Why We Have Another Eruption of Left-wing Extremism

The last eruption of left-wing extremism in America was in the 1960s. That was the famous age of campus rage and long-hairs, and of course, the end of the New Deal Democratic Party in the famous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Now it's happening again, with "all" the Democratic candidates supporting left-wing extremism from Medicare for All to climate change to LGBT. Even a noble liberal spear carrier like author and journlist George Packer has expressed his concern because it is hitting him where it hurts, in the education of his child in the New York City schools.

I am come out with a new maxim to deal with this issue. It points out the problem when the tribalis of politics intersects with the moralism of religion.

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

Actually I missed something out. Because of course the true totalitarianism mixes all this with government force. So totalitarianism is the one that makes appoints "us good people" as police enforcers of morality over the "them bad people."

It seems to be instinctive in humans to want to "deal" with the problem of bad people. And this, I suppose is natural, for morality distills down to a fiery spirit, the need to enforce social standards. The point is, of course, that there is a difference between a furrowed brow judging someone else's moral lapse, or the "I can't believe she said that" of the culure of complaint with a law to send a moral leper to jail.

And this has been a problem with leftism since its birth in the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

And so the good old American idea of the separation of church and state rather cunningly deals with this issue. Your church ladies can mutter away with their Culture of Complaint that "I can't believe he did that" and by such means bring social pressure upon moral defaulters. But they do not have the power to put people in jail and get them fired from their jobs. On an unverified accusation.

But we have a problem. The dominant religious culture in our society, which is left-wing "wokism," does not have a church. Its institutional structure is government, whether it is the Democratic Party, the government schools, the government university, the media. People that subscribe to the left-wing of race and gender want to express their faith in government programs.

Yes, lefties, but that means, as you told us many moons ago, that you believe in "legislating morality."

And let's be clear. When you call for Medicare for All, you are making a moral argument, that it is sick and wrong for anyone to be deprived of medical care. When you call for America to stop fracking you are making the apocalyptic and prophetic point that, unless we act now, the god of the arc of history will bring the world to an end. When you outlaw single-sex bathrooms in the school attended by George Packer's kid you are making a moral point about the exclusion from the mainstream of non-binary genders. And you are saying that government should enforce these moral arguments with fines, jails, and social exclusion.

I think there is a basic problem with this totalitarian collapse of morality and government into a single agent of morality and force.

Not that lefties are the only people playing that game. We all do. It's just that, back in the day, our Founders thought we ought to keep a distance between the arena of force and the arena of moral disapproval.

Maybe I need to expand my maxim as follows.

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Government is the division between "enforcers" and the "prisoners." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good enforcers" and "them evil prisoners."

And it is so easy to progress from a comfortable feeling of "us" to the conflation of "us" with "good" and "moral" and to then make the step of enforcing "our goodness" over the barrel of a gun.

Whaddya think of them apples? 

Giving Our Guys a Pass

In politics we usually give our guys a pass, but pick up on any accusation against someone on the other side.

Thus, for instance, the guys at Powerline expatiate endlessly on the various accusations against Rep. Omar (D-MN), including that she allegedly entered into a sham marriage with her brother for immigration purposes. But Omar's hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, seems remarkably reluctant to probe into the doings of its Somali-born US Representative. Recently, there have been reports that Omar has entered into a relationship with her campaign manager and is separated from her husband.

Imagine if a Republican US Representative had been accused of such behavior.

There are also accusations of sexual harassment against the Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of Virginia. Conservatives seem inclined to believe the accusations. Democrats? Nothing to see here.

Then we have the poorly sourced accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that were rather obviously flaky when Christine Blasey Ford made them before the Senate Justice Committee and less so when two NY Times reporters got out a book with more poorly sourced accusations against the Justice.

Oh, and then there were the poorly sourced accusations against President Trump that were boosted for two years by the entire liberal media.

It all does rather show the value of the rules of evidence in evaluating an accusation. And it does rather show the problem with mixed-sex college drinking and partying. Humans are easily tempted to make rash accusations, especially against their political enemies. And people can remember all kinds of things that happened at mixed-sex drunken parites decades ago.

What is difficult to evaluate is how people react when their side is gettin its ox gored. Does our side get riled up and determined to go vote no matter what? Or does it slink away in shame?

It helps, I suppose, to have the media on your side. That's why Republicans, up until Trump, learned the hard way that it does not pay to go up against the guy that buys his ink by the barrel. On the other hand it is also said that Republicans always trail in the approval ratings until the time comes to fight it out with paid media, as in a campaign.

The truth is, I suppose, that when the other guys are screwing your guy over, you need to get out there and give 'em hell, just like Harry Truman did. For unless you rile up your supporters with the vile injustice of the other guys, and get them out to vote, then the rightness of our cause doesn't mean a thing.

How to Control the Global Elite

The Zman has another interesting question, about the problem of our current elite. The problem is that the current constitution was written before the creation of the current global elite, the educated ruling class that runs all the western governments.

Back in the day, he writes, the Senate was a committee of the local elites, appointed by state legislatures. But now? Well, the problem is that there is nothing in the current design that provides a proper balance between the global elites and other interests, such as the ordinary middle class. Zman thinks that maybe we need a third house of Congress that represents the interests of the rich, the corporations, and, I would say, the educated.

But what exactly is the problem? I would say that it is that the educated and the activist occupy all the bandwidth of the public square and almost unconsciously mute the voices of the rest of us.

For instance, the Uber driver taking us to the airport at 4:00am told us that he preferred to drive at night because during the day the traffic on I-5 and elsewhere was impossible. And the other day I was talking to an Amazon friend who was down for the whole educated-class agenda, from climate change to mass transit.

Now my belief is that the interest of the ordinary middle class is for more highways, more office parks, schools for every taste and need, and more leafy suburbs. But good luck with that, because there really is no bandwidth in our current public square for the ventilation of that kind of agenda. Why? Because all the activists and interests are aligned with the educated class and its "urbanist" agenda of transit, bike lanes, "woke" education, and dense housing. Because climate. Because sprawl.

And the problem is that the legal system and the administrative hierarchy is completely dominated by the culture and the power interests of the educated elite. Good luck getting a word in edgewise against the blaring horns of the activists and their bribed apologists in the administraive hierarchy and the media.

Wait, there's a bigger problem, that the educated elite has no idea, no conception, that its agenda is narrowly focused on its own selfish interests, the interests of the educated elite, and is utterly oblivious to how its agenda affects and cramps the lives of ordinary people. And the important thing to understand that the educated class's agenda is mostly about being in the catbird seat and ordering other people around -- in their best interest, of course.

Of course the educated elite is engaged in things that benefit the educated elite, but not self-consciously, becauses its agenda is experienced by itself and advertised to the rest of us as merely doing good -- or as President Obama so innocently said, bending the arc of history towards justice.

Parenthesis: when Martin Luther King, Jr. used the phrase he talked about the arc of history bending towards justice, as though it would do it on its own. But with Obama, we, the cultural and political elite, are talking about consciously taking the arc of history and bending it towards justice ourselves. I'm sure that our educated elite has no idea about the rather significant difference between the two recitations.

So I don't know whether fiddling with the constitution or adding another house of Congress is going to do much for us.

For I believe that the problem is upstream of politics, in culture, and upstream of culture, in religion.

Now I am reading a bistory of Protestantism, by Alistair McGrath, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution -- A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-first. Wow, what a mouthful! I'm only at the beginning, but already there is useful stuff.

For instance, we tend to think of the Protestant Revolution as Martin Luther and his 95 Theses. But McGrath is saying that the revolution spontaneously arose in a bunch of German cities all at once, led by some local rebel priest: Luther in Wittenberg, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva. Now, the question is, what was going on in those German cities that was throwing up these troublemakers and what was it about the citizens of these cities that the Luthers and Zwinglis and Calvins connected with them?

What was going on was something different than the fake activism of the educated class and its well-born scions that we experience today. But, we might say, there is something vaguely similar between the spontaneous eruption of Protestantism and the rise of Trump and Brexit and nationalists all over Europe. Because "nobody" saw it coming. I mean, nobody that was anybody, darling.

But, now that we see the populist nationalism right before our very eyes we can see the parallel with the Protestant Reformation. Back then, what with the Bible now available in print thanks to Gutenberg, so that many city people could read it themselves, the people in the city were saying, OK, we are going to br ptacticing our religion ourselves based on our own interpretations of the Bible, thank you very much, and we are not going to take it all on faith from the Catholic Church and its corrupt hierarchy.

Now, here in the good old US and A, and Brexit Britain and elsewhere, people are saying that we've had it up to here with you preachy and insufferable educated-class wankers -- sorry for the Britism -- and we are not going to take direction from you clowns any more. Because you are clueless.

I'd say that our beloved educated ruling class, at present, does not get it. I am not even sure if they have got to the "natives are restless" stage of realizing that something is up. Because the easiest way to understand the Get Trump culture and the Get Kavanaugh culture and the Cancel Culture is that our rulers have not got past the outrage someone is making a noise out in the public square and it is interrupting important ruling-class ceremonies. We have not got beyond an "out of the way, peasants" irritation among our august rulers.

The question is: what will happen when our rulers realize that something serious is going on, and that a genuine movement has formed in opposition to their rule? Because their reaction will determine what happens next.

If tbey realize, wow, we have a problem here Houston, and we better understand it and respond in a manner that accepts that the rulers should only rule with the consent of the governed, then we will get a period of reform and everything will be copacetic. But if the rulers continue in their current train and imagine that they can solve the problem by canceling Trump and canceleing Kavanaugh and canceling anyone that ever tweeted a racist sexist homophobic tweet ever since they were five and a half, why then we might end up with a revolution.

Now my belief is that ordinary folk, that just want to wive and thrive and raise a family and hope for our children to do better than we did, need to get with a vital truth. And that is this. Much as we might like free stuff, the problem is that the more free stuff we expect from our rulers the more power we ive them to order the details of our lives. We may not like to have to sweat it out in the market economy and do without all kinds of entitlements and benefits, but listen up. The more goodies we get from the government the more that the educated class gets to rule over us. And the more injustices we expect our rulers do Do Something about the more that we are encouraging ruling-class activists to come up with more ways in which they and their kind get to order us about.

I don't know if there are many of us that are ready to look that truth in the face. And I don't know if there will be that many of us ready to accept that truth a hundred years from now.

If politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion we are talking about a religious revolution in which the common sense, the conventional wisdom of all good little girls that right now are putting #WeBelieve yardsigns out front, would change so that they would be saying instead: "I can't believe that people are protesting the result of a normal presidential change election." Or "I can't believe that people are losing their jobs for a tweet sent 20 years ago." Or, "I can't believe that I can't send my kid to the school of my choice."

See what I mean? We are light years away from that, because good little girls today, especially good little educated girls, are good little supporters of the current educated ruling class. Because that's what good little girls do.

My Journey from Common Sense to Common Sense

One of the complaints of conservatives is the death of common sense. Logic and reason and common sense are what we assume inspired the Founders when they rebelled against the Brits to form this more perfect union.

And, we complain, the lefties have declared "War on Common Sense." Thus, Robert Curry in American Greatness:

Political correctness is quite simply a war on common sense. It is a war by the elites on the common people and on the shared understanding of basic realities of life that has made it possible for us to rule ourselves under the Constitution. Once this common-sense understanding of reality has been vanquished, it is “mission accomplished” for the Americans who reject America.

I would have agreed 100% with this 20 years ago. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been showed by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

And, of course, our Constitution and political culture in the United States was based on the truth, the common sense, of Descartes, Locke, and Hume. So began for me an intellectual journey in which I made my way through Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and now finally Nietzsche and Jung.

I still think our lefty and politically correct friends are wrong, as Curry does, but not because they are opposed to common sense and logic and reason. I think they are wrong because I believe that the German Turn does not invalidate the British empirical philosophers, but puts a new layer on knowledge on top of it, in the same way that relativity does not replace Newtonian mechanics completely, but only when dealing with astronomical distances and speeds close to the speed of light.

See, the "common sense" of the politically correct is that there is not one correct view of life but that diffferent cultures experience a different view of the world. It's all relative and uncertain.

And indeed modern science argues that all living things must choose, from the overwhelming amount of data pouring in through the senses, which data is important to them.

Prior to the Germans we Anglo empiricists thought there was mind, and matter, and common sense to put it all together. But actually Hume, the skeptic, noted that we cannot, for instance, justify the notion of cause and effect. Just because some event comes after another does not mean the first event caused the second. It is our faith -- in science, in Newtonisn mechanics, in common sense -- that connects the two.

Then Kant came along and questioned everything. Never mind cause and effect, he said. Really we cannot know things-as-they-are. All we know is what comes in throught the senses as sense impressions, and the theories we spin in our mind to make sense of it all. It is my belief that this radical notion, that really we are making it all up, leads directly to Einstein's relativity, do not pass Go. Because Einstein tells us that space and time are not absolute, as openly assumed in Newton's mechanics, but relative.

Do you see the amazing thing here? By casting loose from the notion of absolute space and time and matter vs. idea and believing that we know reality we humans made the most radical step forward ever in understanding how the Universe works.

Another thing that got moving in the German world was modern psychology. By the time we get to Freud and Jung we are saying that our conscious mind is just a tiny thing riding on the top of a fathomless unconscious. That really we are not conscious rational actors, but mostly the slave of our unconscious instincts. I recently read that scientists have discovered through brain scans that our mind makes its decision to act about 1.5 seconds before we experience the decision in our conscious mind.

Now, I believe in "common sense." It's just that my common sense is built upon all the work of Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung. I walk around the world realizing that my eyes are seeing far more stuff than I am aware of. It's just that my mind ignores 97 percent of the visual information and only concentrates on what it thinks is important. That could be a problem if I am stopped at a stop sign and my visual processing system fails to notice a car coming up in the corner of my eye. Indeed the whole modern concept of "situational awareness" understands that the processing of information in our brain is a tricky thing. And they say that at 79 your situational awareness starts to make such a serious decline that over-79s get involved in lots of "failure to yield" accidents at stop signs. Roll on driverless cars!

Now, I think that my journey, from the common sense of the British empiricists to the common sense of the post-Jungians is a glorious and liberating thing. Because it means to me that I can understand all the people in the world that have a different view of common sense than I do. And I have the conceit that I know where they go wrong. So I can forgive them, the poor little dears.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to show how it is perfectly natural and physical that people are different. The People of the Subordinate Self are workers and peasants; they think the world is run by vengeful gods and lords and political bosses. They do not yet know science. The People of the Responsible Self are citizens, that live and work in the city. They believe in a God that created the world and then told humans to get on with it, and he'll judge our performance on Judgement Day. Thus is pays Reponsibles to develop science and laws and stuff to make sense of the world and act responsibly in it. The People of the Creative Self are people that realize that humans are like gods, they can create the world anew, and change the Law, and even dream of a world of perfect justice.

But, if the People of the Responsible Self treat the People of the Subordinate Self like slaves and use them up as slave workers in satanic mills and slave plantations and factories with child labor then they are monsters. That is what Marx was talking about. Actually, the People of the Responsible Self were not that interested in driving slaves; that's why they abolished slavery just about at the moment that lefties first appeared over the horizon. They were OK with giving the workers rights and giving them the vote. So everything is now copacetic on the border between the Responsibles and the Subordinates.

However, if the People of the Creative Self treat the People of the Responsible Self as racist sexist homophobes, and declare them to be deplorables, and create politcal regimes to deliberately oppress and dis-empower Responsibles then they are monsters. And that is exactly what Stalin and Mao did, and plenty of Creatives to this day have failed to utterly deplore and condemn this great crime of history.

Yes, lefties, the People of the Responsible Self may be a bit slow, and bigoted and superstitious, compared to the woke, the educated, the evolved folks like you. But they still have a right to live according to their lights. Just as you chaps insisted, back in the day, that the workers had a right to live according to their lights and demand their rights even if it was mighty inconvenient to the bourgeoisie.

The point of any knowledge or world view is: does it help me understand the world? I say that my "common sense" helps me understand why lefties are going bat-shit crazy right now.

The lefty world view says that lefties are involved in a sacred project to "bend the arc of history towards justice." Obviously anyone that tries to stop this process is a monster and should be named and shamed and ostracized and fired from their job and deplatformed from social media. And yet, Donald Trump and his deporables!

Do you see how it makes complete sense that liberals would be beside themselves right now? Call it a Failure of Prophecy. By now, all the old racist sexist homophobes were supposed to be a thing of the past. And yet here we are, with a president elected by the votes of white working class deplorables in the old industrial states that liberals once loved and revered.

How could this have happened! What is going wrong! Obviously, the only thing to do is to redouble our efforts to bend the arc of history towards justice and suppress all the hate speech and toxic masculinity and extremism and fake news from whacko sites on the internet. This sort of reaction is normal. It is explained by Leon Festinger et al. in When Prophecy Fails and also by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution as the Reign of Terror that revolutionaries enact when their revolution fails to transform society in ein Augenblick.

See how my world view enables me to understand the Trump Derangement Syndrome of our liberal and lefty friends? My world view must be a good one, that's what I have to say.

And there is this. The world seems to be one religious outburst after another, when some religious group prophesies the end of the world unless we act now. As in socialism and as in climate change. But the overwhelming majority of people, most of the time, just want to get on with life, wiving and thriving and raising a family and pursuing happiness. When these two cultural forces clash then you are going to see some fireworks.

And by the way, that is why our Founders decreed a separation of church and state. So that religious fanatics could not seize the reins of state. Hey, I just came up with this maxim:

Politics is the division between "us" and "them;" Religion is the division between "good" and "evil." Totalitarianism is the division between "us good people" and "them evil people."

And the problem with our liberal and lefty friends is that they are mixing their politics of big government with their religion of bending the arc of history towards justice. History tells us that nothing good comes of uniting religion and government.

Let us end with a word from Nietzsche, who suggests in The Gay Science §292, to preachers of morals that they deprive the best things of honor and worth by praising them all the time.

Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again concealed secrets of solitary souls; say that morality is something forbidden.

That way, writes Nietzsche, you might win over the only people that matter, the heroic.

Well, that's a thought. Maybe our liberal and lefty friends are making the case for tolerance and good fellowship by demanding absolute conformity to woke morality and lock-step conformity. 

Jane Austen and the Resumption of Manners

Last week the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Jane Austen and manners, "Jane Austen Knows That Manners Make the Man." Author Paula Marantz Cohen notes that, when Jane Austen became respectable, in the 20th century, the question of "manners" and "civility" was depreciated by critics. They preferred her "moral depth and astute satire."

And of course, by the mid 20th century manners went right out of fashion, and things have only got worse in the decades since.

But Cohen wants us to understand that in Jane Austen, civility and manners are a guide to morality, and that manners "need to be strengthened by practice." Maybe so, but I would say that the current moment shows a revival of interest in manners. The whole #MeToo movement is not so much a movement against sexual harassment as an attempt to revive the importance of manners.

So when the feminists bring out accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, they are really complaining about the lack of manners. A girl can't go to a party and expect the men to behave themselves any more. A girl can't work in an office without some man making her uncomfortable.

I think this raises an interesting question. Back in the day, when rough tough feminists were telling us that women could do anything a man could do, they were really telling us that the old rules, where women expected to be protected, were over. Women could take it, and they could give it right back. We are still in the aftertow of this, with female superheroes and rough, tough female helicopter pilots in Avatar.

I think we are seeing that those days are over. Women have now instinctively returned to the old culture, in which women expect to be protected. That is what special snowflakes, microaggressions, and safe spaces are about. It is women, now dominating the culture of the university, demanding a return to a protected space.

Of course, because it is lefty women leading the charge, it will be a complete mess, because lefty women "literally know nothing," in the famous phrase.

Now I believe that the culture of manners is the way that women dominate the domestic space. Among themselves, men do not have a culture of manners. Indeed, as I say, men have a Culture of Insult. This is related to the nature of honor among men, which is the reputation for courage, for in the casual insult between men, the guys are raising the question of courage. They are wondering if the other guy would really rise to the occasion when the chips were down. They are also testing the current state of the male hierarchy.

But women have a culture of manners among themselves and for mixed company, and they are pretty good at naming and shaming and even ostracizing people with bad manners. My notion of women having a culture of complaint, and of complaining about other women with "I can't believe she said that" is my way of understanding the women's culture of manners. By the way, the women's culture of complaint ties into the nature of honor among women, which is a reputation for chastity. I don't just mean sexual chastity, but being an all-around good little girl. Being a good little girl is the price she pays for protection and the right to complain about other people.

The dirty little secret about the sexual revolution -- and women's liberation -- is that it did not liberate women. By dismantling the culture of manners, women dismantled the major way in which women dominate the face-to-face culture of daily life. The point is that when there is a culture of manners in place then women dominate. That is the point of Jane Austen. The men in Jane Austen are mostly ciphers. The women run everything. And some of the women -- well you wouldn't want to get anywhere near their force field. I am thinking of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park.

Oh sure. The women don't own the mansions and the income. They don't have to. They command the domestic space, and that is nearly everything. Indeed, you might say that the overriding issue in Jane Austen is how a young woman crosses the bridge from vulnerable singlehood to a secure domination in her own married household. It is made perfectly clear at the end of each novel that the heroine, newly married, is to become mistress of all she surveys.

Think of the sexual revolution as the sexual equivalent of going off the Gold Standard. This usually happened because of war, back in the day. Getting back on the Gold Standard was called "resumption," and it usually included a tough time of deflation and social disruption, as after the Napoleonic wars, the US Civil War, and World War I. And the truth was that the losses suffered in the wartime inflation could never be made up, not without hurting innocents.

So I would advise that the resumption of manners is not going to be pretty. And the reason is that the educated women who will likely be in charge of the resumption are, like most men and nearly all women, completely blinded by conventional wisdom. These are the women that in North Seattle are putting #WeBelieve and "We're Glad You're Our Neighbor" and "Hate Has No Home Here" yardsigns in their front yards and thinking that they are demonstrating their superior morality and wisdom.

So, in many ways, it's going to get worse before it gets better. But nobody said that life was a bowl of cherries.

Nowhere Else to Go: Understanding Identity Politics

You may wonder why it is that our liberal friends have chosen to champion illegal immigrants and Muslims.

Actually, you may wonder what the whole universe of identity politics is about, apart from the fact, suggested by my Great Reaction meme, that identity politics is neo-tribalism.

The answer is that the name of the identity politics game is that the subject group needs to have no place else to go.

Or rather, said group needs to believe that it has no place else to go.

You can see that this cunning little trick started way back with Marx. Hey, he said, you workers better get with the program, for unless you sign up with the Communists the capitalists will oppress and exploit and "immiserate" you like you wouldn't believe. Really, you chaps have nowhere else to go.

Now, I am not saying that the workers didn't have a rough time in Britland back in the 19th century. Of course, the rough time was nothing compared with the rough time that the peasants experienced after the lords dumped them following the nationalization of the armed forces in Britland by Henry VIII. That was what the Elizabethan Poor Law was all about: trying to Do Something about the starving peasants causing chaos throughout the land. The last event in this story was the Captain Swing riots in SE England in1820.

But the truth is that the industrial revolution was the best thing that happened to the lower classes until the invention of sliced bread. Do I need to rehearse the reasons? First, working indoors. Yeah, I bet you never thought of that, but the Nike workers in Vietnam sure think that. Then, by moving to the city, the lower classes became the Social Question and achieved strategic concentration. And got the vote. And got to share in the loot and plunder of politics. And what with steam power and electricity and oil and manufacturing and all, they eventually got up into the middle class and bought houses and cars.

Anyway, the left tried the same game on women. Oh lord! Women had been oppressed since the Dawn of Time by their violent patriarchal husbands. Listen you ladies: unless you sign on with us lefties you will be raped and pillaged and kept barefoot and pregnant -- and Offended -- forever more. And as for a nice career in corporate HR, forget it! Really, you have nowhere else to go.

And so on with blacks, and gays, and transgenders and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Hey, with Hispanics, not so much.

But today, the truth is that all the victims of the left, that once had nowhere else to go, are really in the catbird seat. Government, the ruling class, is forever fussing and worrying about whether their diapers need changing.

So the lefty rulers need new recruits to their political army. Nothing new here, nothing that the Ottomans didn't do centuries ago with their slave Janisseries, kids that were plucked out of their Christian families and forcibly converted to Islam and made into elite soldiers -- with no place else to go.

Whatabout illegal aliens? Really what's not to like about them? Because they have no legal rights, being illegal residents of the US, they rely for their continuance on lefty activists acting for them, and exempting them from the law of the land through the cultural and political power that any elite possesses. Yeah! Why not declare all the liberal cities in the nation to be sanctuary cities! Then the illegal aliens know who their patrons are, are really, they have no place else to go.

You can see how this applies also to Muslims. Because Muslim terrorists demolished the Twin Towers, patriotic Americans are naturally a little suspicious about them. And it doesn't help that their women wear headgear that broadcasts their difference. I mean, when every other woman in America is broadcasting her sexual assets far and wide with leggings, what kind of a weirdo would cover her hair? Still, given the way that Muslims keep themselves separate from the rest of America, can you blame them for sidling up to our lefty friends when they have no place else to go?

The whole point of identity politics today is to keep the liberal little darlings in fear and trembling. If it is blacks, the Republicans "wanna put y'all back in chains." If it is women, we are just one abortion away from women barefoot and pregnant. If it is gays, homophobia is ready to break out and throw gays back in the closet.

All I can say is that it works. And why not? The whole point of tribalism is to keep "our people" united and mobilized against the tribe next door, because you never know when the tribe next door will try to kill us all in a Dawn Raid. So, in the movement of the Great Reaction, the neo-tribalists are playing the same game. Unless you support us, the next thing you know the racist sexist homophobes will be eating you for breakfast.

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.