law regardless of his personal convictions."

I say baloney to that answer. I say that the proper response is:

Senator, I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that it constitutes a religious test for public office which is forbidden by Article Six of the United States Constitution thus: that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." And Senator, because I value your continuance in an office of public trust I hesitate to answer this question and thus perhaps put you in possible criminal liability for monstrously violating the spirit and the letter of the Sixth Article.

Of course, the last thing our liberal friends ever imagine is that they are the McCarthyite witch-hunters of the 21st century. Hey, I doubt even that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is old enough that maybe he was around during the McCarthy era, has the smallest smidgen of a suspicion that his questioning of nominee Russell Vought for Islamophobia might amount to a religious test. Said Sanders:

Sanders said, "I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, that this nominee is really not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about." Vought is an elder in his church, married, and has two daughters.

I would simply say that anyone that doesn't have an least a question in their minds about the suitability of Islam in a modern society, not to mention the suitability of left-wing thought in a modern society, is a fool and a knave that never ventures outside the walled garden of NPR and The New York Times.

It has been said that "Nietzsche was the Nazis' favorite intellectual," as if such a statement was an automatic disqualification of Nietzsche's thought. Why is it then that the statement "Marx was Stalin's favorite intellectual" is not an automatic disqualification for any and all left-wing ideas from the Equator to the Antipodes from now until eternity. After all, Stalin was perhaps the most blood-thirsty ruler since Genghis Khan. Unless you figure that Mao Zedong has Uncle Joe beat in the killing department. If the notion that Marx leads to Lenin leads to Stalin is not a red flag about leftism wherever it may be found, I don't know nothing.

But somehow, in 21st century America it is routine for politicians and activists of a certain stripe to marginalize mainstream Christianity while privileging the latest in kooky left-wing ideology.

I don't get it.

But still, it would be fun for nominees to start invoking the Article Six prohibition of religious tests.

Now the Psychologists Come Out Against Traditional Masculinity

When viewing the actions of the left, the charitable thing to do is to echo Christ, and say: "forgive them Father, for they know not what they do." The less charitable thing is to tell the truth, that the left is a sink of cruelty and injustice, and that every word uttered by a lefty is a lie, including "and" and "the."

So  now the American Psychological Association has come out and declared traditional masculinity to be harmful -- to men, as reported by US News.

Traditional masculinity ideology – which the APA says includes elements of "anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence" – can be psychologically harmful to men and boys, the association noted in its 36-page "APA Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men" that's highlighted in the latest issue of its Monitor on Psychology magazine.

Well, yes. If you are a lefty, and believe in the left's reactionary secular faith, and think that middle-class mores of resilience and responsibility are sick and wrong, and believe that the exploration of sexuality in a creative manner is the right and true and only way to live -- provided you are not a certified victim of the patriarchy -- then of course you would think that traditional masculinity "can be" harmful to boys and men.

On the other hand if you believe like me that a fruitful way of understanding modern humans is with my reductive Three Peoples theory then you might have a more nuanced view of masculinity.

You might think that, for boys and men in the ghetto, who are People of the Subordinate Self, the notion of masculinity -- as not takin' no dissin' from The Man "can be psychologically harmful," not to say physically harmful. Because the way the world works in the city is that you do not reduce it to gang warfare, but go forth to find out if you can be useful in the economy of the city, and you offer your services on the labor market of that city. An excessive attachment to "risk, and violence" might make that adaptation very difficult.

On the other hand, like Jordan Peterson, you might think that, for middle-class twentysomething men hiding in their parents' basement, a little courage and risk-taking might be a good thing. When BCC North London luvvie Stephen Sackur talks to Jordan Peterson on BBC HARDTalk he wants to link Peterson's responsibility mantra to alt-right anger. Says Sackur:

Anger is a powerful force in politics, and there is a lot of it about. Donald Trump, Brexit, and a host of populist movements have been fueled with anger by the way things are.

No kidding, Stevie! I remember when the left celebrated the anger of the workers, of the  feminists, of the civil rights marchers, of  the Stonewall rioters. But that was then. This is now.

Hey, Stevie, why do you think that Peterson has struck such a chord (especially with men)? Peterson:

Because I'm having a serious conversation with my viewers and listeners and readers about how to structure their lives individually and the relationship between responsibility and meaning. And it's a level of discourse, or, I would say, of analysis, that people don't often have an opportunity to participate in.

But is it reaching out to men who are angry, replies Stephen Sacker?

Well, no, not exactly. It is giving men who belong to the People of the Responsible Self what they are looking for, a program for them to get out of their parents' basement and become strong and responsible men. Not toxic masculine men, but men programmed and ready to be responsible workers, husbands, and fathers.

You can see the problem, for North London luvvies and lefties on all the ships at sea. Their whole world view is built upon the notion that the responsible middle class is is fact a vast conspiracy to visit injustice on women, minorities, and the victims of all patriarchs and white supremacists. That was what Marxism was about. It appointed itself to the holy task of stopping the bourgeoisie in the act of descending like the angel of vengeance on the poor helpless workers who were toiling away for peanuts in the dark satanic mills and reducing them to "immiseration."

Therefore there must be something wrong with all the culture around the middle-class cult of responsibility: something toxic, something patriarchal, something supremacist. Eeuww!

Only, of course, the workers had migrated from the farm to the mills in the city because they were starving on the farm, and hoped at least to earn enough for bread in the city. And they did earn bread in the city, and much more, because the bourgeois system, of markets and wage labor, by its internal logic, poured a benison of prosperity upon the workers that were formerly starving on the farm.

In fact, of course, my reductive Three Peoples theory -- which is certainly not as reductive as every word out of a lefty's mouth, including "and" and "the" -- also has something to say about the ideology and anger and hate of the average North London media luvvie and the anger and hate in all the lefties in all the ships at sea. These lefties are People of the Creative Self, and their god is the creative self. That is why Nietzsche said that God is Dead. He meant that the old god of responsibility and divine justice was dead because chaps like him -- and well-born scions in Europe everywhere -- no longer believed in responsibility and divine justice as the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. What they believed in, instead, was to be the creator God Himself, creating art, literature, and above all, justice.

Yes, there are a ton of people out there that believe that the most creative thing in the world is to use political power to create a perfect state with perfect equality and perfect justice, ruled over by them and their cronies. Their record thus far is 100 million dead. Way to go, lefties!

As I said, everything lefties say and believe is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Now, it happens that I believe, in part, in the ukase of the American Psychological Association. I agree that if you are a would-be creative then the traditional masculine culture of "anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence" is not for you. You are not planning to be a warrior, willing to risk your life defending the borders of your patch of land against the village next door, or even a soldier in a national army defending the borders of the nation state from foreign marauders. So it doesn't make any sense for a would-be creative to train in the martial arts, to work hard at attaining a reputation for courage, to be adventurous, and make people fear your terrible swift sword. OK, bully for you, creatives. Although you might want to look into Nietzsche, who said that to become an Übermensch, a superior man, you had to be hard. I think he means that the path of a creative artist is not for the faint of heart, in particular because in the creative arts many are called but few are chosen.

But not all people in the world are People of the Creative Self. The qualities that a creative person must develop are not the qualities that People of the Responsible Self and People of the Subordinate Self must develop. And it is cruel and ignorant to marginalize the qualities that these other people must develop if they are to understand the "relationship between responsibility and meaning" in their lives, and so on.

The great contribution that lefties made to the world was to say to the bourgeoisie, back in the 19th century: you chaps should not create a society just to suit yourselves, the responsible middle class. what about the workers? They want and need protective social structures, things like labor unions and wage and hour laws, that may mean nothing to you bourgeois chaps, but are very important to them.

Good point lefties. Now, a word. Have you not noticed that the dreaded bourgeoisie has acceded to the demands of the workers, and permitted a huge welfare state go grow up, even though it is not in the interest and the culture of the middle class, and even though the middle class has to bear most of the cost of the welfare state, which does nothing for them except make it more difficult to afford a house, to start a business, and to provide for the future? You haven't noticed? Dear me, where have you been, leftie?

Now I say this. You lefties and luvvies and creative bigots have basically said: we are going to build a  society that is suitable and comfortable for us, the People of the Creative Self, and you racist sexist homophobic bigots of the People of the Responsible Self can go pound sand.

Do you not see, lefties, and luvvies and creative bigots, that this is cruel and unjust? Because it says that there is no room in the world except for people like you? Is not this the argument you made against the middle class 150 years ago, that the middle class was making a world to suit itself without a thought for the poor helpless working class?

Until you lefties and luvvies and creative bigots start to get a glimmer of this, you are going to find, in the words of leftie luvvie Stephen Sackur, that there is going  to be a lot of anger comin' on. And unless you lefties and luvvies and creative bigots allow a space for other kinds of people, the notorious "other" of which we've heard tell, then the anger is going to grow and grow.

Because most people aspire no higher than a modest life of responsibility and work and family and children and grandchildren. They don't want to get all creative about sex, or about morality,  or about art, or about anything in particular. And they deserve a place at the table too, one little place alongside all the magnificent gilded thrones reserved for activists and artists and politicians, and writers and intellectuals and all the rest of the People of the Creative Self.

I say that this is the defining issue of our age: that the People of the Creative Self learn tolerance for people who are not like them. Or else.

Why Do Millenials Like AOC Believe in Big Government?

How in the world can a young woman like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believe in Medicare for all? Or her Green New Deal that would forcibly convert the US to green energy in ten years? How indeed can she possibly be a "democratic socialist" given the track record of socialism for the last 150 years?

I mean. Socialism has resulted in 100 million deaths in the last century. And the latest socialist country to show us the way, Venezuela, is in the middle of going down the tubes, with hunger and misery all around as its national oil company also goes down the tubes.

And why is Venezuela's national oil company going down the tubes? Because, dear friend, then-President Hugo Chávez replaced the oil company executives with political placemen, and the engineers that worked for the national oil company all got up and left and went to work for the oil industry in Columbia.

Why do the millennials believe such rubbish? The answer is that the millennials have all been carefully taught. Universities have always really been seminaries to teach the rising ruling class the ruling-class ideology. Back in the day, the whole point of Britain's Oxford and Cambridge was to teach "Greats," meaning Greek, Latin, and Philosophy, and "Modern Greats," meaning Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The idea was that rising politicians needed to know the classic texts about politics, from Plato to Aristotle and the Roman writers from Seneca to Caesar to Livy to Marcus Aurelius. Because if you read those chaps then you got a feel for how to be a successful ruler. And in the modern era you needed to tack on modern political science and economics because a successful government needed to know how to manipulate those factors in order to rule successfully.

And in Germany they invented the research university in the era of German liberation during the Napoleonic Wars as a strategy to make Germany strong so that it would no longer be conquered by the French whenever the mood took them, as it did during the Thirty Years War, the Wars of the Spanish Succession, and the Napoleonic Wars. You will recall that this German national effort was remarkably successful, and the Germans beat the French in the Franco-Prussian war, World War I and World War II. Only problem was that in WWI and WWII the French got the rest of the world to help them and so the Germans got demolished in the process.

This just shows that the plans of ruling classes often go upside down. As Burns put it:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley.

Who knew?

In our day our ruling class rules by dividing the middle class from the victim class. It teaches the victims to hate the middle class using victim politics. It teaches the latest migrants to the city that the bourgeoisie is out to get them. This worked for the working class, for the blacks, and for upscale women. Now the ruling class is teaching the young heads full of mush to advocate for poor helpless gays, transgenders, illegal aliens, and Muslims against the awful forces of white supremacy.

Who knows, it might work.

But the rise of nationalist "populism" in many western countries suggests that this ruling-class strategy may be reaching its sell-by date.

Meanwhile, well-born youngsters like AOC are being carefully taught in our universities to advocate for big government programs like one-size-fits-all government health-care systems and one-size-fits-all government higher-education systems. Oh and one-size-fits-all renewable energy systems.

It is really not surprising that these youngsters -- especially the women -- innocently believe what they have been carefully taught. Despite the notion of rebellious youth -- very popular when the left saw itself as the rebellious sector -- young people are not, in fact, very rebellious. They usually go with the zeitgeist because young people are genetically coded to go with the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist thing is especially important for the ruling class when it wants to send a whole generation of young'uns to war as in WWI and WWII.

The problem is that what the young have been carefully taught, in my view, is the orthodoxy of a reactionary movement, a movement I call the Great Reaction, that rejects the fundamental tenets of the modern age, which is to reduce political power in favor of market power, and to institute a separation of church and state, that is, religion and politics, which have usually, down the ages, been joined at the hip. In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism author Michael Novak proposes what I call a Greater Separation of Powers between not just the branches of government but between the great sectors of society: the political, economic, and cultural/religious sectors. The idea is to prevent two sectors from ganging up on the other sector.

And I believe that this Great Reaction is not just cruel and unjust, but a strategic error that buries humans in misery and death and destruction wherever it is tried. In other words, every ruling class that tries to enact the agenda of the Great Reaction tends to walk itself and its subjects right off a cliff. You would think that ruling classes would have got the message by now. But they haven't and I think the reason why is that the temptation of temporary political power in the here and now is just too enticing for them. I mean, if you were AOC right now, you would think that everything is coming up roses.

The only question is whether the American people think so too. My guess is that they will not, because life, the universe and everything looks a lot different to an ordinary person just trying to get along with a job, a family, and a mortgaged home than it does to a well-born young person that has graduated from a selective college and has been suddenly vaulted into Congress or is otherwise advocating at some activism NGO.

But we shall see. For me, all this looks like rewind city. Back in the Sixties "the kids" thought that they were bringing in a new era. They were shocked, shocked, when Richard Nixon representing the "silent majority" won two elections in a row against them. So they decided to remove him from office.

Sound familiar?

Only this time, I feel, the Republicans are not going to let Democrats manipulate the system with phoney charges and boot the president out. Been there, done that.

But you never know.

When Things Go Wrong: Humanity's Basic Challenge

Yesterday I struck back against Tucker Carlson's attack on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. When a corporation is in decline, someone has to do something, because most likely the current management ain't up to the job.

So what do you do? Do nothing and let the corporation go broke? Have the government do a bailout, as per "Government Motors" in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008? Have NGO activists take it over? Take a poll of financial journalists?

The bigger question is what do you do when anything goes wrong? Years ago, I learned this at work discussing communications protocols with other engineers. The point is, the other guy said, the only interesting question with data communications is what do you do when there is an error? The case where no error occurs is trivial. The question is: what do you do when something goes wrong? This is a gigantic issue: everyone of us is connected into the internet, and believe me, there are errors going on all the time, and yet you and I are almost unaware of this. As far as we are concerned, the internet "just works."

Believe me, the internet does not "just work." Indeed, the internet was invented by the Defense Department's DARPA precisely to solve the problem of what would happen if a nuclear blast knocked out a section of the nation's communications system so that it didn't work. They had no idea that the protocols they developed would be robust enough to work under conditions of billions of global thermonuclear smartphones, but they were.

Now, the fact about humans is that we don't like it when things don't work. But neither do we like to prepare for disaster. We just prefer to do nothing to prepare for a rainy day and then blame politicians and corporations when something does go wrong.

However, you will note that, when disaster does strike, humans immediately jump in to help. The so-called "Cajun Navy" that helps people in the floods after hurricanes is an example of this. And I am not judging the virtue of the bass-boat guys that man the Cajun Navy. The fact is that, instinctively, many men feel that the coolest thing to do after a hurricane is to launch the bass-boat and get out there to help.

This is the biggest problem with government programs. When advocated and passed, nobody thinks of what to do when things go wrong. And the fact is that it is almost impossible to reform a government program while it is starting to go wrong. Only after it is dead on the floor is it possible to change things, and this is not a bug but a feature. We want the laws to be, ideally, unchanging: an immutable statement of justice and redress. But how do you write a law for something that will change over time, like, for instance, education? The answer is that you can't. What you create, when you create a government program, is a great big expensive monster that cannot respond to change and cannot fix itself when things go wrong. Our government education system was set up over a century ago to educated immigrants to literacy and teach them to be conformable factory employees. But what about the children of people already literate and adapted to the wage economy? What about adapting education to deal with online teaching and knowledge? And so on.

But people, when things go wrong, do something about it. They hate to do it, but they do. And the market economy is infinitely adaptable to change, and is full of emergency protocols, like bankrutpcy, for the time when things go wrong. Probably one of the reasons we all hate the market economy is that we don't like it sounding warning signals way before we are ready to respond.

So why do progressives respond to the mess of health care by proposing a bigger, more expensive, more centralized system, when all the problems are caused by the existing centralized administrative system that creates new special interests for breakfast and is inevitably destined to control costs by rationing?

You can ration the economy with prices, or with rationing. If health care is rationed by price, then it will be constantly trying to deliver more service at less price, as with Wal-Mart and consumer products. But if health care is free at the point of delivery, there will be no price rationing and no attempt to improve and streamline service delivery. Health care will be rationed by rationing. That is all.

Why do progressives refuse to learn the lesson of the market economy? It is because their trade is politics and power. And the way to wield power is to control a resource that people want, and have the power to deal it out to your supporters.

And if you are a Person of the Subordinate Self it never occurs to you that there is any other way to order affairs. If you need something, you go to you lord or your political boss and ask for it. Hey, that's the way the world works -- if you are a serf or a slave.

That is the basic question of our time, and any time. When things go wrong, what do you do? Do you go to your overlord? Do you call in Mitt Romney and Bain Capital? Or do you try to figure it out yourself with your fellow humans?

Our problem is that, in last two centuries, incredible new ways have been invented to solve problems short of waiting for disaster to strike. But most of us still practice the culture of the feudal peasant. We expect our lord to solve the problem for us.

But as I say: when you are an underling, or even a spoiled "little darling" of some political power, there comes a day when your lord leaves you by the side of the road because you are no longer of use to him, and all his promises of protection lie broken in the dust.

And what will the robin do then, poor thing?