Disagreeing with the Zman

I like to disagree with the Zman because, I suppose, he is plowing the same field as I am, only with a different plow and a different tractor. Not that much different, of course.

Today he is talking about the ineffectiveness of the right in countering the left.

The Democrats figure out how to get a majority and push through some reforms, which never work as intended or satisfy the base. The majority falls apart and the Republicans come in to preserve the real reforms, while cleaning up the collateral damage and telling their base they plan to roll all of it back. This never happens, of course.

But, I would say, this is not because the Republicans don't want to roll it all back. It is just that, since

government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the people to reward its supporters

the Republicans have a problem. If you want to roll it all back you are going to make the supporters of the Democrats, the guys that got "rewarded" for voting Democrat, really mad. And in politics you don't want to do that. You want to motivate your own supporters to vote and you want to demoralize the supporters of the other side or put them to sleep.

That is why I say that it is impossible to reform a government program -- or the welfare state. The whole point of government programs is to hand out loot and plunder to your supporters. But the second after anyone gets a government check they decide they deserve it. So to take the check away is to take away something that the recipient is convinced he deserves.

This is why the only way to end government programs is in a general breakdown of law and order and the economy, after a losin war or a hyperinflation, so that people are worried about much more than the continuance of their checks.

The Zman represents our current politics as a dance between reformers and restorers, reformers trying to bring on a bright future through government programs and restorers trying to bring things back to the good old days. But now the restorers are losing credibility and a radical revolutionary right is appearing. And this legitimizes a radical revolutionary left.

My line is that the reformer left is running out of plausible plunder to offer the broad middle of the voters. If you have already provided pensions, health care, and education, then you are running out of new goodies to offer. Thus, the Democratic presidential candidates are proposing not just loot and plunder but radical ideas to overturn the present order, because that is all that is left to offer. And the Radical Right is reacting to an obvious attempt to name and shame and ostracize them, which merely encourages more extremism.

My belief is that the current annoying divide between a radical left and a radical right will continue, with the average American in the middle demanding a continuance of his or her benefits. This will continue until we run out of other peoples' money.

Note that President Trump is appealing to the middle that just wants things to continue. So he promises to Make America Great Again while not touching Social Security and Medicare. This is a cunning strategy that will work until Social Security and Medicare run out of money.

But what will come next? Well, that is where my Three People theory comes in. I'd say that it will be a contest between radicals of the People of the Creative Self, the Educated Youth that has been demanding the right to create the world in their own image for the last 170 years, and the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class that just wants the right to wive and thrive and serve their fellow humans without being bossed around too much by the swells. I'd say the whole thing will turn on which of the two radical movements, one Creative and one Responsible, manages to earn the trust and followership of the People of the Subordinate Self.

The big question is who will the People of the Subordinate Self consist of? Clearly, the People of the Creative Self have been trying to import a new Subordinate class so they can continue just as they are, imposing upon America their religion of creativity for themselves and subordination for the rest of us. And we Responsibles have been trying to head them off at the pass.

So I believe that the key is a New Right that is based upon the notion of the fundamental injustice of a creative class that believes in the absolute right for them to refashion society according to their vision of justice. The whole point of revolution is to run on injustice. A wise ruling class understands that however blind and bigoted and superstitious the plebs may be, a ruler still needs to patronize and flatter them. A foolish ruling class believes that it has the right and duty to eliminate all beliefs and people that stand in the way of bending the arc of history towards justice: i.e., injustice.

I believe that the solution to all our woes is for the creative class to learn a bit of tolerance for the folks that aren't quite and wise and evolved and educated as them. But I am confident that it will not learn this lesson except by the hard way, as is usual in human affairs.

So it is up to the rest of us to stick it to the Man and tell 'em to put it where the sun don't shine.

Forget 1619 NYT. Learn About 1917

One of the things our liberal friends want to ram down our throats, as evidenced by the New York Times "1619 Project," is that the United States was born and raised on slavery and racism.

Of course, the interesting story is not that, in 1619, North Americans from northern Europe were racist and introduced the first slaves from Africa into North America. The interesting question is why slavery and racism should have become a scandal. I would say that slavery became a scandal not later than 1800 and racism became a scandal around 1900.

The question is "why?" I have a short, Nietzschean, answer to that. It is because slavery and racism Do Not Pay. Yes, yes; I know. The issue is much more complicated than that, but still...

Now let us talk, NYT girls and boys, about something much more important: 1917. Anyone want to guess what I am talking about?

I am talking about the Bolshevik Revolution that enslaved the entire Russian people (and other non-Russians in the Russian Empire). If you want to talk about slavery, how about the Soviet Union, the second biggest slave state in history?

What? Only the second biggest slave state in history? So what was the biggest? Really, do you have to ask? I am talking about Maoist China, that enslaved the glorious Chinese people in one of the greatest crimes of history.

Get it NYT? Slave State #1: Maoist China. Slave State #2: Soviet Union. Total dead as a result of Communism, according to The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Cortois et al., 100 million men, women and children. Population of the world in 1950, the heyday of the Communist states. was 2.55 billion. So the death toll of Communism was approximately four percent of the total world population.

So how does the United States rank with those two slave states? You tell me, pal.

Another thing, NYT. Those two slave states, the greatest slave states in human history, were not just socialist, or Communist. They were national socialist states. That is to say that they were both self-consciously about "socialism in one country." I thought you guys were nothing, if not anti-fascist.

Hye NYT. How about a "1917 Project" all about the great slave states of the 20th century.

And now we have the comical tweet you NYT chaps sent out on Twitter on 9/11 (and have since deleted):

18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.

Hey NYT. How about a "9/11 Project" all about how educated liberals in the United States rammed 9/11 down the memory hole just as soon as journalistically possible.

You know, back in the day, NYT, your national socialist pals in the Soviet Union -- hey, remember NYT chappie Walter Duranty that said of the Ukraine famine in the 1930s, nothing to see here, move right along -- and your national socialist pals in Maoist China -- hey and in NYT's Herbert Matthews' beloved Castroite Cuba -- used to send people to "re-education camp." Do you think that maybe some of the folks in your Twitter unit need a spot of re-education, to purge them of the folly of their woke lefty stupidities?

Of course, I am not talking about a real "re-education camp" of the kind presently universal in our glorious US universities where youngsters are prepared for a life of debt slavery for the glorious necessity of keeping all the diversity and inclusion administrators and deputy diversion and inclusion administrators in work. Oh no. I just think that you should send some of the good little boys and good little girls presently working at the NYT -- that have been carefully taught from year to year in their little ear to hate and to fear the good old US and A -- to Seattle so they can have coffee with me. Maybe I could teach them something, or maybe not. Because, after all, those good little boys and good little girls at the NYT know which side their bread is buttered, ideologically speaking.

Hey! I was driving south on Highway 99 and there was a guy, a white guy, by the side of the road peacefully protesting with a TRUMP RACIST sign. This on the day before Trump lifts the ban on federal funding for faith-based historically black colleges. As Ed Driscolll notes on Instapundit: "WORST. RACIST. PRESIDENT. EVER." I get the guy's point. Whatabout the non-historically-black-faith-based-colleges?

But back to my original point. Why is it that we have put slavery, universal throughout the world until the day before yesterday, behind us?

Inquiring minds want to know. You chappies at the NYT might want to start an "1863 Project." For it was on January 1, 1863 that the US President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

See, I think the big queston is why slavery became a scandal, and why good little boys and good little girls at the New York Times know to say "Eeuuww" when the topic of slavery comes up.

Our Ruling Class Does Too Have a Religion. And How.

Here is the Zman bewailing "The Collapse of Authority." He means an authority that decides things.

The cancer eating away at the modern West is a lack of authority to which people can point to judge public policy, public debate on those polices, as well as the reactions to those policies and debates. As a result, debate has degraded into various camps striking poses, usually by signaling their unhappiness with the pose of other camps in the public sphere. The lack of an agreed upon authority means there is no way to judge the merits of any claim. Instead, it leaves force to resolve disputes.

But the reason that there is no authority is that we deplorables are contesting the authority of the current ruling class's religion. And they are striking back at us, trying to marginalize and eliminate us.

The Zman says that we don't have a religion any more.

In the current age, normal religion has been sidelined, not only as a source of authority, but as a legitimate part of public discourse. Fifty years ago, a public discussion of morality would have had representatives of various faiths to discuss what ought to be according their religions. A century ago those representatives would have provided authority for the current morality. Today, no public debate about moral issues, about what ought to be, includes religion, much less priests or theologians.

To which I say that you just ain't looking hard enough. I take this position from Roy Rappaport, who wrote:

No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion.

 So I say there must be a religion. Because no human can exist, in my view, without a religion, something that declares "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Of course, in our society there are competing religions, and no one religion is generally accepted by almost everyone as the one true religion. I have, of course, explored this question under "Three Peoples Religion." Briefly, we have:

The Religion of the Creative/Educated Class. These people, our rulers, believe in: equality, supervised by them; education, supervised by them; the administration of the economy, supervised by them; the elimination of pollution, supervised by them; the prophecy of the end of the world, due to climate change caused by the sins of mankind. See the New Yorker. "What If We Stopped Pretending?" that completely endorses the ruling class prophecy of the end of the world, because human-caused warming. Anyone that contests this religion is evil, a modern Satan, and must be named, shamed, and ostracized, or worse.

The Religion of the Responsible Class. These people, you and me, believe in one of the Axial Age religions or their modern precipitates. We believe in a world created by God -- or the Big Bang -- and we believe that it works according to laws set down by God -- or learned through the transmission of tradition. We the People are empowered, indeed required, to work out our lives according to the laws of nature and nature's God.

The Religion of the Subordinate Class. These people do not believe they have agency, the ability to direct their own lives. They look for a powerful lord or politician to be their protector. Of course, they may determine, from time to time, that the lord or protector has betrayed them and riot in the streets.

When the Zman talks about the Collapse of Authority I believe he is really saying that we Responsibles have not yet come up with a modern religion that can take on the current lefty religion and its adherents in the educated and creative class. This is illustrated in the failure of "Buckleyite conservatism" which appealed only to Responsibles and did not attempt to win the hearts and minds of the educated class or become the champions of the Subordinate class.

My take is that we deplorables and Responsibles and dissidents need to formulate a new religion that merges the religion of creativity with the religion of responsibility. It would introduce the creatives to the notion of humility, that almost all creative action in this world is doomed to failure and irrelevance, and that certainly no creative activist should believe that just because they believe in something that they have the authority to force the rest of humanity onto their Procustean bed. It would encourage the Reponsibles to step out a bit, to challenge the hegemony of the Creative class and to seek the support of the Subordinates by becoming their patrons.

My belief is that this new religion is suggested in the German Turn from Kant to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Jung. Where Kant starts with the statement that we do not know things in themselves, but only appearances, Nietzsche shows us a clouded vision of what the creative life is all about: that it means getting away from the herd, that it means getting away from hating yourself, that it is hard. Jung shows that the Hero's journey is a descent into the unconscious where you relearn all the lessons that are hidden below the horizon of self-consciousness. Jordan B. Peterson elaborates on the Jungian framework to remind us that the Hero is always a Sacrificial Hero, that sacrifices himself exploring the border between Order and Chaos.

What I say is that the religion of the future is all there, waiting for us to grasp it and prosletyze it. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Now, let us say that our lefty friends are not totally clueless. But, like all creative endeavors, their record is full of disaster and error, and like most humans, they refuse to learn from their errors and disasters.

Really, all our lefty friends have to understand is that creativity is a wonderful thing, except that almost every creative endeavor is a failure, just as nine out of ten business startups is a failure. Every true creative hero understands that he will not end his days in clouds of glory, but in the oblivion of sacrifice, for the true hero is not a Supreme Ego, but a Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live.

This is not that hard. Except for the would-be hero.

Let's Check Out the Woman Question

I suppose the most important thing to know is that when people are arguing about the number of angels that fit on the head of a pin, you know that the age is coming to an end, and will be replaced by an age in which the number of angels on a pinhead is irrelevant.

And so, in Quillette they are looking at the absolute madness ongoing between transgender activists and radical feminists. Since it is left against left, you can imagine that the question is: Who can outshame the other girls? Or guys, depending on your identification.

Well, I just want to cue Nietzsche in on this, from The Gay Science, Book Three:

Whom do you call bad? -- Those who always want to put to shame. 

What do you consider most humane? -- To spare someone shame.

Just saying. Hey, lefties, how ya doin' today! Is there anything on your agenda that does not involve naming and shaming someone?

Here's an interesting take. In the American Spectator Ann Hendershott observes that the decline in marriage seems, according to schientists, to involve the fact that women like to marry up.

[M]en who found women to marry them have an average income that is about 58 percent higher than the actual unmarried men who are currently available to unmarried women. The researchers conclude that the decline in marriage is due to the “putative shortage of economically attractive partners for unmarried women to marry.”

In other words, if a woman can't find a good provider -- compared to her own economic status and education -- she'd rather not marry at all, darling, and that means not to have children at all.

But back to the vital important of non-binary gender identity. Let's not lose sight of the important things!

I know! Let's take a look at the Zman.

The thing about the war of the sexes is that it is really a war on normal women. When you examine the arguments from the Left and from feminists, not a lot of it is aimed at changing male behavior that is beneficial to women. Mostly it is aimed at eliminating the protections a healthy society has for its women. The resulting social breakdown creates more unhappy women, who can then be recruited into the coven of feminism.

Zman raises an interesting question, for which I do not have the answer. Are women in fact helpless victims, condemned eternally to repeat the conventional wisdom of their Mean Girl betters and spiral into bitterness without the agency to save themselves?

Because if the result of the war of the sexes is that women get unhappy and turn into cat ladies, then it makes sense that women have not, in the past, been recruited into the happy band of philosophers, politicians, and warriors.

Let us turn again to Nietzsche in Part Four of The Gay Science,  where he longs for an heroic age for ideas "which will restore honor to courage above all" and

human beings who know how to be lonely, silent, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; humans beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished[.]

Well, you can see why lefties want to brush Nietzsche aside as "the favorite intellectual of the Nazis."

I am reading a history of the tech world, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara. This foolish woman stops the action every couple of pages to recite lefty pieties on race and gender. I call that racism and sexism, straight up.

Here's a piece where normal women are fighting back aainst the gender activists. They are protesting against trans-boys using the girls' restroom, against trans-boys competing in girls' athletics. Or the Scottish teenager that was thrown out of class for insisting there are two genders. So maybe women do have a clue.

I suspect that the fuss about "microaggression" and "safe spaces" is a visceral reaction by women -- normal women -- against the "virile, warlike" nature of the public square. For the only human activity that really matters is the bearing and raising of children. And that requires women, or men pretending to be women, retreating from the public square to bear, and suckle, and raise, and nurture those children. They leave it to others to act all virile and warlike and lonely, silent, resolute, and cheerful and all that other Nietzschean stuff. If the women in our human society forget all that, in some periodic religious cult, then, like the Shakers, we are not long for this world.

It is odd, is it not, how many millenarian religious cults react against the simple agenda of wiving and thriving. What is going on, I wonder? Why would people rebel against the most obvious and necessary activities of every living thing, to make more of them. Maybe it is just Hegelian, in that the thing is the same as its opposite.

I wonder whether it will be normal women that insist on the return to normal wiving and thriving or whether it will be "virile, warlike" men that do it for them. Perhaps it will be a combination, for in Spirit and Flesh James M. Ault observed that while men hold all the offices in a fundamentalist church, the women run the church through their husbands.

Comte's Three Stages vs. My Three Peoples

August Comte was the inventor of what he called Positivism, which called attention to the last of his three stages of history. The notion of three stages is one that is very comfortable for humans. Even though it is obviously a gross simplification, nevertheless it has an enormous attraction for humans who must identify the important signals coming in throuh their five senses from all the noise of the world out there. Think of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and the hope for Eternal Life in Paradise: there's a three stage theory for you.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is one such three-stages theory. It's a gross simplification of the irreducible complexity of human life, but it is trying to filter some really important notions from the flux of events.

So what about Comte's three stages theory? La Wik:

The Theological stage refers to explanation by personified deities. During the earlier stages, people believe that all the phenomena of nature are the creation of the divine or supernatural. Adults and children failed to discover the natural causes of various phenomena and hence attributed them to a supernatural or divine power.

My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe themselves subordinate to another's power. It may be a god or it may be a warrior lord. The point is that Subordinates experience humans as not capable of agency, of changing things in this world; they must submit to the will of the gods and the will of their earthly lord. I think I am talking about the same thing as Comte, but with different emphasis.

The Metaphysical stage is the extension of the theological stage. Metaphysical stage refers to explanation by impersonal abstract concepts. People often tried to believe that God is an abstract being. They believe that an abstract power or force guides and determines events in the world. Metaphysical thinking discards belief in a concrete God.

I suppose this is supposed to refer to things like Greek philosophy that attempt to explain the world by reason and logic alone, rather than the combination of reason and experiment in Comte's final stage.

The Positivity stage, also known as the scientific stage, refers to scientific explanation based on observation, experiment, and comparison. Positive explanations rely upon a distinct method, the scientific method, for their justification.

Now, I would say that my People of the Responsible Self straddle the Metaphysical and Positivity stages. My responsibles regard the world as set up by God and regulated by His Law, for people to live and wive and thrive using their knowledge of God's creation and God's law. But in fact they combine the metaphysics of rational speculation with the experimental ethos of the mechanic, and create wonders. But here is the thing: they do not think of themselves as creative; they just think of themselves as responsible beings living according to the law.

Whatabout my People of the Creative Self? I think that our modern creatives have gone beyond the Metaphysical and Positivity stages to become self-conscious of the notion of creativity, that humans can create the world anew. In short, our modern creatives experience themselves as gods.

The interesting point, I think, is that humans all along have been creative. That is the whole point of a conscious mind; you do not just do things according to instinct. You consciously attempt to understand the world, and do something about it. My Subordinates consciously imagine themselves as helpless victims before the power and the will of the gods of heaven and earth. In fact, they have a lot more agency than they think.

My Responsibles are notably creative, but they do not think of themselves as creative. They think of themselves merely as responsible agents of God's law. My reference point for People of the Responsible Self are the two heroes of Adam Bede: Adam Bede himself and his remarkable love interest, the lay Methodist preacher Dinah Morris. These two think of themselves as just working out their lives according to God's Will. But in fact their responsibility and their earnest analysis is in fact remarkably creative and projects them out of their subordinate roles in the old agricultural world into purposive and creative lives as moral and economic actors in the modern world.

The difference between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Creative Self is that the creatives are self-consciously creative. They see themselves ordained by history to make the world anew, according to their own Law, or notion of justice and peace.

This is where we come to the point of what I consider my important insight. If you are a creative God it does not mean that you sit on high and direct the affairs of the world. That was, after all, one of the great Temptations of Jesus Christ, where Satan took him up unto a high mountain and offered him all the nations of the world to rule. In fact, as we know from the Passion of Christ and from the Jungian notion of the Sacrifical Hero, the act of creation is also an apotheosis of self-destruction, just as economic growth emerges phoenix-like from the ashes of the destruction of the old order. This is the lesson that our educated ruling class has yet to understand. The creative does not get to rule the rubes from a glorious educated throne supported by glorious titles and sinecures. That is not how the world works. To imagine yourself as the Director of mankind is, as we say, the dreadful conceit of a Stalin or a Mao.

It is interesting that the world of Positivity and the mechanical certainties of the Newtonian age gave way almost immediately to the scientific revolution of relativity and quantum mechanics, in which the fundaments of the universe are relative and hidden in an uncertainty principle and the probabilities of the wave function. This means to me that the self-conscious belief of the Creatives of themselves as gods is in fact not an apotheosis of the modern but a regression to the ethos of the Olympian gods that ruled the world by jealousy and power, as the mood took them.

Thus, I call our lefty friends as the authors of a Great Reaction, back to the primitive. They think of themselves as noble creatives, but in the event they aspire to be the cruel and vindictive lords of Olympus, directing the affairs of mankind as the mood takes them and as their petty Olympian squabbles direct them. Hello Stalin; hello Mao.

Gut-Check Time for the Educated Ruling Class

My idea is that the salient fact of the last two centuries has been the replacement of the old landed ruling class of kings and lords by a new ruling class of the educated. In a sense Marx's Communist Manifesto was the Declaration of Intent of the new ruling class that was termed, in those days, Educated Youth.

We may say, perhaps, that the new ruling class proposed to rule by the words of its propaganda and its administrative bureaucracy, replacing the old ruling class that ruled because of its military power that enabled it to protect the tillers of the soil.

Now the only warrant for government power is the sense of existential peril. In the old days the existential peril was the armed warriors next door who might sweep down at any moment and seize the grain and sell the wives and children of the tillers of the soil into slavery. As bad and oppressive as the rulers were, there was no substitute for their protection. Either put up with their nonsense or deal with the Vikings -- or the Huns or the Mongols -- on your own.

The new ruling class came up with a new existential peril: the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Where the old ruling class had promised to protect the peasants from the depradations of the old warrior pirates and plunderers, the new ruling class would protect the workers from a new eruption of piracy and plunder, the capitalist "robber barons."

You have to say: it was brilliant! Because a ruling class must conjure up some sort of existential peril: otherwise there is no justification for its political power.

Of course, if the educated ruling class had not conjured up this existential peril they would not have become the ruling class.

Now I say that the rise to power of an educated ruling class amounted to a Great Reaction and a profound misreading by the educated class of the meaning of the industrial revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

I say that the educated ruling class's enthusiasm for socialism is nothing more that neo-slavery, and that its marquee political achievements of the Soviet Union and Maoist China are the most egregious slave states in history. Hey! How does that feel hanging round your necks, lefties?

And I say that the educated ruling class's welfare state is neo-feudalism, the reduction of the workers to the status of feudal peasants, their lives and occupations supervised by a bureaucratic army of educated experts. And the false promise of the new feudal lords is the same as the old ones: the promise to protect the peasants is always, in the end, reneged upon. This is not rocket science. The truth is that the world changes, and mankind must change with it. Whether we are talking about drought and famine or the interminable wars of the warrior class or the fluctuations of the modern economy and the successive technological revolutions of the last 200 years, the fact is that the feudal lords could not, and the neo-feudal lords cannot, deliver on their promise of security and safety.

But that is all beside the point. The Big Thing of the modern era is that while the peasant was worth a lot less than his grain -- which was why the Vikings killed the peasants and stole the grain back in the day -- in the new world the skills and the "intangible capital" in every human brain is worth more than the product the worker produces.

This means that good old armed plunder, or its modern equivalent, political plunder, does not pay.

For, how do you plunder the "intangible capital?" The simple answer is, you can't. The ruling class doesn't have a clue, and its constant plunder of the productive sector just means less for all. As any ruling class will agree, its instinct is to prevent economic change because such change always disturbs the status quo and hurts the ruling class and its little darlings. Look at all the technological revolutions of the past 200 years, from machine textiles for the masses to steam transportation for the masses to personal transportation for the masses to electrical power for the masses and now smartphones for the masses as in 4 billion smartphones worldwide. Every one of these innovations was a complete surprise and the educated ruling class had nothing to do with it. The only thing the educated ruling class could think to do was to tax it and spend the revenue on buying votes.

For years the workers seemed to like the rule of the educated class: the union wages, the pensions, the health care, the education that the educed ruling class shoveled out at them.

But now the bloom is off the rose. The workers just want a decent job, a decent home, a family; the educated ruling class wants something different: a world in which it can execute on all manner of creative projects from politics to art to sex. And the new warrant for political power is the existential danger of climate change.

If you are an ordinary middle-class or working-class person you are bound to feel that the educated ruling class "doesn't care about people like me." And you would be right.

That is the meaning of Trump and Brexit and nationalism in Europe. The ruling class has gone off at tangents, feeding its need for creative projects rather than stolidly providing a solid and stable ground for ordinary people to wive and thrive.

What will happen next? Obviously, things are going to change. The current ruling class will object, and it does object. Because when you have been a ruling class for a while, it is inconceivable -- inconceivable -- that the natives would be restless. Why, what would they do without us, the wise and compassionate ruling class, to run things for them? What do the deplorables know about politics and programs?

Thus we have predictions of civil war, of an end to the current era, of a Reign of Terror, of the conquest of the West by the migrants. And we have the spitting rage of the ruling class in its hatred of the existential threat of Trump and Brexit to its privileges and sinecures. And we have the educated ruling class plunging into cultish fantasies of white nationalism, toxic masculinity, and racism, racism, racism.

We do not know what will be the end of it.

But I tell you this. Whatever the future, the educated ruling class is going to hate it. Maybe they will get to reproduce Xi's China where everyone better toe the party line, but I doubt it, because that level of political control will throttle everything else in society and conjure up a head of rebellion. Or maybe we Normals will get to tell them to put it where the Sun don't shine.

It ain't gonna be Paradise, and it is not all going to be over by bed-time and all well, as Falstaff hoped.

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.