Explaining Hate: My Pure Theory of Politics

So what are we going to do, Americans? How are we going to heal the divides in our beloved country?

Here's the thing. The only time people in a country come together is when they are threatened by an existential peril. The rest of the time they are free to argue and quarrel, and they do.

Example #1: World War II. The divisions of the 1930s were all healed and all Americans were united in fighting and destroying the threat of Nazism. But after the war we went back, not to our old divisions, but new ones.

Notice that there are two kinds of existential peril. There is the threat of an army on the border threatening invasion. It's amazing how people can bury the hatchet when the Nazis or the Mongols are massing on the border.

Then there is the existential peril of a natural disaster. If your barn collapses in a storm you'd be amazed how your neighbors will rally round to help.  And if you neighborhood is flooded by a hurricane, you'll be amazed by all the fishermen launching their bass fishing boats to help out.

It is pretty obvious why this is so. It's a question of survival. Down the ages, humans have rallied together when faced with an existential peril -- and survived.

Notice that there is another kind of evil that humans combine to fight against: a moral evil. So whereas it is political leaders that bring us all together to fight an existential peril, it is moral leaders, the priests, the bring us all together to fight a moral evil.

In the present fight over The Wall, President Trump is making the existential case to keep out dangerous foreigners, while Speaker Pelosi is making the moral case that a wall -- or at least This Wall -- is immoral.

A vital part of every appeal to unity to fight the existential danger is: Hate. The political leader always teaches us to hate the enemy on the border. And the moral leader teaches us to hate the Evil One that is threatening the moral order. The best thing is to represent the Hate you generate in your supporters as a rage for justice and to represent the Hate in your opponents as Literally Hitler. Because we wouldn't want anyone to think that we are all Haters at heart.  No, no. We are the good guys, and the other guys are the Haters.

So, if you want to get anything done in politics, you have to conjure up an existential peril, and rally your supporters to fight the foe. In normal times this means that the two political parties will be rallying their supporters to fight the other guys over some existential issue. Sometimes the issue will be physical, such as an army on the border; sometimes the issue will be moral.

In the good old days local political differences were resolved by civil and dynastic wars. But we are above all that, at least for now.

The idea of democratic politics with a legislature and all is to convert actual civil war into a fake civil war called an "election" and then continue the sham fight with lively debates in the legislature where elected politicians throw verbal barbs instead of real ones at each other, and then defuse the natural tendency to fight endlessly over some real or imagined issue by splitting the difference with half a loaf, or by shifting the costs of the issue on some third party that isn't at the negotiating table.

It really is very clever. Instead of plundering the losers by sacking their cities and robbing them of all their worldly goods right then and there, you plunder them gradually with taxes laid by democratic votes in the legislature. Instead of grabbing the loot and passing in out among your supporters in the smoking ruins of your opponent,  you pass out the goodies to your  supporters every month with a check. This is not that hard to understand. Any shepherd will advise you not to kill the sheep to get its wool, but rather to shear the live sheep every year.

Obviously it is not good when the political parties can't agree to disagree and instead insist on all or nothing. But it is not surprising. After all, if we are facing an existential crisis, it obviously will not do to compromise; we are talking life and death here!

Going back a couple centuries or more we had a bunch of political thinkers here in the West who invented a politics that would try to dial down the natural enmities among men. That was what all the fuss and feathers about democratic elections, dual-camera legislatures, and separation of powers was all about. These chaps decided that politics and conquest was not the best way to resolve human differences. So they attempted to mew up politics and politicians with a web of rules and opposed institutions to discourage squabbling and reward fair dealing in the corridors of power.

But then came a bunch of political thinkers that invented a politics that made political power into the very salvation of mankind. There are still a lot of them around, and this kind of politics is taught to all our young people in the government schools and government-funded universities.

It becomes very tricky to conduct politics when one side thinks that politics should be confined in a zoo and the other side thinks that their particular brand of saving politics should roam free and unconstrained -- while the other side is nothing but privilege and hate.

But that is where we are.

Attempting a Scientific Explanation of Elite Hate

The last couple months have been definitive, if you ask me.

First, our lefty friends utterly abandoned all the principles of our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition in their hate-filled attacks on a nominee to the Supreme Court. "Believe all women" they cried.

Second, our lefty friends utterly abandoned all principles of decency when they took out after a white Catholic teenager wearing a MAGA hat in the face of a Native American mostly peaceful protester.

I think the two events show our human propensity to go with our faith rather than the facts. And I think that this is both natural and physical.

In other words, I propose that to "keep the faith" with your tribe or your religion, or your family, or the place you work is a fundamental part of being human. I propose that the reason we humans are alive today is in part because of this blind allegiance to "our" side, and our blind hatred for the "other" side.

And I like to say that the big reason for humans "keeping the faith" has been the necessity of defending our own little patch of food-growing land from other people. Nothing wrong with other people. It's just that only one tribe or village at a time can occupy a patch of land and harvest its food. Same thing goes for chimpanzees where the males defend their patch of food-growing land from the males in the neighboring troop. If you don't defend your patch of land from competitors then you soon will be out of food. Curtains, according to philosopher Bugs Bunny.

But then came cities, and then the industrial revolution, and the world changed. All of a sudden, it didn't really matter who owned the patch of land. Because now humans could trade for everything. Now the only thing that mattered was deploying a skill that you could trade for the necessaries of life.

I don't think we really appreciate what a staggering change this is.

By the way, do you remember that "H" word chap? One of the basic principles he propagated in his book was the obvious fact that a people needed to live on their own food-growing land.

Formerly, what humans needed was a firm tribal solidarity so that, at a moment's notice, its young men could be mobilized to defend the border of its patch of land. I dare say that the whole panoply of tribal culture that involves worshiping the same god, loving our tribe, and hating the next tribe over, is all a part of the human need, right until yesterday, to defend the patch of land.

But now everything has changed. Now the question is not how do we figure out new ways to defend our patch of land from other people. Now the question is how do I figure out new ways to increase my skills and create products and services, all so that other people will buy my labor and purchase my products and services.

Do you see the difference? Formerly, other people were a danger. Today, other people are an opportunity.

So, the world has changed.

But, obviously, there are bound to be people that don't get it. And there are bound to be people that, after repeated demonstrations of fundamental transformation, still don't get it. That, after all is what religion and culture and politics is all about. You hold onto your religious, cultural, and political faith even though you are getting signals that everything has changed.

So when Marx and Engels said, in the years when the industrial revolution was starting to hit Germany, that nothing had changed, that the old domination of feudal lords over agricultural peasants would be replaced by the domination of the bourgeoisie over the industrial workers, they had a point. It stood to reason that once the rising bourgeoisie had achieved political and economic hegemony it would rule and dominate just like the feudal barons of old.

Only Marx and Engels were wrong. The bourgeoisie did not become a new feudal elite, and exploit the workers into the ground. They were willing to dilute their power by giving the workers the vote. I like to say that the reason this happened was because the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power.

Too bad, because by the time that the facts on the ground indicated that Marx and Engels were wrong, the two agitators had been transformed into the prophets of a new religion, a religion of believers in the holy commitment to advocate for the wretched of the earth and lead them in a political movement against the bourgeoisie and its program of domination and exploitation that the prophets had foretold.

But I don't want you to think that this disinterest in power demonstrated any particular virtue in the bourgeoisie. It is just that in the bourgeois religion and culture and experience it pays to get along with other people as co-workers, as customers, as clients, as lenders, as borrowers. So that is what bourgeois people do.

The problem is that the movement that Marx and Engels created is based on the old principle of implacable opposition between my group and your group. It didn't matter that the facts on the ground belied the lefty faith in class conflict. Humans live by faith. And when our human faith is challenged we tend to redouble our faith rather than question it. By the time that facts on the ground indicated that Marx and Engels were wrong the new religion was in the saddle and propagating its faith all over the world.

And just in time a new generation of prophets arose. When World War I demonstrated that the old class conflict theory was problematic, because the workers identified with their nation before their class, a new generation of prophets prophesied the white male exploitation of women and minorities.

OK, so in the Sixties, the males and the whites were persuaded to accede to Civil Rights Acts to guarantee rights for women and minorities. Once again, the broad middle class demonstrated that it was not that interested in power. It was perfectly willing to allow women and minorities into the charmed circle of male white privilege. (Dirty little secret: it is not power that makes the world go round, not any more; so the evil white male monsters were not giving up the philosopher's stone or the Ring of Power).

But the Faith! The Faith in the power of educated enlightened activists to Smash the Power! Just because the world has demonstrated that Power is not the only thing, or not even much of a thing at all, that has nothing to do with the Faith of educated white ruling-class activists of good family in the sacred calling of activism to save the wretched of the earth from oppression and exploitation with the Ring of Transformative Political Power.

And this is what we are seeing. People, especially white liberal ruling-class people, are interpreting the images of the day in the light of their faith. In the affair of Brett Kavanaugh the faithful did not see the monstrous injustice of using un-corroborated accusations from high-school days. What mattered was their faith in abortion and their terror that their abortion rights might some day be reduced -- and this from women mostly beyond their child-bearing years. People, especially white liberal ruling-class people, are interpreting the Covington Kid as a smirking toxic white male oppressor. They do not see the vile racism of black religious cultists that had spent a hour yelling vile racist, sexist, homophobic slurs at the kids. They do not see the vile bigotry of a Native American forcing his drumming culture in the faces of people that maybe weren't all that interested in Native American drumming culture. They saw nothing except what their faith taught them to see: a white male kid in a MAGA hat "smirking" at a helpless Native American victim.

My point is that the faith of our liberal masters believes in a world in which racism sexism and homophobia are everywhere. It is not surprising that, in faithful observance of their faith, our liberal masters do in fact find racism, sexism, and homophobia everywhere they expect to find it. That is the whole point of faith.

And our liberal masters are utterly oblivious of the fact that their program of Affirmative Action that became diversity and inclusion is racism and sexism, straight up. Their program uses government power to privilege people according to their race and gender.

But have some compassion for these poor deluded ruling-class folks. They are merely believing and practicing what they have been carefully taught, to hate and to fear the people that their teachers have told them are racists, sexists, and homophobes.

At some point, I think, our liberal masters are going to experience a crisis of belief, when the world will start to crash in on their walled garden of faith, and it will suddenly start to dawn on them that everything they believe is a lie, including "and" and "the."

In my view these crises of belief occur in witch-hunting events that we also call a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The crisis occurs because the saving faith of a revolution is not quite delivering on its promises. So the faithful amp up the voltage, because obviously the only way to bring on the millennium is to start eletrocuting the heretics.

And then the whole thing collapses in a Thermidorian Reaction.

Of course, this natural and physical process of purging might take years, even decades. But you never know. It might all be over tomorrow, or possibly November 4, 2020.

Why Don't We Normals Have Anti-left Pejoratives?

When someone calls you a racist, sexist, homophobe what do you do?

I mean, here in America, the land of the free and the brave, any blue-check lefty-liberal can get up on Twitter and call anyone a Nazi, or "literally Hitler," and we normals have nothing to say, except  "No I'm not."

Which as we know basically concedes the cultural stage to the lefties.

In a nation with civil rights laws, it shouldn't matter if I'm a racist or you are a homophobe. The point is that the government and a corporation can't discriminate against you on the basis of race or sex or sexual preference.

Or, to use a lefty meme, if the principle of non-discrimination occupies the commanding heights of  culture and politics, then a group of racist tiki-torchers really don't matter; they are, as we say, too marginalized to matter.

Of course, in reality, according to the mendacious concept of "diversity and inclusion," the government and corporations actively discriminate in favor of woman and minorities, so the tiki-torchers are even less powerful than you might think.

And the lie that some kid in a MAGA hat is a danger to shipping is a bunch of baloney. But then, what notion from the left, ever since the marginal revolution blew up the classical economics in Marx's Capital in 1870, hasn't been a bunch of baloney?

Still. It would be nice to have some delicious pejorative to sling at lefty-liberal Twitter thugs. It is not so much the ability to insult that I am interested in, but the ability to signal that we normals occupy the high ground and the lefties better watch out.

The problem is that we normals are not really in the business of cultural warfare. We are People of the Responsible Self and we are not organized in para-military fashion ready at a moment's notice to descent on some lefty cultural thug to teach him a lesson. We just want to live our responsible lives, obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. We just wish that the lefties would mind their own business and stop bothering us.

If you have been reading my stuff you may know that my brilliant, though reductive, Three Peoples theory tells us what should be the cultural norm in America.

In my book, People of the Responsible Self should be tolerant of the groupishness of People of the Subordinate Self. The point is that People of the Subordinate Self,  the workers and peasants and traditionally marginalized groups of which we've heard tell, have not yet developed the cultural and economic skills to experience and live modern life as competent People of the Responsible Self do. So we should cut them some slack.

The germ of truth in the left's pejoratives about race and white supremacy and toxic masculinity is that white males are perhaps the most adapted to a responsible life in the city and therefore ought to be understanding and tolerant of people that have not yet achieved those economic and cultural skills.

But in my book, the People of the Creative Self should be tolerant of the responsibility culture and the rigid rules of the People of the Responsible Self. As Nietzsche pointed out, the life of a genuine creative person is hard: many are called but few are chosen. Most people really don't have the chops to be a creative artist, or writer, or journalist, or start-up businessman. So it is monstrous and vile to attack the normies because they don't quite measure up to the lofty creative standards of the creative elite, which most of the time our lefty friends cannot live up to, because they don't have the creative chops and the Nietzschean hardness to make it as a creative.

OK, great. So our lords and masters of the educated ruling class should be more understanding, more tolerant -- hey, even compassionate -- of us dull routinist normals.

But how do we recover a cultural space and the right to our dull routinist cultural beliefs and "make" the lefties respect us?

I can think of a lot of clever retorts to the accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, or toxic masculinity, such as:

How's your Two Minute Hate going today, precious?

Look, diversity/ inclusion is racism, straight up. 

Where's the toxic masculinity if colleges are 60 percent female? 

What white supremacy? There is nothing more shameful and low-rent today that being a white male in a MAGA hat.

But that falls short of a one-word insult. And let's face it: it took a while for liberals to make "racist" the most shameful insult ever.

Maybe the way to deflate the "racist" insult is to say: "Of course, and how about you?"

But there is still a problem.

I'm not sure that developing a quiver of cultural arrows that we can launch at a moment's notice on Twitter is "who we are."

I think that more realistic is getting ordinary middle-class women -- wives of men and mothers of boys -- to be saying to each other in their kaffee-klatsches: "I can't believe (some lefty activist or Democratic politician) said that."

One little problem with the Trump rebellion is that nice suburban women were offended by the macho insult methods of Trump. I get that. Trump lives the male Culture of Insult, and women prefer the action indirect: "I can't believe she said that!"

But shouldn't suburban women be just as offended by the Twitter thugs that could descend on their husbands and children at any moment with a vile and insulting accusation that could ruin their lives?

Nietzsche, after all, writes in Ecce Homo:

Woman...  after all, the state of nature, the eternal war between the sexes, gives her by far the first rank.

So take it away, ladies! 

The Left's Religion of Political Power

They say that Lenin's question -- Who? Whom? (кто, ктого) -- is the central question of politics: who gets to do what to whom?

But let us try to understand this at a higher level. The question for social animals like humans is how disagreements are to be handled, and the basic question is how to minimize the expensive and risky resort to force. That is the meaning of Jordan B. Peterson introducing the lobster into his 12 Rules. The lobster is a creature that goes back 300 million years, yet it is programmed to avoid force by use of the concept of hierarchy. In other words, lobsters know their place in the hierarchy and accept their place most of the time. This means that not every lobster conflict -- usually having to do with sex -- is settled by force.

The same thing, Peterson wanted us to understand, applies to humans. We have hierarchy to minimize the incidence of violence. And incidentally, the incidence of violence has gone down from 500 violent deaths per 100,000 per year in the hunter-gatherer age, to 50 per 100,000 in the high Middle Ages, to 5 per 100,000 today in the US.

But today we have a completely new way of reducing violence than mere hierarchy. It is the market system. Instead of the hierarchy among males in the village, or the hierarchy among landowners in a hierarchy of feudal vassalage, we have the interactions of market buying and selling. The guy that satisfies the demands of the consumers at the sweet spot of price and quality preferred by the consumers makes more profit and gets to mate with a more beautiful girl than the guy that is not quite as attuned to the choices of the consumers. No need to resort to fisticuffs. 

We do not appreciate just how much of a staggering revolution this represents in human social cooperation. Let us look at it through the lens of the Indian caste system. Here, everyone inherits the caste status of their parents and their means of livelihood: priest, warrior, merchant and artisans, laborers, and untouchables. But suppose things change and society needs more merchants and artisans and less laborers? Or suppose the prince Gautama Siddhartha wants to become a priest? Sorry, Charlie, no can do. Thus the unfortunates either submit to the caste system or they bust it up.

We moderns would regard such social rigidity as a recipe for revolution. But, most likely, down the centuries of the agricultural age it didn't much matter. Things didn't change much except for the odd invasion and the periodic famine, so what else were we going to do?

But the thing about the market system, we have learned, is constant change and constant economic revolution. This constant change and constant economic revolution, scientists say, is the basis of the extraordinary economic growth of the last two centuries: there has never been anything like it before, not ever.

But think of it. If there is going to be an economic revolution every generation -- machine textiles; steam power; steam transportation; oil illumination; electric power; internal combustion engine transportation; cheap steel; airborne transportation; computers; internet; smartphones -- then in every generation there is going to be an upheaval in the economic lives of the people. And the people that were doing very well just yesterday will find that the new thing has utterly cut their livelihood to ribbons. We know that when this happens to people they are not happy.

In the old days of agriculture there wasn't much the average person could do if the weather or the climate or the ruler changed. You died or survived; if you could you migrated in the knowledge that to stay put meant starvation. If you had a bit of military might you might try to resolve your problem with a spot of conquest and loot and plunder.

But today? Today there are two strategies for dealing with economic change. You can keep your eyes open and respond to the changes in the market for labor and skills by adapting when things go against you. Or you can depend on the political system to bail you out of trouble. You can follow the market or you can follow a political leader.

In my view the strategy of adapting is the new and the revolutionary way of dealing with the world; and the resort to politics is the old and the dysfunctional strategy. If you use the adaptation strategy in your life you are likely to weather the inevitable changes and revolutions in the economy; if you use the political strategy you will likely end up like the white working class that is reported to be dying of despair. If you adopt the adaptation strategy you are surrendering to the verdict of the market and its price system; if you adopt the political strategy you must surrender to some political leader that promises to lead you to safety and justice.

This is why I have declared that the leftist movement is a Great Reaction. It is a reactionary faith in the power of politics and force to put off the challenge of economic change.

It's all very well to allow combinations of workers in restraint of trade. But nothing is going to save a mature corporation where the workers are organized into a labor union and the labor union leaders refuse to countenance pay cuts when a recession bites or the market changes. But if there had not been a labor union then there is a chance that the corporation might have weathered the recession or adapted to a change in the market. The truth is that union workers are trapped in the walled garden of their above-market union wages and benefits. Everything is great until the market rings down the curtain.

It's all very well to legislate a pay-as-you-go old-age pension scheme funded by taxes, but what happens if life expectancy changes? Or the birth rate changes? What happens as, over the years, the politicians rejigger the plan to reward various political supporters? What happens as, year after year, the politicians put off adjusting the workers' contributions to the plan and the beneficiaries' benefits from the plan?

It's all very well to interpret the Civil Rights Acts as demanding Affirmative Action of hiring by race and sex or "diversity and inclusion" which is the same thing by a different name. But how are you ever going to bring the system of reverse discrimination to an end when the people benefiting are going to raise holy hell if you try to cut back on their benefits?

Our lefty friends believe that political power is the way to resolve the problems of the people: legislation to protect workers from the bosses. Government pensions to assist people in old age. Hiring quotas to assist people marginalized in olden times. But I say that this political faith is a reactionary return to a philosophy of force. And I say that the whole point of social cooperation from lobsters to humans is to reduce the costly and destructive incidence of force.

I say that when a new idea comes along that allows the resolution of millions of economic transactions through the market and prices and avoiding the indirect power of hierarchy, it should be understood as an astonishing miracle. And it should be a signal for our modern advanced and evolved citizens to educate the people and lead them to the promised land teach them to worship the new god, and they should be the first to abandon the worship of the graven images of the old god and his philosophy of force.

And my faith is that we are living through the last tempestuous years where the lefty reactionaries are making their last desperate efforts to cling onto their crumbling faith in political power and government force.

Hey, it's not really that surprising. Humans live in the past as much as the present, and many of us long for a return to an imagined golden age. The current market economy is a brutal and unimaginable destruction of all old and venerable customs and culture. Of course there are many of us that long for that wondrous time in the past when everyone lived in communal bliss.

But I am here to say that the left's Great Reaction back to the old faith in political power is a monstrous lie: for socialism is neo-slavery; the welfare state is neo-feudalism; and lefty identity politics is neo-tribalism.

They way to the Promised Land flowing with the milk and honey of the market economy is the way of a new god, and his Ten Commandments begin with the command that thou shalt have no other gods, such as the gods of political power, before him.

Don't doubt me on this.

Interpreting a Smirk in 2019

Hey Catholics! Any of you guys planning to vote Democrat any time soon after the Covington kids free-for-all?

Considering that liberal Democratic senators now want to apply religious tests on Catholic judge nominees. 

Considering that your average Twitter leftie looks at a clean cut Catholic high-school kid trying to be polite to a mostly peaceful protester drumming right in his face and sees a racist sexist white supremacist smirk.

Yeah it's interesting. Your average Twitter mobster looks at a clean-cut white kid trying to be polite and sees a monster. Not to mention having nothing to say about a bunch of African Americans spewing racist sexist homophobic bile at a bunch of white kids.

Yeah it's interesting. It's nothing for a bunch of leftie mostly peaceful counter-protesters to insult pro-lifers at the annual March for Life. Nothing to see here.

But imagine if a bunch of MAGA-hat wearers showed up at the sacred (and anti-semitic) Women's March. I am not talking about them showing up and shouting "build the wall," or marching around with fife and drum playing Yankee Doodle and singing "Baby Ir's Cold Outside." I am talking about some MAGA folks just showing up at a sacred lefty mostly peaceful protest. Imagine the outcry! Imagine the doxxing! Imagine the vile threats! Imagine the foaming lefties throwing themselves on the ground in a rage about white supremacy and toxic masculinity!

If you are a mom, what do you think about the possibility that your polite teenage son could be traduced from one end of Twitter to the other? Imagine mostly peaceful lefties interfering with your son's college applications. Whaddya think of that?

If you are a dad, what do you think about the American Psychological Association deciding that the normal masculine traits that you are teaching your son are an expression of "toxic masculinity?" Whaddya think of that?

Now, I believe that my reductive Three Peoples theory explains the whole procedure. What we have in America and on all the ships at sea is a natural tendency among the special People of the Creative Self to regard the ordinary People of the Responsible Self as less than human, or at the very least, limited, rigid, superstitious and bigoted.

This is a natural tribal instinct, and that is why certain wise heads developed the notion of tolerance, the separation of church and state, or belief systems and force systems. The idea was to keep our natural tribal instincts down to a dull roar, and let other people live according to their lights, even if there lights were rather dim.

You see, when you are a creative person the basis of your world view is that the established cultural memes are there to be broken. Nobody, you think, should just accept the mores and the beliefs of yesteryear. The meaning of life, the universe and everything, you believe, is to break the mold, to create something new: break old sexual roles, both in bed and out of it, break old ways in art and literature, etc. Transvaluation of all values, baby. And if you don't agree you are a racist sexist homophobe.

Well, I say that such an attitude is great among People of the Creative Self. But I say it is utterly wrong to insist that everybody else believe in and practice your religion of creativity. Because, as my Three Peoples theory explains, there are also in this world People of the Responsible Self and their belief system says that you should live your life as a responsible individual according to well-established religious and cultural rules about how men should behave, how women should behave, and how children should be raised. You think that your religion of creativity gets to impose itself on all the other religions of the world? Just between you and me, pal, I think that your attitude is a recipe for religious war.

And suppose that you chaps of the Creative Self lost that religious war? What would you do then, poor things?

My warrant for my belief is the lesson that the People of the Creative Self, the Educated Youth of the 19th century, taught the People of the Responsible Self, the bourgeoisie way back when. Educated Youth -- like Marx, Engels, and the British Fabians -- said that it was monstrous -- not to mention unjust -- of the bourgeoisie to insist on a society of individualism, markets, and laissez faire, and impose it on the working class. The working class wanted the protection of labor unions, of wage-and-hour laws, of government-run social insurance, and they had a right to insist on it, and pass laws to institutionalize it. Maybe some day they would want to become People of the Responsible Self, but right now they wanted society to protect them from the harsh winds of corporate power and market prices.

And you know what? The bourgeoisie basically accepted this critique; they gave the workers the vote and the workers voted for government benefits and the combinations in restraint of trade implied by organizing into labor unions.

Speaking as an upper-middle-class person I am perfectly willing to be taxed to support social insurance programs for the workers-- not to mention widows and orphans. But I don't want to be forced to be enrolled in them. In other words, I want the right to be a responsible person and take care of my own retirement income through personal savings and investment, and I want to be responsible for my own end-of-life medical and custodial care.

But the Educated Youth of the 19th century and the educated ruling class of today deny me the right to be a responsible individual in these central issues of life. The educated rulers arrogate to themselves and their supporters the right to dominate and control the People of the Responsible Self and make them march to their idea of justice; they deny ordinary responsible people the freedom to organize their lives in their own way according to their own lights.

See what I mean? Back in the day lefties demanded that the middle class adjust the political system to accommodate the workers. Today the lefties demand that the right to adjust the political and cultural system to suit themselves, and to hell with the People of the Responsible Self as mere "deplorables,"

So I say that the lefty People of the Creative Self are cruel and unjust, and violate their own sacred principles of inclusion and diversity and compassion for those less fortunate, less educated, less evolved than themselves.

And that is why I think that ordinary Catholics -- not to mention ordinary moms and ordinary dads -- are slowly coming to see that the Democratic Party and the Twitter thugs are not their kind of people and that it is not likely that they will be voting Democratic much in future elections. Because justice.

What Do We Know About Sex in the Lower Classes?

If you think about the sexual revolution of the last century, you soon realize that almost all you know is about the educated class.

I was reminded of this as I read Stefan Zweig's excellent memorial, The World of Yesterday, of his adult life from about 1900 to 1940.

Zweig tells us all about the horror of girls in high bourgeois cities like Vienna being trussed up in girdles and corsets that completely disguised their real bodies, and mourns their utter ignorance about sex. That was upper-class bourgeoise girls. Whatabout the tidal wave of prostitutes that the young men of the era patronized, given that they couldn't sample the wares of the well-born girls that were being chaperoned out of all recognition.

How much better it was, he writes, after World War I when young people could freely mix and match, and actually be friends with the opposite sex.

Well, Zweig died in 1942 so he couldn't have known about the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s arising out of the pill and abortion on demand. And he couldn't have known about today's confused backlash against the sexual revolution in the #MeToo campaign and the demand for safe spaces and the Age of  the Cat Lady.

But one thing that struck me was that apart from prostitution, we folks in the Olympian world of the educated class really have no idea how sex goes down in the lower classes.

The only thing I know is the progress of the Irish Americans from "shanty Irish" and 50,000 "nymphs of the pave" in the New York City of the mid 19th century to "lace curtain Irish" by the turn of the 20th century. I translate this to mean that in 1850 the potato-famine Irish were dumped on the streets of New York and Boston and had to make their way as best they could. But by the turn of the century, with the help of Archbishop "Dagger" John Hughes and the slogan "first build the school, then the church" the Catholic Irish had achieved an astonishing and remarkable ascent to middle-class respectability.

So, what was going on with the family and sex in the world "below" the middle class all this time? What was the effect of the cultural transformation between the Edwardian era and the inter-war period on the European and North American working classes? We know all about hippies and feminists in the Sixties, but what was going down in the households of factory workers and policemen and firemen? I doubt if All in the Family exhausts  the possibilities.

And what did the welfare revolution of the Sixties do to the lower classes? We know that premarital childbearing went up and marriage went down. And thanks to Charles Murray and Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 we know that, in upper-class households, career and merger marriages reign, while career and marriage aren't that firm in the middle. And that the bottom 30 percent don't work much and don't marry much.

And that is just for white people!

See, my feeling is that back in the day liberals were drenching us with narratives about working-class life and then African American life, in service to their lefty politics, but what did we really learn?

And in the aftermath of the civil rights era, I'd say that things aren't going so great that liberals want to talk about them.

All I know about lower-class life is from visits to Rudy's Barbershop where I encounter the tattooed and the pierced at first hand. Or I interact with the aides that attended upon Lady Marjorie's mother at her end of life. Just between you and me, I feel that life ain't so great if you live outside the charmed circle of the educated class.

That's because the educated class is great at making a society fit for the educated to live in, but really doesn't have a clue about anyone else, except as a vehicle for activism.

Of course, you know me. I blame liberals for everything. For demolishing the unions and fraternal organizations and mutual aid societies of the 19th century. For demolishing the Catholic Church with Vatican II in the Sixties. For demolishing the lower-class family with welfare on demand. For sending women on a wild goose chase of "career" which was society's amazing solution to the problem of how to socialize aggressive men. For devaluing sex with abortion-on-demand and divorce-on-demand and the attack on bourgeois respectability.

See, I wonder how kids are socialized about sex and marriage in the lower classes today. I wonder how all the ruling-class obsessions about non-binary genders and the rape crisis and #MeToo and safe spaces plays by the time it has filtered out of the educated class out onto the street.

It may be just me, but I don't believe that the obsessions of well-born women and carefully-taught activists has any relevance to the lives of ordinary people that work at "jobs."

I guess that I should keep a weather eye out for writing that would give me a clue about life outside the charmed circle of ruling class privilege and ruling-class obsession. I'll bet it's out there, for anyone willing to pay attention.

And Stefan Zweig has reminded me that to learn anything useful you have to pay attention and look away from the endless rubbish of ruling-class propaganda.

I better get to work.

The Knotty Problem at the Center of Western Politics

I've been reading the autobiographical look at the glory days of Vienna before World War I by Stefan Zweig: The World of Yesterday. The book depicts the glorious summer afternoon of bourgeois luxuriance, before working-class politics took over and built the welfare state, and before the Great War and its ruinous post-war inflation unleashed Bolshevism and Nazism.

Well, there was the terrifying day that the workers staged their first May Day parade and marched to the Prater, the great public park in the center of Vienna -- and nothing happened! The workers and their wives marched "four abreast" singing the Internationale and their kids sang school songs. Just a Sunday afternoon at the park!

Zweig and all his buddies in high school were absolutely transfixed and intoxicated by the ongoing revolution in the arts, from Nietzsche to Hofmannstahl to Mahler. But at the same time, there was this young chap, son of a customs official, who experienced fin de siècle Vienna as a mortal threat to ethnic Germans because in the Austrian-Hungarian empire ethnic Germans were a divided minority fighting against all the other ethnic nationalities: Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, you name it. You may know his name; it begins with an "H."

The point is that the Hapsburg imperial regime had been playing mild ethnic politics with all the various ethnic identities for decades, and thought it had the whole thing pretty well in hand. No doubt it did, provided it did not get into a losing war and lose most of its revenue and therefore find itself unable to reward its supporters in the manner they expected.

In many ways we are in a similar position all across the West. Our ruling class successfully marshalled the working class into the bourgeois state decades ago by rewarding it with a broad array of neo-feudal benefits while warping the bourgeois state of individual rights and limited government almost out of recognition -- and dealing itself lots of lovely sinecures.

Then our ruling class brought high-born women and blacks into the room with the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. This was a great idea except that the supporters of political parties are not really interested in rights: they are interested in loot, which was delivered first as Affirmative Action, then diversity, and now diversity and inclusion. Hey, handing out loot and privilege is what politicians do, whether they wear kingly crowns or merely facelifts.

The problem is that, first, people are insatiable: what have you done for me lately; second, at some point you run out of other peoples' money; and third, the ruling class tends to forget who deserves what loot and why.

That's how I understand the rage of the white working class here in the US, of the gilets jaunes in France, and of the White Van Man in Britain. Was a time when these folks were the little darlings of the ruling class. Well, when you are a little darling you are supposed to get regular presents from your sugar daddy, right? How come the presents stopped coming?

Of course, from the ruling class things look different. Hey, pal, you are still getting your Social Security, your Medicare, your health insurance, so what's yer problem? Well, any little darling knows the answer to that. How come you don't look at me the way you used to, Daddykins? And it's Sugar-Puff, not "pal."

But the thing is that the ruling class promised a perfect world of safety and justice and benefits, and that the working class and the gilets jaunes would live happily ever after. And the little darlings, starting to get lonely in their love-nests remember every loving word, every promise, every gorgeous present of jewelry from Sugar Daddy as if it were yesterday.

The answer, to chaps like me is to tell the little darlings that their first mistake was that first date with the married Sugar Daddy. Sooner or later, you have to get with the bourgeois program,  and stop believing in the blandishments of every damn politician to show up on the hustings.

But, as Stefan Zweig points out, all good things come to and end. That long-ago glorious summer of the Viennese bourgeoisie, particularly including the Jewish bourgeoisie, came to a crashing end -- through no fault, really, of the bourgeoisie. The Hapsburgs got reduced to Dukes. And after the crash, you have to suck it in, and get with the program.

So I dare say that the knotty problem at the center of  western politics: how does the wise and worthy ruling class take care of the ageing stable of little darlings while beguiling the pretty new faces at  the same time and still keeping a credit balance at the bank?

I  don't  know. I just don't want  to be the fall guy that has the pay the bill for the ruling class's many follies and injustices.