Reich: Three Consciousnesses is Not Enough

Well, so now Charles A. Reich, who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame in 1970 with his Sixties manifesto The Greening of America recently passed on. Roger Kimball has a long piece about him at American Greatness.

What caught my attention was Reich's notion of the Three Consciousnesses, as follows, from La Wik:

Consciousness I applies to the typical values and opinions of rural farmers and small businesspeople which dominated society in 19th century America. 

Consciousness II represents a viewpoint of "an organizational society", featuring meritocracy and improvement through various large institutions, the ethos of the New Deal, World War II and the 1950s Silent Generation. 

Consciousness III represents the worldview of the 1960s counterculture, focusing on personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs.

OK. So Consciousness I is the bourgeois ethos; Consciousness II is the educated ruling class ethos of socialism and the administrative state; Consciousness III is the ethos of creative artists and activists and stuff, the vision that our liberal friends have of themselves.

Do you see what is missing? Call it "Consciousness 0," except that I don't think there is a zero in Roman numerals. It's the consciousness of the People of the Subordinate Self, people who nestle up to a powerful leader -- in Consciousness II -- and surrender themselves as foot-soldiers in his power project.

But really, I find Reich's notion interesting, because of what it tells us about our liberal friends. It tells us that a gay professor like Reich knows that the welfare state is not the last word in human evolution. Who knew?

However, you will notice that our liberal friends have not proposed any reform of the liberal administrative welfare state they have built. So even though all evolved people have moved on to the creative project of Consciousness III they still need the structures of Consciousness II. And you can see why. Our liberal friends obtain their political power and the resources for their creative projects by staffing the bureaucratic slots of Consciousness II, keeping the peasants -- of Consciousness 0 that does not even exist in the world of the Three Consciousness slots! -- enslaved to entitlement programs and whacking deplorable racist sexist homophobes from their fire-bases in corporate HR. They must keep the sub-human rubes under control even as they explore the cosmos of intersectionality and creativity from their safe spaces.

Also, Reich leaves out what we might call Consciousness IV, which is the label I would put on the German notions from Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung, the understanding that consciousness is only a pimple stuck on the vast unknown of the unconsciousness, and that "personal freedom, egalitarianism, and recreational drugs" are a wet and adolescent first attempt at the Hero's Journey into the unconscious in which terrible monsters are experienced, and from which the creative person does not necessarily return. And only when the Hero has passed his trials in the underworld does he return as the Sacrificial Hero that has acquired the wisdom that empowers him to guide those left behind on the terrible border between Order and Chaos upon which he is called to sacrifice himself, to die so that others may live.

You can see that Reich's hot mess is nothing compared to the glorious vision afforded for the adepts of my Three Peoples notion. Let us express it in a way close to his own Three Consciousnesses notion.

Subordinate Consciousness applies to the dawning self-consciousness expressed in a felt lack of agency in the slave, the serf, the worker, the employee in a big bureaucracy. Their reality is the subordination to the will of the overlord who makes all the decisions and who we would say shamelessly exploits and sacrifices the subordinate in the pursuit of his power project.

Responsible Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that experience themselves as responsible, usually to God, for the actions of their lives. The idea is to conform one's life not to the power of an earthly lord who eventually betrays those that follow him, but to a heavenly lord who a dispenses a perfect heavenly justice. These people are self-conscious as responsible agents before God.

Creative Consciousness represents the viewpoint of people that have come to believe tht it is not enough just to live a responsible life, but that humans are called to create, to be, in the words of Nietzsche, a free spirit. But, the creative realizes, the creative life is not a walk in the park with an occasional blast from a mind-altering drug, but a terrifying journey into the unexplored land of the unconscious, and the frightful temptations and monsters therein. Nor does the journey end with prizes and encomiums and "good jobs" and all, but with the sacrifice of which the Passion of Christ is the model. In fact, the sign that the hero is a false hero is that his life is a power project of self-worship rather than the equivocal fate of the Sacrificial Hero or the Scapegoat. Read all about it in Rene Girard and Violence and the Sacred.

You can see the Big Problem with our liberal friends. Their project always ends up as self-worship, demanding that the world genuflect before their wonderfulness.

Sorry, dear liberals. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not like that at all.

Yeah, Let's Talk About Reparations, Concentration Camps, etc.

The problem with our lefty friends is that they don't really want to have what they call a "conversation." Their idea of conversation is the deployment of catchphrases by activists in ideological combat: words as weapons.

Let's take slavery and reparations. First, slavery.

Slavery was ubiquitious in human society up until the day before yesterday. Ancient Greeks? Slavery. Romans? Slavery. A thousand years ago in Europe? Here are a few words from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

Welleas, or Welshman, was one of the Old English words for slave -- which showed where the Anglo Saxons got their slaves... Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking slave merchants based in Ireland. According to contemporary chronicles, eleventh-century Dublin operated the largest slave market in western Europe.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine and distress... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands... It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

And, of course, plantation slavery started right after the Crusades when western Europeans learned about sugar cane from their Muslim enemies. The first slave sugar plantations were established on Cyprus, were financed by Venetian merchants, and used local serfs and Muslim slaves as labor. I should say western capitalistic slave plantations. It was the beginning of a big business that spread westward to the Islas Canarias and then to South America. The Brits got involved in 1640 when they learned the business from the Dutch and set up slave plantations in Barbados.

And then, sometime in the 18th century, slave plantations started to become a scandal. Why? My take is: partly the populist moralism of the Great Awakening, and partly upper-class resentment of the new slave barons -- think the Bertrams of Mansfield Park -- that were building obscene mansions and pushing their way into the Brit Parliament. Also, I suspect, there is this. Slaves have to be guarded and disciplined with the cow-hide whip -- and fed, and housed. But free labor just has to be paid: must less bother. And, lefty politicians have been glad to take the workers off the hands of the ca-pittle-ists and make them into neo-serfs and neo-slaves in the great plantation -- or concentration camp -- of the welfare state. And then the biggest reason of all. With free labor the ca-pittle-ists make more money than with slave labor. Who knew?

What about reparations? Old as the hills. Back in the day, of course, the whole point of "conquest warfare" was loot and plunder. Reparations was the plundering of a defeated people. And it makes sense because back in the day wealth was equal to land and to grain stores and livestock. So the Vikings would visit the Brits every fall, sail up the rivers, take the grain, kill the men and transport the women and children to the slave market in Dublin. That'll teach 'em.

My take is that loot and plunder -- the noble and woke civilized looting operations of the big government welfare state excepted -- has only become scandalous because it does not pay in the modern world where something like 80 percent of wealth or capital is "intangible" capital, the kind that resides between human ears. And I predict that the days of the welfare state are numbered because it does not pay. Much better to have the workers save for their own retirement and health care. They will work a lot harder than when retirement and health care are managed neo-feudal style in entitlement programs run by the educated ruling class.

That's another reason why concentration camps are probably on their way out. (Modern concentration camps were invented by the Brits, by the way, in the Boer War in South Africa. They were not concentrating the innocent Bantu warriors of Shaka the Zulu, by the way, but the Dutch Boers, who were conducting a guerrilla war against the armies of Britland.) Just look at the absolute waste of the Nazi concentration/labor/death camps. I'd say that if you were conducting a global war for Lebensraum you would want to mobilize everyone in the glorious Reich to produce the sinews of war. And that means mobilize their minds. And who has sharper minds than the Jews? And let us not forget the labor/death camps of the Bolsheviks: the Gulag Archipelago; the White Sea Canal; the Kolyma goldfields.

Sorry, Mao ZeDong and Pol Pot. I didn't mean to insult you guys. You chaps had slavery and concentration camps that were tops. And your famines were the best. Made those white supremacists in Europe and North America look like pikers.

My point is that slavery and concentration camps and piles of skulls are as human as apple pie. The astonishing thing is that we moderns, for all our follies and faults, have come to think of slavery and concentration camps and Trails of Tears as scandalous.

But I do not think our modern ideas indicate a more advanced morality. Not at all. I just think that we are stumbling towards a realization that loot and plunder and slaves and camps are brutally inefficient ways for the ruling class to get rich off the labor of their deplorable subjects. Much better to let creative minds loose and turn responsible wage-earners to their jobs. And just tax 'em at the rate approved by Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Art Laffer according to his eponymous curve.

And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Reparations? I agree with Ryan Bomberger, who identifies as half-white half-black. Let the Democratic Party pay for reparations. They, after all, were the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the KKK, of Bull Connor, of the neo-slavery of the welfare state. Let the enthusiasts of the Great Awokening pay reparations, and save their activist souls.

Is Running Against Hillary a Mistake?

In President Trump's maga-rally in Orlando, Florida, announcing his candidacy for President of the United States in 2020, he took out after Hillary Clinton. And the usual suspect among the Democratic operatives with by-lines all took out after this as fighting yesterday's war. Hey, Mr. President, they tweeted, you want to redo 2016? Big mistake!

Maybe it's a good thing that our Democratic friends are finally ready to stop re-fighting the 2016 war

Maybe the critics have a point. Maybe it is time to put the whole Trump-Russia-Hillary-emails to bed and concentrate on The Issues. You remember them.

But obviously, I reckon, the Trump campaign has taken a strategic decision to be prosecuting deep state actors in the "intelligence community" all next year. I suppose the reason is to rally the faithful on the one hand, and to demoralize the Impeach Trump folks on the left.

After all, if the Trump administration is prosecuting bad actors in the intelligence community that spied on a presidential campaign, isn't that "draining the swamp?" Doesn't that mean that Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do in his 2016 campaign? And isn't that smart politics?

Look I don't know which end is up, but I suspect that having malfeasance of high government officials in the news during 2020 tells ordinary Americans what they want to hear, that someone is doing something about corrupt government officials. And I suspect that ii also insistently pricks the liberal bubble that our lefty friends have been living in over at MSNBC & Co. for the last two years and more. And it tells them something that they desperately do not want to hear, that their party is the most corrupt entity since Boss Tweed.

But whatabout our friends the "educated suburban women" that are definitely not Trump fans? Would they get turned off by trials and accusations? Well, maybe we can do something about them. I suggest that Trump enlist a corps of women to run around the world of suburban women repeating the refrain "I Can't Believe That Hillary/Brennan/Clapper/Comey/McCabe Said/Did That!" Everywhere. All the time. On TV. On social media.

That's the way you communicate to women. You inject yourself into their Culture of Complaint and let 'er rip!

Or, at least, that's what I think. I could, of course, be completely wrong.

For instance, the whole election could turn on whether or not it is a Bad Thing that Joe Biden once actually talked to a racist Democratic Senator from the racist South.

But then that might be a good thing if we can lay the "raciss" canard to rest. Along with literally Hitler.

Choose the Form of the Destructor

I don't really know what "choose the form of your destructor" means. I didn't even know it came from Ghostbusters till I looked it up.

But I am going to assume that it means that the very thing you set up to make yourself safe is the very thing that destroys you. As in:

Labor Unions. Yeah, pal. Labor unions are supposed to protect the workers from their rapscallionly employers. Only the trouble is that labor unions tend to raise the workers' wages above the market rate, and encourage the workers to concede nothing to their rapscallionly employers. So that one day the labor union has priced the workers out of the market and the corporation they work for collapses into bacnkruptcy. And the fact is that when there is a big downturn in the economy, everyone has to take a haircut: workers, ca-pittle-ists, widows, and orphans.

Liberal Arts Colleges. There was Bernie's wife's college, Burlington College, that went bupkis over some land deal or something. Because Jane Sanders, probably, is an idiot that don't know nothing. And then there was Newbury College of Brookline, Mass. The girl journalist Alia Wong writing in The Atlantic about the closure spent half the article talking about girl stuff like the "grieving process after hearing the news that went from shock to panic, curiosity to nostalgia, heartbreak to acceptance". And the college president talks about what he might have done to avoid bankruptcy. But hey, stuff happens. There is no "but critics say" paragraph about what the administration coulda woulda shoulda done. And why it should go to jail, like Trump.

Public High Schools. You've heard all about the shocking racism at New York City's specialized high schools where you have to pass a white supremacist test to get in. Did you know, writes Walter Williams, that

Dr. Thomas Sowell provides some interesting statistics about Stuyvesant High School in his book "Wealth, Poverty and Politics." He reports that, "In 1938, the proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school, was almost as high as the proportion of blacks in the population of New York City." Since then, it has spiraled downward. In 1979, blacks were 12.9% of students at Stuyvesant, falling to 4.8% in 1995. By 2012, The New York Times reported that blacks were 1.2% of the student body.

No, Dr. Williams, I didn't know that. But I think it is probably close to the crime of the century that black educational performance has taken such a plunge. But hey, what can you do in the face of all those Tiger Mommed Asian kids? Who knew that those kids would ace the tests designed by white supremacists to racially institutionalize white supremacy? Yeah. Blend in a little government force, lefties; that should do it.

SJW Social Media. So social media SJWs are busily deplatorming anodyne conservatives, because hate speech, or something. And my usgovernmentspending.com organic search traffic from Google fell by 50 percent on April 2 when Google, presumably, changed the rules. Hey, Sergey, how yer doin', pal! It's too early to say what will actually precipitate out of all this. But I suspect that the result will be far different from what the SJW and ruling-class conventional wisdom thinks.

Welfare State. Yeah, we are all about helping the people. And we need Medicare-for-all, and free college for all, and Green New Deal, and justice for refugees and migrants, and all. Because Scandinavian countries. Except that did you know that the Scandi countries have been privatizing their state pensions plans, and education, and are now privatizing their health care? Who knew? Because, you see, if you really care about The People then you are going to make sure that there is actually a system around in 15 years to deliver the sacred benefits, and not just close up one day because, oh well, stuff happens.

Some of our Democratic friends like to rail at Republicans for failing to raise taxes to fund the welfare state. They get it wrong, because it is Democratic voters that depend of the welfare state. It is Democratic politicians that should be obsessively reforming and repairing the great monuments of the welfare state. But they aren't, because there are no votes in reform and repair; there are only votes in more free stuff.

And that means that one day the whole thing will collapse, and, to coin a phrase, it will be women and minorities hardest hurt. Because it is women and minorities that actually believe the promises that politicians make to get their vote.

The whole point of limited government is to limit the damage that politicians and their bribed apologists can do, and to try and have a cultural and political and economic system that is self-repairing.

But you knew that.

What the Three Peoples Want from Society

The problem for our modern society is that we have three distinct kinds of people living around us, and many of those people are not "us" but "them." When we are confronted by the fact that other people are different and want different things out of life and society, we get mad.

But the beginning of wisdom is to understand why other people are different and why what they want -- and what they do not want -- makes complete sense, if you try to understand a little about what makes them tick. So let us think about what our Three Peoples -- the People of the Subordinate Self, the People of the Responsible Self, and the People of the Creative Self -- want from society and this life on Earth.

The People of the Subordinate Self, unquestionably, what someone to take charge and relieve them from the responsibility of making tough decisions -- that very likely will be wrong decisions -- in this life. But, as Georg Simmel reminds us, though people want to follow a leader they also resent the leader. So I dare say that the more you lust after a leader the more you are likely to rail against him for not providing perfection for you. No doubt people in a hierarchical organization like a big corporation or a government office choose that employment for the presumed safety. But once comfortably tucked up in bed they immediately complain if their needs are not met, and the well-deserved promotion is not obtained. And, of course, the presumed safety is often an illusion, for the safety promised by the organization lasts only so long as the subordinate remains useful to the organization's goals and timetables, and so long as the organization thrives.

Above all, I suspect, the People of the Subordinate Self want to live in a group that approximates the personal relationships of the village, where the Big Man runs things and the men know their position in the hierarchy. In such a world, a man knows who he is and where he stands among his brothers. And if he wants to change things then he has to have the courage of his fists.

The People of the Responsible Self are people that have reconciled themselves to living in the city. They understand that the only guy that's going to look after their interests is them. It is a curious thing to behold, for the main difference between the Subordinate and the Responsible is that the Responsible subordinates himself to the market and society and its norms in general rather than to a leader and his group in particular. The Responsible individual accepts responsibility for making his way in the world: choosing a job or career, a spouse, a home, to insure against the perils of life. And yet, for all that, he probably lives a pretty conventional life, accepting the norms dished out by society without question. One might very well ask: what really is the difference between life as a subordinate peasant and a responsible citizen? In the end they stand and fall by the success of the society and the group they live in.

So what is the difference? I think it is symbolized by the "get on your bike" phrase that made British politician Norman Tebbit famous and scandalized the North London luvvies.

I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot; he got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking 'til he found it.

The other version of this is "when the going gets tough the tough get going" quote attributed to football coach John Thomas of the Green Hornets. The truth is, of course, that we are all hostages to history, and there may be little each of us can do to change our lives and rise above our misfortunes. But for the People of the Responsible Self the idea that the individual has control of his fate is central to his faith.

If the People of the Subordinate Self are focused on what society should do for them, and the People of the Responsible Self are focused on what they can do for themselves, the People of the Creative Self have a different point of view. What gets them up in the morning is what society should do for them so that they can gloriously transform society with amazing creative innovation.

It's obvious. The entrepreneur wants to amaze us with his amazing startup. But without society right there as unformed clay and willing consumers, the poor chap is just mucking around in his garage. And what kind of a life is that, Steve? The activist wants to amaze us with his activism and his organization of helpless victims into a peaceful protest that will awake the conscience of the world. But unless society is a vast impersonal mass, what kind of scope does this ambitious little Hitler have to wield the power of activism in the world? The artist and writer wants to paint a picture of some imagined world that either evokes timeless verities or imagines verities waiting to be born. What would be the use of living in a little village that does not afford the genius global scope? The politician is just a village Big Man or a local yokel unless he gets to become a United States Senator and hector witnesses from on high, or run for President and direct traffic across the entire world. If you want power you have to have power over something, and the bigger the better.

Let's look at things the other way. Suppose you wanted to rile up the People of the Subordinate Self, what would you do? You would show them the man behind the curtain and show them what they don't want to know, that this world is uncertain and contingent, and the people in charge really don't know what they are doing, and will abandon them when the going gets tough.

Suppose you wanted to rile up the People of the Responsible Self, what would you do? You would force them to contribute to all kinds of government programs and take away their imagined agency. And you would criminalize their religious faith and make life difficult for voluntary organizations. And you would call them racists, sexists, and homophobes.

How to rile up the People of the Creative Self? I know! Enforce the First and Second Amendments. End government subsidies for the arts. Make activists pay for the "hate" they stir up. End government education. Make colleges personally responsible for the "mostly" part of their peaceful protests. And reduce government so that politicians are playing with nickels and dimes instead of billions and trillions.

But there is a serious side to this. The more we understand that there is a good reason why other people are different, the more we will put teeth in the notion "why don't we all just get along."

And in the end, people are people.

Lefties: Getting the Hero's Journey Upside Down

I believe, following the logic of my reductive Three Peoples theory, that the tripartite nature of our modern society requires that the elites realize that each of the Three Peoples really does live in a different world, and that the essence of wise governance is to respect that different People will want and need -- and deserve -- the right the live their lives according to their lights.

Of course if you believe, as I do, that the fundamental nature of the creative person is that they must follow the Hero's Journey, first into the underworld of the unconscious and then into the sacrificial role of exploring the boundary between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown, then you will understand this. The Hero is the sacrificial Christ-like figure, reprising the role of the Son, like Marduk, Horus, and Co.

The antithesis of the Sacrificial Hero is what John Ralston Saul in Voltaire's Bastards calls the Egoistic Hero. You can see what is going on here. The man that works on the border between Order and Chaos, discovering new knowledge and power, is a very dangerous person. So it is bad enough if he is a modest sort of chap. But if he has delusions of grandeur, then it is Katy bar the door.

And, if you didn't get the point, the 20th century has produced magnificent specimens of the genus Egoistic Hero, from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao and beyond.

Our problem today is that the more influential members of our ruling class, as People of the Creative Self, have institutionalized the Egoistic Hero as the best and most wonderful thing in the world, unless he is a businessman or a right-wing politician.

Creatives of all kinds: artists, writers, intellectuals, activists, politicians, gurus; these are celebrated as the highest and best of all humans and deserving prizes, accolades, pensions, and human material on which to experiment. Every youngster from an educated home dreams of a life of creativity; that is what he has been carefully taught.

But I think the opposite is true. I think that young people should be discouraged from a life of creativity. The truth is that most people should just do the right thing and live lives of wiving and thriving. The whole creativity thing just encourages people to shortchange their life on the wiving and thriving front, and this is a great social danger, because Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

You can see the result of the celebration of the creative life. People are encouraged to think contributing to the economy, finding a life partner, and having children is not all that great shakes. They are encouraged to dream up some creative sexual identity for themselves that is a lot funner than the dull routine of selecting a life partner and being true to her through thick and thin. They are encouraged to spend their twenties "finding themselves" in some yeasty urban safe space rather than getting a job.

The truth is that the creative Hero's Journey is, in great part, an anti-social path, which will probably end in failure and misery. Because many are called but few are chosen. He who descends into the underworld of the unconsciousness will probably disappear forever, mourned only by his mother. Only he who can get through the descent into the underworld and learn its lessons can hope to return to the social world and bestow on his fellows the benison of the wisdom he learned in the darkness of the underworld.

In other words: you really don't want to try out for the Hero's Journey. You have no idea what you are signing up for.

The truth, I think is contained in the notion expressed in my latest American Thinker piece:

The Jungians, guys like Jordan Peterson, say that the crux of all religion is the hero, the Christ-like figure, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown, so that the rest of us get to the Promised Land.

But our lefty creative friends think that they get to go to the Promised Land, and the deplorables get to be sacrificed.

No, no. True religion is not like that, lefties. Trouble is that, so long as you chaps live like Alice in your Wonderland, so long will millions suffer and die for your conceit and your folly. Because that is what happens when an egoistic activist organizes millions of victims and then fails to deliver, as Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Castro and Chávez and Maduro failed to deliver.

Oh and don't forget Barack Obama. He went down to South Chicago for a year to organize the laid-off steelworkers. Only he discovered it was too hard. So he went to graduate school instead.

If you want to be an activist and save the victims; an artist to discover a whole new vision; a writer to describe a whole new world, you should understand that this is hard, much harder than you can possibly imagine.

And at the end of it you must submit to the Sacrifice and become a scapegoat. Because that is the fate of he that toils at the border between Order and Chaos, between the Known and the Unknown.

Notice how that updates the notion of the scapegoat in Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. In Girard's notion the community chooses a scapegoat as a sacrifice to heal its divisions. In the Jungian Peterson vision the scapegoat offers himself to be sacrificed.

Until you understand that, you understand nothing.

Oberlin: Generals Fighting the Last War

I don't think that the president and administration of Oberlin College is evil for defaming and libeling the good folks at the Gibson Bakery.

I just think they are fools and knaves. And this is a much bigger problem than we think.

Back in the day, in the Cold War, our liberal friends used to virtue-signal about "generals fighting the last war." That was in the days, if you remember, when Pentagon generals were represented in the average newspaper cartoon as cartoon figures with dark glasses, an expressionless and craggy face, and a chest full of ribbons: military robots.

Not that liberals have ever bothered to educate themselves about war and strategy or anything like that.

Anyone that has thought a minute about war would recognize that it is almost inevitable that generals would be preparing the fight the last war all over again. What else are they going to do until the next war actually starts and they find out what works and what doesn't in the new situation?

Moreover there is the bureaucratic effect, for bureaucracies are top-down entities, designed and implemented to get the poor suckers at the point of the spear to risk their lives for:-- something or other. So no bureaucracy, including an army, is going to change unless forced to by the immediate threat of defeat and disgrace.

Now, I think that in the modern world this "generals fighting the last war" applies to nothing so much as all the institutions of the left and the welfare state. If you come up with a plan for reforming anything that deviates from just spreading out more money you come up against a brick wall of opposition, from everyone. The voters don't like it because they have arranged their lives around the status quo. The politicians don't like it because the voters don't like it, and the bureaucrats don't like it because all they know is how the program works right now and they risk getting the blame if anything changes.

So I look at the women administrators at Oberlin College -- Carmen Twillie Ambar, president; Meredith Raimondo, vice-president and dean of students; etc. -- and understand exactly what is going on. These women are idiots that have acquired their positions without a clue about what in the world a college is for and, more important, what it will have to become in the future. They are just bureaucratic numbskulls that have been carefully taught in the current culture of lefty diversity and inclusion and that is all they know.

Now, because I am a sexist, I believe that women are peculiarly ill-adapted to the governance of institutions. Their culture of complaint and their instinct for manipulation are excellent for the primary function of women, which is to keep their kids alive, and for community-of-women relationships. But women very seldom have any strategic sense -- beyond the obvious one of knowing how to manipulate personal and social relationships.

So if you are a woman administrator at a college like Oberlin you really have no idea, beyond performing the rituals set forth by your liberal predecessors. Intersectionality and diversity and inclusion and safe spaces and microaggressions are the meat and drink of a good little girl that has graduated into college administration and she has no idea, and no inkling of an idea, that she has any responsibility beyond the proper observance of the Elevation of the Host during the liberal Eucharist.

When people express their pessimism about the future of America, I instinctively agree, but I also know, because I have studied it, that rulers that have inherited their thrones -- and their courtiers too -- tend to have no idea what they are doing. They go through the motions of the celebrations of pomp and majesty and they punish dissenters and rebels, but really don't understand what they are doing at a deep level.

Now I think that the founders of the left were geniuses. Marx's idea of forming a coalition between well-born rich kids and the workers was brilliant, especially since the middle class then and now is a tolerant and kindly bunch that can be persuaded to be sorry for the folks that do the dirty work and don't get much in return. And it didn't hurt that the working class was the biggest class.

It was also brilliant for the Frankfurt School to realize that the left needed new recruits as the middle class expanded and workers started movin' on up. Thus women and minorities.

But the problem is that lefty politics doesn't really do much for its clients, other than passing out loot taken from the middle class. It is really cool, of course, for the well-born scions of the educated class, who get to staff the bureaucracy and run the universities. Not only that, but the record of the last century is unequivocal: if lefty politics actually results in a socialist state, it ends in ruin.

And lefty politics works by demonizing the middle class as white patriarchal supremacists, or whatever the pejorative du jour is.

You get to the point where the major institutions of lefty supremacy are run by scions, sons and daughters of the dynastic founders, that really don't have a strategic sense of what they are doing, and how the world really works outside their ruling-class bubble.

It is my suspicion -- nay, hope -- that we are at that point now. That the liberal elite really doesn't understand the way the world works nowadays, and that we are gong to see them flailing around helplessly as the world turns.

And so I think we are going to see more Oberlins: clueless liberal administrators flying up box canyons and terrified when they realize that there is no way out, no way back, nothing but the hope that everyone doesn't get killed when the plane crashes into the canyon wall.

Because the joke about "generals fighting the last war" is a pretty sad joke. Fighting the last war is what all of us do. All of us. even well-born liberals. It is only the crazies and the whackos that can see round corners. And usually they are wrong.