Yes, Democracy is a Fraud. So What?

The Zman today is expatiating on the Fraud of Democracy. "According to the political class, democracy allows for public policy to reflect the will of the people."

In reality... the parties put on a show for the voters, rarely intending to actually do what they claim. Instead, they manufacture differences between one another, so they can pretend the choice before the voters is stark.

But after the election is over, the rulers just go back to business as usual. Perfectly true. But.

But after a while the malfeasance of the ruling class -- any ruling class -- starts to have consequences. And that's where we are in the West at this time. Because government and politics -- any government and any politics -- is like a dam of fallen trees holding up the natural flow of the river. At some point the waters behind the dam will break through, and the world will change.

Yes, our ruling class in the United States is appalled by the Trump phenomenon, its whiteness, its bigotry. And they have done a lot to hold it up, to prevent the Trump agenda of reduced immigration and payback against China. And the elite is right that the Trump voters are a bunch of bigoted nationalist fools that don't know what is good for them.

Only, of course, the elite cannot see how much they have gamed the political system to benefit educated credentialed elitists like themselves. Life in great, in the United States, if you have a masters degree in anything except "studies."

But if you are the child of the white working class, and you don't have credentials up the yin-yang, then things are not that great. Because the elite has imported a lot of immigrants that are competing with you for the low-skill jobs. Because the elite has outsourced everything from car manufacture to plastic toy manufacture. OK, so you don't have a ten-point plan to get America back on track. But then who does? Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? If the agenda of President Trump for reduced immigration and tariffs on Chinese imports is pretty lame, whatabout Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal?

Back in the day the educated ruling class was delighted to enact labor laws to benefit the suffering working class, and prided themselves on the glory of the civil rights laws to help blacks and women. But for some reason today's ruling class is not much interested in the sufferings of today's white working class. They seem to think that the travails of the white working class are their own fault.

Then what about Brexit Britain? You can say that Britain will do best economically if it stays in Europe. But Europe demands that Britain import millions of immigrants from Eastern Europe, from the Middle East, and from Africa. And these low-skill immigrants are going to be competing for jobs with low-skill natives. And how about that Brit education system that is failing its most vulnerable citizens? The average Brit feels that they are being screwed.

For now, the Brit ruling class is holding off on Brexit, because it has the power to defeat the will of the people. But in the end, something's gonna change, because the average Brit feels that he is being screwed. It won't be pretty, as we can see with the current political shenanigans. And it won't necessarily change things for the better. What people want is not necessarily what they need.

The way I understand democracy is not as a logical and rational discussion of the issues, and not as the fiction that the people rule. It is a blundering, corrupt, subconscious cultural phenomenon that, as Winston Churchill said, is the worst form of government, except for all the alternatives.

So, it may be that the current Western educated elite will hold off the rubes and maintain their cultural and political hegemony for another 50 years. Or it may be that the rubes manage in some way to force some kind of political realignment. It may be that the economic policy of the educated elite will result in economic ruin, or it may be that the policy of the Trumpians and Brexiteers will result in economic ruin. Or it may be that the whole thing will dissolve into civil war.

Something's gonna change, but be careful what you wish for.

Accepting the Fact of Exile In America's Jacobin Terror

At American Greatness, Jared E. Peterson reminds us that the Democrats have gone full Jacobin. Or Leninist, or Stalinist or whatever.

Today’s Democrats condemn conservatives, traditionalists, and patriots in words chosen to promote hatred and intensify existing social divisions. Their opponents are not wrong for rationally stated reasons—they are dismissed as racists, white supremacists, white nationalists, xenophobes, homophobes, Islamophobes, climate deniers, “deplorables.”

Thus the 2020 election will be a contest like no other.

It will be a contest between those animated by loathing who pursue revolution, and those animated by affection who seek improvement. It will be a struggle for national survival against those who despise the nation and openly seek to replace both it and the descendants of its European founders and later immigrants.

For the Democrats, it is a battle against "whiteness." David Cole writes about an Amazon movie The Aeronauts based on the real-life story of a man who saved himself and in compadre from death in a balloon.

Above cloud level, at unprecedented heights, Coxwell, fighting to stay conscious, bravely climbed up the balloon’s rigging to release the blocked valve that was preventing descent. Oh, and he released it with his teeth while holding on for dear life with both hands.

In the movie, this death-defying heroism is done by a woman. I don't think so. Same with James Cameron's Avatar where the girl helicopter pilot joins the dissidents and uses her helicopter to hide the Avatar machines from the evil Marine general. Wouldn't have happened. Girls just don't do stuff like that. Instead, they insist on safe spaces, freedom from microaggression, and how they feel offended.

But the question is: what do we do about it? Beyond winning the 2020 election?

The Zman writes about the situation of the dissident. The natural resort of dissidents, at first, is to seek access to the institutions "to make their case." But what if that doesn't work, and that, as now, we conservative nationalist dissidents are all dismissed as racists etc. as above? In that case, the dissident is facing "exile" like the Puritans:

[The Puritans] began as reformers of the English church, but eventually ended up as exiles. They were not only exiled from the church, but from English society and eventually their country. As a result, Puritanism was able to develop into a fully formed and independent set of religious and social beliefs. Puritanism probably could not have survived if not for the exile of its adherents.

That is what is facing us "normals" or "deplorables" or "white supremacists." Or whatever. It will no longer do to live as the Outer Party to the Democrats' Inner Party, living by the grace and favor of the Inner Party deep state. We have to develop an "independent set of religious and social beliefs." And this set of beliefs must, at a minimum, put the current Jacobins of political correctness and identity politics on trial as enemies of all that is good and true.

Of course, this is what my whole life is about. I define the broad nature of the people in our society with my reductive Three Peoples theory, where I characterize our current educated ruling class as People of the Creative Self that have defined the ordinary bourgeois People of the Responsible Self as the enemy, the essential political "other." I define the Progressive world view as the Great Reaction, where socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, and identity politics is neo-tribalism. And I try to pull a solution together in my Perfect Plan.

My idea is that we all of us have something of serfs in our personality: we want someone to take care of us. So there will always be some sort of welfare state. Most of us, however, possess the bourgeois culture of responsibility, that we should each set our own course within the framework of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. So there must be a market economy that makes us all adjust to the price signals of the consumers.

The big problem is our creative class that believes in their miraculous role to effect the transformation of the world according to their vision of the anointed. Yes, perfectly understandable, but monstrously evil if it includes the utter demonization of the ordinary deplorable People of the Responsible Self.

And this is especially evil since the clear tendency of capitalism is to encourage and reward people for being responsible and cooperative.

Clearly, it is the nature of the People of the Creative Self to get into religious and cultish enthusiasms from time to time and want the utter transformation of society, right now, as did the Jacobins. Here in the United States they did it in the Sixties. It took Republicans winning four out of five presidential elections in a row to cure them of that, for a season in 1992. But Barack Obama triggered a new Reign of Terror and Virtue against the deplorables of the Responsible Self.

Despite all this, the fundamental datum of human existence is the necessity to return again and again to the basic task of wiving and thriving, putting the next generation on the ground and feeding it and keeping it alive until it leaves the nest. That is all the ordinary people of the earth ever wanted and all they ever will want.

It is up to us to teach our betters about this truth. Otherwise they will consume the earth in the terrible wrath of their genius and their conceit that they are the Chosen Ones that have come to lead us to the Promised Land.

The Left Led the Workers into a Wilderness

On Labor Day we honor the workers, those who toil that we may live. But on this day I wish to raise the question of the betrayal of the workers, by those that claimed to love them and give them the justice and respect they deserved.

I am talking about the Left.

We see throughout the West that the old working class championed by the Left for over 150 years is coming on hard times. Many have blamed the global corporate elite, and they are probably right, in part.

But I wish to advance the notion that the miseries of the old working class and the lower middle class today is a direct result of leftist politics. The Left seduced the working class with glorious promises of love and security; but it led the working class into the wilderness.

What the working class needed in the early 19th century in the maelstrom between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution was a Road to the Middle Class. Instead it got a neo-feudalism.

The problem with feudalism, from the point of view of the serfs, was that they were helpless before the power of their lords. They enjoyed, indeed, an informal right to live and grow food on the lord's land, but only at his convenience. There were, you may say, two understandings between lord and serf. The first was that the lord would allow the serf and his descendants to live, to wive and thrive, on the lord's lands, in perpetuity. The second was that the peasant would be protected from raiders and plunderers.

The truth is, however, that these understandings were, like everything in life, merely empty promises. The serf got to live on the lord's land so long as it was convenient for the lord. When the lord could make money with "improvements" he kicked the peasant off his land. When the lord could no longer enlist the peasant in his private army, then he pretty quickly got rid of the extra mouths to feed.

The central fact of the dilemma of the modern working class is that the rising educated class has used the working class as its foot-soldiers in its war to rule the world. And now the working class is no longer useful in the ruling-class power project. So the educated ruling class has abandoned the working class.

What the working class needed, as it became a "thing" in the 19th century, was to learn how to thrive in the culture and the economy of the city. The fact is, as I explored in my Road to the Middle Class that you need to acquire the culture of the middle class if you want to thrive in the city. There is no reposing upon your patch of land. In the city the economy changes all the time and you need to change with it. And this means that you must acquire the middle class culture of adaptability and responsibility. In my book I identified four cultural markers of the middle-class culture: religion, education, law, and mutual aid. You must acquire one of the Axial Age religions that teach you your responsibility before God's creation and God's law; you must acquire education in the skills that will make you useful, and thus employable, by your fellow citizens; you must learn and acquire the culture of law, the settlement of disputes by judges rather than vengeance; and you must enter into the culture of mutual aid, that thrived in the 19th century where very ordinary people banded together in lodges and societies like the Masons and the Elks to insure themselves against the uncertainties of life in the city.

What happened in the 19th century is that the rising educated class adopted the working class as its special project, and made the working class into its "little darlings." In return for becoming its neo-serfs, the underlings of the new class of political activists and administrative state experts, the new neo-feudal ruling class declared that it would protect the working class from the rigors of the market economy.

In other words, instead of becoming independent and adaptable to the changing trends and technological and market changes in the industrial economy, the working class became utterly dependent on the beneficence of the great Oz. And the day came when the working class no longer mattered to the political project of the educated class.

You might think that wage and hour laws and labor union laws universally benefit the working class, but you would be wrong. Perhaps the worker wants a more flexible arrangement than the 8-hour day. Or perhaps he would be willing to work for nothing to learn his employer's business. Or perhaps he would prefer to obtain health care outside the employer's benefit system. It might seem that labor unions universally protect the worker from the employer. But labor union agreements tend to privilege existing workers and protect them from competition. They encourage workers to think they have a job for life. They encourage workers to plunder their employer. The truth is that all life is contingent, and we must all adapt to the changes or die. To erect wage and hour laws and union protection panders to a mirage, that we can wish away the unalterable contingency of all life on this Earth.

You might think that free government education is an unalloyed good. And yet government education has become a huge and dysfunctional structure that is almost impossible to change. And it caters to current ruling-class conventional wisdom. What kind of education does the kid of a single-mother in a black ghetto need? Anybody ask her? What kind of an education does the child of a unionized factory worker need? Anybody ask? How useful is a college degree? For a child of privilege? For a kid that wants to be a programmer? Or a web designer? Should people start working at age 8, as of old? At 12? At 16? At 25 as a kid with a masters degree might? A century ago conventional wisdom in the educated class was that children should be eduacted to become tractable factory workers. That's what universal high-school education was all about. Is that a good idea? Has it been good for the children of factory workers? The truth is that education is a tributary of the ruling class; it is intended to confer rewards on the supporters of the adminstrative state. If it educates children, so much the better. But educate them for what?

You might think that the welfare state combination of old-age pensions and health care and unemployment benefits and industrial accident insurance is an unalloyed benefit. Except that the government collects the money and uses any surpluses for its own agenda.

Suppose all contributions to welfare-state benefits were owned by the individual beneficiary? In other words, for Social Security, you would have an actual account with Fidelity or Vanguard, and your current contributions to FICA, presently 6.2 percent of your wages from your employer and 6.2 percent of your wages from you would now be deposited every payday in your personal account and would grow over the years according to the laws of compound interest. Then, when you retired you could decide whether to take your pension out of the income of your account or to purchase an annuity. If you decide to live off the interest, then your children would inherit the balance of your retirement account.

Whatabout retirement health care? If you determined how to save for health care in your retirement years you could determine whether you wanted heroic care to keep you alive into your nineties, or whether you wanted minimal care. You tell me. Under present law, the ruling class decides what sort of health care seniors get, one size fits all.

Whatabout unemployment? Suppose instead of the current system, where the government collects money from your employer and distributes unemployment benefits as the mood takes it, you had your own unemployment account, paid into by your employer and backed up by a government insurance plan in case you lost your job and emptied your unemployment account. Perhaps you could use the money that had accumulated to start a business, or buy a house, or educate your children. Why not? Because some people would abuse it? But you wouldn't abuse it, so why do you have to be denied access to your savings, because "we" know better? In any case, big time unemployment events, like the Great Depression and Great Recession are really failures of government not of individuals, so why should you individually have to bail out the government and its follies?

My point is that the welfare state has been great for the ruling class: by, for, and all about the ruling class. It has handed out benefits to people, and earned their undying gratitude. Only, of course, the money originally belonged to the people; the ruling class is buying the loyalty of people using their own money sequestered away in government accounts and spending programs that the ruling class uses for its power projects rather than actually helping people.

And now the ruling class is tired of the working class. It has gone on to bid for the loyalty of others: women and minorities. But the game is the same. Offer to protect the people, and then charm them with benefits paid out of their own taxes, and pretend you are doing them a favor.

I say that every ruling class is basically in it for the power. They don't care about people like you. They only care about acquiring power. That's why it is probably best to confine governments to basics, like defending the people against enemies foreign and domestic. Everything else ends up with the government buying our support with our own money. Or, worse, buyin our support with other peoples' money.

Let me put it this way. Whenever the government is buying your support with free stuff it is only temporary, like wages paid to soldiers. When the time comes that you are no longer interesting, because the votes of people like you are no longer interesting to politicians, then look to your own resources rather than the help of government.

Dems That Believe the Talking Points

How should we understand the current Democratic presidential campaign? The crazy promises ranging from Medicare For All to student debt forgiveness to slave reparations to the Green New Deal? At the current stage it does not seem to be offering strategically pitched items of loot, but something more existential.

I think that the way to understand the Democratic campaign is as a religious festival. As sacrifices to the gods. And as the promise of Paradise. Take the climate change issue. Tucker Carlson:

Do you really think Nancy Pelosi believes climate change is an existential crisis? Of course, she doesn't think that. Plus, she flies private. Obama can say whatever he wants about carbon emissions. He can shake his chin and be concerned, but when you're spending 15 million of your own dollars on a beachfront estate on Martha's Vineyard, you're not too worried about the oceans rising. But the Democratic base doesn't get the joke. Democratic primary voters believe the talking points.

That's the point. Belief. "Democratic primary voters believe the talking points." Yes, actually believe the blandishments of politicians and the passionate declarations of activists. But why?

It comes down to the basic truth, that everyone has a religion, a way of coming to grips with "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." And everyone has that basic fear, that is so cunningly expressed in the notion of Original Sin, that we humans are basically flawed, that the world as we know it is coming to an end, and that something must be done, something dramatic, to prevent the End of the World.

But most people do not -- why, they cannot -- individually conduct a spiritual quest to determine, for themselves, what life means for themselves. To do that, they would have to read a book. Instead they rely on religious experts -- priests, evangelists, inspirational teachers -- to do the heavy lifting, and plump for one of the prefabricated religious doctrines on offer. I was just reading a Zman take on that; he writes about ageing baby-boom women and their "various self-actualizing fads." Religious cults, by any other name.

I think that we experience this feeling in different ways at the different stages of life. Take the eternal problem of the End of the World. As young'uns we fear that the older generation will wreck the world before we get our chance. Getting older as parents we worry that the world will come to an end before our children establish their place in the world. As we get older still we worry that the world as we have known it will come to an end before our death. Or, as John Derbyshire reports of his working-class mother's thought on her deathbed: "At least I knew England when it was England." At that point, you know your world has ended, but at least you had experienced it in its glory.

Now, our Founding Fathers, like many wise heads of their era, understood that this religious experience of the End of the World exists uneasily with government and politics. That's because their generation experienced as disastrous all the religious wars in Europe of the previous century. They wondered how to relieve the tension between existential religious fears and hopes and the mundane question of who has political power to knock people over the head for breaking the peace.

So they came up with the notion of the Separation of Powers and the Separation of Church and State. To express it in terms that our liberal friends used to to be able to understand, the Founders wanted to make it difficult to "legislate morality."

Of course, in the event, it is impossible to separate law and morality, because morality is implied in every law passed by a legislature or legal decision promulgated by a court of law. But at least the notion of the separation of church and state recognizes that there is a problem, that there are other people out there with a different view of the meaning of life. It expresses the notion that, while the view held by many other people is obviously wrong, still, there is a need for people of different views to get along, if they can.

The trouble is, of course, that there is always a new enthusiastic religious cult coming on the scene with an apocalyptic view of life that knows that, unless we act now, we are all doomed. We know these religious cults by the identities of their enthusiasts: Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Fascists, Nazis, Maoists, Environmentalists, Climate Activists. We wise ones aggregate them under the heading "totalitarian," meaning the recombination of politics and religion into a single millennarian movement.

It's understandable. In my view the notion that the world is not coming to an end, that we should not all act now to prevent the Second Fall, that there are not Evil Forces that need to be smashed is a world view of almost unimaginable nobility and sophistication, completely inaccessible to the average member of the Democratic base that never read a book.

In other words, the idea that life is always in existential tension, that the meaning of life is always going to be uncertain and unresolved, that there is both good and evil in every human heart, that in the end we must just keep on keeping on: this is a world view that few can hope to attain.

And meanwhile there is always another generation grasping impatiently on a new religious cult that promises redemption from the intolerable burden of a Fallen World.

I suspect that the cult of redemption tends usually to be an upper-class thing, a conceit of people that have it made, or almost made.

In the terms of my Three Peoples theory, I would say that the People of the Subordinate Self only get restless when reacting to immediate problems like the loss of a job, or a collapse of the economy. In that situation they strike out like cornered rats. They are not looking for redemption, just the chance to live another day.

The People of the Responsible Self tend to think of setbacks and perils through the lens of personal responsibility and their existing religious beliefs that prompt them to work out what a responsible person should do in the present emergency. Come what may, they are already "saved" or redeemed by their Redeemer. So their response to existential peril is likely to be measured and rational.

It is the People of the Creative Self that are likely to respond to existential crisis with a new religious cult. For them the temptation is always there to use their creative talent to make the world anew. They do this because they are people that imagine they have the power to "make a difference" in the world. You would too if you thought that you had the brains and the truth to set the world to rights.

Obviously, politicians are no fools. Their métier is to know how to push peoples' buttons and turn them into supporters, even true believers. What every Democrat running for president knows is that their base is panting for a leader to lead them out of the Land of Trump, where every firstborn is in danger of -- well, something or other -- into the Promised Land of peace and justice, and on the way to vanquish the monsters of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

See? Nothing has changed. We humans are eternally slaves of the Pharaohs, eternally hoping for the Messiah to save us from the hell of the present. And eternally threatened by evil monsters.

Especially educated members of the Democratic base.

Shakespeare and Austen: Things They Never Told Me

I am swinging through Britland with my daughter, with stops in Stratford and Bath. And I am learning things I never knew.

For instance, I now understand why the ordinary Brit Bill of Stratford could write about Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida. It's because of the school he attended at the Guildhall in Stratford.

See, back in the 1570s, a kid like Bill, son of the local glover, could go to work, at age 8, or he could go to the free school at the Guildhall.

Here's how the school worked. There was a master, paid 20 pounds a year, and about 40 to 60 students. These students sat on forms -- that is boxes that contained the beer they would drink during the day -- by age. The youngest boys sat on the First Form, the next youngest on the Second Form, all the way up to the Sixth Form. British schools are still organized on this model.

Back in those days the instruction was entirely verbal, because paper was so expensive. So students learned their Latin and arithmetic and multiplication tables verbally. Also, the master did not teach them all the time. How could he when there were 60 kids from 8 to 16? So most of the instruction was from the older boys to the younger boys. And if a younger boy didn't know something, he would apply to an older kid for help. Studies show that people remember 90 percent of what they teach.

Since the kids were learning Latin they were also learning Classical history.

So now I know how it was that Shakespeare, a nobody from Stratford-on-Avon, could write plays about Roman history. He had a remarkable education from the local guildhall school, and thus knew about all that stuff.

I asked the chap telling us about all this where he got his information. He said it came from a book, The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham. It is available on Google Books and elsewhere. I will be checking it out.

But I want to know: how come I didn't know this? And how come such a system worked, at such a low expense? And how the students learned all this stuff, even though there was no paper and no textbooks?

And how come our present system is a total failure even though it is drenched in money and teachers? How come a schoolmaster paid £20 per year could educate 60 boys without a scrap of paper? And how come the kids could come out with a serious knowledge of the classics? Seriously, how come?

Now, my theory of education is that kids should be chucked out of school at about 11 or 12 and told to get a job, or an apprenticeship. The ones that wanted to continue in school would have to crawl on their knees over broken glass begging to be allowed to stay in school. You can see that the system in Shakespeare's time was not all that different. Only in those days you started work at 8 unless you could get yourself enrolled in school.

The guild school had a punishment day, Friday, on which all defaulters would be "birched" or beaten with a bundle of birch twigs. But here's the thing. You could redeem yourself by good behavior in the interval between your infraction and the Friday birching ceremony. What a concept!

It's interesting that our entire knowledge about early education comes from Dickens and Dotheboys Hall and Mr. Creakle and Dr. Wackford Squeers. What if education in former times was nothing like Dickens' notions? What indeed.

Then we went on to Bath, location of Jane Austen novels like Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Jane spent several years in Bath, four years in the house of her father who had moved there after retiring as a parish priest, several more years in reducted circumstances after his death in 1805.

Here is what shocked me. The Pump Room is right next to Bath Abbey, quite an imposing church. But I never recall reading about the Abbey. Just a hundred yards away from the Pump Room and the Abbey is the river Avon. How come Jane Austen never mentioned the river? She lived in Sydney Place, just across the river from the Abbey and the Pump Room, so would have frequently crossed the bridge across the river Avon.

But another mystery was solved. Sir Walter Elliott, father of Anne Elliott the heroine of Persuasion, lived in Camden Place. There is no Camden Place in Bath, according to Google Maps. But, on a map of Bath in 1800 there is a Camden Place. It is close to what is now Camden Crescent. So we are to assume that there has been a lot of demolition and building in Bath. Which is odd, because you would think that Bath emerged complete and entire like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus and has remained pure and entire ever since. Apparently not, although the terraced houses of the Circus and the Royal Crescent are still as magnificent and entire as they ever were. Only today they are mostly broken up into flats.

I'd talk about our visit to Stonehenge, only we bailed out after we found that the entrance fee was £34. So we took off for London and took a photo from the road. Back in my day little kids could run in and out of the stones; my dad took movies of me to prove it. But now visitors are kept at a distance. Because preservation.

What a world!

Understanding the Left

The Zman is trying on ideas to understand the left. Is it just a bunch of cat ladies? Is it a plot to undermine white-created society?

Or is it an assault on "rationality and order," using the idea that the world is a "narrative of opinion?"

But if that is the case then

If race is a social construct, then diversity must also be a social construct. In fact, it is irrational, as what would be the point of decorating an organization with things that do not exist? That also means so-called hate speech is a social construct, as it is rooted in the belief in racial and ethnic differences. If those differences are imaginary, then hate speech is imaginary as well.

Of course it doesn't matter because whatever social construct the left comes up with is treated by them as the truth, whereas other peoples' constructs are treated as racist sexist homophobic lies.

So the whole thing depends on the ability of the left to control the conversation.

Now I think that it is a mistake to imagine that anyone's world view is based on "rationality and order." It is all based on some narrative opinion, some notion, upfront, of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

Every world view is based on the situation of humans that, as self-conscious beings, we are able to construct a view of the world, and then marshal knowledge and "rationaliity and order" that seem to us to explain the world and what comes next.

We conservatives have a world view that is based on the notion that we do not know what heaven on earth would look like. Because we believe this we believe that religion and government should be separated, that religious world views should not have the power to use government to enforce their world views.

Indeed we believe that there is only a limited amount that government can do to make a better world.

But our lefty friends believe that with political power they can make the "arc of history bend towards justice." So every lefty action is devoted to the notion of using political power as an agent of justice. Part of that strategy involved delegitimizing other world views in any way possible. So it doesn't matter what they say about other people, how many people they deplatform, if it brings us a step closer to justice and equality.

If you believe that your political beliefs represent The Way to truth and justice then it makes complete sense to push aside people that disagree with you, to accuse them of being worse than Hitler. For they are roadblocks on the road to justice.

Now my belief is that the lefty idea that political power is the royal road to justice is the problem. Political power is only useful for defending us against enemies, people that wish to use force on us.

But once that is achieved, we believe, there is not a lot that government can do to make the world a better place. And the point of the Founders and the thinkers that inspired them is that the thing to do is to create limitations on the use of government power, to make it difficult for anyone to use government power to alter the arc of history. Because the idea that the arc of history is moving towards justice if it agrees with your ideas is baloney.

Anyone can come up with a vision of a better world, and anyone can imagine that, with him in charge and the naysayers out of the way, that we could abolish poverty and injustice in short order.

And that is the problem with the left. Lefties have the naive idea that they are the good guys, period. And so we ought to do what they want. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in one aspect, they have got it wrong. How would we know? What would we do about it? What mechanism would there be for rolling back a program that, despite good intentions, does not achieve what it promised?

Supposing some Koch Brother came up with a critique of a lefty program. How would he get the lefty government to give it some consideration? Then how would the lefty government deal with the fact that it considers all Koch Brothers and their ilk as un-redeemable?

The fact is that humans are not good at taking correction from people they believe are evil, as lefties believe the Koch Brothers are evil.

Reduced to its essential, the best way to understand the left is as a religious group, a cult, with a vision of paradise on Earth. It wants government power to legislate its moral vision and enforce it on the rest of humanity.

Well, the left has been pretty good at realizing that if some Christian group tried that it would be disastrous. That is why lefties are very strong on opposing any attempt to "legislate morality."

But the beginning of wisdom is to understand that it is wrong for anyone to "legislate morality." Anyone can see that when the other guy legislates morality is is a Bad Thing. But only a wise fool can see that when I legislate morality I am just as bad.

That is why the government governs best that governs least. Because it will mean that the government is doing very little in the line of legislating morality, and imposing its moral view on other people.

Try convincing a lefty friend of that. You can't, because he believes that his belief is a saving truth and only racist sexist homophobes could or would disagree. And since anyone that disagrees with him is evil à la lanterne with them!

Trying to Put Multiculturalism on the Stage

Last night I saw As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon from the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was as multicultural as you like, with a black Orlando, a vaguely non-white Celia, a woman Jaques, a black female Silvius, and thus a lesbian thing with Phoebe. And deaf or dumb Audrey who needed another character to interpret her sign language.

Oh and there were minor parts for a South Asian and and East Asian.

Really, considering the effort that went into providing satisfaction for the progressive political community it is amazing that the production team had any creative energy left for the play itself.

But it was great fun and My Girl Rosalind was delightful.

I get the problem. As You Like It is about the travails of a bunch of rich kids involved in family power and inheritance problems. The only character in the least bit modern, and the least bit non-patriarchal-white-supremacist is Jaques, the professional pessimist reciting his Seven Ages of Man.

Do you see the problem faced by our lords and masters in the educated ruling class? The great cultural monuments that the 50-ish white woman wants to go see are all about white culture, and often pre-industrial revolution white culture at that. The issues and concerns of the left have no place, were not even thought of back in those days. What's a woke theatre creative to do?

Well, they do what they did with As You Like It here in Stratford in 2019. And I got to see an As You Like It by the semi-pro Seattle Shakespeare Company earlier in the year. They too had a couple of reversed genders. Just to maintain their street cred in the theater community.

What these chaps really want to do is the musical version of The Boy in the Dress, "the story of a twelve-year-old boy who enjoys cross-dressing, and the reactions of his family and friends." Hey, whaddya know, RSC is doing just that this summer.

Actually, I get it. My reductive Three Peoples theory gets it. What our educated class wants these days is to be "creative." And the easiest thing to be creative about is sex. Let's ring all the changes, and the more it épates the bourgeoisie the better.

But here is my thing. What we need today is not navel-gazing by the educated class and their bribed apologists in the theater community. What we need is cultural product that explores much more the situation of the ordinary middle class in the 21st century. Not to mention the immigrant community.

What does it mean, today, living in the world of the flyover middle class, scorned and abandoned by today's educated class? What does it mean to be an immigrant to the developed west, torn between your ancestral culture, the business workaday culture and the political culture? Your ancestral culture still tugs at you and seems to be a safe place but it isn't; the workaday trust and customer-oriented culture of work and business is something that you need to master in order to make it in the city but it is frightening; and the political culture offers all kinds of temptations and short cuts, which all come with a hidden cost, that you are cannon fodder for the various political power factions in the society.

And where are the satires of modern life, satirizing all the sacred cows of the educated ruling class? Why aren't we assailed from morning to night with penetrating satires of abortion activists, LGBT organizations, journalists, NGO activists, AntiFa, woke Google employees, idiotic tweeting celebrities, and so on? How about a satire on the modern university and its feminized bureaucracy? How about a searing look at K-12 education, that looks at the insanities of failing to educate inner-city black children? Why is it that movie villains can only be white military officers and white businessmen?

Look, I get it. The reason we have the currrent "divided country," and that everyone on the left is spitting cotton, is that the left's Great Reaction is failing everywhere. But, as is the way with all cultures, the first and second encounter with failure only prompt the culture leaders to call for a bigger effort, a Big Push, in the language of World War I, an extra effort to get the team over the goal line.

It cannot be true that the whole endeavor is heading for disaster, that its glorious vision metastasizes into misery wherever it is tried. That realization doesn't come till later, till the gutters are running with blood, till the day before Thermidor.

Now, as you know, my Three Peoples theory has an exact prescription for all our ailments, and it should be taken daily.

For the People of the Subordinate Self, the prescription is to learn the trust and service culture of the city and of Axial Age religion, to graduate from the tribal and hierarchical culture of the agricultural age to the trust and responsibility culture of the city.

For the People of the Responsible Self, the prescription is to step out a little beyond the comfort of merely obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules, and dare to do something a bit dangerous.

For the People of the Creatie Self, the prescription is to understand fully the Hero's Journey, that it starts with the terror of the descent into the underworld of the unconscious, and it ends not with glorious success and the adulation of the multitude, but with a Sacrificial Death, pointing out the Way along the borderlands between Order and Chaos: dying that others may live.

Now, imagine if our theater and arts community was writing plays and movies about the meaning of life, the universe and everything informed by the wisdom of the Three Peoples theory.

That would a a world of wonders.