We Must Understand that the Left is a Group of Religious Cults

Back in the day the Founders made it clear that their constitutional framework was designed to deal with "faction," the natural and tribal instinct for humans to divide into factions and squabble with each other. Says Jay Cost:

As Madison argued, the purpose of a “well constructed Union” is to “break and control the violence of faction.” Our political system is currently less capable of this than Madison wanted.

Of course this implies that chaps like Madison get to make the rules and have the moral stature to preside over the factions and setting the rules so that their ability to cause damage is reduced to a dull roar.

Madison & Co. were living in the aftermath of the "religious wars" between Protestantism and Catholicism that were suspended by the spirit of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We could say, I suppose, that the ruling class of the time had developed some sort of a gentleman's agreement that they would not rile up their factions with the nuclear fuel of religious fanaticism, and instead would act together to soften the hard edges of factional conflict.

But then the whole thing blew up in the fanaticism of the French Revolution. This was a new departure, because the New Fanaticism was not strictly religious, a battle between religious sects, but the fanaticism of a secular political faction, the Jacobins, that was battling against:_ what exactly? The ancien régime? the Girondist moderates? You tell me. And, at the height of the Reign of Terror, the Jacobins had turned the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris into a Temple of Reason. So, was the Jacobin terror the eruption of a religious cult devoted to the worship of Reason?

And then, with Marx and Engels a new secular religion was born, Socialism. What has to be understood is that socialism was not then and is not now merely a "faction." It is a religion, whose devotees are committed to bringing heaven on earth with the creation of the society of true equality.

So when former Vice President Joe Biden called Vice President Mike Pence "a good guy," Jay Cost gets to mourn that he was quickly corrected by an LGBT activist, actress Cynthia Nixon, of the TV show Sex and the City.

Of course he was, because the left's various groups are not "factions" in the sense understood by Madison and the founders but secular religious cults. Each of them professes a "true religion" in the sense that Voltaire took apart in his critique of Pascal's Pensées in his Letters on England. Obviously, if the gay movement is a "true religion" then there can be no compromise with a faithful Christian like Mike Pence, the guy famous for never dining with a woman alone.

Or rather, the fact that gay activists treat practical politician Mike Pence as Satan himself tells us that gays are not a political faction but a religious cult.

This point is crucial. If the post-WWII conservative movement has failed, and I think it has, the reason is that it treated the left as an opposing political faction and not a religious movement pursuing a saving truth.

It doesn't end there. In "Pigs on Two Legs Turn on Each Other" Victor Davis Hanson comments on lesbian tennis great Martina Navratilova getting reamed for objecting to transgenders competing in women's sports.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

That is the way with religious cults. When each is possessed of the saving truth, it stands to reason that the cult next door is flat-out wrong, and should be damned to hell when its error-riddled orthodoxy conflicts with my saving truth.

The reason that the Progressives of a century ago advanced their notion of a "living Constitution" was that the Founders' notion of "faction" as the playground fights of schoolchildren to be judiciously put down by the adults in the room was no longer accepted by the new ruling class.

The ruling class of the Progressive era, like our ruling class today, believed in the ability of politics to bring on a just society, not just to legislate against injustice when and if it reared its ugly head. Politics was not just a necessary evil, but a vehicle for a better society. As William James proposed in his landmark essay announcing the end of war in 1906, we would now need to base our politics on "The Moral Equivalent of War."

Well, Bill old chap, the moral equivalent of war is the mashup of religion and politics. That's what the Thirty Years War was all about, and that is what the Jacobins were all about, and that is what the Bolshevik Revolution was all about. One hundred million dead, old chap.

The fundamental thing that we normals must understand is that the Left is not a political faction. It is a congeries of secular religious sects, for each of whom their secular religious faith is a matter of life and death.

Wouldn't it be fun if the reprobate Donald Trump is the guy to puncture the left's hot-air balloon of secular religious bigotry and hate.

Everyone Wants to Legislate Morality

Back in the day, liberals opposed middle-class morality by opposing the notion of legislators "legislating morality." Today they are busily legislating their own morality, as in born-alive abortion bills in the liberal states, and non-gendered bathrooms, and diversity and inclusion.

The truth is that all government and all legislation amounts to "legislating morality," even laws against murder. The whole point of morality, and of laws, and of human society, is to replace the rule of power with the rule of law. And law inevitably borrows from somebody's notion of good and evil.

Back in the day, the Roman paterfamilias, the patriarch of the Roman family, had the right to rule all members of his family and his slaves, up to and including the death penalty. And in the feudal era the feudal lord dispensed justice to his serfs. A real feudal potentate could dispense all three of the high, middle, and low justice. But as time went by the state interposed itself between the family and the individual family members, and between feudal lord and the individual, and took away the powers of the patriarch. You will notice that the state today does not permit family members to imprison another member they consider to have committed a crime against the family. Only the state can do that.

The question is not whether we legislate morality but who gets to do it. The American idea of no establishment of religion is a modest attempt to avoid having one agent, the state church, with the sole power defining the morality to be used in legislation. But that is not the worst case. The worst case is what we call totalitarianism, where all power, religious and political, is concentrated in the government.

Many people in our society think they have risen above a narrow view of legislating morality by opposing gender roles and strict rules about sexual activity and imagine that they are therefore enlightened and liberated.

But, in fact, the removal of rules creates a danger that power will rule. Did the sexual revolution liberate the sexes, or does it pressure young women to agree to sex and submit to sexual harassment in the workplace? I would argue that the current #MeToo movement is a movement of women that want society to reimpose rules about sex and punish men that violate the rules. Do abortion laws liberate women from unwanted children, or do they help men pressure women into submitting to sex in the first place and "getting rid of it" later?

Does the abolition of gender roles liberate women to work in the workplace, or does it force women out of the home into the workplace who would prefer to live as wives and mothers? I would argue from my reductive Three Peoples theory that while People of the Creative Self want a world in which individuals can chart their own life courses the People of the Responsible Self want clear rules about what to do and what not to do. So who gets to set the rules? And can rules be set so that both people can choose which philosophy to follow?

There is a way, that if you are a creative person you join the church of creativity, a community of people that believe that people should choose their roles and not be forced into rigid gender and life roles. If you are a rules person then you join a modestly strict Christian church where the members all believe in following Biblical morality. But you will notice that there is always a temptation for liberals to enforce their world view on the deplorables, and a similar temptation for Christians to anathematize non-Christian world views. This would require the state to relax its rules and allow intermediary institutions to enforce rules upon their members.

Liberals luridly imagine a dystopia where everyone is forced into fundamentalist Christian morality in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Deplorables imagine a dystopia where everyone lives in a liberal arts college and is named and shamed for any discouraging word about race, gender, and LGBT.

Everyone lives in fear of being bullied around by someone else legislating morality and lives in anticipation of people like them living free as air when their own true morality is universally accepted and applied.  But the fact is that the whole point of human society is to soften the hardness of power into the softness of rules that even the powerful have to observe.

There is a name for this taming of the powerful: the legislation of morality.

Free Spirit vs. Fettered Spirit

Having read the later Nietzsche -- Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morality, etc. -- I have gone back to the start of his thinking, specifically Human, All Too Human: A book for free spirits.

I realize, as I read Human, All Too Human, that this is where Nietzsche first develops the ideas that are tossed around like fireworks in his later work. And by the way, the guy that was publishing his later work was encouraging him to amp up the controversial in order to improve book sales. Titles like Thus Spake Zarathustra sold about 125 copies out of a print run of 1,000.

My interest in Nietzsche derives partly from my project to read and understand the German Miracle, from Kant to quantum mechanics, and partly a project to mine him for ideas with which to broaden and deepen my own Three Peoples notion: that We Humans can be divided, admittedly in a reductive manner, into People of the Creative Self, artists and writers; People of the Responsible Self, the solid middle class; and People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants and victims.

For it is obvious to me that Nietzsche's basic aim is to prophesy the transition from the responsible life of good and evil to the creative live of imagining something new.

So, about a quarter of the way through Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche prophesies the "free spirit:"

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Pretty obviously, this aligns with my idea of the People of the Creative Self. Then Nietzsche anathematizes the "fettered spirit" through its accusations against the free spirit: that the free spirit wants "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." Or maybe the free spirit arrived at his correct ideas by wrong paths.

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

You can see that in the time that Nietzsche was writing, the free spirit was clearly the creative artist or thinker, and the fettered spirit was clearly the ordinary bourgeois trapped in the coils of good and evil; that is what Nietzsche assumes when he rails against "the priests" that taught us to hate ourselves and fetter ourselves in the prison of good and evil.

But, for the 21st century, I propose a different analysis. In my view the People of the Responsible Self are not fettering themselves with the notions of good and evil, they are instead putting on the armor of light that protects them on the journey from subordination to responsibility. That is why enthusiastic Christianity is the religion of emerging Africa and the populist movement in Brazil. And why it was the religion of the hero and heroine of George Eliot's Adam Bede: Adam, the worthy carpenter exploring his way to responsibility; and Dinah Morris, the Methodist lay preacher; both children of the farm making the journey from agricultural idiocy to middle-class responsibility.

No, today the fettered spirits are the believers in progressive or lefty orthodoxy, that imagine they are creative and contrarian, but in fact are merely the rank-and-file of the secular religion that superseded the God-based religion of Christianity. Your progressive thinks and believes exactly "what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would [be] expected of him." Or Twitter will know the reason why.

The free spirit has been further developed by the Jungians to be the sacrificial hero who, in the Hero's Journey into the underworld of the unconscious, learns how to benefit mankind by a perilous adventure on the border between Order and Chaos.

So I propose to define the free spirit as the creative person truly trying to think new thoughts and ideas, and the fettered spirit as a fake creative that really is completely fettered by the conventional wisdom of the age.

So I would divide the People of the Creative Self into two parts; the free spirits or true creatives living on the border of Order and Chaos; and the fettered spirits, or fake creatives living in a fantasy world.

But then I would, wouldn't I.

Leftism is a School of Hate

Mulling over the fake hate crime craze, I finally realized what it is all about. Hate.

Well, of course. But then in the middle of the night I realized what it is all about, why lefties are convinced that the world hates them.

It is because lefties teach their supporters to hate. Leftism is a school of hate. Let us begin at the beginning.

With Marx, the left began by teaching the working class to hate the middle class. That's because the middle class, the bourgeoisie, according to Marx, were the chaps responsible for exploiting the workers, just as the feudal lords had exploited the peasants. Because labor theory of value.

In fact in the textile revolution, followed by the steam revolution, the middle class gave the workers jobs; thus the landless laborers that were being thrown off the land because of mechanical threshing machines got to live. And when lefty activists demanded that the middle class give the workers the vote, son-of-the-middle-class Benjamin Disraeli was the prime minister that expanded the franchise. By the turn of the 20th century, in Britain, the working class was enjoying a modest, but robust prosperity. So how about that middle-class! Maybe they were willing to accommodate the just demands of the working class. So middle-class classists were willing to do this?

Then came feminism, and the left taught women to hate men. And marriage and babies. That's because men represented a patriarchy that had exploited and oppressed women since the dawn of time. So I suppose that when noble widows got to enjoy up to three dowers (income during widowhood) during the Middle Ages, and no attempt was  made by the patriarchs in the legal profession to deprive these women of their income that was often a substantial drain on the wealth and the political power of noble estates, somehow this was exploitation of women. On the fiction front there is the curious case of Helena, the heroine of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well first produced around 1600. This young woman seems to have agency, and bravely acts to win the hand of the noble -- but contemptible -- Bertram, the man who spurns her as the daughter of a middle-class apothecary far beneath him in status. How come the patriarchy put up with this?

But men were perfectly willing to give women the vote, and in due course no-fault divorce, and abortion on demand. How come they allowed this, if they were sexists and fierce patriarchs determined to keep women down? So male sexists were willing to do this?

Then came civil rights, and the left taught blacks to hate whites. So the blacks were slaves. So was almost everyone, slave or serf, until the day before yesterday. So Jim Crow denied blacks civil rights in the South. So did Hitler and Stalin and Mao deny civil rights to everyone in their power. So does Maduro in Venezuela today. Why, President Maduro even detained lefty journalist Jorge Ramos and then deported him for asking him an impertinent question.

But whites in America were willing to be persuaded in the civil rights era that blacks should receive full civil rights in specific legislation that defined those rights. So white racists were willing to do this? And ever since they have put up with being stigmatized as racists without rioting in the streets?

Then came gay liberation, and the left taught gays to hate straights. Over the past generation, the supposed implacable homophobes have acquiesced to decriminalization of gay sex, permitting gays to openly live as gays, and seen the legalization of civil partnerships and gay marriage. And the homophobic straights put up with this?

Now we have the left teaching Muslims to hate the West, illegal aliens to hate borders, and millennials to hate carbon dioxide and the evil fossil-fuel industry that spews it into the air. Of course they are. Because leftism is the school of hate.

But why? I will tell you. It falls naturally out of my maxims, that politics is division and government is force.

If you believe that politics is a necessary evil, then politics and elections are minor events that stir the voters up for a season, and after the election the passions subside. Because no big deal.

But if you believe, with the left, that progressive politics is a saving truth, then the Other must be Evil for opposing you. You must mobilize your supporters as if for war: hey, it's a matter of life and death! How do you mobilize your supporters for war? You teach them to hate the enemy. That is what Orwell's Three Minute Hate was all about in 1984. That is what war propaganda is all about.

But why now?  Why all the hate now, hating white supremacists, toxic masculinity, gay bashers, Islamophobes and xenophobes? And why the fake hate crimes?

It is because to continue the revolution you must re-up the enthusiasm. And obviously, fifty years after the civil rights era, that gets to be harder to do. But if you are a good little girl learning all about toxic masculinity in Gender Studies, you need to find actual evidence of toxic masculinity, and, by hook or by crook, you do. If you are a good little boy learning all about racism in Race Studies class, you need  to find actual racists out there, and prompted by your teachers, you see red MAGA hats behind every tree.

The fact is that the left has been wrong all along. The middle class are not implacable exploiters, determined to keep the working class down. Nor are men determined to keep women down, or white  determined to keep blacks down, or gays in the closet. It is not that we are angels, but just that the middle class is not that interested in power, and therefore not that invested in hate.

So it is probably time to wind down all the lefty movements -- except the anti-borders movement and pro-Islam movement -- because workers got their rights, women got their abortions, blacks got their civil rights, and gays got their gay marriage.

Well, that's not how politics works, and especially lefty politics. The left taught the workers to hate the middle class. You think they are going to call off the hate? The left taught women to hate men. You think those man-haters are going to wash away their rage? The left taught blacks to hate whites. You think they are going to give away the black vote to Trump without a fight?

From the day that Marx declared war on the bourgeoisie, the left has been a school of hate. You think they are ever going to change?

Tell me why.

Hey Xi! Maybe Your President-for-life Notion is Rubbish

Golly. Who could have seen this coming? The New York Times (H/T Powerline) says that China's President Xi has declared an emergency. A year ago, wrote the Times,

Mr. Xi triumphed at China’s national legislature, abolishing a term limit on his presidency, opening the way for another decade or longer as both president and party leader, and shaking up the government to become a more compliant tool of party power.

But now,

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly summoned hundreds of officials to Beijing recently, forcing some to reschedule long-planned local assemblies. The meeting seemed orchestrated to convey anxious urgency. The Communist Party, Mr. Xi told the officials, faces major risks on all fronts and must batten down the hatches.

Funny, isn't it, that a politician's solution for all problems is more politics.

“The central leadership’s assessment of risks to China has officially expanded from the economy to every sphere,” [Beijing analyst] Mr. Wu said. “This year will put policing and security to the forefront.”

Ain't it amazing, that the tough Chinese  government needs to get tougher? Who could have seen that coming?

It's an endless problem. Politicians put themselves in charge of the economy, and screw the economy up. And then they have to give the economy political shock therapy to deal with the problems they have created, and bring "policing and security to the forefront."

Hello President Xi. You make yourself President-for-life, head of a monopoly single-party state, where all direction comes from the top. And then you start a Belt and Road colonialist policy, lending money to developing countries for port expansions, etc. And then you have an economic policy that frankly steals foreign technology etc. And then foreign countries start to penalize you for your predatory policy. Well, hey, Mr. President: Things are likely to get into a bit of a mess. And all the time you have maintained your vice-grip on political power, so you really don't have a clue about the manifold injustices that your hegemonic and dominatory rule has created.

What could go wrong?

The situation in the West is illustrative. Here we have had a kind of soft dictatorship where the so-called Progressive movement has run the administrative state for about 100 years. All the best minds, etc. Except that the natives are restless. Because the wheels are starting to fall off all the brilliant centralized administrative solutions that the best minds conjured up for us.

The reason is obvious. The best minds conjured up government programs -- to deliver pensions, health care, and education -- that they could comprehend and codify into legislation, and sell to the voters, and administer and control.

Notice what is missing. Things that the best minds could not comprehend, or did not approve. Things that are too complicated and changeable to be codified into legislation. Things that the voters would like but don't want to pay for. Things that would benefit people but which were not thought of in the original legislation. Things that are not of interest to the best minds. Things that reduce the power and influence of the best minds. Things that are going to cost existing program beneficiaries because of mistakes made in the original legislation and in subsequent administrative regulation. Failure to project program costs and benefits. Failure to modify the program to reflect unanticipated costs and benefits.

The point is that all the Things that I have suggested in the paragraph above are very difficult to do right in politics and government. The reason is simple. It is very difficult to do anything complicated or change or adjust anything in politics and government. Indeed, one of the purposes of government is to set up important things and make it very difficult to change them. Because some things -- such as the presumption of innocence in criminal law-- should be very difficult to change.

But here is the thing. The notable thing about the Great Enrichment, an increase in per capita income of 3,000 percent in the last 200 years, is that it features staggering waves of economic change, completely unanticipated change that took even the best minds -- especially the best minds -- by surprise, when old ways of doing things were radically changed. If government had been in charge of all this economic change it probably would never have happened,  not without remarkable political convulsion.

Please, stop and think for a moment. Imagine politicians and activists being in charge of the textile revolution: whatabout the handloom weavers? The railway revolution: whatabout the hostlers at the coaching inns? The illuminating oil revolution; whatabout the sperm-whale hunters and the candle makers? The electric revolution: whatabout the lamplighters? And so on. The point is that any politician worth his salt, whether democratic or totalitarian, would think it his job to save the jobs of the whatabouts. And he would have helped to organize the whatabouts into whatabout coalitions to provide them with lots of lovely subsidies and retraining and government handouts.  And where would the Great Enrichment be then poor thing? I will tell you. Venezuela.

And if the politician -- say President Xi -- was a far-sighted leader of his country and had committed it to a menu of top-down prestige projects, whatabout if he turned out to be wrong?

The point is that almost every glorious plan for anything turns out to be riddled with mistakes and unanticipated problems. These problems need to be solved if the plan is to succeed and to benefit anyone. But politics and government are the system of one more Big Push. This is because they are, in the first instance, a human project for defending the border. And the obvious strategy for defending the border is that, if you seem to be failing, you pour in more young males. The only problem is that almost everything else in the world is not suitable for the one more Big Push treatment. It needs the people on the sharp end with the authority and the responsibility to fix things on the fly.

So when President Xi calls for a Big Push, putting "policing and security to the forefront," he is probably wrong. Not that that will hurt him. He is President-for-life. But his one more Big Push will probably hurt the long-suffering Chinese people.

Politics is about power, and the one thing that political people do not understand is that almost everything in this world is not best organized and solved by politics.

Yes, Why Fake Hate Crimes?

Why so many fake hate crimes? I mean, really! Why go out and manufacture an incident of evil white crackers hating on a helpless person of color?

Jonah Goldberg makes the obvious point that real victims of hate, like Jews in Nazi Germany, aren't going to be faking hate crimes. Nor blacks in the Jim Crow South. Because that would be "incredibly stupid."

Actually, I think Jonah misses the point. If you are a Jew complaining about some local yokel brownshirt, what do you think is going to happen to you? You think the local Gauleiter is going to invite you in for a friendly Kaffee? Or if you are a black complaining about the local KKK Kleagle? Are you Krazy?

When there is real oppression, and real targeting of a marginalized group, you as an ordinary person are going to keep a low profile. The last thing you want to do is to draw attention to yourself. You hope that, by being invisible, the regime thugs will not notice you and you will get to live another day. Moreover, you will instinctively know that the most likely outcome of your fake hate crime will be to make things worse for your regime-targeted group. The regime may wish to make an example of you. Or, as Stalin's thugs used to tell people, you will disappear and no one will even know your name. That is how the world works when you are a genuine victim of regime-sponsored hate.

That is why the activist culture and its "peaceful protest" is also fake. In the modern West well-born activists are pampered and lionized by the regime and the regime media. Of course they are, because they are advancing the ruling-class's agenda. White nationalists, Brexiteers, and German AfD activists need not apply. They know they will be made to appear in the worst light.

That is the first problem with fake hate. The lefty fakers knows -- even if unconsciously -- that the local regime thugs are not going to descend on them when they go public with a fake incident. And they know, like Jussie Smollett, that the local police are going to put on their kid gloves and treat the fakery as genuine, because if they make a wrong step every lefty activist in town is going to jump all over them. Everybody knows that the worst thing in America is to brush off an accusation of hate by a Person of Color. Indeed, the lefty faker knows that, with a little bit of luck he may become a media darling and get sympathetically interviewed on TV. Every faker knows that, at least initially, he/she will get sympathetic treatment from government officials and media.

The second problem with fake hate is that discrimination against all the little darlings of the left -- racial, gender, and all the rest -- is actually illegal, and is vigorously enforced by government law enforcement. People are social animals; they know which actions are approved of by society and which actions are disapproved. Only really exceptional -- and really crazy -- people go up against the status quo and against regime power.

The third problem with fake hate is that there is no organized political faction that wants to undo the civil-rights revolution. This means that the overwhelming majority of people just go about their business and interact with other people according to established norms. They are just not going to be making trouble for themselves. Put it this way. There is no equivalent on the right of AntiFa, which is a genuine street-thug group and seems to be funded and supported by the usual left-wing establishment funders. If there were a right-wing version of AntiFa it would be roundly condemned by all respectable regime supporters and its funders would be expelled from polite society.

No, the fact that is staring us right in the face is that the civil-rights movement has succeeded beyond all imaginings, and there is literally nothing left for activists or for government to do. But every year brings up another crop of well-born activists that desperately yearn for a moral crusade and battlements of injustice to storm.

Hey, I know lefties. How about you start protesting the injustices of socialism, and all the failed government programs that hang around our necks? How about education reform that empowers parents rather than activists? How about health-care reform that de-cartelizes and de-credentializes the health care industry?

Somehow, all the activists of the world want to increase government power, with them at the controls, rather than decrease government power. What is with these people?

And what is with their willing dupes, that keep coming up with obviously fake hate crimes?

We Must Bring the Past Back to Life

I was down in the Peoples Republic of Fremont, Seattle -- where we Seattle-ites have our statue of Lenin -- and I went by Ophelia's Books, because Lady Marjorie had given me a gift card.

Truth is, I had put off going to Ophelia's for months, because Fremont, but I found that it was not a hopeless lefty tract store, but an excellent little used-books store. I got a book about Trollope's later novels, and also The Death of the Past by J.H. Plumb.

Really, it was another proof of God's existence, because I have been needing to encounter such a book for months, if not years.

The book argues that the old kind of history, that is really an ideological justification of the current ruling class, has gone away because now we have professional historians that are dedicated to telling us how it really was, as opposed to how glorious our rulers are and how they are descended directly from Moses or Achilles.

The book was written in about 1968, from a series of lectures that Plumb, a Cambridge don, had given in NewYork. It was, I propose, about the last moment that anyone could talk about the end of history as regime apologetics.

Plumb was the son of a factory worker in Leicester, England, but went to a "grammar school," a kind of school in Britain that was famous for plucking talent out of the masses and giving it an education and that was murdered by lefties in the Sixties. But Plumb was a faithful lefty all his life. In his book he celebrates how the Enlightenment substituted facts and research for the naked special pleading of history down the ages. But, he admitted, something was lost when the narrative of where we came from gets abandoned for facts, facts, facts.

To say that the past has died, I think, misses the point. The past was deliberately murdered,  and murdered by chaps like Plumb, who sneered at Macaulay for spicing up the Enlightenment faith in  "progress" with Whig history and jingoism.

In doing so he provided the bulk of the British nation with a usable past, by which they could ease their consciences in the present and look with optimism towards the future.

But the professional historian will have none of that:

Crude ideological interpretations, Marxist or nationalist, conservative or liberal, religious or agnostic, providential or progressive, cyclical or linear, are a violation of his discipline and an offence to his knowledge.

Many conservatives take a parallel view, when we talk about our "facts and logic" as opposed to liberal "emotion." We imagine that we are the reality guys, and the left is the fantasy department.

How is that strategy working out? The fact is that, since 1968, the left has seized control of the past and murdered the old narratives of Christianity and of nation. And that is why I wrote in 2016 that my "gentlemanly conservatism" was dead.

Now the left dominates the landscape with its narrative of good and evil: the good and noble activist that is engaged in a life and death struggle with the racist sexist homophobes in order to lead the helpless victims of racism and the patriarchy and hate to the Promised Land.

If professional history has a role today, under the unjust rule of the left, it is to fill in the blanks to prove just how oppressive and unjust the old religious, white, oppressive patriarchy was. Indeed everyone in the academy knows that they had better echo the ruling class narrative about activists and victims, or else.

Notice how the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax fits into this culture. The activism/victim culture is hungry for tales of hate, and young heads full of mush are only too glad to supply them.

It is noticeable to me that Plumb's history of the world ends with Marx and Darwin. There is nothing about Nietzsche, or Freud and Jung, or the quantum mechanical revolution in physics. That makes him ill-equipped to deal with the modern world in which the certainty of Newtonian mechanics is replaced by the uncertainty principle, and the facts, facts, facts, of Gradgrind are replaced by the notion of Jordan B. Peterson that you see facts through the lens of your values. Or the notion that the primary function of the brain is to filter out all the non-essential signals coming in and only notice the important stuff. You hope.

The future belongs to those that own the past, just as George Orwell said:

Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.

So we cannot let the past die;  we cannot let  the left murder our past. We must revive our narrative of the past, and it must be a narrative that takes the narrative of the left head on and demolishes it.

Of course, I realize, most of my writing is precisely about that. My reductive Three Peoples theory is a narrative about the present world as a natural and cooperative combination of creative people, responsible people, and subordinate people that directly takes on the left's narrative of conflict and oppression. My Great Reaction maxim is an attempt to marginalize the left's narrative by stating that socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, and identity politics is neo-tribalism.

In taking up Jung I am embracing a narrative that the experience of the past through archetypes is programmed into our unconscious, and that a narrative about the past is the most natural thing in the world. Indeed, the whole notion of the unconscious is a narrative that says that the past lives in us a lot more than we think.

In taking up Nietzsche I am advancing the narrative that the creative life is a lot more than the crude and narrow option of creating new and just political order, as the left thinks, but an incredible difficult hero's journey of stumbling around in the unconscious on the border between order and chaos hoping for inspiration.

And Plumb's The Death of the Past helps me see the desperate crudity of the left's oppression narrative: the insulting idea that America is a cesspool of racism, and sexism and hate, the America that legislated special status for non-whites, non-males, and non-heteros. Really, what planet are you living on, lefties?

The truth is that our lefty friends are living a lie. We might adapt the old nursery rhyme:

The south wind doth blow
And we shan't have snow
So what will th'activist do then, poor thing? 

This is not the worst of times; it is the best of times. But unless it is the worst of times our lefty friends have nothing to do: no-one to blame, no victims to lead, no injustice to protest.

Except the many injustices that lefties themselves have visited upon the innocent deplorables of this land.