Warren Understands that Politics is Loot and Plunder

Rightly or wrongly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) understands that elections are not about religious questions like abortion and gun control and climate change. Government is about loot and plunder. You promise your supporters goodies in return for their vote.

So she is promising Social Security recipients $200 per month extra on their monthly checks. To be paid for by people earning over $250,000 a year with a 14.8 percent tax on wages exceeding $250,000 a year and a 14.8 percent tax on investment earnings over $250,000 ($400,000 on families) per year.

Really, what's not to like? The top 10% of federal income taxpayers already pony up a little less than 40% of the income tax take. Go where the money is.

I suppose it is useless for a guy like me to point out that untaxed income of the rich is a "live" resource that will be used by the rich to create jobs from anything from the wages of startup company employees to the wages of yacht-builder and mansion-builder employees. Whereas once resources are seized by the government in taxes they are dead as dead can be, paid out to people who are not taking the money in exchange for services rendered but just as loot.

The "science" is pretty clear on this, from the classical economics of Adam Smith to the marginal economics of 1870, even to the Keynesian economics of post World War I. The less the government gets its cotton-pickin' hands on the earnings obtained by people in voluntary economic activity the better.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has to know this. Even though her law degree comes not from Harvard or Yale but from Rutgers Law School, she is bound to know Economics 101. But Economics 101 does not get you elected President of the United States, and for some reason the same people that blather on about "settled science" when it comes to climate change are notably silent when it comes to settled economic science, about the human knowledge that explains the unprecedented Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

Imagine a better world. Imagine a world in which an impressionable teenager like Greta Thunberg was lecturing the United Nations about the iniquity of taxing young workers and taking economic growth away from their futures in order to pay the pensions of older workers. Why, if government teachers spent five minutes teaching economics in government schools instead of climate change orthodoxy who knows what impressionable kids would think? Look, this is not that hard; conomics is not rocket science. Why, I dare say you could design a computer game to show children how economics works.

But here is the point. Just as nobody thought about gravitation until Newton, nobody thought about supply and demand until Smith. But, boy, what a difference it made. So our educated class knows all about the science of the modern era. But it would prefer not to, not when it is going back to the future on its Great Reaction, not when it conflicts with its power project.

Of course in a better world the voters would understand that when Sen. Warren offers them loot and plunder she is really bribing them with their own money. And, of course, if you are not in with the in-crowd you get to stand in line to get your share, and, if money is being handed out as loot it is not going to grow the economy so that the next generation can be better off that we are.

In a better world humans would not be tempted by loot and plunder, but I am not holding my breath. Obviously loot and plunder is one of the ways that humans have survived over the millennia. It has been a successful adaptation, at least up until now. 

Now I think that the age of loot and plunder is over, because humans don't get into a cornered-rat situation too much any more where it pays to loot and steal when you are starving in the hope that it will get you over the hump.

But we are still programmed to go for loot and plunder, and politicians know it. A politician like Sen. Warren started out her professional life with a lie, that she had native American blood, and so would be the first diverse law professor at Harvard. So what's another lie to her? Where's the downside for her in conning the peasants into voting for a little loot and plunder?

Meanwhile let us all look with disdain upon the educated ruling class, of which Sen. Warren is a perfect exemplar. They tell us they are all for justice, for fairness, for science, for saving the world. But really they are just like any ruling class since the dawn of time. They are into power, they want power, and will do whatever it takes to obtain that power and keep it.

Until.

Until the land fails to yield its bounty, because the productive and the creative have been stripped of their seed corn, because of the looting and the plunder of the ruling class and its supporters.

And the whole cycle begins again. With new rulers.

Understanding Postmodernism and Science

Here's a piece from Quillette about postmodernism and science by Maximilian Werner, who suffered under postmodern profs back in the day. Says he:

Although, in principle, challenges to the mainstream tradition are much needed, they reveal a bias toward culture as a vehicle for determining truth:

Well, yes. That's how the world works. That's what liberals are doing by challenging the mainstream tradition. And the whole point of lefty-liberals is to be the hegemon in charge of culture and be the guy that determines truth for you and me.

Competing narratives attempt to revise the dominant narrative according to their own particular ideological, racial, ethnic, or cultural experience. The voicing of these perspectives is, of course, long overdue, and because of it we have begun to appreciate the uniqueness and complexity of human experience.

Diversity, jolly good show, and all that.

But as the work of Foucault and other social constructionists shows, if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail.

Exactly. Which is what liberals are doing with their "cancel culture" that deplatforms and gets people fired for disagreeing with the liberal narrative. In fact, I would say that the dominant culture under liberal postmodernism, that liberals tell us is diverse, is the opposite. It demands a suffocating uniformity. It does not allow competing narratives to challenge the dominant narrative, which is the lefty-liberal postmodernist narrative. It uses the supposed diversity of "racial, ethnic or cultural experience" as a Trojan horse to occupy and demolish the cultural space of the supposed "dominant narrative."

But the postmodern idea that there is “no underlying meaning” in the world apart from what people may produce is nonsense.

Right. Ish. The point is that we do not know if there is an underlying meaning, but we all assert some sort of underlying meaning based on the implications of our own narrative. The only thing is that the dominant group -- lefty white liberals -- gets to impose its dominant subjectivity, other groups licensed by lefty white liberals are only allowed to advertise their narrative providing it conforms with lefty white narrative, and don't you forget it, peasant.

That a certain perspective is exclusive and hinders access to other ideas is a comment on the limitations of the perspective, not on the degree to which truth can be known and shared.

Sure. Except that no "truth can be known and shared." All truths are asserted. The question is: does the dominant group allow other narratives any cultural space or does it marginalize and cancel anything that dissents from the dominant group narrative? Oh, and does the asserted truth work? But everyone disagrees about what works, up until it is too late.

And yet Foucault’s oversight persists, as evidenced by the popularity of writing texts that privilege subjectivity over objectivity; lived experience over scientific fact; difference over similarity; orthodoxy over exploration.

Sorry, there is no "scientific fact." There is only lived experience and faith. Here is how faith works in respect of science. You have faith in the equations of quantum mechanics, and all the lived experience of semiconductor technologists, and so when you next apply Moore's Law and design the next generation of chips you have faith in your scientific theory and the lived experience of your technology. And so the beat goes on. But most likely, in getting to your next generation of chips you find that you made a lot of mistakes, and that some of your science about semiconductor technology, in which you had faith, turned out to be less than factful.

The whole fuss about climate change illustrates this approach. There are a bunch of scientists that say that with current trends in greenhouse gases they have a scientific theory that proposes runaway atmospheric warning. They have developed computer models that they say model the atmosphere usng their theories sufficiently to show significant warming over the next few decades. Activists take those results and declare that unless we act now we will see the end of the world in 12, or 50 years. Yes, but will the warming actually take place? Will it significantly change the climate as in moving agricultural zones and in causing species extinctions? The truth is that there are no scientific facts. that can tell us whether there is a problem. All we have riht now are prophesies. Almost certainly, whatever happens, the scientists will discover that they have made a lot of mistakes. If they are lucky the mistakes will cancel out.

From the postmodern perspective there is an dominant mainstream narrative supported by high government officials, government-funded scientists, and left-wing activists. According to Foucault, then, "if truth is subjective, and one truth is as plausible as another, as long as there is a dominant group, particular subjective truths will prevail." Which is exactly what is happening.

But are liberals up in arms about the dominant group naming and shaming the dissident groups as "denialists" and demanding a diverse approach to climiate science? Of course not. Because lefty-liberals use postmodernism only as a club with which to beat their political opponents. In other words, for liberals and lefties postmodernism is for use in attacking their political opponents. But when they are anxious to maintain their own idea as a dominant narrative then forget about subjectivity. Climate change is settled science -- scientific fact -- and anyone that disagrees is a science denier that rejects scientific objectivity.

What these blind lefties do not understand, because they do not want to, is that nothing is really settled, everything in science or politics or culture is faced with serious questions that have no easy and agreed-upon answers. This means that orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of educated liberals, must not snuff out exploration by others.

The point is that a successful society operates at a delicate balance point between subjectivity and objectivity and orthodoxy over exploration. Societies like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were notable for not allowing any dissent from ruling-class orthodoxy and the result was not good. Our present era of lefty white postmodernism is an echo of those regimes. But what matters is, does the subjective narrative deliver the goods?

Or as Shakespeare put it:

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. 

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

And suppose, after the summoning, that Owen Glendower says that the spirits have come and Harry Hotspur says that they have not?

The truth is that if you are an open-minded person you are perfectly willing to allow a diversity of opinion and allow orthodoxy to mix it up with exploration. So if you are an open-minded person you are really a postmodernist.

But the supposed postmodernists are closed-minded people that are only interested in postmodernism when it can be used as a club to smash dead-white-male-toxic-patriarchy. Otherwise their truth is scientific fact and you better not take a step out of line.

Religion as Sacred History

One of the tasks of religion is to deal with the problem of Creation. How did the world begin? And who or what created it? But then there is the how and why of what came later, what we now called mythology, the story of the Earth and of humanity.

But another important function of religion is to document the trials and tribulations and overcomings of the past. The most famous is the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt that Jews celebrate to this very day.

First we were slaves; now we are free is a very big part of what we might call "sacred history." It is obviously the major component of religion as practiced by the modern left.

First we were slaves as workers; then we won our rights. First we women were slaves of the patriarchy; then we got education and abortion. First we blacks were slaves of the white man; then we got our freedom and civil rights.

You can also see this narrative in the American revolution. First we were taxed by the bloody Brits to pay for their bloody French and Indian War; then we taught 'em a lesson they'll never forget.

There is another form of sacred history, that we were never slaves. The Brits have a version of this, with the idea that the last time Britain was invaded was in 1066. "Britons never never never shall be slaves," goes the line from "Rule Britannia!" Well, back in the day, most Brits were serfs. And, on my information the Dutch Prince William invaded Britain with a 500-ship navy in 1688. So what is that all about? It is about the Brits saying that they aren't victims, not nohow.

Obviously, in the modern age, the "we were victims" sacred hsitory has become almost universal. Really, you don't count unless you have a sacred history of victimhood. In the narrative of Christianity, this narrative is about the personal liberation from the bondage of a state of sin into the freedom of salvation through a personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior. But in the modern left-wing sacred narrative we are talking about the whole group's enslavement and the whole group's liberation from bondage through the agency of a political savior.

If you ask me there is a bit of a problem here. In the narrative of personal salvation there is a clear tendency to revisit the occasion of sin, and even, perhaps to wallow in it. In fact our lefty friends tend to be particularly critical of the whole guilt thing. My pal Nietzsche piles on with his critique of "the priests" that taught us to hate ourselves.

But our lefty friends do exactly the same thing with their holy victims narrative. Clearly, the workers are to be victims forever, and don't you forget it. Likewise women and minorities. It doesn't matter that we have enacted about a century's worth of pro-worker legislation, or that women have had the vote for about a century, or that the slaves were freed 150 years ago and obtained full civil rights 50 years ago. The victimization of racism, sexism, and homophobia are real and if you question the narrative you are a racist sexist homophobe.

Now, I've been reading some unapproved ideas lately, and it has occurred to me that maybe you can overdo this victimhood thing. I'm not at all sure that the Jewish obsession with going nuclear on anti-semitism is always a good idea. But, when you are a small minority, it seems like you need to be permanently mobilized against the possibility of danger. Perhaps because Jews have been an important part of the left since the beginning, all leftist movements share this culture of permanent mobilisation.

Is this culture of permanent mobilisation a good idea? It's a good question. If you want to maintain a group identification forever I suspect that the culture of mobilisation is essential. I don't think that the Jews could have maintained themselves as a people over thousands of years without their fierce culture of self-defense. But whatabout the workers? Do workers want to self-identify as embattled workers forever, now that workers are no longer starving and indeed sharing in full measure the prosperity of the modern era? Do women want to keep rehearsing the bad old days when women could not get an education and could not pursue careers? Do blacks want to maintain a separate racial identity from the rest of America?

Back in the day the declared purpose of the various left-wing movements was to mobilize people so that they could take their place at the table.and be recognized as the equal of anyone else in society. But the culture of mobilization keeps groups forever separate, forever rehearsing their grievances against the majority culture. This perpetuates a permanent division. And in fact indexes of memes like Google's Ngram have been documenting increased use of terms like "racism" and "sexism" in recent years. Really? Things are worse than they used to be?

We can see that the modern sacred histories are the same as the old sacred narratives. In fact, as Nicholas Wade writes, there is only one way that the gods can die, and that is if people stop believing in them. So it is with secular religions. The priests will continue serving the faithful as long as there are faithful. It is only when believers fall away that a religious movement starts to die and the priests are out of a job.

I suppose that the recent intensification of old left-wing narratives is an indication that the priests are worried. They evidently feel that their believers need to be energized and their faith renewed. But there's a problem. Whereas the old gods of Olympus needed to be propitiated with sacrifice forever, and the occasion of sin in Christianity is everlasting and the hope of salvation must be renewed constantly, the average left-wing religious movement begins, at least, as a specific attempt to right a specific wrong. Once the workers get their rights, once women get their abortions, once blacks get civil rights, once gays get their marriage, then, surely the urgency of bending the arc of history towards justice recedes.

The fact is that in the present time our lefty friends act as if they have a profound need to occupy religious space with a powerful victim narrative; otherwise someone else is going to elbow them aside with the urgency of their own misery.

Maybe conservatives need to play this game with our own narrative of monstrous injustice. Maybe that's the name of the game we have to play. But I don't like it. Suppose we beat the liberals at their own ame and create a narrative of conservative victimization. Will conservatives in their turn become so enamoured of their victim narrative that they can't leave go of it?

I'd say that there is another way to create a sacred history, one that avoids the trap of permanently mobilized victimhood. It would advertise America as the last best hope of mankind on Earth, the city on a hill that is "still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home." Hey, President Trump's notion of Making America Great Again is, in part, about renegotiating great trade deals with our major trading partners to make sure that everyone gets into a win-win proposition. It creates an inclusive narrative of America to which all belong, as opposed to an exclusive narrative of competing victimhoods.

Here's the challenge. I reckon that every human community needs a sacred narrative to establish where it is coming from and where it thinks it is going. The Christian narrative, of sin and redemption, is one such narrative, but it is clearly challenged by the left's victim narratives. We need a new narrative for Americans, indeed for all humans, to attach to, one that supercedes and overarches the lefty victim narrative with something that is higher, nobler, more inspiring than the lefty victim narrative of us against the world.

I get the utility of the victim narrative, especially if you want to maintain the identity of a small group in a large world. But the trouble with such a combative narrative is that it might encourage non-group people to think that they really are in a no-holds-barred fight against the small group, or use the small group as a sparring partner to maintain its own identity.

At any rate, I would say, non-lefty Americans either have to come up with a sacred narrative that goes mano-a-mano with the lefty victim narrative or we have to come up with a better, wiser narrative that marginalizes the victim narrative into a shriveled nothingness, for a simple reason, that our better, wiser sacred narrative appeals to ordinary Americans much more directly and inspirationally than the dreadful everyone-a-victim siren song of the left.

Ruminations on "Politics is Downstream from Culture"

We all know the Breitbart dictum, that politics is downstream from culture. That is to say, before you "win" in politics you need to win the culture. Then I read sci-fi writer John C. Wright, and he extended the maxim: "politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion."

How true. And that is the problem for conservatives right now, that not only do our liberal friends have control of the culture, through literature, education, the arts, journalism, but also through the dominatory hegemony of their secular lefty religion of political correctness.

For instance, I was to several Shakespeare plays over the last year, from Seattle, to Ashland, Oregon, to Stratford-on-Avon, UK, and every one of the plays had modern LGBT gender-bending. So this means that, over the whole English-speaking arts world, the culture of the educated elite and its promotion of LGBT culture is hegemonic. Personally, for me, this is unfortunate, because I believe that LGBT culture is dull and superficial. But you better not dissent from the idea that having general gender chaos in Shakespeare with women playing male roles and lesbians and transgenders showing up all over, because homophobia.

Now, I believe that the reason that today's elite culture is so superficial issues from the superficiality of its religion. The elite religion is that the current elite creative culture is the only thing in town: everything else is bigotry and superstition. The purpose of today's elite culture is that we elites get to practice our elite creative culture and your job is to like it. And the more it humiliates you racist sexist homophobe proles, the better.

I would say that the most bigoted and superstitious religion in history is the current superficial religion of creativity of our educated elite. But what would I know?

I believe that an authentic creative culture would issue from an authentic creative religion. And that religion would echo the Jungian notion that the creative process exists on the borders of order and chaos and that usually the creative experience ends in disaster for the would-be creator and also for those associated with him. Thus a true religion of creativity would be drenched in the humility of that knowledge, that the true creative hero is a tragic hero, a sacrificial hero.

Now we travel into new territory.

It seems to me that the function of religion is to translate and transform our unconscious instincts into the conscious culture of a religion. Obviously -- or, at least, obvious to me -- the nature of that transformation will reflect the reality on the ground and the needs of the particular human community that the religion serves. The religion of a hunter-gatherer band will be different from the religion of an agricultural people will be different from the religion of a city people will be different from the religion of a creative educated elite. And this is right and proper.

Now I think -- from five minutes ago -- that the religion of a people tends to be specific and conscious, and its purpose is to set the parameters for the unconscious culture of that people.

Huh?

Well, I think that the purpose of religion is to reformulate and redirect the unconscious instincts of a human group to set its members up to inhabit a new world of unconscious instinct -- that we call culture -- adapted by some prophetic visioniary to suit the new world of the group and to train its members how to act in their everyday lives, by consciously putting on the new suit of the religion and thereafter unconsciously wearing that new suit in day-to-day life.

On this notion, politics would be the conscious expression of the culture in connection with the specific communal problems of the society, and specifically those questions that require the use of force, of which the major items are the defense of the community from enemies foreign and domestic.

The point is that normally the day-to-day culture of the people will resolve all problems, because people instinctively and unconsciously follow the unwritten rules of the culture. But those that do not respond to gentle persuastion need specific encouragement -- perhaps throught the use of force -- and problems that seem to be beyond the ability of the unconscious culture rise to consciousness in the rhetoric of politics to be dispatched by communal decision and executed by government force.

It seems to me that the actual operation of government is, again, a return to unconscious process. The fact is that government goes on in its dilatory way, in its various programs of government force, from the collection of taxes to the policing of criminals to the education of children, in another unconscious culture, where people are not really thinking about what is going down. People do not think about being forced to pay taxes or send their children to government school, but they pay their taxes and send their children to school. They obey the law without really thinking about it.

Only when the application of government force is experienced on the receiving end as injustice does it then rise to consciousness and into politics.

Now you can see why the Breitbart dictum about politics being downstream from culture is important. Because culture is an unconscious thing. It is what it is, and it does what it does. And one of the thing it does is set the agenda for politics by setting the unconscious agenda of what "everyone" accepts as day-to-day reality. So, if you don't like the way that politics frames the problems of society you now realize that to do that you have to change the culture.

But then, you understand, after John C. Wright, that to change the culture you need to change the religion.

And that is not a small thing.

As I say, the problem with the world at this time is that its educated elite has developed a false and malicious religion. Its religion of creativity is a religion of self-worship that basically says that everything that educated creative people do is good and anyone that disagrees with them is a racist sexist homophobe that should be named, shamed, ostracized, canceled, fired from their job. And think themselves lucky that they haven't been sent to the guillotine.

Now I think that we have all the knowledge we need to solve this problem. We have the psychology of Jung which explains how our conscious culture is necessarily entangled with our personal unconscious and with all the collective unconscious and its archetypes down the ages. We have Nietzsche telling us that creativity is a hard and lonely path, as his Zarathustra explained. We have the developmental psychologists from Piaget to Wilber that demonstrate how different people have different levels of consciousness and how only people inhabiting the higher levels can understand people at lower levels, and that people at lower levels think that people not at their level are either dumb idiots or crazy loons.

What we need is our creative class to understand that only a few people are ready for a religion of creativity. Most of the rest of us don't want to live creatively and wouldn't know how to anyway. So a True Religion of Creativity would start with the knowledge that the creative life is not for everyone.

And most important of all, the True Religion of Creativity would start with the advice of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Do you know what the advice was? There are variations, but it starts with advice to a young actress being bothered by the affections of older actors.

It doesn't make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

Interesting isn't it, that our liberal friends seem to have the opposite idea, that the whole point of a creative life is precisely to stampede the horses in the street and then shoot them for being too skittish.

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.