What's an Elite Scion to Do with his Life?

One of the problems our ruling class has is that its concerns are not the concerns of ordinary Americans.

As a congressional candidate that I recall in the dim mists of memory said. It is all about jobs, jobs, jobs. That is the primary concern of ordinary people.

But the sons and daughters of the ruling class already have jobs. So they must find something else to do in order to find meaning in life.

It is, of course, a problem we would all like to have.

One thing that you can do if you are a wealthy Peter Buttigeig or a Beto O'Rourke is go into politics.

I'd say that it is a sensible and practical thing to do. I suspect that using family money to jump-start a political career is probably a good way to go, especially if you are a likable guy or gal.

(Hillary Clinton need not apply).

But, I would like to say, this is a pretty low-rent way to live.

Or put it another way.

If you are a creative person, as all educated people imagine themselves, what is the best way to be creative and benefit mankind? Artist? Writer? Business startup? Activist? Politician?

I suspect that if you ask a young head full of mush about this they would respond by putting activist first, followed by artist and writer, then politician, then business startup.

I think that I would probably order the list the other way around. If you want to benefit mankind, the most concrete way to do it is the business startup, to bring to market something that nobody ever thought of. But it is the hardest. Then I'd say artist and writer which is relatively harmless, but also much less likely to make a difference. Then politician, which is a way to muddle through with clumsy programs of compulsion because you are too dumb to figure out cultural changes that could do the same thing without force.

At the bottom I'd put the activist, which is 97.2 percent conceit and very little chance to "change lives." Why? Émile Zola made the point way back in 1885 with his novel Germinal. It's about the union activist, Étienne, that comes into a mining district, riles up the miners into striking and sabotaging the mines, bonks all the girls, and then heads out of town to his next activism gig.

Yep. That'll do the trick, Étienne, old chum.

So, I'd say that politics and activism are cheap ways for well-born youngsters to get their names up in lights. But politics and activism don't actually do anything to make human lives better.

Politics in its defensive aspect is protecting people from existential harm; in its offensive aspect it is loot and plunder. In practice politics and government is loot and plunder disguised as protecting us from existential peril. And the politicians are forever conjuring up existential perils, real and imagined, from which we need protection.

And then activism. I think the word on that was given by Barack Obama, who started an activism career organizing the laid-off steelworkers in South Chicago. He quit after a year, and went to law school. Why? Because there was nothing that could be done for the steelworkers. The jobs had gone, and were never coming back, at least not as basic steel union jobs. So all Barack the activist achieved was raising false hopes.

And this is a basic problem with activists and politicians in general. The facts of life are that nothing is forever. When the gig is up, you up-sticks and move on. Politicians and activists propagate the lie that, no, it's not necessary to move on. Instead it's the cruel corporations, the greedy bankers, the system. And we will fight the system and bring back your jobs.

No. Usually the jobs never come back. Not because of the perfidy of the capitalists, but because technology changed and it would cost too much to update the factory to utilize the new technology. Plus the workers were already getting paid well over the market rate, so, from the point of view of the capitalists, it is better to get out of town and start anew with workers that are not yet organized by activists and politicians to demand above market rates for their labor.

Remember this: the real per-capita income of Americans has gone up by 30 times in the last 200 years. There has never been anything like this Great Enrichment in human history, says economist Deirdre McCloskey. And what did it? Innovation. Guys with an idea that put it into a business and made peoples' lives better.

What politicians did do about that? They failed to stop the innovations, probably from ignorance and stupidity. Bully for them. What activists did is they failed to peacefully protest against the innovations until it was too late. Thank goodness for that.

And artists and writers? Maybe they occupy the sweet spot, between the grueling struggle of the business startup and the negative spiral of the politician and activist. And they create the narrative by which we attempt to understand the past and wonder about the future.

But it's a problem. What can elite scions do to make their lives meaningful?

The Elite's Religion: We are Holier Than Thou Because We Care about the Victims

I had an email from a regular correspondent today reminding me that the "backlog of asylum cases at the US border stands at 855,000." Thanks Lon.

You may wonder: why? How in all the world did we get to a situation like this? I mean, come on, fellahs, a border is a border.

So why do we have 855,000 applications for asylum in these United States?

The reason is that the religion, the morality, the "ethics" of our elite educated class is that they care about "the victims."

And everyone in this world has a religion, particularly those people that deny they have a religion. Oh, you may say, with Nietzsche, that God is Dead. No doubt for our educated classes the God of Abraham is dead; the God of whom Christ was the Son is dead. Dead for them, the educated, the compassionate, the enlightened.

So, the fundamental thing to ask, when people say they don't believe in God is to ask: OK, so what do you believe in, that can answer the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

For many of our nation's Subaru and Prius and Leaf drivers, the meaning of life, the universe and everything centers around advocating for the victims. That is their religion.

Like I say: first it was the workers, then it was women and blacks, then it was the indigenous, then it was gays. Victims for whom young well-born people advocated and peacefully protested. Now it is Palestinians, Muslims, and "refugees."

There is a double bonus in this religion. In the first place, you get to fight against sin, the sin of exploitation, oppression, genocide; so you get to virtue-signal your virtue to the world. But there is a bonus: you get the political support of the victims, and so your virtue-signaling is a royal road to political power. Really, what's not to like?

Well, you might look at the previous victims, antecedent to the current Little Darlings of the in-crowd: the workers now dying of despair, the women who are less happy than they were half a century ago, the 77 percent of black children not born to two married parents. You may wonder: what was the point of advocating for those victims if this is the payoff?

The point is that, as far as the Subaru and Prius and Leaf drivers are concerned, the system is working. They get to practice their religion and get the absolution of sins -- the sins of you and me -- and they get political power from representing the victims-du-jour.

As you may know, this is not new. Charles Dickens was making fun of this 170 years ago in Bleak House with Mrs. Jellyby, who was working hard on helping "the natives in Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger." While neglecting her own husband and children.

President Trump has been playing on this hypocrisy by proposing to dump illegal aliens in so-called "sanctuary cities" that do not cooperate with federal authorities when it comes to illegal aliens. On cue, the singer Cher has tweeted in opposition to this, because in LA they are already overwhelmed.

I think there are a number of things going on here. There is the need for any upper class to differentiate itself from the common crowd: 100 years ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin; today the opposite is true. And today there is the whole idea of your car making a moral statement about you.

Now, I don't think I am different from anyone else on this. I consciously like to differentiate myself from the liberal hypocrites and their version of virtue-signaling. I think that the vilest, cheapest thing in the world is to be an activist. I think that the vilest, cheapest thing in the world is to advocate for the Green New Deal and kick the global poor out of their cars before they even get a chance to own one. I think that the vilest, cheapest thing in the world is to advocate for big government programs that keep the poor and a lot of the middle class in permanent subordination to government entitlement programs.

But hey! I don't pretend to be anything more than a racist sexist homophobe.

And I say to my betters: you are better than this. If you want to cut a dash in the world, to be a creative, compassionate person to whom everyone genuflects, then this victim game is the last thing you should be doing. Because it is vile and it is cheap. And it is advocated by the ruling-class stooges in the schools, in the universities, in the media, in politics, in the activism community, and in north Seattle.

Eeeuuw! Who would want to be like them?

Actually, I believe that the problem of what do the People of the Creative Self believe in when they no longer believe in God is the biggest problem in the world today.

And we need to solve the problem before the People of the Creative Self kill us all with their compassion and their virtue.

You can quote me on that.

Notre Dame: Civilizations Fall When The Elite Scam Fails

OK, so the image of the Cathedral of Notre Dame burning seems to many of us to be a metaphor for our age.

When I was last in Paris I went to up to Notre Dame, but decided not to go in. I guess my experience with the cathedral in Florence, and the duomo in Siena, is that these buildings are monuments to civic pride, more an expression of "our team is better than yours" than religious devotion.

But it wasn't the burning of Rome that caused its downfall. It was simply that the rulers' economic game didn't work any more.

Rome had operated for centuries on a loot and plunder model. The Roman Army would conquer some place out in the hinterlands, and the loot and plunder would flow back to Rome and enrich the coffers of the state and the ruling class.

But by, let's say, 200 AD, the game was about played out, because the frontiers of the empire were too far out. It was just too hard to find new lands to plunder, keep control of the commanders of the legions, and get the loot back to Rome.

Of course the end of the feudal era was a bit different, but still, similar. The rise of manufacturing disturbed the loot and plunder model of the landed feudatories. And the agricultural revolution meant that wealth and power belonged to people that could adapt agriculture from conservative peasants sitting on the land to energetic improvers using land drainage and new methods to increase crop yields.

Even then in the later stages of the agricultural era the landed magnates still had a good thing going. A lot of their revenue was not from land rent, but from court fees in their manor courts from local farmers buying and selling the leases on the land they farmed.

But ruling classes are all alike. They want to set up a system to loot and plunder the people so they can reward and keep their supporters. As in my maxim:

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

The problem is that the world is always changing, so a system of taxing and rewarding that has worked like a charm for centuries may cease to work, at some point. And, of course there is the little problem that the supporters always want "more."

The beautiful thing about our current system of the market economy is that it is the complete enemy of the fixed system, with some elite "farming" the nation for themselves and their supporters. The market insists of serving the consumers, and it insists on what we might call "permanent revolution," so that today's dominant corporation becomes tomorrow's basket case.

So the wise ruler rails and complains about the evil capitalists, but still lets things take their capitalist course. Our Bolivarian socialist pals in Venezuela show what happens when the rulers think they are smarter than the capitalists and staff the technostructure with political hacks: they can't even keep the lights on!

So, in the United States in the wake of the Crash of 2008, caused by the ruling-class policy of low-down and liar mortgages, which resulted in the nationalization of bankrupt General Motors and the bankrupt mortgage twins Fannie and Freddie, the government has sensibly let their nationalized basket cases return to private ownership, and they have eased up a bit on the liar loan thing.

But everyone in the ruling class believes -- and always has believed -- in command and control. That is the internal logic of political power. You rally the nation -- or tribe or army -- to face the foe, and of course that means that all the young men must be enlisted in the army, and the rest of the nation must be subordinated into a common effort that will save us from existential peril.

And jolly good fun it is for the ruling class, win or lose, and indeed for many down the chain of command that get to step out of the normal life of wiving and thriving and do their bit for the cause.

Yes, this is a crucial aspect of a ruling class. They get to thrive, most likely, win or lose. Did Napoleon die on the battlefield of Borodino? Not a bit. When the decision was made to retreat from Moscow, Napoleon rode home in his carriage; the rest of the army struggled and starved their way home to France -- if they got home at all.

We are in a situation today where all the cunning plans of our ruling class are coming to ruin, because they are inflexible top-down stupidities that cannot adjust to changing times.

The US rulers could have set up a pension plan that forced every worker to save ten percent of his wages in a private savings account. In a system like that the worker retires when he can afford to. If there is a nasty recession then maybe he has to put off retirement for a couple of years. But in the system our rulers did set up the pensions are fixed by the politicians, with no idea what will happen in 30 years, and we just hope that the money is there.

Our rulers could have set up a system for senior health care that allowed seniors to determine whether they wanted heroic care or palliative care at their end of life. Obviously, if the government is going to force the income taxpayers to pay for elderly care, as we do now, then everyone wants the gold-plated version. But, I tell you, if I were paying for my Medicare without government assistance, I don't think I would want to pay for heroic surgery up onto my late 80s. But the system our rulers gave us doesn't have that flexibility, at least, not on the surface. But below the radar they have done all kinds of cunning things to make Medicare viable by limiting care. Here's one little item. If you are on Medicare and you can no longer swallow, they don't put you on a feeding tube. The protocol is that you go on Medicare Hospice, and you die in a couple of weeks in a flurry of home health care aides.

Back to the top, and the ruin of Notre Dame and the threat of the end of the world.

The end of a civilization is generally not due to God's will or the sins of the people. It is usually due to the fact that the ruling class's loot and plunder system runs out of other peoples' money.

The Transformations of Modern Life, for Men and for Women

Back in the day, real men were warriors. Or they were hunters.

OK. So most of us were serfs. So now you know the meaning of Cassius' sneer to Brutus, that "our" fault was that we were underlings.

To be an underling means not to be a real man. And only a real man gets the girl.

The fascinating thing, for me, about the modern era is the way that we men have replaced the old order with immensely ingenious social institutions that fill in for the annealing fire of war and the thrill of the chase.

Instead of the hunt we have careers, where the ability to stalk a deer is replaced by the skill to navigate the jungle of business. And instead of war we have team sports where we can all cheer our city's team in the eternal battle for dominance and venerate our heroes. Or maybe it is business that provides the war experience and sports that replicates the hunt. Who knows?

All so we can determine who is the real alpha male that gets the girl.

The remarkable thing is that this all happened in a flash. Back in 1700 the only thing to be was a warrior. By 1900 we had corporations -- which are really reflections of armies, with the same notion of rising through the ranks and doing battle with the competition -- and we had sports teams up the ying-yang.

But what about women, you ask? Exactly my point.

Back in the day, 1800, the lives of nearly all women were entirely engaged as wives and mothers. Their entire lives were consumed with getting a couple of kids out of the womb and keeping them alive until they were out of the nest.

This life was just as nasty, brutish and short as men's lives.

But now things are different. For one thing, women don't die in childbirth. For another children don't die like they used to. Yet another, women can control their fertility, and only get pregnant when they want to.

But I think that women have made a dreadful mistake. They have wanted to become as men, because, I assume, life as a man looks pretty good from the outside.

So women have wanted to become educated, as men. They have wanted to have careers, like men. They have wanted to become "independent women" as men. They have even wanted, some of them, to approach sex as men.

I think this is foolishness, and a dreadful mistake.

I don't think that women need to be sent to schools to learn stuff. I think that women and girls naturally learn everything needful. Indeed, in my experience, women love to go to school and learn stuff and will do so at the slightest excuse. In my view, the purpose of schools is to ram stuff down the throats of boys that, at least since Shakespeare's time, go "unwillingly to school." Shall we run the whole quote? I think we should:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel.
And shining morning face, creeping like snail.
Unwillingly to school.

Exactly my point. Whoever heard of a girl creeping like a snail to school? Unless, of course, the Mean Girls are making her life a hell.

I don't think that women are that interested in climbing the greasy pole, and their natural way of socialization does not lend itself to the administrative hierarchy of the army and the bureaucracy. Many women complain of women bosses in business and in government. In my view, women practice a form of socialization where there is indeed a hierarchy, but where there is a conceit, at least, that all women in the neighborhood are equal. And then there are committees. If you are a man you assume that when you get on a board or a committee you shut up for a year until you have shown that you deserve to be listened to. But women expect to be able to "share" the moment they get on the board, and they get insulted if they are not treated as an equal from day one.

Sorry girls. I don't think that women in business makes much sense. But there is a lot that women could be doing instead: running neighborhood home schools, charities, and just maintaining a community of women in the neighborhood that keeps an eye on all the kids and the old people.

But here is a Good Thing. Women as writers. I'm all in favor of that. And health care. Let's give the whole health care system over to women. They live and die for health care.

I don't think that women want to be, or even can be "independent women" as Simone de Beauvoir proposed in The Second Sex. And the truth of this is in the absurdity of Oscar Wilde's question: What Do Women Want? No Oscar, old chap. It's not what do women want, it's What Do Women Expect. Just between you and me, anyone that "expects" things is someone that has a servant or a husband providing her with services. Because she expects it.

Then there is sex. I remember a unit on the Dennis Prager radio show years ago where he interviewed a bunch of college girls. What did they yearn for? To be romanced, rather than getting a booty call. No wonder educated women are going every which way except conventional sex and marriage. What they want -- what they expect -- is to be courted, cherished, and loved. What they do not want is to be picked up, pressured into sex, and then dumped after a few weeks: that is my takeaway from Mattress Girl and the frequent lying Title IX accusations of college women against their former lovers. They are dying of despair in the modern sex scene.

Then there is abortion. It is sad that women are joining men in the eternal refrain: "get rid of it."

Now I have kept the prophecy of German sociologist George Simmel close in recent years. He noted that "19th century technologies 'made for less labor in the household.'"

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

This is fine and dandy, except that not everything in the world lends itself to "a more feminine sensibility." And I am afraid that we are going to have to find that out the hard way.

But there is plenty of human life in the "world outside the home" that would benefit from "a more feminine sensibility." It's just not where the feminists and their ilk think it is. And I am sure that, in the end, women will show us the way.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Searching for a New Religion: Leftism, Feminism, Wokeness, Etc.

What are we to do about the demoralization of young people? Why are the Kids so unhappy, The Atlantic worries? Christopher DeGroot answers that it's the "autonomy paradox," Yeah, sure, autonomy is great, but it brings new problems to life. For instance, after the sexual revolution, the Kids find themselves battered in a wild world of sexual licence, finding free sex to be a torpedo that has circled round and attacked them in a perfect storm of resentment and rage.

Or feminism. David Solway at PJMedia wonders how, in our amazing age of "the rule of law, scientific discovery, technological invention, educational opportunity for the masses" we have "radical feminism, which seeks the ruin of motherhood and the breakdown of the relation between the sexes." I mean, here we have women freed from the thankless toil of ages, and they are fit to be tied.

Suzanne Fields notes the curious dialectic between the #MeToo movement and the hypersexualized depiction of women in media and screen and notes that in

a provocative article in the conservative journal First Things, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, Katherine Kersten blames "false feminism," where there has emerged a serious disconnect between women's feverish attention to sexual impropriety on the part of men at the same time they embrace the nation's sex-drenched popular culture that demeans and hypersexualizes women.

Stalwart David Limbaugh worries "how intolerant and filled with rage leftist extremists have become[.]" It's like the runup to the French Revolution, he thinks.

Well, I am not surprised by all this at all. Because you should understand that we are in a period of religious revolution, rather like the Reformation, in which people are all at sea about the "meaning of life, the universe and everything."

The reason that people don't get this is that they have been carefully taught to believe that, oh well, old-fashioned religious frenzy was then: witch hunts, Galileo imprisoned for daring to suggest that the Earth goes around the Sun. But now...

Well, now we have exactly the same situation. People are going off into crazy new sects, the ruling class is trying to clamp down, and people are chasing Evil Ones all over the place. Nothing new under the sun.

But, but, Science, you say. No doubt, but science doesn't tell you anything about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Just the facts, ma'am, and often not much of that.

Oh sure, "science is real" as the #WeBelieve yardsigns say. But it doesn't tell us what we really want to know, which is the meaning of reality. And right now, if you really believe science is real, science can't really tell us whether CO2 is a killer drug or the loving friend of plants and all living things.

What I am saying is that we humans are in the position we have always been in: we need to tell a story about who we are and what our lives mean. But we have a problem. The Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years, not to mention the stunning success of science in explaining how things work and how to use things as a source not just of food but of power, has, shall we say, invalidated the religious narratives of old.

Now, what would you expect of a sudden change in the experience of daily life? You would expect that it would show that the old narratives about the meaning of life, the universe and everything needed a spot of paint.

They might need more than a spot of paint. They might need paint remover, a vigorous sanding, and a complete do-over.

Now actually, most people are perfectly happy with the way things are. Only a few people are all riled up, and as you know, this is perfectly illustrated by my reductive Three Peoples theory.

The People of the Subordinate Self are perfectly happy. Their religion is that you need to stick together in your ethnic enclave and you need a strong leader to defend you from the employers and the fat-cats and the KKK. All they need to do is punch up their political Uber app and an activist will be right along to peacefully protest on their behalf.

The People of the Responsible Self are perfectly happy. Their religion is that you need to believe in the God of divine justice and live a moral and responsible life according to the precepts of their Axial Age religion.

The People of the Creative Self are not happy, and that is what all the fuss is about.

In my view all the fuss and feathers -- not to mention the death of the 100 million -- is about creative people thrashing around looking for a new religion, something that answers the need for a narrative that explains the meaning of life, the universe, and everything for them.

The French Revolution was all about a religion of Reason, only it ended in Terror and the Thermidorean Reaction and Napoleon.

Romanticism was a religion of feeling, that life was clearly not a mechanical thing of logic and reason and Newton. The Romantics believed in a religion "characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature." That's what La Wik says. But what about the workers?

The Communist Manifesto was all about Educated (and creative) Youth in the mid 19th century on a hero's quest to bring justice to the working class -- and more importantly find meaning in their own lives.

Nietzsche and the religion of "free spirits." Forget nationalism; forget the morality of "the priests;" forget socialism and its encouragement of big government. You wanna be a creative genius, a free spirit thinking and doing new things? Then you belong, like Zarathustra, all alone in a cave in the mountains. And that life is hard.

Blavatsky, spiritualism, the discovery of the "unconscious" with Freud and Jung. A religion that tries to mate the conscious mind with the buried unconscious of affect and instinct to solve the problem of the creative life. This is life after bourgeois Christianity, whether you are Freud blowing up the world with your infantile sexuality, or Jung bonking the babes in his Jung cult.

Bolshevism, and educated-class revolutionaries shall be as gods! And kill about 100 million innocents in their project to subordinate all humanity to the wisdom and knowledge of political activists.

Feminism, the religion of female creativeness above and beyond the crude creativity of making children.

Cultural Marxism, a new project for Educated Youth: to bring justice to women and minorities -- and more importantly find meaning in their own lives.

The sexual revolution: finding meaning by breaking the barriers of bourgeois respectability and getting creative about sex by letting it all hang out.

Intersectionality: finding meaning by demolishing the bourgeois culture and making everything into activists and victims -- and more importantly find meaning in their own lives.

What I think.

I think there is room in the world for the religions of subordination, responsibility, and creativity. What we need is the sense to realize that our own religion is not right for everyone.

We enlightened ones should be perfectly happy for People of the Subordinate Self to live in their tribal communities and imagine that the employer or the KKK or the patriarchy is out to get them. We just need to be smart enough to build political institutions around them that prevent the workers and peasants from empowering their leaders to plunder and/or demolish the rest of the world.

We enlightened ones should be perfectly happy for People of the Responsible Self to live their responsible lives and wive and thrive and go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. We just need to be smart enough and wise enough to do our naughty creative stuff without frightening the horses in the street.

We enlightened ones need to understand that our religious activities and beliefs, in creativity, in breaking the mold, in doing the hero's journey down into the underworld of the unconscious, etc., is not for everyone. Indeed it is probably not for the overwhelming majority. So we should follow Nietzsche's hint and do it in a cave in the mountains. And when the adepts and the fans show up at our door, we should send them away, back, in the words of Lina Lamont, to their hum-drum little lives where they will be much happier than in our lonely cave of creativity where we hope to understand, one day, the meaning of the shadows on the wall.

The big lesson that we creative people need to understand is that we should not draft the rest of the world into our creative projects. We free spirits should have the wisdom to realize that we are not God's gift to humanity, but just a bunch of Educated Youth with more enthusiasm than sense.

O-Kay! "Investigating" is not "Spying"

Thank goodness former Attorney General Eric Holder has 'splained the whole procedure to me. See, when Attorney General Barr replied to a senator's question.

"I think spying did occur," Barr said during the explosive hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. "The question is whether it was adequately predicated. …Spying on a political campaign is a big deal."

No, no, no, tweeted Holder.

When there is a predicate, a legitimate basis, it's called "investigating" not "spying."

O-Kay. But it is amazing, is it not, that a whole wall full of Democrats erupted onto Twitter saying what a monstrous thing it was for Barr to talk about "spying."

Hey kids! Isn't that what intelligence agencies do for a living? Spy on people? In fact isn't the fact that we call them "intelligence agencies" just another Orwellian lie? Because what they do is spy on people. S-P-Y. With a capital S.

What the spy agencies are supposed to do is spy on the nation's potential enemies, so we have an idea about what said enemies are up to.

But there is always that little problem, sports fans, that a spy agency might get used for the partisan political interests of the party in power, or the general interest of the ruling class, rather than in the national security interest of the nation.

'Cos it's all so easy to imagine that your own particular interest is the interest of the nation, particularly when the candidate of the Other party has yellow hair.

Of course we have laws and regulations and procedures to prevent the improper use of national spy assets for partisan political purposes. But the truth is that the system is no better than the folks operating it. And if you have the worst ruling class in living memory, full of knaves, crooks and people that got their political education in Chicago...

The point is that, back in 2016, there was nobody that said: "hey, wait a minute guys! We are getting awfully close to spying on the Republicans with this surveillance! Maybe we should just send a word to Trump Tower, word to the wise, and all that, that some of their campaign chappies are getting a bit too close to the Russkies, and maybe they better be careful in case they get compromised." Maybe there was someone that tried to hit the alarm. If so, we deplorables would like to hear from him.

I mean, that is how people of good faith would act. Because we are all Americans, all in this together, right? And we don't want to flush our nation down the toilet, not even by accident.

Only that is not what the Obama spy guys did back in 2016. That is not what the FBI/DOJ did in the presidential transition. That is not what the Democrats and the media and the deep state did in the two years of the Russian Collusion inquiry.

No, instead it was pedal-to-the-metal hysteria that Trump was a traitor. And should be removed from office! Impeached! Imprisoned!

And now all the Democrats in unison are tweeting their outrage that Attorney General Barr should compromise himself with a remark about "spying."

Hey kids! I think it is a bit too late for that. You guys started this whole spying thing.

And the question that lingers in the minds of all patriotic Americans is: what in Sam Blazes was going on in the Obama administration that they were "investigating" peripheral figures around the Trump campaign? Because it sure looks to many of us that there was some dirty pool going on. Not quite cricket, old chap. What do we do about it? As the Mikado put it, so elegantly:

The billiard-sharp whom anyone catches
His doom’s extremely hard—
He’s made to dwell
In a dungeon cell
On a spot that’s always barred.
And there he plays extravagant matches
In fitless finger-stalls,
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.

It just seems to some of us nerds that there was something rotten in the State of Denmark, Obama administration version, and it might be a good idea to give a few bad apples in the Deep State a real going over -- kinda like the two year pursuit of Trump -- pour encourager les autres.

Nothing personal, you understand.

Imagining "No Left Left" in the US

Over at This Week, sorta-centrist Damon Linker is writing, after the Israeli elections, that "There is no left left in Israel." Says he:

Center-left social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years across the Western world. But nowhere has the collapse been more stunning than in Israel, whose founders and ruling class for the first 30 years of the country's existence were very deeply linked with the labor movement. Labor has been in retreat ever since the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians in 2000. But its showing on Tuesday was truly astonishing: With 5 percent of the vote, the Israeli Labor Party is now less than two percentage points away from failing to clear the minimum threshold (3.25 percent) for winning seats in the Knesset. The party is approaching the possibility of extinction.

Oh no! How could that be? Never mind.

[The left] exists now primarily in the minds of the right — as an existential threat, a sort of suicidal impulse toward surrender to Israel's many blood-thirsty enemies that must be resisted at all costs.

Sounds delicious to me, but what do I know?

But "It Can't Happen Here," to coin a phrase. Or could it?

Of course, it makes sense that "social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years" because, after all, the average voter is no longer a "woiker," of eternal memory. The average chap or chapette is an office worker, or a retail worker. He or she is no longer a factory worker that experiences the world in class terms. In fact today's average person probably owns a home -- in partnership, of course with the bank -- and a car and expects the kids to go to college.

So what? Well, I suspect that despite the effort of today's ruling class to panic us all into either climate crisis or intersectional crisis, the fact is that most people want a government that keeps the trains -- or rather the jobs -- on time, and the mortgages available and the SUVs on the dealer's lot.

On this view, the woke left in the academy and the media is a frantic effort to keep the old system going, and the more it seems like Trump is winning the more frantic the woke left gets.

Or what about the House Judiciary Committee hearings yesterday on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism." Huh? What is all this about? Maybe, as the Zman suggests, it is just

that our political class is simply consumed with rage to the point where they are defined by it. Who they are is entirely dependent upon how much they hate heritage America and native stock Americans.

There is the notion that, ever since World War II, the western elite has been obsessed with a "never again" attitude towards Nationalism. Because Hitler. And now the whole anti-nationalism culture is starting to break up. There is, after all, a "the Russians are coming" aspect to the ruling class marginalization of nationalism, as in "the fascists are coming." Really, you mean like those tiki-torch bearers of Charlottesville? The horror of peaceful protest Walmart-style?

Look, all politics is based on some version of "the Russians are coming." It might be "the capitalists are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants off the workers. It might be "the patriarchs are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants of women. It might be "the lynchers are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants off blacks.

The problem for our ruling class is that Trump has opened a pretty useful front with his Make America Great Again, where he is doing quite a good job of scaring the pants of us deplorables with "the illegals are coming," not to mention "the Chinese are coming" to take our jobs.

Hey what's yer problem ruling class? You've had a pretty good run with "the capitalists are coming" and "the racists are coming" and "the sexists are coming" and "the homophobes are coming." You think your game is going to last forever?

The point about all these political memes is "if it takes." If it takes, then you get to win the election and pass out the goodies to your supporters. If it doesn't take, then it is time for you to think again, and find some other meme to scare the pants off the voters.

But you can imagine that any ruling would get into a fine old rage when the good old memes don't seem to be working any more. How dare the peasants do a thing like that!

I always like to use the World War I notion of the next Big Push. That's how they represented the Battle of the Somme and Passchendaele. Quite so, chaps. Only they were bloody useless and stupid, the products of minds without a strategic vision. And they killed off a generation of young men. Anyway, what on Earth were the European nations doing having a Great War?  To do what, exactly?

Yeah. So these days our ruling class is obsessed with another Big Push to stamp out White Nationalism, or Hate Speech, or whatever. Because they don't have any better ideas.

But what, dear leaders, does White Nationalism and Hate Speech have to do with the concerns of the average person, who is probably more interested in jobs, the price of health care, and the ruinous cost of college?

Nothing, but politicians gotta politick, and what the ruling class has succeeded in doing, over the last century, has been dividing people first by class and then by race and gender.

Obviously that works until it doesn't work.

As I say, humans are tribal, and so politics is all about which tribes we are going to be this week. Tribes can be anything: nations, families, races, religions, language speakers. The only question is which tribal notion is going to win the election this week.

Now I would love a world in which there is no left left in the US. But, I have to say, there is no telling if the replacement will make me yearn for the good old days when lefties ranged across the Earth like the dear old dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs seem pretty cute to us moderns; but I wonder what life was like with those chaps romping around needlessly. It might very well have been nasty, brutish, and short.