Government: Is Plunder All There Is?

As I slowly read through Thomas Penn's book on Britain's Henry VII, Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England, I can't help comparing it to today's America. Henry VII was implacable about nosing out conspiracies and collusions with foreign powers. He was brutal about extracting revenue from the merchants of London and the powerful aristocrats.

Basically, King Henry would sicc his finance guys on some unsuspecting rich guy on some pretext or other and order the rich guy to pay up. Plus, he would force his target du jour to post a bond to guarantee future good behavior, and the bond would be big enough that the target would have to raise money from his friends, so the friends were put at risk too. Sound familiar?

What did Henry VII do with all this money? As far as I can make out he used it to build more palaces and hunting retreats, more gorgeous jewel-encrusted clothing, and more displays of regal magnificence.

Which shows how small-minded the little kingie was.

As you know, my line on government is that it taxes the people to reward its supporters. But Henry only spent money on himself. No wonder the Brits couldn't wait for the guy to die.

There is not a whisper in Winter King about economic growth. All Henry thinks about is extraction: loot and plunder. But there was one thing in his favor. He didn't go to war. Sure, he played international power politics with the Frenchies and the Castilians and the Hapsburgs, and was always trying to line up a nice dynastic marriage for himself. But he couldn't bring himself to throw the dice and go to war; he wanted to spend all that lovely revenue on himself.

Fast forward to today. If you listen to our Democratic friends they are talking about nothing except lovely loot and plunder for their supporters: Medicare For All. Free College. Student Debt forgiveness. But they also want to go to war -- on climate change with a Green New Deal. Not a word about growing the economy to create jobs, jobs, jobs.

In my reading, the first evidence of government thinking about the benefit to itself from  economic growth is this statement by a notable just before the Glorious Revolution that I read in 1688: The First Modern Revolution by Steven Pincus. Observing the early effect of manufacturing in England, Carew Reynell wrote in 1685:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

Imagine you are a politician and have the strategic vision to see what "ten times richer" means to you in respect of tax revenues and rewarding your supporters and strutting your stuff on the world stage. You would think that the thoroughly modern Millies of Big Government would be all over the economic growth gambit because of the glorious potential to increase the pot of loot and plunder. But in fact they don't. They just talk about new spending programs and increasing taxes on the rich; they don't talk about making the pot bigger.

Is this a problem with today's voters? It is clear that there is a major divide between the political parties in America. Obviously President Trump with his Make America Great Again slogan is playing the Reynell notion, that with economic growth we can all be richer. The Democrats are playing the Winter King dirge of Henry VII: they are going to extract revenues from their hated enemies in the white supremacist and toxic masculinity sector and then spend all the lovely loot on a war on climate change, plus free health care and college for all.

OK. You already saw what was coming. How does this play out with our reductive Three Peoples theory? Obviously the People of the Subordinate Self are interested in whatever loot gets tossed their way: Yay! free health care! Obviously the People of the Responsible Self respond to Make America Great Again; they just want to go to work, obey the law and save some money for a rainy day.

What about our pals, the People of the Creative Self? Obviously, they want something on which to exercise their creative talents. What better than working on the science and the policy analysis and the activism and the generalship of the climate wars?

So what the 2020 election will lay out for us is where the American people stand on all this. Do they want to get a share of the loot and plunder? Do they want to participate in the growth and the jobs, jobs, jobs?  Or do they look forward to looking down from the commanding heights of climate activism and generalship?

Do you know what? I have absolutely no idea how it will turn out. But it is pretty obvious how the two political parties are lining up for the tournament to come.

The Internal Contradictions of Our Rulers Political Faith

When CNN's Don Lemon interviewed Gladys Knight, who sang the National Anthem at Super Bowl LIII, he ran a tape of Colin Kaepernick's lawyer making the lefty activist case against the National Anthem and then basically asked Knight how she could descend to singing the National Anthem at a public event and didn't she worry that such an act could hurt her career.

Knight returned evil with love, and said there is "a better way to do this than to be angry", and basically said that if you are not going to honor your country what are you going to honor.

Meanwhile, President Trump is going to honor a rainbow coalition of ordinary folks at his State of the Union speech tonight, from the

family members of an elderly couple killed by illegal immigrants and the father of a seaman killed in the U.S.S. Cole attack... [to the first] Americans released from prison as a result of the First Step Act, a woman recovering from opioid addiction, and a border enforcement official.

And also a kid getting bullied at school because of his unfortunate surname.

Hello liberals! Do you not get that if some kid called Joshua Trump is being bullied at school, then You! Did It! as Col. Pickering has it in My Fair Lady.

While the Democrats accuse President Trump of being a racist, anyone with eyes to see can tell that the president is openly making a bid for minority votes. Indeed, that is a part of the whole idea of Make America Great Again. It's not just for the forgotten white working class, but for the African Americans that have failed to thrive in the 50 years since the civil rights era, not to mention low-skilled Americans of every stripe that are forced to compete with legal and illegal immigrants.

Stop-Press: wages for manual workers are presently rising faster than wages for white-collar workers.

Now I don't know if Trump's  populist nationalism counts as "civic nationalism" or some other nationalism. But I do know that if Trump can't create a political culture where all Americans, whatever their "diverse" origins, can celebrate being Americans and members of the American nation, then we are heading for a very dark age.

Because if nationalism fails then we will revert to narrower, meaner forms of identity based on race and religion.

The basic fact is that humans must belong to a tribe. My Tribalism series explains the whole procedure.

In our modern age we have two competing tribalisms. There is the tribalism of "nation," the notion that all people living in some unified political territory are all members of the nation.

Then there is the tribalism of the current western educated ruling class that issues from leftist thinking based on the international class war imagined by Marx. Its notion is "anything but nation." It imagines itself free of the taint of tribalism, especially of nationalism-is-a-dirty-word-because-Hitler.

But, of course, since the educated ruling class believes in its divine right to rule, because the Enlightenment, and believes in politics as a salvific, or at least beneficial, quest, it has to invent its own form of tribalism. Because all politics is based on a tribalism.

If you believe in politics, then you believe in tribalism. If you don't understand that then you'd better stop reading now.

The two forms of tribalism that our rulers have invented are "identity politics" and "supranationalism." There is nothing remarkable about this. If you decide against the tribalism of nation then you are going to have to find another tribalism that works for you.

Identity politics is a sub-national tribalism. Because all politics is based on tribalism it is necessary for rulers to appeal to voters based on some sort of tribalism. In the 19th century big-city machine politics was based on ethnic and religious origin: Irish, Italian, Jewish, Catholic: identity politics. By the New Deal era this was blended with the class politics of socialism/welfare-statism: identity politics again. In the post civil rights era identity politics has meant anti-white-male-ism: identity politics. So our rulers use identity politics to manipulate and divide the electorate. Divide and conquer.

The other tribalism is the actual tribe of our supra-national leaders. Their identity group is the transnational educated elite that studies and works and conferences with itself all over the world. To this tribe the tribalism of nationalism is mean and narrow. You see it already in Ecce Homo in Nietzsche, who sneers at German nationalism as having "deprived Europe itself of its meaning... into a dead-end street." Napoleon is his guy. And Stefan Zweig, writing in 1940, echoes Nietzsche, wondering why all Europeans could not get together like he and his writer friends from Austria, Germany, France, Italy,  Britain have done.

Well, echoing Enoch Powell, "Europe" cannot work because there is no European demos, no European people. The intellectuals and philosophers don't get this because they experience themselves and their brothers-in-arms in the global intelligentsia as a tribe of brothers, and therefore why can't we all get along as they do? Because, dear intellectuals, just because all you writers and intellectuals feel like brothers doesn't mean that the rest of the world feels the same, especially since you chaps are working overtime to divide us all with your supranational political dreams. Indeed, you chaps make it perfectly clear that we "deplorables" are outside the charmed circle of intellectual brotherhood and we'd better get with the program or, as Don Lemon so aptly says, it could be curtains for your career.

My point is that we humans are tribal: our politics is going to be tribal. The question is which tribalism works best? In my view nationalism is the best thing going thus far. It unifies a diverse population into a single national idea, based on a fake unity of language and a historical unity based on the war that founded the nation.

Yeah, that last thing is key. All nations were founded in a war. So there cannot be a Europe until the Europeans fight and win a war. Think about the meaning of that!

Our rulers' divide-and-conquer identity politics is a Great Reaction back to the tribalism of the agricultural era; the supranational notion is a non-starter because there is no supranational demos, except among the elite.

So my prediction is that Trump's Make America Great Again nationalism will win despite the united opposition of the better sort of people. And it is going to drive them mad.

Three Peoples: There is No One True Faith

One of my maxims sneers at the People of the Subordinate Self. The meaning of life for workers and  peasants is to shelter as a "little darling" of a powerful patron, a lord of the land, a union, or a powerful politician.

But, I argue, the day will come when that powerful patron will abandon you, because you are no longer useful to his power project. There is no long-term safety in subordination.

But then, I realized yesterday, the same is true for the other two of my Three Peoples. In other words, it is not enough to have a fixed principle of life, because life, the universe, and everything changes.

If you are a Person of the Responsible Self you live as a responsible person by fixed rules, maybe handed down from God and the Bible, or maybe from good bourgeois cultural memes. But what happens if the world changes, and the good old rules no longer work? A responsible person goes to  work, follows the rules, and obeys the laws. The same work? The same rules? The same laws? Forever? Obviously that cannot work, not forever.

Ah, say the People of the Creative Self, you deplorable responsibles just don't get it. The world is changing, and we, the creatives, the educated, the activists, will show you the way.

Only, of course, what if it is the wrong way? I was reminded of this by a piece by Jonathan Cook taking our "liberal elite" to task and complaining  of "rampant creativity." Or this piece about the decline of classical music since Debussy and critiquing creativity for the sake of creativity. It is not for nothing that Jungians present the creation and destruction as two sides of the same coin. It is telling that critics of, say, Jordan Peterson are flummoxed by the definition of the feminine as the opposition of creation and destruction. They have been carefully taught to think of creation as good, destruction as bad.

But obviously it all makes sense. If you are a creative person then you should be thinking that your brilliant idea may be a brilliant mistake. That is what the environmentalists are going on about with their Precautionary Principle. Don't do anything without thinking about the possible unintended consequences.

That's why I think the Three Peoples should open their eyes and recognize that there are different ways of looking at the world, and different ways of living, and that the other guys may have a point.

Above all, what I may think as perfectly right and true may in fact be the royal road to disaster. Obviously, it is much easier to grasp that what another person thinks as perfectly right and true is in fact the royal road to disaster. One thing we humans really excel at is picking apart the ideas, the beliefs, and the actions of other people.

So what is the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?

It's a good question. And isn't it comforting that everyone is working on it, and most of us are pretty confident that our answer is the right one?

Let's Apply Three Peoples to This Week's Issues

Yesterday I triumphantly showed why my reductive Three Peoples theory is a triumph of humanity, because it understands that all kinds of different people need to be accommodated in this world so that "we can all get along."

By contrast, I showed that the Left's Three Peoples theory is a recipe for conflict, because it reduces Good vs. Evil to a caricature of noble activists vs. evil deplorables -- with the noble activists wanting to help the helpless victims of the world, and the evil deplorables wanting to oppress and marginalize said helpless victims.

Why should this be?

It all makes sense if we understand the Left as a secular religion that wants to save the world by bending the arc of history towards justice. This means that our lefty friends have not got Beyond Good and Evil as Nietzsche proposed. The clue is clueless Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) calling border walls "immoral."

Now, in Beyond Good and Evil our pal Fritzi made a big deal about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves. We had to get beyond the self-destructive culture of blaming ourselves for all the problems of the world if we were going to become amazing Zarathustras thinking deep thoughts at the top of the mountain.

Actually, I think that Nietzsche didn't quite get "the priests" right. What they were saying, from the Axial Age on, is that we all had to get right with God if wanted to transcend the sins of the world. And then we would be saved. But those that didn't listen to "the priests" and the Word of God that the priests preached would go to Hell.

Now, tell me the difference between "the priests" of old and "the priests" of today preaching salvation by social justice -- and if you don't believe in the Word of the Left then you will lose your job, won't get your book published, and certainly will not be allowed to teach at the nation's schools and universities?

The joke is that the enlightened have been teaching us for two hundred years that we must never go back to the bad old days of the wars of religion when people were burned at the stake for the crime of heresy.

Hey, it's only been a hundred years in which the world has seen political regimes that make the autos-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition look like a walk in the park. One hundred million dead at the hands of the left's murderous regimes, and that says nothing about the lives merely brutalized and ruined by the all those lefty thug regimes from Lenin to Maduro.

Anyway, a while back a bunch of white supremacists said: I know! Let's reduce the power of government and religion to get together and teach the government rebels and the religious heretics a lesson. Let's forbid a state religion, and any condominium between government and religion!

I know: they should make a movie: Crazy Rich Founders.

Egad! What a crazy idea! Why, in a regime like that who will be teaching the racist sexist homophobes a lesson? What kind of a world would it be in which free range bigots were running around without the proper correction from the righteous Twitter enforcers?

I am trying to say that our lefty friends have recreated with their own three peoples theory -- featuring creative activists, evil deplorables, and helpless victims -- the old regime of the Axial Age and its various priestly religions. There is only One God, and his Word, as interpreted by his priests, is final.

In the political regime set up by our Founders an attempt was made to introduce the notion of tolerance, in which it was understood that people have all kinds of different beliefs, and that people ought to live almost side-by-side with the Other. Questions of life and death would be decided by government; questions of social cooperation would be decided by the gentler give and take of  interpersonal cooperation.

And, of course, my Three Peoples theory recognizes, as a first principle, that each of the Three Peoples is really different, and not likely to agree on a lot of things, some of them  pretty central and important to the question of how do we all get along.

So what about the Covington Kids at the March for Life. Our lefty friends say that it is monstrous that a white supremacist teenager wearing a MAGA hat should smirk at a Native American mostly peaceful protester, because "hate." I would say that anyone in America can smirk at anyone else. Period.

So what about the Democratic presidential candidates coming up with Medicare For All and wealth taxes and higher marginal income taxes and Green New Deals? Do you see that all of these ideas are monolithic one-size-fits-all notions where you will sign onto the official line and there is no opting out? That is the basic point of big government. There will be one size fits all; there will be no exceptions. And you will be forced to pay for it. I  think that we have a word for this kind of thing: injustice.

So what about abortion, in which New York State just legislated that any woman can abort a fetus up to and after natural birth? I think that abortion is a terrible mistake for any woman to make, because what is the point of a woman but to bear and rear children? And for a man I would say that telling a woman to "get rid of it" is utterly despicable, because what is the point of a man if he does not protect and support the mother of his baby?

See, in the old way, the Age of Good and Evil, there can, indeed, be Only One Way. That was so during the Wars of Religion, and it is so in the left-inspired socialist and welfare-state regimes across the world.

In my way, founded on the understanding of my reductive Three Peoples theory, we understand that there cannot be Only One Way, because, for a start,  there are Three kinds of People in the world.

We say that it is one thing to decry racism, but another to insist that everyone toes the liberal line on race, or else.

We say that helping the poor and the aged with e.g., health care, is a good and proper thing, but making health care into a single comprehensive and mandatory program of government force is another thing.

We say that swingeing taxes -- except in wartime -- whether to teach the rich a lesson, or to save the planet from global warming, are an abomination.

We say that abortion at full term is a monstrosity, whereas abortion before viability is merely shameful.

One of the big differences between government and religion is that government operates by force, but religion -- when not a state religion -- operates by naming and shaming.

So when you separate government and religion you can get the government to focus on evils for which overwhelming force is the only option -- such as arresting a 66-year-old Russian colluder with the full force of the FBIs and their SWAT teams.

And we can get religion to focus on things that are merely shameful, such as smirking at people trying  to get you all riled up. And if everyone's religion is a private community without access to the coercive powers of the state then people that are merely shameful still get to live, and however riled up people get about the sinner next door there is no chance that they are going to be able to get the FBIs and their SWAT teams to wake that sinful neighbor up one winter morning.

Unfortunately, every religion that I ever heard of finds it very difficult to avoid the temptation of what liberals used to call "legislating morality" and forcing the other guys to bow to our gods.

What is needed is for everyone to believe in my Three Peoples theory that proposes, as a basic principle, that there are three kinds of people in the world, that they experience the world differently, and they want and need different things to successfully wive and thrive, and that this is perfectly natural and physical.

And that if we all  accepted this we could all live together and live happily ever after.

Of course, there is the problem of people that have not yet accepted the saving truth of my reductive Three Peoples theory. As of right now, I do not have a solution to that problem.

My Three Peoples vs. the Left's Three Peoples

As you may know, I divide people into three parts, as Caesar did with Gaul. It's a very human thing to do: Past, Present, Future; Garden of Eden, present misery, future Heaven; past perfect society, present injustice, future heaven on earth. The Rule of Threes is all over the place.

My Three Peoples are: the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants; the People of the Responsible Self, middle class individuals; and the People of the Creative Self, artists, writers, and activists.

The left has a different Three Peoples. There are: the historically marginalized helpless Victims, that lack agency. There are the Creative Activists, dedicated to bending the arc of history towards justice. And then there are the vile Deplorables, racists, sexists, and homophobes, that are responsible for all the world's wrongs.

Do you see the big difference? In my Three Peoples theory the question of Right and Wrong has not already been determined. In fact, it seems to me, the big point about my Three Peoples is that each People is living life according to their lights. Sure, my People of the Subordinate Self choose to minimize their responsibility, but this is a sensible decision based upon their understanding of the world and the disadvantage of living as a subordinate peasant or a worker. But the subordinate peasant or worker still lives in a responsible, if subordinate, way.

The People of the Responsible Self accept the suzerainty of the market, and do their responsible best to respond to its demands, while living according to the Word of God or other fixed menu of how to live. Obviously, for the responsibles everything hinges on how well you have followed the rule book. Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell, follow from that.

The People of the Creative Self accept the hardness of the creative life; how creative acts are not available by signing up for a course, or for following the rule book, but found in a perilous life on the border between Order and Chaos, ending perhaps in the death of the Sacrificial Hero.

In the Left's Three Peoples, the world is much starker, and simplified.

The Helpless Victims have no agency. They are not to be judged, for they are innocents, crushed under the wheels of oppression and injustice. Their only hope is to be led by activists in mostly peaceful protests to demand their rights.

The Deplorables have agency, and they have used it for ill by oppressing the Helpless Victims with racism, sexism, hate, homophobia, and all the other -phobias since whenever. And their very culture is poisonous: white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

The Creative Activists have agency, and they have used it for good, by rooting out long-buried oppressions and injustices visited on the helpless and the powerless, particularly in the capitalist age, because profits and patriarchy, and by advocating for the helpless and the powerless, and leading them in mostly peaceful protests to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Well? Am I right, or am I right?

I think that I am exposing the absurd moral drama that the left conjures up. It can't be true that the noble activists are always the good guys. Are there really no bad apples? And if there is an occasional bad apple, how could we tell? It is an insult to present the Helpless Victims as incapable of agency, forthat makes them subhuman. And it is a vile injustice to present the whole middle class -- as Marx did -- as evil.

Now, in my admittedly reductive Three Peoples system, the agency is understood to be graded, with the People of the Subordinate Self practicing the least amount of agency, and the People of the Creative Self practicing the most amount of agency.

And one of the most important things to understand is that the more you act in the world whether as a simple bourgeois that follows the rules, goes to work, and obeys the law, or as a creative artist or start-up businessman or as a political activist, the first thing you should grapple with is that, when you make a mistake, people will be hurt. That is the argument of the environmentalists' Precautionary Principle. In other words, the more talent you have, the more creative chops, the more ambition, the more lofty your goals, the more you should think about who gets hurt if, as the Brits say, you get your sums wrong.

Ain't it cute? When it suits the left to stop the capitalists and their projects dead in their tracks, the Precautionary Principle is front and center. But when we are talking about, e.g., a government takeover of health care, then nothing but crickets.

The reason for this little problem is quite simple. The left does not have the basic decency to look at itself in the mirror and ask: am I really helping the helpless, or am I merely flattering my conceit as history's gift to the helpless?

And that is worse than a mistake, worse than a crime. It is a blunder.

So, Kamala Harris Won't Axe Private Health Insurance. She Says

In her triumphant presidential campaign kickoff, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) promised Medicare For All. And when asked by an interviewer a couple days later, she said that it would be the end of private health insurance.

“Let’s eliminate all of that,” Harris said when asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if, under her proposed “Medicare For All” proposal, Americans with private insurance plans could retain them.

Now she has backed off. Of course she has.

Let me rehearse the reason why.

Way back when, neoconservative god Irving Kristol said that the only way to help the poor with social programs was to deal in the middle class.

If you wanted to help the workers in their old age with government pensions you would have to create a comprehensive and mandatory program that would also give benefits to the middle class. Thus the popular Social Security.

If you wanted to help the elderly poor with medical care you would have to enroll all the elderly, including the billionaires. Thus Medicare.

So when HillaryCare emerged in 1993-94 I thought to myself that it can't work because the average American worker already has health insurance at work.

I still remember where I was, in the summer of 1994, when a bewildered NPR woman reporter told us Seattle liberals that the American people were against HillaryCare. Of course they were: Because of the Kristol Rule. The average American already had health insurance, so HillaryCare would do nothing for her.

The Democrats had learned their lesson when pushing Obamacare. President Obama lied, and lied again when he insisted that, "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Oh and keep your "health plan." He had to lie, otherwise Obamacare would never have passed.

But, of course, after Obamacare was passed the voters wised up and elected a Republican House of Representatives on the spot, and a Republican Senate four years later.

Because, Senator, the voters were damned if they were going to give up their private health insurance to help the 30 million or so marooned between Medicaid and workplace health insurance.

So now comes Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) with a brilliant and wizard wheeze for BernieCare, or KamalaCare or whatever, and her first step out of the gate she says "let's eliminate all that" private health insurance.

Which, I think, tells us that Willie Brown's best girl is not yet ready for prime time. Because, Senator, you can only pass new government programs if you deal in the middle class. Or brazenly lie about it.

The problem for our Democratic friends is that there is almost nothing left in the loot-and-plunder department in which the middle class has not already been dealt in. Yeah, you can propose Medicare For All, but the middle class already has health insurance. You can increase taxes on the wealthy but guess what: you ain't gonna collect much new revenue because all the tippy-top rich are going to get their money out and that means that their money ain't gonna be creating much in the way of middle-class and working-class jobs. You can pass your glorious program to save the world from climate change, but the ordinary yellow-vest middle class isn't going to stand for paying swingeing energy taxes to get there.

Hey, it's not just Democrats that have a problem here. I'd like to reform Social Security and make it into a real savings program: but today's workers and grandpas basically say "over my dead body." I'd like to reform Medicare so that it provides a basic decent health program for the elderly poor, and get everyone else to pay for their own end-of-life health care. But grandma says "they'd better not touch My Medicare." I'd like to reform government education, but the teachers and administrators say: "over my dead body."

So that's why we have a deadlock in US politics today. The Democrats are becalmed because the middle class doesn't want to pay for somebody else's benefits. The Republicans are becalmed because the middle-class doesn't want to give up a dime of the benefits that they "already paid for."

What's the end game here? I have no idea. Maybe, when the crisis arrives and the government runs out of other people's money we will elect a leader that will propose and administer the bitter medicine that will repair the government's finances. Or maybe, as in Venezuela, the government will flush the whole country down the toilet rather than admit that it was wrong.

Hey, maybe the wonders of 5G will unleash such a tidal wave of prosperity that the deficits and the debt will disappear. But I doubt it.

All I know is that when the crash comes, minorities and women will be hardest hit. Just like last time.

And you can take that to the bank, Senator Harris.

The Educated Class Have Had It Wrong Since Before World War II

I am reading Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday which features a pretty big helping of "we intellectuals" were the good guys, back before World War I, who were building trans-national friendships and understanding and creating the idea of a united Europe, so how come the haters and the narrow-minded gave us World War I and the haters and the fascists gave up World War II?

Well, Stefi, I will tell it to you, straight. But I warn you, you won't like it.

You don't found political entities on the basis of international friendships and hoity-toity rich-kid writers all getting together in a cafés in Paris -- or in meetings up in Magic Mountain land.

You found political entities, Stefi, in the crucible of war. That's the only thing that can create the experience of unity that persuades people to give up their old allegiances for a new one.

Sometimes the sense of unity is created by the agony of defeat. Take France, within which was the semi-independent Duchy of Burgundy taking up about half the land area of modern France. La Wik.

[W]hen Charles the Bold died in battle without sons, Louis XI of France declared the duchy extinct and absorbed the territory into the French crown. The daughter of Charles the Bold, Mary of Burgundy... refus[ed] to accept the loss of the duchy. The War of the Burgundian Succession took place from 1477 to 1482. Eventually, King Louis XI of France and Archduke Maximilian I signed the Treaty of Arras (1482). Maximilian recognised the annexation of the two Burgundies and several other territories.

So, the King of France said: That's it, Burgundy is part of France, and after a couple of wars, the Burgundian rulers capitulated.

When did Britain arise as a nation? Probably as a result of the Civil War of the 17th century, and certainly by the end of  the Second Hundred Years War against France from 1688 to 1815.

The US? Obviously the sense of US nationhood was forged in the Revolutionary War, and then, for those that didn't get the message, in the Civil War. Did you know, by the way, that politicians that had served in those wars were always referred to by their Revolutionary/Civil War rank? As in Colo. Hamilton and Major McKinley. Those guys were brothers-in-arms forever after.

Now, Germany is the example that proves the rule and that, after many years of confusion, made the whole matter clear to me.

See, Germany was a collection of more-or-less independent states, ruled over by a collection of princes  and bishops, and nominally joined together in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. But the empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. And you can imagine what the various princes would say about being subsumed into a Prussian-dominated German nation.

So what was Bismarck to do if he was going to unite Germans into a single nation that could take on  the French nation that had been trampling Germans underfoot for the last two centuries, and very likely more?

Answer: fight and win three convenient little wars against Germany's neighbors, starting with the easy one, against little Denmark in 1862, continuing with the medium one against a decliningAustria in 1866, and finishing up with the big one against France in 1870. With each war Bismarck got more and more German princes to send their hometown troops to contribute to the effort. You can see why this worked: with each victory, the prince that kept his troops out looked like a pansy. And so the German Reich was announced in 1871 in Versailles.

Now, the reason that there is no European nation is that Europe has never fought a war as Europeans against some eevil anti-European foe. It really doesn't matter that elite Europeans all have friends across Europe, or that elite Europeans can get together in Brussels and cook up various bureaucratic dodges to force the nations of Europe into a European nation. Without the unifying experience of a war it will never happen.

Obviously, the only candidate for eevil anti-European foe is Russia. But somehow, I don't think that a nice quickie war against Russia would be a very good idea.

And then, assuming that the Europeans did unite against some dastardly foe, what about the aftermath? Who is going to be the Big Cheese? The French or the Germans? If you have the brains to solve that problem, you probably should not be in politics but working on the next Physics revolution that will make quantum mechanics look like a walk in the park.

Look, I think that Stefan Zweig is a great writer, and he can evoke the Zeitgeist of intellectual Europe magnificently. But in important ways, Zweig and Co. are idiots, the kind of idiots that have got Europe to its present state of dysfunction, where in various ways the people are rising up against the clueless cultural and political leaders that have led a continent whose women aren't much into having children, and whose men aren't much into shouldering manly responsibilities, and that think that the solution is to import millions of Muslims.

Our ruling class has got three things wrong during its dynastic domination of the past century. First, it has betrayed the migrants to the cities by encouraging them in their tribalism and by failing to teach them the ways of the responsible bourgeoisie. Second, it has failed to be tolerant of the great middle middle class, imposing its own religion and culture in a kind of soft Reign of Terror. Third, it fails to understand that the only way to get a united Europe is by a war.  And, by the way, the only way to get global governance is through an interplanetary war. Think of that!

Other than that, our educated ruling class is tops. In other words, no better than any other stupid ruling class down the ages.

I admit I am prejudiced, but I think that the only ruling class that had more than half a brain was the US Revolutionary generation. If you ask me, the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, and Hamiltons were so miraculous that they constitute a proof of God's existence.