The Politician That Trumps the Race Card

In his piece today old warhorse Michael Barone rehearses the historic character of each of our political parties. Says he:

The Republican Party was formed to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed slavery in the territories... Ever since it has been centered on one core constituency of people who are regarded by themselves and others as typical Americans but by themselves are not a majority of the nation.

And the Democrats?

The Democratic Party was formed to oppose the Second Bank of the United States and support Andrew Jackson... Ever since, it has been a coalition of divergent constituencies, capable of winning robust national majorities in favorable times but being fractiously fissiparous in others.

Any questions? Well, we could repeat the line of Steve Sailer:

As a Coalition of the Fringes, the only thing that holds together the Democrats is demonizing core Americans. Without ever increasingly whipping up hatred of whites, what is there to keep the Democrats’ collection of miscellaneous identity groups from turning on each other? 

Now the interesting thing is that I, even as an immigrant, have always considered myself a typical American. It started when I found that I disliked other Brits back in the 1970s complaining about America and Americans. I found that I did not want to be around that kind of person. Now I know how to make fun of it, as the Aussies do: "Go back to Britain you whingeing Pom." By 1980 people were commenting about the fact that I had become a "rock-ribbed" Republican.

So be it. But I am not the only person in the world. And I propose to you that the main thing to know about the Trump era is that the white working class now considers itself as typical Americans.

And the recent move of the white working class to the Republican Party makes complete sense. The old white working class does not consider itself part of the fringe any more. They consider themselves typical Americans.

Of course, as Eeyore may not have said, many moons ago,  "I was pushed." The white working class was perfectly happy being the Little Darlings of the ruling class, the beneficiaries of political loot and plunder, from above-market wages to Social Security. But then came the civil rights era, and the white working class had to make room for the new girl on the block, blacks and women. So today the white working class does not derive loot and plunder from voting Democratic. Not any more. They have to share those firefighter jobs with women and minorities. And the good old lifetime union jobs are gone with the ossified management that went with them like bacon with eggs.

You can see that white working-class Americans see themselves as typical Americans by the way that President Trump speaks at his rallies. His rhetoric is pure America-boosting. If you were to think of yourself as a typical American his rhetoric would seem completely natural and physical. But if you think of yourself as someone special -- and you could be special for any one of a thousand reasons, all of them coming down to the fact that you are a hyphenated American, from educated American to Somali American -- then you think that Trump is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic and a hater.

The way that our Democratic friends keep their Coalition of the Fringes together is by teaching them to hate typical Americans. Typical Americans are all racist sexist homophobes that will, if given the chance, "send them back" to where they came from. The genius of this strategy is that it has worked, and that the worst and most embarrassing thing in the world is to be called a "racist." So today all typical Americans live in fear of being branded a "racist."

And boy, haven't our liberal friends had a field day playing that "race card" for the last 50 years!

But I predict that one fine day a politician will appear in America that will discover how to Trump the race card.

Oh my! Imagine the liberal wailing and gnashing of teeth on that day, the rending of garments, the tears, the rage, the demand for safe spaces -- the Hate!

Of course, I am a simple fellow. And I think that the fact that we have a President called "Trump" may be a portent that something is in the wind on the race-card front.

If indeed President Trump actually does Trump the race card, I will tell all my liberal friends that it is another proof of God's existence. And even a mild suggestion that God has a sense of humor.

But politics will still be the same. There will be a Republican Party of typical Americans, and politicians will appeal to us with the themes of Ain't America Great, and suggesting that those that don't like it can go back where they came. There will be a Democratic Party of the fringes, and politicians will appeal to them by wailing about their victimhood at the hands of the toxic typicals, and by playing the victim card on typical Americans.

Because, like the man said, politics is division. Into Us and Them.

"Whoever-Shows-Up" Nationalism

There's a lot of sound and fury on the right these days about nationalism. The argument is the old one about which witch is which? Which nationalism is the right one?

Is it civic nationalism, "an inclusive form of nationalism that adheres with traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights?" (La Wik)

Is it white nationalism, "a type of nationalism or pan-nationalism which espouses the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white national identity?" (La Wik)

Is it "blood and birth" nationalism, proposed by Vox Day? "Nations are not soil, they are blood and birth. Because nations are people, extended families that share genetics, language, religion, culture, and traditions." (Vox Day)

Here is what I think, I think that proper, effective nationalism is "whoever-shows-up" nationalism.

That's because I believe that every nation was forged in the blood of war and/or revolution. (Note how my "blood" is slightly different from Vox Day's blood). The cult of the nation is a cult that is put together after the formation of the nation, and its forging in the furnace of war, and the blood that was shed to win the war.

The cult of the nation is the lingering brotherhood of the men that fought in the war. And those guys would be? They would be the men that showed up and risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the conflict.

See, the nature of honor in men is the reputation for courage. So, if you are a man who has been through a nation-creating war, your reality and your reputation is the knowledge of the courage and the honor of the men that served with you, and their knowledge of your courage as you served with them in that war. And you and your comrades will come to set the tone and the narrative of the national founding. And so it always has been, and so it always should be.

But, obviously, as time goes by, the founding narrative will start to wear off, and new generations will arise, that knew not the founding generation. They will, of course, change and probably weaken the original notion of the nation that was created by the founders and their publicists. But that is life.

And so the founding narrative winds down and fragments, until another war. And then the nation will be redefined by the men that showed up.

We can see that in the founding generation that created the American Revolution, fought its war, and set up the nation of the United States of America. A telling point, I think, is that men that fought in the war were forever after known by their rank in the war. Thus, Colo. Hamilton, not Secretary Hamilton.

Same thing occurred after the Civil War, which is often called a Second Founding. President McKinley was called Major McKinley, after his rank in the Civil War.

After World War I there were tons of movies celebrating the heroes of that war, including, significantly in musicals like On Moonlight Bay, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. After the start of World War I, by the way, there were no more German Americans. They all became Americans, or else.

World War II, in my view, healed all the divisions of the 1930s, as the sons of immigrants, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Irish, you name it, were all sent off to war, and became buddies. (Note that the segregation of the armed forces meant that African Americans didn't get to be foxhole buddies with the 1900 immigrants. What a missed opportunity that was).

The most famous nation-forging operation in our modern memory is the genius foundation of Germany by Bismarck, who tricked all the various German states and statelets into joining in his three carefully calibrated victorious wars: in 1862 against Denmark; in 1866 against Austria; and in 1870 against France. At the end of it Germany proclaimed the Second Reich, a united German nation, in the very heart of France, and the palace of its absolute monarchs, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The point of these wars was not conquest; it was to unite the Germans into a single nation. The Germans subsequent problems can be attributed to the fact that Bismarck was followed by idiots that really had no understanding of what he had done and why.

So I believe that it doesn't matter who Americans are, whether they are the original founding stock, or today's "diverse" America. What matters is what happens the next time we have a war.

Of course, it is possible that the war we are talking about is the current "cold civil war." The winners will get to define what America is all about for the next 50 years.

The question will be: who shows up. They will get to define what the post-war America is all about.

"I Will Fight For You:" Politics as Protection

In the wake of President Trump's "racist" tweets against The Squad of four lefty Representatives of Color, some of the usual suspects are wishing that he would stop the insults and get down to an honest and rational discussion of the issues. As in Ben Shapiro. As in Bill Murchison.

But that misses the point. Politics is not about a rational discussion of the issues. It is about one of two things. First, what are we going to do about "those" people that want to kill us, or at least rob us of everything we hold dear? Second, after the glorious victory how are we going to distribute the loot and plunder?

Our lefty friends are perfectly clear on this. That is why they are eternally mobilized to fight the racists, sexists, and homophobes that threaten everything they hold dear. And that is why, when their candidates take a breath from promising to fight against racists, sexists, and homophobes, they promise great heaping piles of loot and plunder to their supporters, as in Medicare For All, student debt forgiveness, reparations to the descendants of black slaves, etc.

That is all. Anything that does not involve fighting for our lives or distributing the loot and plunder does not belong in politics. Here is Kshama Sawant, Brahmin from Pune and software engineer turned "socialist, feminist, and union member" running for reelection to the Seattle City Council, in her voter's pamphlet statement:

I've used my two terms in City Hall to help build powerful movements of working people to win historic victories in the face of fierce corporate opposition.

She says that "the for-profit housing market has failed us" and that is "why we're building a movement for city-wide rent control, free of corporate loopholes."

Now the point about a politician like Kshama Sawant is that to have a rational discussion of the issues would be missing the point. What Sawant wants is a fight. It would be useless to sit down with her and her activist supporters and have a rational discussion about rent control, and the price system, and how regulations and mortgage subsidies and low down payments have screwed the housing market for low-income people. People like Sawant and her supporters already have their minds made up, and the only thing left to do is to fight a war of words. After the election victory, Sawant will hand out the loot in public housing and rent control and whatnot to her supporters.

Like I said. Talking about a rational discussion of the issues completely misses the point. Discussing the issues makes sense when you are equal people sitting around a table proposing to get together to solve a problem.

But obviously you don't sit around a table if first, you are waiting to see who wins the election and will then have the power to enforce their proposal upon the rest of the people. Rational discussion makes sense only when none of the parties has the power to enforce their will upon the others or expects in the future to be able to enforce their will upon the others.

Since our lefty friends believe that politics is the way to bend the arc of history towards justice we have nothing to discuss with them. Because the question between us and them comes down to the question of power and force. They see the resolution of everything in terms of a political enforcement of their view of history. So that is the name of the game we are playing with them.

The problem with conservatism over the past half century is that we have always hoped and thought that we could sit down with our liberal friends and have a frank and friendly discussion of the issues. This is obviously not true, because, as our lefty friends make perfectly clear, we are all racist sexist homophobes -- not to mention xenophobes and haters -- who must be defeated.

OK. Then you lefties are all socialists and Commies. And, by the way, your politics is all about race and "gender" and helping migrants and refugees and victims of Islamophobia. In other words, you chaps think purely in terms of race and gender and how to fight the white supremacists and the patriarchs for justice. You guys are racists and sexists and heterophobes. And I'd say that anyone that is at all in favor of abortion on demand is a pedophobe, if "pedophobe" can be said to mean someone who is frightened to death of unwanted babies.

The point about Trump and Brexit and neo-nationalism all over Europe is that ordinary whites in America and ordinary Brits in Britain and ordinary Hungarians in Orban's Hungary are afraid. They are afraid that the current ruling class does not care for them, and is going to sacrifice them to the migrant wave that is pouring into Europe and North America from the "shithole" countries of the world. What all these people want is "protection." They want to elect a politician that will protect them and their posterity from the invaders.

What a concept! Because that is what politics has always been about. Protection.

And so, we may well think that Trump's "racist tweets" are indeed a "dog whistle." They are a dog whistle to ordinary middle-class folks that Trump is their protector and will fight to preserve their way of life from the lefties and their immigrant invaders.

For the last 50 years our liberal friends have succeeded in preventing right-wing politicians from protecting their voters, because racism. Every politician was scared silly that he would be branded as a racist. And so he cowed before the liberal bullies.

It looks as though Trump is a guy that does not cower before the liberal bullies. It looks as though Trump is willing to fight for ordinary white middle-class people. It looks as though Trump may have the cojones to throw the accusation of racism right back in the lefties' faces.

It helps, of course, that the four women of The Squad are not straight-up African American descendants of slaves. But that is beside the point. The point is that, sooner or later, a political leader will arise in America that throws the accusation of racism right back into liberal and lefty faces.

I'd say that it would be better for all of us that this leader arises sooner rather than later.

The Brits in India, Part One

On the last day of our India trip last winter, I got to go to a bookstore in a New Delhi shopping center. Nearly all the books were in English. Hmm.

But what caught my eye was a two volume epic, The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon. Hmm, I thought, and looked it up on Amazon, where it appeared as a 1,200 page single volume doorstopper, two volumes in one.

In the end I bought it from Amazon when I got back to the US, and it's been a real experience.

I started out with the idea of finding out when Indians started to develop a notion of India as a nation. In other words, when did an Indian National Movement emerge from out of the chaos of history?

The story starts with the Brit East India Company in 1705 with its trading ports at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.

The situation was that there was always a border between the Brits and some native prince, and the Brits would always find a reason to teach that native prince a lesson. When they did they would establish suzerainty over him and demand revenue to pay for the troops to garrison his state and make everything "safe." Of course, wherever the border is, the native princes beyond the border end up being a problem...

From time to time, the East India Company would have a Governor who was extra aggressive with the native princes. This happened first during the Napoleonic War when the Brits were worried about the French, especially if some native prince had a French officer as an advisor. The second time was in 1840 when the Brits started to worry about the Russian Threat, and so started a foolish incursion into Afghanistan.

But, as I say, I was wondering about the Indian national movement, and this is what I experienced.

In about 1825, some Brit noticed that the people in India didn't really like the Brits. They seemed to prefer to be ruled by their own native princes, corrupt and disorganized as they were, rather than the modern and efficient Brits.

In about 1840, the Brits started to think about internal improvements, roads, canals, even education. But they found that they didn't have any money to do it, because of the expense of the war in Afghanistan.

By about 1850, you get a Brit governor mentioning "Indian opinion" and when a legislative council was proposed they were a little taken aback when "some young Indians" saw it as "the beginning of a Constitutional Parliament in India." No, no: not what we had in mind at all, old chap.

Then there is this, during the Crimean War and the Siege of Sebastopol from 1854-55.

Educated Indians were now sufficiently awake to the outside world to follow with close interest this European war in which their masters were engaged, and ill-wishers of the British, of whom Azimullah Khan was an example, discussed with malicious glee the ill-success of British arms.

Do you see what is happening here? Under Brit rule the inhabitants of South Asia are starting to develop a national "public opinion," and the Brits are conscious of that. And the thing is that by uniting most Indians into a single state, they are in fact, willy nilly, creating an entity that could be called and experienced, by Brits and South Asians alike, as "India."

Also, about 1850, the Brits actually have in hand actual projects: to build irrigation canals -- starting with the 525-mile Ganges Canal; to build railways; and to create an education system.

Then, of course, in 1857 came the Indian Mutiny, or Great Rebellion. But what was really going on? Partly, no doubt it was this.

It was becoming increasingly evident that the now unquestionable supremacy of the British was likely to lead to the cultural extinction of the old ruling classes and feudal aristocracy, and also posed a threat to the long-established influence of the Brahmans.

Hmm. Our modern politics tends to revolve around the poor helpless victims and what "we" must do to save them. But there is also, even in the United States, the thing you are not allowed to discuss: the impact of change on the traditional ruling class. In India in 1850 it was the old feudal Nawabs and Rajahs and the Brahmins that were feeling the pinch. But you would not expect them to oppose the Brits on the grounds of the extinction of their ancient right to rule and plunder the agriculturalists. No, just as in our own day, the threatened ruling class would argue that The People would suffer, and that they were valiant champions of The People advocating valiantly to protect them from the existential peril of white supremacy of our day and the Brit imperialism of 1850. We well-born activists are doing it For The People!

The other takeaway, for me, is the power of the European nation state when compared with the feudal native princes. Throughout the story, the contrast is stark. When a European nation state, with its central banking, its access to the world credit system, its organized and disciplined army, its administrative bureaucracy, goes up against a feudal ruler that thinks no further than his feudal revenues, his harem, his succession, and the occasional raid on his neighboring prince the result is no contest.

And, of course, that is why India had to come up with a National Movement in order to deal with the Brits on their own terms. But how that happened is, no doubt, the subject of Part II of The British Conquest and Domination of India.

Was Trump's "Go Back" Tweet a Blunder?

The usual suspects are horrified that President Trump tweeted an invitation for Rep. Omar (D-MN) to go back to Somalia and fix her homeland before she tells us what to do here in the good old US and A.

Of course everyone does this. My favorite is the explanation of the meaning of "whingeing Pom," an Australian insult usually directed at Brits. The explanation on Urban Dictionary (slightly modified) 

Brit: "It's bleedin' hot 'ere in Australia"

Aussie: "go back to Britain you whingeing pom"

All good fun and let me buy you a drink afterward.

So either President Trump has sunk his chances for reelection or he has lanced the boil on the American heartland.

You know what I am talking about: The Race Card.

Because liberals have been playing the race card, woman and girl, for 50 years.

And that's odd, when you think about it, because if, with the Civil Rights Act, we have banned racism, what's the fuss about? I mean, let the racists say what they want: the law is clear. You can't discriminate against people on the basis of race. Full stop, done deal. Who cares, any more?

Well, lotsa people.

But then I thought: this is a girl thing, the Complaint Culture and "I can't believe you said that!"

And what we are talking about here is the insertion of girl Complaint Culture into politics.. And this is wrong.

Look, politics is about one thing and one thing only. Protection. Politics and government are there to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic.

But. This only affects men, because, down the ages, invasion and conquest has most closely affected men. That's because the disposition after a conquest is that the men are killed and the women are taken over by los conquistadores. Maybe the women are sold into slavery.

Example: Briseis, the queen of Lyrnessus, sacked by the Achaeans on their way to Troy. Of course the king of Lyrnessus and the three brothers of Briseis were killed. But Briseis merely became a slave, the concubine of... Well that was the problem. Did she belong to Agamemnon or Achilles?

Fast forward 2,000 years and the Vikings visiting Britain in 1,000 AD. In the fall they sailed their longships up the rivers of Britain, killed the men, took the grain, and sold the women and children in the slave market of Dublin, Ireland.

Fast forward another 1,000 years to the sack of Berlin in 1945. In A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, the German women are anxious to become the mistress of a Russian officer, rather than the other ranks, because it is safer, and, I suppose, the officers are thought to be less brutal. Or maybe this is just hypergamy at work. But, the women hid the teenage girls in the attic. The men? They were all away getting killed in the Army.

See what I am getting at here? The prime question in politics is a guy thing. Because it is the men's lives that are on the line where enemies foreign and domestic are concerned. The women? Well they will try to figure out how to survive through the holocaust.

Notice how the women's Complaint Culture is not really dealing with matters of life and death. Instead it is about calling out some woman who has stepped out of line. This means that all the questions of life and death -- of protection -- have already been solved. The only question is the hierarchical sorting out of the Mean Girls. Who will be Queen Bee and who will the whore that all decent women agree cannot be received in polite society.

When you are complaining about racism and pointing the finger at an unreconstructed racist you are arranging the deck chairs on the replacement of the Titanic. Who will get to sit next to the Duchess of Windsor on the upper deck, darling, and who must be denied entrance to the sacred royal precincts?

And this is probably always the case. You have a war or a big political battle. You win the war, or pass your comprehensive and mandatory reform bill. Now the man's work is done. Now the women get to work to decide who is in or out, who is up or down, and who needs to be disciplined for violating the comfortable consensus of the respectable women of the community.

So it is completely appropriate that the current catfight in the Democratic Caucus is about the women calling each other names. Because the important battles were fought decades ago.

But now President Trump has got into the act and said something that has offended all liberals and all women that have #WeBelieve sign in their yards. What they know is, well, "I can't believe he said that."

When someone is "offended" we are talking about girl stuff.

But I say that, at some point, some man has to step forward and lance the boil, or cut the Gordian Knot, or comment about the emperor's clothes, or just step up and snatch the Race Card off the table and tear it in two.

Somebody has to say that all this racist sexist homophobic name-calling has to stop. Because I say so!

And I suspect that it is the world-historical role of Donald J. Trump, insulter extraordinare, to do this for America in respect of the Race Card.

But I have to say, all this raises the question of what women are doing in politics at all. Because the women only show up after the basic question of do we live or die has been resolved.

And I think that the question of punishing the local whore or any other woman who steps out of the comfortable consensus of the community of women is not something that should be resolved by government force and formal politics.

The whole point of the community of women and their naming and shaming is that it is a method of social control that stops short of force and violence. So, if you ask me, mashing this culture of naming and shaming up with government force and night-sticks and so on is the first step to totalitarianism.

As the case of Briseis illustrates, the resolution of any conquest comes down to "who gets the girl." Or, if you like, who gets a share of the loot and plunder. But mixing the women's culture of complaint and naming and shaming into the division of the plunder, I think, is probably a monumental blunder.

But what do I know?

Is There a Difference Between Ethnic Politics and Identity Politics

In his latest column at NRO Jonah Goldberg is trying to draw a line between good old ethnic politics, which he says is harmless, and identity or "categorical" politics, which is not.

First, Jonah on identity politics as ethnic politics:

[T]his form of political engagement is as old as the country itself, because it’s as old as politics itself. From the Pennsylvania Dutch (who were actually Germans) to the Irish of Boston and New York, to the Scandinavians of the Midwest, various European ethnic groups engaged in politics in much the same way later waves of Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Arabs, and Hispanics have, never mind the most obvious example of African Americans.

This, he thinks, is a far cry from categorical politics,

[t]he notion that all you need to know about a person is the color of their skin still strikes me as close to the definition of racism, whether you’re talking about black people or white people or people of some other hue. If you think you know what a woman is going to say before she says a word simply because you believe all women think a certain way, you’re a sexist.

I think I see what he is trying to say here. Let me help, by making my own judgements.

Ethnic politics is the politics of people arriving in the city from the farm and forming a defensive community based on their previous identity, as members of the tribe in the old country: Germans from Germany, Irish from Ireland, Italians from Italy. It is perfectly natural and physical, and confirmed by settled science such as the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Categorical politics is when ruling-class intellectuals and politicians gussy up ethnic loyalties into an intellectual system and, as often as not, into a Saving Truth, and they use it not as a defensive system but as an offensive system, an ideology of conquest and domination.

Let us say it again. I think the difference is that when ethnic groups newly arrived in the city group together it is a natural and physical effort to band together for self-protection.

But when ruling-class intellectuals and politicians turn ethnic loyalties into a categorical system then you are facing exploitation, straight up. Because the folks in the categorized group are no longer merely banding together for self-protection. They are now Little Darlings, soldiers in the ruling-class army, and they are merely soldiers to be used, abused, and disposed of, in service to the ruling-class's power project. Hello white working class!

But we would expect this, we Hegelians, knowing that the thesis is equal and opposite to the antithesis, that the Master is very often manipulated by the Slave, and that there is no difference between the North Pole and the South Pole of the magnet. The follow-on Germans in the psych business called this  thingy "projection."

Thus we would expect that our lefty friends -- devoted unto their sacred tenure and their well-earned pensions -- would, by their devotion to the demolition of oppression and exploitation, create the most exploitative and oppressive structures in history. Their very devotion to the acquisition of power to help those ethnic groups would, by the nature of the process, create power that would dominate and oppress the very groups they turned into helpless victims.

You lefties listening? I thought not.

But what should happen? How should ethnic politics fit into our glorious modern world?

Thank you senator, I am glad you asked that.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to answer such questions with great depth of understanding and breadth of wisdom.

Obviously, the People of the Subordinate Self are the folks that naturally and physically coalesce into ethnic groups when they approach to politics. They are people that look to a leader to protect them in the terrifying new world of the city. They look to their leaders to tell them how to vote, because they are not really newspaper readers; indeed they really do not relate to the world of ideas. Not yet.

But when the People of the Subordinate Self get their city legs and learn how to wive and thrive in the city they no longer need the protection of the ethnic association. And so they become city people, bourgeois, where, as People of the Responsible Self, they understand that it is each individual's job to make himself useful to his fellow citizens, by his work skills, his contribution to civic associations, and her contribution to the network of neighborhood women. A member of the bourgeoisie, the Bürgertum, does not feel threatened by the market; he knows it is dangerous but he has learned to ride it like a surfer. So he does not need to hide from the world in his ethnic group.

Now we come to our pals the People of the Creative Self. These are people that want a bit more out of life that to merely function as responsible citizens. You can see this when considering their gods. Whereas the People of the Subordinate Self think of gods as temperamental lords rather like the earthly leaders that have their quirks that you have to deal with, and the People of the Responsible Self think of the one God as a just and wise lawgiver that tells his people the rules you need to follow to be a success in life, the People of the Creative Self understand that it is up to them to invent their own life, to create it. In this, they are like gods; it is gods that create the world. In fact they want to be as gods.

Now there are two ways to be creative and be a hero. You can be an Egoistic Hero, that comes into the world to create amazing monuments, or to lead the oppressed to liberation, or invent amazing inventions. Or you can be a Sacrificial Hero, a Christ-like figure that goes down into the underworld to encounter the evil demons in his unconscious and then, shimmering with this hard-won knowledge, he returns to the public world to explore the border between Order and Chaos, and probably die in the process.

The Left's Error, in my view, is that it has chosen the path of the Egoistic Hero, and that means that all the efforts of lefty People of the Creative Self are devoted to self-glorification. Look at me the Glorious Activist! Look at me the conquering feminist! Look at me challenging the white supremacists!

If you look at a lot of the ideas that have come out over the last century, you can make a good point that it is all about trying to figure out what a creative life means.

But what people don't really want to know is that the creative process is one blind alley, one dry hole, after another. It is not about cutting a fine trajectory in the world.

And the point about identity politics -- or ethnic politics or whatever you call it -- is that it belongs only to people just starting out in the city that do not yet feel the competence to interface directly with the market.

For People of the Responsible Self to band together and exploit the People of the Subordinate Self is wrong.

For the People of the Creative Self to systematize ethnic politics into categorical politics is not just wrong; it is evil.

But I fear that the lefty People of the Creative Self are going to find that out the hard way.

As Nietzsche says, again and again: Being a "free spirit" is hard.

When the Other Shoe Drops

The great question about life, the universe, and everything is: am I seeing reality or am I blinded by my "priors" and am therefore interpreting reality into a comfortable Matrix?

For instance, I was talking with a liberal friend who was all worried about the German "with alleged neo-Nazi ties' that murdered a German CDP politician. But in the Breitbart piece, the German police are more worried about this:

Another major issue for Berlin police has been the influence of Arab clan criminal gangs who are said to extort and threaten police officers who try and investigate their illegal activities spreading rumours of sexual impropriety with prostitutes and other threats.

Of course, this is just like the US during the great immigration before and after 1900. There were immigrants gangs up the ying-yang: Irish, Jewish, Italian, you name it.

But then they grew up to be nice middle-class suburban homeowners.

And now we have black and Hispanic gangs. Because that's what the immigrants to the city do.

So which is the problem? The neo-Nazis or the immigrant gangs?

Now we have AOC bridling at the treatment she is getting from Nancy Pelosi. Apparently Our Nance is giving Our Alex jobs to do, and she has less time for activism.

And that made me think about what happens when Our Nance retires and a POC takes over as top Dem in Congress.

See, the guys I read say that the current Democratic shtick works so long as whites don't panic. So long as whites run the Democratic Party, and whites experience themselves as the default Americans, and whites can be taught to be guilty about slavery and patriarchy and the nice gay guy next door, the current Democratic Party is doin' fine.

But what happens to nice liberal women when the Democrats in Congress are run by AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and their non-white gal pals?  The truth is that upper-class educated women have had a pretty good run for their money for the last 50 years. They have been making like they are poor helpless victims. But I tell you nice liberal white girls: to the POC women you are all Beckys (Note that La Wik does not call the term racist).

In other words, what happens when whites no longer feel safe? What happens when the white Beckys no longer feel safe? Politics is about protection, pals, and women "expect" to be protected.

When whites are just the largest racial/ethnic minority, what then? Do all the non-whites gang up on whites? Or do we get a Polar Alliance of Europeans, East Asians, and higher-caste South Asians against the Tropical Alliance? And what about Hispanics? I've heard that Hispanics think of themselves as racially white but ethnically Latino. What does that mean?

Of course, my bigger point is that you can rile up the voters in any way you want. It can be by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by class, by occupation, by religion. That's because all tribalism is fake tribalism, gussied up by political leaders looking to lead a movement. Oh, and this from Singapore guy Lee Kwan Yew:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

So the fact that, over the past 50 years, politics has developing slowly towards an open politics by race, means nothing. Politicians will divide us by something. Race, class, gender, religion. Anything will do, because that is how humans divide themselves into tribes, by gussying up some notion of "the tribe," or "the race," or "the Chosen."

There is another way of creating a fake tribe. It is the fake tribe of the Nation. That's what President Trump was doing on July 4 when he headed up a Salute to America and gave a speech in which he declared America to be the bestest country, and Americans to be the bestest people in the world. And forever after.

The point to keep in mind is that our present politics was born right after World War II when all the right people decided that we must never let the nationalist beast out of its cage. Never again.

So they built the administrative state, of the elite, by the elite, for the elite. In the best interest of us deplorables, of course. And they did civil rights, because it was the right thing to do, and then discovered that a conscious race policy and gender policy of riling up selected races and genders was good politics. For the elite. For the moment.

But now we are 50 years down the road, and things are different. The Old Guard of the Democratic Party is about to die off, and be replaced with eager graduates of the race and gender seminaries that have been carefully taught in all the doctrines of the faith, of the Great Awokening.

Yes, every army needs efficient subalterns and field officers to carry out the policy of the higher ups.

But somebody, somewhere has to have a strategic mind and see beyond the conventional wisdom and the routine training that are needed to sustain an efficient ruling class.

And I suspect that in the next few years we are going to see that the folks that inherit the Democratic Party will turn out to be complete idiots utterly unprepared for dealing with the situation that their white mentors set up 50 years ago.

In the same way that in the last few years we have seen that the folks that inherited the Reagan Republican Party turned out to be complete idiots and were replaced by Trump.

As Jordan B. Peterson says: we see the world through the lens of our values. And the brain scientists say that our brains ignore almost all the information coming in through the five senses to focus on the information that it thinks it important.

The question always is: am I ignoring the one thing I ought to be paying attention to?

And the answer is: Probably.