Great Reaction: Activism is Neo-Knight-Errantry

I am so pleased with my notion of the left as a Great Reaction -- socialism is neo-slavery, welfare state is neo-feudalism -- that I keep wanting to add more fuel to the fire.

So, yesterday I thought: what about "activism?" How does that fit into the scheme of things? What kind of neo- is it? Of course, I didn't have an answer, not right away.

But then the answer came to me -- in another proof that the Freud-Jung notion of the unconscious has real legs.

Here it is: Activism is neo-knight-errantry. As in Don Quixote and tilting at windmills.

And the more I think about it, the more I know I am right. Activism is Don Quixote on stilts -- I mean Rocinante.

The joke about Don Quixote is that its hero had spent so much time reading "chivalric romances" that he imagined himself to be reviving that ancient way of life, wandering the world righting wrongs and saving damsels in distress. So, says La Wik,

Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story.

Of course, the chivalric romances -- like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Parzival -- were, even in their time, highly romantic notions of the life of the aristocracy. The whole point, I imagine, was to make the feudal lords feel good about the purpose of their life on Earth. Heck, they were not mere armed looters and plunderers, but noble do-gooders, riding around the country righting wrongs with sword and spear in the name of the lady-love whose scarf they displayed on their helmets.

So there is a double joke with Don Quixote: he's all revved up about a fiction which was itself a report on a fictional Golden Age of a ruling class righting wrongs instead of merely running their feudal fiefs and keeping the serfs in their place.

See how this applies to our activist friends? The conceit among our activists is that they are revolutionaries, in the mold of those famous revolutionaries of 1789 and 1848, sallying forth into the world to lead "the workers" or "the marginalized" to justice. Because the injustice!

But the reality is that every lefty revolution has lead straight to injustice, do not pass Go, and to death, and killing, and starvation. That is what you young heads full of mush want to model your lives upon?

And there is another thing, that I symbolize with my maxim: the middle class is not that interested in power.

If you form a movement, or even a minor political group, and you petition our modern middle-class governments for a redress of grievances, chances are good that the political system will try to "do something" for you. That is how we got the whole bloody welfare state costing 35 percent of GDP in taxes. People want free stuff, and the political system responds to them.

Notice that the left does not believe in the redress of grievances, not when it's the bourgeoisie or toxic white masculinities.

But think about the current situation from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. All this free stuff is poison to us. Apart from the fact that it is all based on force, because government is force, there is the soul-destroying stupidity and inefficiency and inability to adapt that applies to all government programs. Yet we put up with it. And we believe in live and let live, not in punishing Christian bakers.

So why do we need activists to lead the downtrodden and fight for justice? The answer is: we don't. Because middle-class government is a government of laws, not of plunder, or it would be if the middle class had its way. If someone has a genuine grievance, then middle-class people will give him or her a hearing. That is the record of the last century, subsequent to the moment when the middle class got the vote and replaced the old monarchical and feudal governments.

The point of the old notion of chivalry, I imagine, was the need for young aristocratic blue-bloods to think up something glorious, something a little more glorious than administering their boring aristocratic agricultural fiefs. That is why, I presume, as late as the time of Henry VII in England in 1500, they held tournaments, where aristocratic hot heads could tilt lances at each other, riding expensive horses and wearing expensive plate armor, while the ladies watched in terror. Merchants need not apply.

Same thing today. Activists fret and strut their hour on the stage, reading the historical romances of Marx and Zinn, and imagining themselves like the revolutionaries of a former age bravely out-daring the dangers of the time (only they would not be quoting Shakespeare). But today's activists are not brave rebels: they are the little darlings, the scions of the ruling class. And Marx and Co. were not brave revolutionaries either. Sure, Marx got kicked out of Europe for his doings in 1848, but he didn't get sent to die as a slave laborer in the Kolyma goldfields. He lived out his life in London, bonking the help, writing books, and supported by his rich kid friend Engels.

The fact is that our lefty activist friends want to take us back to a time that never was. Revolutionaries are not noble activists; they are murderous thugs.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It's not just the Collusion Confusion that has me worried. There's the utter collapse of the education "system" into lefty narrative: that's why it's possible to have a phenomenon like AOC. There's the censorship of conservatives on social media; last weekend Twitter was manipulating the account of the movie "Unplanned" and its followers. There's the whole stumbling bumbling dishonest stupidity -- thank goodness -- of the administrative state that we got to see throughout the collusion drama.

Maybe there's a real silver lining to all this: that the educated, the credentialed, the wise, the advanced are no better than the rest of us. They all, as Jordan B. Peterson says, look at the world through the lens of their values, their model of how the world works. They didn't want to see that the deep state conspired illegally to entrap President Trump, starting during the Obama administration, and because they didn't want to see it, they never did see it.

Maybe that's good news. The ruling class, like all ruling classes that inherit power from their forefathers, is a bunch of idiots. Those guys really aren't that smart.

But here is the thing. What happens next?

We know that everything about the left is a lie, including "and" and "the." That is because the left is a curious movement of reaction, what I have called The Great Reaction. Actually, I am conceited enough to think I understand it. The whole explosion of city living, of humans all over the world leaving the rural life of subsistence -- or near subsistence -- farming for the market economy in the city, is terrifying, unlike what humans have experienced for millennia. So it is natural that leaders of reaction should arise and tempt people back to the old ways.

I sneer that socialism is neo-slavery, that the welfare state is neo-feudalism, that identity politics is neo-tribalism. But there is this: the fact is that slaves usually don't work very hard. Primitive man, according to chaps like C.R. Hallpike, didn't work too hard either. So, pal: whaddya want? Freedom and enslavement to the market, or slavery and a neo-childlike existence where most everything is provided for? Freedom and hard work, or feudal subordination and the implied promise that your feudal lord will protect you when the going gets tough? Individual responsibility and its cares, or the comforts of tribalism within the crowd of a nation or a liberal identity group?

But where do we go now?

The Zman is obviously thinking the same thing, as he states that Left and Right have been arguing about equality and hierarchy, Horizontal and Vertical, for the last 200 or so years to little effect.

If there is to be a next chapter to the story of European people, it will require a conception of society that acknowledges the hierarchical relationships that are natural to man, but also the interlocking horizontal loyalties and commitments that allows for a strong cultural core.

The funny thing, of course, is that the Left, that worships the horizontal ideal of equality, has created the most horrific vertical hierarchies in all history. And they attack the market system as hierarchical, when it treats all alike, and only asks if they have something to contribute, something that other people will be willing to pay for.

But where is the Next Thing? Who is the Next Thing? If we look back to previous cultural upheavals -- the Reformations, the Enlightenments -- we see the Names that excited the young'uns. Calvin, Luther, Voltaire, Goethe. Marx.

But in this stumble-bumble era there seems to be no Big Name. What is going on? Is it, perhaps, that the previous intellectual revolutions were revolutions from above, an internal affair of the intellectual elite, peons need not apply? Is it that now the intellectuals are all bought and paid for by the ruling class and that there is no opportunity for an intellectual rebel to make a name for himself by forming a phoney-baloney "resistance" to the status quo?

Maybe the future will be determined not by Stars in the Intellectual Firmament but by nobodies whose ideas and notions will infuse the culture the way that market innovations take over the market. And so the world will change without anyone even noticing. Could that happen? Is it possible?

Who knows? All I know is that, for me, the current ruling class has lost the Mandate of Heaven so that an idiot like Trump could run for president and win. And that the dumb and stupid deep state couldn't even shoot straight enough to entrap him with its Baldrick's Cunning Plan of surveillance intended for use on terrorists and not on the opposition party.

Exactly. Jolly good fun.

The problem with the emperor losing the Mandate of Heaven is that the next thing is a Time of Troubles. That is a polite way of saying that a lot of people are going to get killed.

But what would a Time of Troubles look like in the digital age? I was reading a piece this morning about how the Chinese government has a cunning plan to rule the world by a combination of "resource warfare" and "legal warfare." Maybe. But I have this curious feeling that the Chinese ruling class is just as dumb as ours, and that it just does not get the modern age -- any more than anyone else. And that the name of the game is adaption, not power.

Yes, But Don't Mess with Obama and Hillary

Now that we know that Collusion is Schmollusion, the hounds are yelping to go after the real crooks. And one thing we can put money on is that President Obama knew that his chappies were spying on the Trump campaign. And Hillary. Well, after a lifetime of corrupt dealings she sure knows how to insert multiple cut-outs between her and the dirty deed.

Except, of course, that Hillary Clinton is dumb enough not to realize just how monumentally stupid it is to have a private e-mail server.

So now let Hercules go to work and clean the Augean stables of DC swamp-dwellers.

But one thing, Herky baby: Leave Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton alone.

Know why? Of course you do.

If we put Barack Obama in the dock, it is racism, straight up. I mean everyone knows that the First Black President is half way to canonization, and anything that besmirches his reputation is the worst thing that ever came down the pike.

Plus, it would make blacks furious, and delay by at least a decade their inevitable Blexit.

If we put Hillary Clinton in the dock, it is sexism, straight up. I mean everyone knows that the shoulda-coulda-woulda-been First Woman President is a national treasure, and anything that besmirches her reputation is the worst thing that ever came down the pike.

Plus, it would make liberal women mad as hell, and send them out to vote in their tens of millions.

No. I'd say we should stop our stable-cleaning at the Brennans, the Clappers, the Comeys, the Susan Rices. And really, it is they, and others of their ilk, that need to fear the arm of the law. It might -- might -- discourage some future swamp creature from acting like a courtier of an absolute monarch and betraying the Constitution, the Nation of Laws, and basic human decency upon the recommendation of the monarch to rid him of that troublesome interloper.

Also, there is a certain advantage to the political insurgent when justice is not done. That is the point of my maxim: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." Or, if you prefer, that justice is merely the absence of injustice.

What I mean is that what keeps people enraged and ready to go out and vote is a burning sense of injustice, that the system is rigged, and they are not going to take it any more. But if you bring the crooks to justice then the sting is removed and everyone goes home, fluffs up the pillow, and gets a good night's rest.

What President Trump needs for a blowout 2020 election is that people remember the Collusion scandal and that all the real culprits got away scot free, that they remember the scandal of Jussie Smollett's black-gay-Hollywood Get Out of Jail Free card, that they remember the crooked college admissions system and nobody went to jail.

Oh and Trump also needs AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib running free all over the media. Because those three young ladies are a constant reminder to the average American that the system is rigged. Hey Social Media! How about enforcing your glorious "community standards" on your lefty pals!

One thing that comes out clear to me over the last years is that the lefties are clueless. They have, as I say, been carefully taught to hate and to fear, but they lack a strategic sense of how to play the game; they just know which buttons to press. And it has also become clear that all the swamp creatures are small-minded bureaucrats, Barnacles and Stiltstockings, that know how to play the bureaucratic game, but cannot think outside of the box.

And the media: well, they are beneath the gaze of we free-spirits.

The thing to remember is that while all these sheltered snowflakes have been ascending the greasy pole (which for many of them has been cleaned up to make it less hazardous) guys like Donald Trump have been living in the real world, building buildings in Manhattan and living to tell the tale, going through corporate bankruptcy and living to tell the tale.

And now he has through a three-year effort by the educated ruling class to knock him out of the presidency -- and lived to tell the tale.

As I told my liberal yoga instructor on the occasion of the end of Collusion: Nietzsche, I said. What does not kill me makes me stronger. (Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker, for you German scholars.)

Hello liberals. Was that Collusion game really such a good idea, or just another mindless activism culture action that was such a feature of the Obama years?

Strange Death of Europe: But Why?

I spent an hour watching Mark Steyn interview Douglas Murray on his new book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Mark titles his piece "The West in Existential Crisis."

I think I'd rather say that the problem is that the western elite is bollixed up in the internal contradictions of its ruling-class ideology. Why not? Marx predicted that the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to its fall. Couldn't we apply his wisdom to all rulers and oppressors?

Just what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of capitalism, I'm not sure. After all, as a Hegelian he ought to think that capitalism will go from strength to strength as it overcame the antithesis of every contradiction with a new synthesis. Which it has.

But listening to Murray and Steyn talk about the sad decline of Europe, it seemed to me that they were tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Why, for instance, would Swedes say that they are all in favor of diversity while they remove from the vibrantly diverse center cities of Sweden for rural whitey-ness?

The answer is, of course, that they are good little boys and good little girls that know the correct -- orthodox -- opinion they are supposed to hold if they know what is good for them at work and on social media.

Now, I take it as given that whatever is the correct and orthodox opinion in society will have something to do with the class interest of the ruling class. I hope you will not think this is a bridge too far.

So, what is the class interest of the ruling class?

Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked that.

The class interest of the ruling class is to stay in power, and about a century ago -- and in the US no later than the New Deal -- young educated folk decided that the royal road to political power was to put themselves at the head of the working class, then struggling to convert from the rural culture of feudal -- actual post-feudal -- agriculture to the market economy of the city.

Now I believe, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the thing for the working class to do would be to lose the subordinate culture of the feudal peasant and learn how to be a responsible middle class participant in the wage economy of the city. But the working class did not feel that way. It experienced the vibrancy of the city economy as a frightening burden and a loss of all security. So its instinct was to take arms against a sea of troubles by forming labor unions as a means of protection and fighting back against the bad faith of the bosses.

It was the historic role of the Educated Youth of the 19th century to say Yeah! Those stinkin' bosses! Vote for us and we will save you from the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist economic system. Hey, how about Free Education?

This, in my view, is one of the great crimes of the last half millennium. What the Educated Youth should have done is give the working class temporary aid while doing everything to help them assimilate to a middle-class culture. For, to get all Hegelian on you, I believe that the way to get on in the city and obtain a lasting prosperity is to utterly surrender to the market and its prices. To admit that no job, no skill is forever, and the only security is to never settle into a secure job, but always be ready to acquire a new skill as the market economy continually renews itself and puts the "buggy-whip makers" of the day out of business. Instead, the Educated Youth confirmed the workers in their feudal habits, and told them that their neo-feudal capitalist bosses should protect them from economic storms just like the feudal lords protecting the peasants from the Mongols. (Not!)

But you can see what a grand ride it has been for the Educated Youth of the 19th century and their sons, the educated ruling class of today. Political power, administrative state sinecures, social science research grants, activism, peaceful protest: what a ride!

Nothing lasts forever, of course, and when the educated ruling class got tired of telling lies to the working class. There, all of a sudden, were Negroes, victims of a century of Jim Crow in the South. And women: dying of despair in the suburbs, if we were to believe Betty Friedan! So just as the old gig was getting past its sell-by date, up came a new gig, and the educated class jumped in with both feet, promoting special privileges for blacks and women and a delicious expansion of the administrative state and with postmodernism opening up a whole new horizon for academic research, and expanding the old game of class politics into gender and race politics.

Of course, the educated ruling class lied to women and minorities too. Instead of passing the civil-rights laws and letting people get on with it, the ruling class has riled up women and minorities for the last half century with the notion of "institutional racism" and a "glass ceiling" and "white supremacy" and "toxic masculinity" preventing their final arrival in a perfect world. So instead of letting women and minorities find their own way in an economy where government would not discriminate against them, they made women and minorities into their special charges, or what I call "Little Darlings" and fed them a constant narrative of oppression and exploitation.

Well, now the United States has enjoyed its First Black President. What is the educated ruling class to do now? Perfectly simple: encourage migration of the poor from the South and the Muslim lands to immigrate to the city. With any luck they will become the favored political clients of the educated ruling class and continue its rule for another half century. Yay!

You can see that all this is catnip to you if you are an educated person with an advanced degree and interested in a job in the administrative state or social science research or if you are a "woke" twenty-something that has been carefully taught to want nothing so much as a life in activism. But if you are just an average Joe or Jane you might not be quite as enthusiastic. For it might seem to you that you have become a second-class citizen. You might even start to act like the embittered and discarded mistress of a rich guy that likes to trade in last year's model for a hot young thing.

Also, as a disinterested observer, you may feel that we are darn lucky that so far, with the educated ruling class endlessly riling up the latest arrivals to the city, we haven't had any serious political unrest. You would probably have noticed that the educated-class power rests on an immensely cunning and astonishingly successful narrative of naming and shaming any dissent from its agenda as racism, sexism, and homophobia, and now Islamophobia. In 2019 no educated white person wants to have the Scarlet Letter of "Racist" embroidered onto his clothes.

And so the beat goes on. And you gotta say, it has been an astonishingly successful gig for the educated class.

But now we have a cloud on the horizon: Trump, and Brexit, and nationalism in Eastern Europe: ordinary people proposing that government is supposed to serve them and not the latest hot number from wherever.

Of course, if the Trumps and the Brexits and the Eastern European nationalists succeed then it could be "curtains" for our beloved educated ruling class. So it makes complete sense that the educated ruling class has mounted a soft coup to kick President Trump out of office, or at least discredit him enough to prevent his reelection. Same with Brexit: the British ruling class is doing its best to muddy the waters and stay under the rule of the European Commission in Brussels and its army corps of educated administrators.

What would be nice is if we could get onto the "next thing," whatever it is, without blood in the streets.

Our Real Problem is Religious

In the aftermath of the Trump Collusion flameout and the Senate Democrats voting "present" on the Green New Deal, one might ask what is happening?

My answer is: religion. My reason: This quote from anthropologist Roy Rappaport: "No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion."

So, if the educated class since the early 19th century has reckoned, after Nietzsche, that "God is Dead," what comes next?

What comes next is the educated class finding a new religion under every rock. I am reading The Jung Cult by Richard Noll right now. It is, frankly, an anti-Jung screed, saying that Jung was dabbling in all the hazy-crazy religious and spiritualist stuff in the German world around 1900, especially the völkisch movement, and that leads straight to anti-semitism, which, by the 1930s, Jung and his followers were anxious to obscure.

OK, fine. So, on the one hand we have the spiritualist-crystals-cultish-back-to-nature thing -- which is always in danger of anti-semitism and 6 million dead Jews. And on the other we have the rationalist-materialist-administrative-state thing which is always in danger of big government and 100 million deaths and counting. Choose your poison: Jung or Freud. Yes. If you say that Jung is the inspiration for anti-semitism, then it is remarkable how lefties still like Freud.

Let's back up a step. In my view, universities have always been about the education of what Nietzsche calls "the priests." Read Middlemarch and Fred Vincy, son the the mayor of Middlemarch, gets sent off in, I suppose, the 1820s to the University of Cambridge to become a priest. The point is that, for the local businessman Walter Vincy, sending his kid to Cambridge to take holy orders is a step up, socially. Or the university was for the education of the political elite: that's what education in the classics -- "Greats" -- was all about.

Nothing has changed. Only now young heads full of mush are educated in the religion of today's political elite, which means a farrago of lefty cant and postmodernism and identity politics.

So if you wonder about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, stop wondering. She is a perfect product of today's elite education system. She believes exactly what she has been taught to believe.

Now I believe that the big human problem down the ages has been the dance between religion and politics. Let us say that politics, or government, is the need for humans in a community to combine against an existential peril, which might be a flood or an invasion. Religion is the existential need to come to some sort of a common understanding about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Both of these, in my view, are essential to the human condition.

But there is a problem. What happens when the political power of the kings and the religious power of "the priests" are combined? What you get is totalitarianism.

But you also get two rival centers of power, as the political elite and the religious elite jockey around each other, jealous of the other's power. Thus you get "the priests" of Egypt doing for the Pharaoh Akhnaten who wanted to shift Egypt's religion. You get the Catholic Church in Rome in a curious dance with the kings of the Franks in Trier in the era of Charlemagne. And you get King Henry II allegedly asking someone to rid him of the turbulent priest, St. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

When there is turbulence in the political sphere you get civil war, with rebels determined to replace the corrupt and ineffective ruling class; people get all riled up about collusions and traitors. When there is turbulence in the religious sphere you get witch hunts and Inquisitions; people get all riled up about agents of the Devil and other heretics.

When you get political and religious turbulence combining you get the killing fields; you get the police states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and their descendants.

Now it is my belief that the whole phenomenon of The Left is a gigantic effort to create a religion to replace the Christianity that the western educated class has abandoned. But our lefty friends know no way to save the world from sin than through politics. This is the meaning of the obscure phrase invented by Eric Voegelin: "the immanentizing of the eschaton." It means creating heaven on Earth, rather than leaving heaven to the next life. The point is that if the notion of death meaning "going to heaven" no longer has traction, because you don't believe in God and the afterlife, then humans will try to create heaven on Earth instead. And, conservatives say, when you do that you pretty soon create a totalitarian political-religious system that mobilizes the entire society to bring heaven to Earth. Or else.

You will notice that the Green New Deal combines both political and religious themes, and Good Little Girls like AOC have been perfectly taught to believe both in the religion and the politics of the Green faith. The world is going to hell, unless we repent. The world will burn up, unless we replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

In the old days of the West, subsequent to the Peace of Westphalia, a certain distance was established between church and state, so that religion dealt with heavenly matters and politics with mundane matters. This worked, sorta, until Zarathustra came to preach the Death of God. And until the murderous efficiency of modern technology made war into a rather dicey affair that carpet-bombed everything in sight so that there was very little loot left for the winner.

The left's solution to this problem, that God is Dead and war is hell, is "activism." If you are a young person with a burning desire to do good in the world, then you become an activist and organize the oppressed and the marginalized in a political movement to demand their rights. You do not actually practice a religion, but you certainly have your Articles of Faith; you do not actually conduct a civil war, but you do enact shows of force that you call "peaceful protest."

Now my belief is that the left has got it all wrong on the religious front. If you have a burning need to learn the meaning of life, the universe, and everything you should do as Nietzsche's Zarathustra did, and go off into the mountains and live in a cave as a "free spirit," and when a bunch of followers show up at your cave to get the Truth from the Master you send them all packing.

And the left has it all wrong on the political front. If you want people to live in peace and prosperity then you should enable the market system to work its magic, and you should keep government and its administrative state down to a bare minimum. Wanna help your fellow humans on the material front? Go invent something, create a startup, hire a bunch of workers, and try to sell your brilliant to the world. Oh, and do it all without benefit of the dead hand of government compulsion.

One fine day, maybe, we will get to a world in which our educated elite has abandoned its Great Reactionary faith in a poisonous combination of secular religion and big government. But that day is not yet.

When You Strike at a King...

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him."

That remark was made by Emerson to young punk Oliver Wendell Holmes in respect of an article the young fellow had written attacking Plato.

But what about Donald Trump?

Did the swampies think about that when they launched the Holy Office of the Inquisition, Robert Mueller, Grand Inquisitor, on President Trump? I don't think so. I think that the whole Russia Collusion narrative was a weak and feeble attempt to cover up the use of the US intelligence community's powers of surveillance to spy on the Trump campaign.

Because, like, that's illegal, like, whatever.

As they say: "What did the president know, and when did he know it." Obama, that is.

The thing about Obama, I think, is that Margaret Thatcher's famous remark about European leaders applies: "Weak. Feeble." And weak and feeble leaders and weak and feeble swampies do stupid underhanded things that end up biting them in the you know where.

"What does not kill me makes me stronger." That's my pal Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche, you will know if you are a north London luvvie with a TV media gig, is "the Nazis' favorite intellectual."

Yes, dear liberal friends: what happens now? What happens to all those nice moderate Democrats that got elected to Congress in 2018 on the strength of the false accusations against the president? What will the nice suburban women that just instinctively went with the Mean Girls on the block? Will they now turn on the Mean Girls "I can't believe they said that" about the president?

What happens to the noble objective media with its layers of fact-checkers now? After they have acted like Democratic operatives with by-lines for the last three years?

What happens to all the Democratic House chairmen that are all cranked up for impeachment with nowhere to go?

What about all the Subaru drivers with their COEXIST bumper stickers? Can they coexist with Trump? Perhaps they should sell the Subaru and take the bus.

Well, we old time conservatives are revved up by a president of whom it may be said, after President Lincoln speaking about Gen. Grant, "I can't spare this man: he fights."

It really is an extraordinary feeling, and helps me understand the campaign website of, I think Hillary Clinton way back. It was a list of warlike messages: fighting for women; fighting for children; fighting for workers, etc.

But, of course, that is exactly what people want in a politician, someone fighting for them in the eternal battle of life.

Of course, in the end such heroes end up betraying the people that trusted them. Or they get betrayed. Or they get defeated.

And the play goes on.

But the fact is that, after the submission of the Special Prosecutor's report, the swampies have lost. For now.

But take courage, lefties. There are no final victories. There is only: wait until next time.

Yes, Our Ruling Class Stinks, But...

OK, so now Mueller Time is over and it's time to get back to...

Politics as usual?

Yes, but that means that the politicians just get back to bribing us election time with our own money, as prescribed in my definition of government:

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

There is only one way out. You say to the government: you can take your rewards -- your pensions, your free health cares, your free educations, your relief of the poor, and put 'em where the sun don't shine.

Anything short of this means that the game goes on. Because if you are taking money from the politicians then you are just another serf.

Of course, as indicated by my reductive Three Peoples theory, there will always be serfs, People of the Subordinate Self, who want only to live under the protection of a great lord. More, there is something in all of us that just wants to be safe. As Cassius put it:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Shakespeare, don'tcha know.

See, in my better world, we would all have pensions; only we would get them from saving all our lives at Fidelity and Vanguard. And all of us would voluntarily kick in for people "without the means to retire through no fault of their own." Perhaps some billionaire would thoughtfully put himself at the head of Pensions For No Fault of Their Own.

In my better world, we would all have health care; only we would get it, we cheapskates, at Health-Mart: Low health prices, always. And some billionaire would run Health Care Through No Fault of Their Own and we would all kick in to help widows and orphans.

In my better world, we would all educate our kids; only we would do it through all the moms in the neighborhood home-schooling together. And Google would provide a complete smorgasbord of educational tools for the moms and the kids to use. Conservative billionaires would provide conservative alternatives to the sickeningly woke lefty Google material. Game designers would provide addictive games that got kids to learn everything they needed, just by "playing" a silly game. And some billionaire would run Education Through No Fault of Their Own for kids with lousy or ignorant parents. And the neighborhood moms would attach the odd kid, ignorant through no fault of its own, to the neighborhood home-school.

And so on, with welfare. Only, I suspect that the relief of the poor without government would not just be about dishing out money for nothing.

It wouldn't be that hard, and it would be very good for us, because it would exercise our humans-as-social-animals instincts. It would force us, as the lefties say, to be more "ethical" and "altruistic."

And we would all spend a part of each day telling some damn politician to go put his free stuff where the sun don't shine. This would be mandatory, subject to a fine for defaulters that went three or more days without telling some politician where to put it.

See, unless we all get together and "collude" and decide not to take the bait from the damn politician offering free stuff, then the fault, dear reader, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

If we said No to all the free stuff, then we could say No to all the taxes. And maybe get from the current taxation of about 35 percent of GDP down to 10 percent GDP or less.

Imagine an America with taxes at 10 percent of GDP. You can do it if you try. We did have an America like that in 1900, and for some reason immigrants came over to that mean-spirited America by the ship-load.

Gosh, I wonder why.