Not Quite Getting It on Progressive Ideology

Here's National Review's take on Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) "limitless ideology." According to Greg Weiner liberalism of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan variety or conservatism "allows its adherents to ask how much good government can feasibly do." But today's progressivism sees no limits; "progress is like wisdom and beauty: More is always better than less."

So does the internal logic of progress reject limits, when progress is employed as a system of political thought or a principle of political action. It cannot respect dissent because progress is an inherent good, not a matter of dispute. For this reason, Warren describes advocates of progress as enlightened while she characterizes its opponents as categorically retrograde or corrupt.

See how limiting this is? It falls short of getting to the heart of the matter, describing today's progressivism as a religion, as a religion that believes that progressive government is the way to make a better society, and it believes that only through government directing the allocation of resources and activists defining good and evil can we bend the arc of history towards justice. And a government religion for a nation that has outlawed an "establishment of religion."

And, of course, this religious doctrine just happens to align perfectly with the natural tendency of rulers which has been, since time immemorial, to advertise for supporters by promising loot and plunder. In other words progressivism makes loot and plunder into a religion: that it is the essence of the just society to plunder bad people for the benefit of good people. I was to the site of the Battle of Marathon, and a nearby memorial advertised how it was financed "from the 1/10 of the Persian booty from the Marathon battle." It seems it was the regular thing to give 10% of your loot and plunder to the gods. So the notion of "tithing," donating 10% percent of your income to the church, is not as recent as we might think.

My point is that complaining of the ideology of limitless progress that amps up government loot and plunder every time you get a chance is not going to get the job done. It needs to be opposed by another religious doctrine, that the doctrine of limitless progress, increasing the size of every government program every half generation, is wrong, logically, epistemologically, scientifically, and morally. Period, full stop, and everyone that proposes bigger government is evil.

Back in the day the Founders fashioned a government of limited and separate powers. They deliberately created notions like the Electoral College and the Bill of Rights as advertisements against unlimited government. On their system it was wrong to propose to meddle with the power limitation provisions of the Constitution because the whole point of the Constitution was that it was a Good Thing to limit government powers and whoever has their hands of the levers of power at any moment. It worked while the overwhelming majority of Americans were God-fearing Christians. It worked partly because each Christian sect was suspicious of the other sects and did not want another sect to get an inside track on "legislating morality."

The problem with the modern secular religion -- socialism in its different versions from communism to progressivism -- is that it does not recognize itself as a religion. It merely experiences itself as progressive activists bending the arc of history towards justice. And in this religion you are either an activist bending the arc of history towards justice or you are a racist sexist homophobe toxic masculine white nationalist that ought to have been cancelled last week. The word for this in theology is "manichaean."

So I think it is bootless to speak of Elizabeth Warren's "limitless ideology." That does not get the job done. We should speak instead of her extreme and bigoted religion that sanctifies loot and plunder. We should condemn the Tiwtter mobs as the New Inquisition. We should demand the end of diversity administrators at universities as violating the Constitution's prohibition of an establishment of religion. And so on.

I'm not sure what the language should be to do this. That is up to the wordsmiths to develop. The point is that when you combine religion and government you get totalitarianism and religious wars and, as they delicately say in India, "communal violence," meaning Hindu and Muslim mobs killing each other.

In a way, I think we righty racist sexist homophobes have the inside track, because the wokians do not understand, literally do not get, that what they are doing is religion. They think they are modern and progressive and enlightened and educated and on the right side of history. They think they are the good guys advocating for peace and justice. But, to coin a phrase, they "literally know nothing."

I mean, look at AOC. First she comes out with her Green New Deal, an absolutely stupid administrative scheme to upend the whole economy. Anyone with half a brain knows it would starve half the world. And this week she has come with "A Just Society." Now, I'm sure that AOC herself has not put these ideas together. Some lefty brain trust has been doing the heavy lifting. But Egad! This stuff was rubbish 50 years ago! What kind of idiot is still marinating in this stuff! Whatabout the science! Whatabout the 100 million dead! Whatabout the failure of socialism from the Soviets to Venezuela! These people are idiots! This should not be that hard! The fact is that deputizing the government to do anything other than fight a war is a losing proposition!

All this stuff is religious doctrine. Green New Deal: if we don't act now we are all going to Hell! A Just Society: our guys are good and you guys are evil. But never mind the injustice it creates according to my maxim "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." For those of you that only got your education in government school, my maxim means that anyone embarking on a program to create A Just Society is almost certainly creating injustice by the bucket-load.

Hey! How about that! Socialism is the religion that sanctifies loot and plunder as moral obligations -- if executed by approved activists upon economic criminals.

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.