Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: The Uses of the "Political Formula"

Back in the day, smart Jewish kid and software guy Curtis Yarvin made something of a name for himself in a years-long blog odyssey as Mencius Moldbug.

What was Moldbug all about? Just trying to upend the conventional political wisdom. Nothing much.

Who is Yarvin? Let La Wik (as he called it in his Moldbug years) tell the story.

[Yarvin] is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist. He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.

Yeah! "Far-right!" Scary!

Yarvin proved his importance by getting canceled at a 2015 StrangeLoop software conference. In 2016, his invitation to the conference "resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two subconferences, and several sponsors." Note the use of the passive tense.

But now he is appearing on American Mind in a five part series called "The Clear Pill." I'm going to blog about it because that's the best way for me to understand what Yarvin is trying to say.

Yarvin starts by saying that the two turn-of-the-20th-century Italian political scientists Mosca and Pareto, "taught that all states are ruled by elites who subdue their subjects with illusions."

Mosca called these illusions “political formulas.” A political formula is any narrative element which makes [the subjects] prefer actions that objectively stabilize the regime. 

But you are above all that, right? You can see through all the formulas and know the real reality.

Actually not. We all live in a fake reality dome, and we don't know what reality is. All we can do is subject all political formulas to this analysis:

Here is one way to check out any idea you don’t want to believe: assume it’s true, then build a new reality around that axiom. Once you fail, you get to say: I can’t see how this could be true.

That's the Clear Pill. If you can't find a problem with a political formula, then OK. Go with it, for the time being.

But the ideal is to be neutral, to live outside all the narratives, In the perfect case:

You will not be of any use or any harm to any particular cause. You will feel neither political anger, nor political fear. You will neither cause trouble, nor get in trouble. This vacation from politics need not last the rest of your life. But it can.

Now, Yarvin says, our present regime is not like the Hitler/Stalin/Mao regime, "with one person or a small team unilaterally directing the entire state."

Let's call the Hitler-type regime a "one-story state. Everyone has to believe one narrative—one official history of the present." Or else.

But we live in a two-story state. It's really cunning.

When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”

Now maybe both stories are rubbish. Maybe the shared story in the middle is rubbish too. But because there is agreement on some things we humans are inclined to believe the shared story as true. "Stagecraft,"says Yarvin. And the benefit is that a two-story state can maintain itself with a lot less repression than the one-story state.

So how does power operate in our two-story state? According to Yarvin it has a "civic core" and a "political core." Nominally the political core is in charge, as in the voters electing the government. But actually the civic core in in control because it runs the story-making machine.

Public opinion does not direct the civic core; the civic core guides public opinion.

And the civic core is "the permanent civil service" plus "the press, academia, philanthropy, and so on."

If you weren't sure about that before you are now, what with the civic core, from the "deep state" to the MSM to lefty academia doing a 24-7 effort to bounce the peoples' choice, Donald Trump, from office.

And the civic core seems to manage to coordinate itself and its story without any actual Mr. Big in charge. How do they do it?

How does the political core work? Yarvin proposes a three people world, as I do. He calls the three classes: gentry, commoners, and clients.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Usually the gentry rules using the clients as its clients. "The natural conflict pits commoners against gentry plus clients." This is what I say, that the People of the Creative Self (gentry) combine with the People of the Subordinate Self (clients) against the People of the Responsible Self (commoners).

In a society like ours, the commoners are the majority, so it takes a fair bit of talent  -- and "Jedi mind tricks." -- to keep the commoners divided so the gentry can rule.  The trick is to keep the gentry united.

Everything can probably stay copacetic for the ruling gentry unless an outside "third story" comes along.

The most dangerous outside stories (a) are completely true, (b) aim at rogue gentry, and (c) exalt commoners and/or disparage clients. Any such narrative might be the political formula of the next regime. 

Now you see what President Trump is doing in his political rallies: he is "exalting commoners." Obviously chaps like me and Yarvin are interested in outside stories that would do exactly that. Because? Maybe because the gentry seems to be dissing us, people that actually read a book and write about it. And we don't like being dissed any more than black gangbangers in the 'hood.

Waging Permanent Ideological War

Over at The Federalist Joseph Backholm has some fun with progressive writer John Pavlovitz who writes about how he's not a radical leftist, but belongs in the "human middle."

Then Backholm goes on to show how whacko the left has become in 25 different ways, like:

They went from “coexist” bumper stickers to suing grandmothers who preferred not to decorate a same-sex wedding.

According to La Wik, "Pavlovitz is an American Christian pastor and author, known for his social and political writings from a liberal Christian perspective."

And just today, Pavlovitz has issued a rant about he who shall not be named. You see, someone asked him: “John… what happens if he wins again?” and he gave him a comfortable answer. But he was thinking:

He can’t win again.

That isn’t an option.

It simply cannot be allowed.

If he wins again, November 2016 will seem relatively uneventful; a partly cloudy day in advance of a Category 5 hurricane.

And on and on into a lefty partisan rant.

And here was I thinking that the Trump win in 2016 was just the normal "time for a change" election after 8 years of the other guys. With the innovation that Trump made a connection with the white working class that has been abandoned by the Democrats as the ruling class has pivoted away from class politics to race and gender politics. And all he did was get them to feel that "he cared about people like me." Which is Job One for every politician.

I suppose that Pavloitz belongs to the political tendency that interpreted Barack Obama's two terms as president as a "fundamental change" in American life.

And here I was thinking that Barack Obama was First Black President: been there, done that. We've elected a black president, so we can't be called racists. Now back to your regular scheduled programming. Not.

One of the interesting things about the last half-century is how giving people political rights doesn't solve anything. You abolish government-mandated race laws like Jim Crow and instead of race dropping off the radar you find that the whole of society becomes obsessed with race. The Supreme Court declares gay marriage to be a thing, and gays start running around finding deplorables to cancel and put out of business.

Couple of dozen PhDs there, in my humble estimation. Because more research is needed.

And then you have politicians that don't concede elections. I remember, back in the day, when Time magazine would have a post-election issue about how the election is over, and we are all Americans, and how we all come together after elections, and how, bless their hearts, the losers can content themselves with "wait until next time."

Here's what I think, and I think that the John Pavlovitzes should pay attention.

I think that it is a problem when 90 percent of media articles about a president are negative.

I think that it is a problem when the government schools and universities are almost uniformly Democratic, and where conservative voices get silenced and canceled.

I think it is a problem when corporations are enforcing an ideological line in response to pressure from left-wing activist groups.

I think it is a problem when there is no defence against an accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe.

In other words I think that, whatever your beliefs and certainties, it is a really good idea, from a strategic point of view, to let the other guys have their say. Hey, if nothing else, you get to see what absolute clueless idiots the other guys are. It doesn't get any better than that!

 I also think that we should understand left-wing ideological activist enthusiasms strictly as religious "great awakenings." And sometimes we should think of them as religious cults activated by "prophecy."

And then what happens when "prophecy fails?"

You can think of the leftist frenzy since 2016 as a case of a failure of prophecy. Lefties thought that the world had changed, that progressives like Obama would rule forever. And their prophecy failed.

Which, you might say, is why the Founders decided against a state church, so that prophetic cults would not get mixed up in national politics.

Of course, there is no way to keep prophecy out of it. But you can at least put in roadblocks, to make it hard for prophetic groups to grab a hold of the political power, the way that the Bolsheviks and the Maoists did.

And there is nothing like repeated failure at the ballot box to bring the prophetic urge down to Earth.

That's what happened with the Sixties. The Democrats thought they were going to rule forever. Then they lost four out of five presidential elections in a row, and finally, the New Democrat Bill Clinton got elected as a moderate.

But then, as the Bible says, there came a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph, a rising generation of lefty progressives that did not live through the aftermath of the Sixties.

And so it looks like they will have to learn about politics and ordinary lunch-bucket voters the hard way.

Yeah. Because the guys that wage what seems like permanent ideological war are usually rich kids, scions of the ruling class.

But most ordinary people just want to live their lives and wive and thrive without being jerked around by ruling-class jerks.

I wonder what they mean by that?

Conspiracy Theory and Cancel Culture

One of the things that is clear in the effort to get President Trump is that partisans believe the propaganda that their side is putting out. Did President Trump collude with the Russians in 2016? Or did President Obama direct the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign? Did the Obama administration put pressure on Ukraine to dismiss a prosecutor that was looking at natural gas company Burisma? Or did President Trump get Ukraine to look into corruption as a quid quo pro for getting military aid? Depends whose side you are on.

But right now at least both sides get to put out their propaganda without being canceled.

Then there are the things you are not allowed to say. Michelle Malkin is having a bit of a problem because her visits to college campi to discuss immigration keep getting canceled. And Conservatism Inc. is going after her and 21-year-old far right YouTuber Nick Fuentes.

Now that gay marriage is a thing you are not allowed to fund Christian organizations like the Salvation Army. Because homophobia.

Anyone that doubts the narrative of the Holocaust and 6 million Jews murdered in the camps gets their book shredded and their academic career ruined. And in 1940 a ton of Americans got canceled for opposing FDR's move towards war.

Interested in a canceled and pulped book? Ron Unz at unz.com has put a raft of canceled books online on his HTML Books feature. Also 88 books by G.A. Henty: and to think I only read three of them!

Here's my info on Jews and Nazis, obtained from Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk. Wittgenstein the gay philosopher, author of Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations was Jewish from a very wealthy family in Vienna. He was in England in the 1930s, but his sisters were still in Vienna as the Nazis took over Europe. In 1938 they got fake Yugoslav passports and visas to go to Switzerland but were prosecuted by the Nazis. But, "All four were cleared of the charges brought against them." Then, it turned out that the Wittgenstein family had a lot of foreign currency. After lengthy negotiations -- that included Wittgenstein -- the sisters transferred a ton of Wittgenstein wealth from Switzerland to the Nazi Reichbank, and "Hermione and Helene were able to survive the war relatively untroubled." (p.400) So what's that all about?

We all know about the Overton Window, "range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time," the things that politicians are allowed to propose versus the crazy stuff that everyone agrees is beyong the Pale.

I suppose this suppression of radical ideas is a basic part of humans as social animals. For social cooperation to work everyone has to be on the same page, or nearly so.

But what makes Jewish groups so determined to cancel Holocaust Denial? Or gays so quick to cancel Christians? Or the climate community so quick to brand skeptics as "climate deniers?" Or Sen. McCarthy to winkle Commies out of the State Department? Or priests to winkle out heretics?

One thing I read recently, regarding Jews, is that when you are a small group, as Jews have tended to be, your survival depends on culture of innocence backed up by eternal watchfulness. Put it this way, for Jews to have survived as a tribe and a religion for the 2,000 years of Christianity is beyond remarkable. There must be something about Jewish culture and practice that maintains the Jewish identity through thick and thin.

Obviously, there must be something in humans as social animals that makes it beneficial to name and shame and cancel people that cause trouble. And it makes sense that people with crazy ideas could cause the demolition of the community in which they live.

But I just think it is sick and wrong for me to be named and shamed and canceled.

Pejorative Politics: Nothing New Under the Sun

Are you a racist? Are you a sexist? A homophobe? Etc? It's the thing of the moment, what every fashionable and Woke American does: using pejoratives to shut people up -- or even get them fired from their jobs.

The truth is: everybody does it. It's just that, according to my Law of the Incoming Rounds, we only notice when the mortar rounds are descending upon us and ours.

For instance, the nicknames for the political parties in Britain, Whigs and Tories, were both originally pejoratives. "Tory" was a name for dispossessed Irish peasants and became the name for supporters of the Catholic King James II of England. "Whig" is probably a shortening of the word "whiggamore," the nickname of 17th century Scottish rebels.

When we deplorables talk about "lefties" and "commies" we are using pejoratives; we are using the words as insults.

And here is the real genius. Our liberal friends have to change their name every generation or so, because their normal name turns into a pejorative. Thus the Progressives of the turn of the 20th century reinvented themselves as "liberals" in the New Deal. And then, about 15 years ago they reinvented themselves as "progressives." Because in the hands of chaps like Ronald Reagan the word "liberal" had become radioactive, an insult.

But hey, politics is a game of insults, whatever Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says about "people don't insult people." Yes they do, Nancy. All the time. Now, as I observe, in my notion of the male Culture of Insult, the insult direct is a male thing. I encountered probably the base experience of this in Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. The whole thing is about a young soldier wondering if he will have the necessary courage to get going when the going gets tough, and about the bravado and insults uttered by the soldiers as they are hanging around in camp in-between marches and battles.

What Our Nance is talking about is that women do not use the insult direct. In women's culture, insults are made indirectly, when two women have a conversation about a third woman not present: "I can't believe she said/did that." In the women's Culture of Complaint hey complain about her. But the intention and the intended effect is just the same as the insult direct. Isn't it, Nance?

The purpose of an insult direct or an insult indirect is to take out someone. In men's culture you do that directly, basically challenging an opponent to put up or shut up. In women's culture it is done indirectly, by the community of women, in a series of one-on-one convsersations, coming to a collective decision that some targeted woman is to be named and shamed and shunned. Anthony Trollope does a beautiful number on a step-mother naming and shaming and shunning her step-daughter in An American Senator. Of course, her vile actions didn't work because her step-daughter was the heroine of the story!

Ain't I a sexist? As Bugs Bunny might have said.

Back to the use of "deplorable" as a pejorative. The insult was coined by the matchless Hillary Clinton when she said to an LGBT audience during the 2016 presidential campaign:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

 [Laughter/applause]

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.

Well yeah. Of course I would say that you ain't seen haters until you've been around LGBT activists. And that is why Hillary Clinton talked about deplorables in her speech at the LGBT fundraiser. Because that's what the gays and the lesbians wanted to hear. That's why they laughed. That's why they cheered. Because Hillary Clinton was telling them that they were the good guys and the Other was the bad guys.

But here's the thing. We deplorables loved it! We marched right out and owned that "deplorable" pejorative. So that now, it really isn't a pejorative any more, it's a badge of honor. The next day some wag had culturally appropriated Les Mis and designed a poster of Les Déplorables and the song "Do You Hear the People Sing."

Same thing with Whigs and Tories. Back in the day, the parties in the British Parliament were referred to by all and sundry as Whigs and Tories, and Conservative Party voters are to this day called Tories.

So I say that the only way to detoxify the dread accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe is to own it.

Yes, I'm a racist. What's it to you?

And, of course, if I was dealing with a real sophisticate, I would say that, according to Hegel, the thing and its opposite are really the same. So the racist and the anti-racist are united by their obsession with race. You might even say they deserve each other.

Whaddya think about that, pardner?

Of Course I'm a Homophobe. How About You?

The third worst thing in the world is to be called a homophobe. Or maybe it is the first worst thing. Because the gay mafia is really better at the "cancel" culture than the race mafia.

And I have to say that, thinking about this post over the past day, I thought: Hmm. This is the one that could get me into trouble. Except, of course, that I am nobody, and nobody cares what Chris Chantrill thinks or writes.

Of course, I would say, today, that anyone that is not a homophobe is a fool. Phobia -- or φοβία -- is Greek for fear. But in English, according to Google, it is "an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something." Presumably that is the meaning that Freud came up with. So "homophobia" means an extreme or irrational feat or aversion to homosexuals.

Hmm. Again, I'd say that anyone that wasn't really afraid of homosexuals is a fool. Because the gay mafia -- pace the trans mafia -- is a very powerful political weapon that can put you out of a job in 15 minutes flat.

So yeah, I'm a homophobe. Anyone who is anyone ought to be afraid of the gay mafia. But what about homosexuals as individuals and homosexuality in general?

First of all, my experience with homosexuality.

I went to an English public school, and there was a lot of what the Brits would call "wanking" going on. But when I went to university I decided that I'd better stay on the hetero side. My reason? Well, back in those days the left was pretty hard on gays because, they said, homosexuality was all about upper-class "poofters." Better keep my nails clean, I thought.

But then I applied to enter the University Air Squadron at my university. And the officer conducting my physical decided, after I had failed the color pattern test, to check my color vision by having me look at a light source and call the color. So I got in to train as a pilot even though I am color blind. This same officer became my flight instructor, and one day, in the air, asked me if I had ever thought about homosexuality. No, I replied, I hadn't. So he proposed that there was no need to tell anyone about the conversation. So what did I do? I did nothing except continue my flight training.

Here's the thing. If that gay guy hadn't fixed my physical I would never have done flight training at the university, and I consider my flight training in the University Air Squadron one of the more meaningful and satisfying experiences of my life.

So the question for me is: should society gently condone the fact of homosexuals and other non-hetero folk in our society? Should society name and shame and shun them? Or should homosexuality be institutionalized with, e.g., gay marriage?

Let's turn to my pal Fritzi for advice. He observes, in The Will to Power, that Christianity rather overdoes it on the morality front. For Nietzsche, moral rules should be regarded more as common sense than divine commandments. Which is fine, except, as others point out, it is much more effective to propose that God knows everything, and will judge you at the last trump, than to leave the moral ordering of society to earthly moral arbiters like policemen and judges, and God forbid, politicians.

So I would suggest that it is probably best if young people are taught to avoid homosexuality.

Because?

Because of all kinds of practical reasons, starting with the basic function of sexuality, to put the next generation on the ground.

Because it is not true that, hey, you can choose your sexual preference, because human rights, and everybody should be who they want to be. The fact is that if you depart from the main road of life in which you fall in love with a young person of the opposite sex, get married, have kids, and then after 20 years realize that the meaning of life is grandchildren, you are much more likely to end up in the bushes or the wilderness. That is the point of moral rules and cultural guidelines. They are guard rails to point you in the direction that will, hopefully, keep you out of the ditch.

The fact is that kids today are being taught that non-hetero lifestyle is normal, is cool, is exciting. Er, not really. In fact, per Nietzsche, getting off the main road of life is hard to become an Übermensch is challenging, and requires enormous fortitude. Ir is not for the faint of heart.

On Nietzsche's reckoning, to be one of "we free spirits" is the whole point of life. It is creative, but it is hard. Any creative life is hard. And I agree with him.

But that is not how gay activists present the case. For them, it is all explainable in the leftist matrix of oppressors vs. helpless victims. Gays are helpless victims and must be rescued from the homophobic oppressors by law, by diversity and inclusion administrators, and by gay activists.

Sorry Charlie. Like everything to do with the left, this is a lie, including "and" and "the." If you choose to leave the main road of life you will need enormous reserves of courage and energy and fortitude, whatever the law, whatever the D&I administrators, whatever the power of gay activists.

And on top of everything, we have the problem that once the activists get their Civil Rights law or their gay marriage, they don't go home. That's because their identity is their life as an activist. And activists must go out there peacefully protesting every day, otherwise where is the meaning of life?

And there is the peculiar nature of activism that, when you are fighting for your rights, you must act the role of the helpless victim that is just asking for justice. But after you have achieved your goal your meek activist turns into an avenging angel, dispensing justice with fire and sword. What's that all about?

So yeah. Call me a homophobe. I don't care. Because all the vile accusations flying around are merely the crude attempts of political activists to divide people and conquer them. But accusations only work when we cringe. If we do not cringe, then the accusation starts to lose its power.

OK, OK. It's easy for me to say that, because I don't earn my living in the public square: I can't be "canceled."

But right now the accusation of homophobia is an accusation that can hurt your career big time. You cannot say: No I'm Not! Because that won't fly with the safe-space girls in HR.

So really, the only thing to do is to own it. Yes. I'm a homophobe. Because my job as the adult in the room is let the kids know that if you choose live as LGBT you better look before you leap.

Of Course I'm a Sexist, How About You?

The second worst thing in the world is to be called a sexist. Because. But really what is a sexist?

Is it someone that believes that men and women are different? Is it someone that supports the patriarchy or toxic masculinity? Is it someone that believes women should be kept barefoot and pregnant?

Or maybe it is just someone that believes that the Civil Rights Acts mean what they say, that the government shall not discriminate on the basis of sex.

Actually I get it. It is all understood in Eric Hoffer's famous aphorism that "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Or more directly, the problem with every great cause is that after it succeeds it never goes home. But sticks around doing more of what worked to advance in the cause in the days of its innocence. Thus, says Google's Ngram Viewer.
Come on, feminists! You mean to say that we need to talk more about sexism after the government passed a law to make it illegal for government and most private organizations to discriminate against women. I don't think so. I mean: shouldn't we have been having a conversation about sexism before the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s?

Actually, I believe that the government should discriminate in favor of women. Women are peculiarly vulnerable, and not because of millennia of patriarchy, but because women are physically weaker, because women are particularly vulnerable when they are pregnant or caring for young children. And because Oscar Wilde's question about what women want is flat wrong. It is not what women want, but what they expect. And primarily what they expect is to be protected.

Let me give you an example. Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently criticized President Trump for a tweet criticizing impeachment witness Marie Yovanovich. She praised the former ambassador's "strength" and then went on to say that "people don't insult people."

This is, as we say, just like a woman. Guess what: you never praise a man for his strength. You only criticize him in the event of weakness. So our Nance is a sexist. Then the insult thing. It's true. Women don't insult other women to their face. What they do is complain about a third-person woman in an intimate one-on-one conversation with another woman, as in "I can't believe she said that." And at some point the women's culture of name and shame and shun kicks in. And the woman in question finds that she doesn't have any "friends" any more. You tell me which is worse.

Here's more sexist stuff.

I believe that votes for women is a bad idea, because the only valid job for government is protecting us from dangers, and women don't do that.

I believe that abortion is a bad idea, because no man should have the option of saying "get rid of it."

I believe the sexual revolution was a bad idea, because women just don't do hookup culture, not unless they have drunk half a bottle of vodka before the party.

I believe that no-fault divorce is a bad idea, because it encourages men to dump their wives for a newer model; and it encourages women to act on the advice of their friends to ditch the loser.

I believe that careers for women is a bad idea because I think young women should be thinking about marriage and children and married women should be working with other mothers in the community to raise the children together, and that older women should be regulating the neighborhood with their name and shame and shun culture.

I believe that women are learners and carers and teachers, and their instinct is to keep things going. I believe that men are creators, fighters, and destroyers, and their instinct is to march towards the sound of the guns.

I believe that we can see women starting to push back against the follies of the last century, that women can live and work "just like a man." I believe that the reaction against the hookup culture is a start, that the #MeToo hashtag is a realization that women do too need protection in the public square. And I believe that microaggressions and safe spaces are an indicator that women don't do face to face challenge.

And what I think is that men are in the early stages of creating a new men-only culture where courage is expected, insults are just a fact of life, and rebelling against conventional wisdom is a sign of manliness.

So yeah. Call me a sexist. I don't care. Because all the vile accusations flying around are merely the crude attempts of political activists to divide people and conquer them. But accusations only work when we cringe. If we do not cringe, then the accusation starts to lose its power.

OK, OK. It's easy for me to say that, because I don't earn my living in the public square: I can't be "canceled."

But right now the accusation of sexism is an accusation that can hurt your career big time. You cannot say: so's your father, because women don't do face-to-face insult -- the Noble Society of Fish Wives excepted, God bless 'em.

So really, the only thing to do is to own it. Yes. I'm a sexist. Because I'm a man, and a man has to bravely outdare the dangers of the time. Whatever the cost.

Of Course I'm a Racist. How About You?

The worst thing in the world is to be called a racist. Because there is no defense against this pejorative. Oh, you can say: No I'm Not. Good luck with that, pal. Obviously, that answer is not working. So I propose the opposite idea.

Of course I'm a racist. Isn't everyone?

Doesn't everyone prefer their own kind best? For instance, your liberal anti-racist may sneer and be ashamed of his rich-kid whiteness. But that's because his whiteness is not his identity. For a lefty xir leftiness is xir identity. Call him a lefty and he feels the compliment.

I'm a racist because I like my own kind best. As a family I am deeply conscious of how my family dodged the bullets of the 20th century that mowed down tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions: how my dad, born in Russia, got out in 1918 just in time; how my mother, born in Japan, got out in 1940 just in time; how I, born in India, got out in 1948 after Indian Independence because the Indians were too busy killing each other to bother about the left-over Brits.

As a man descended from northwest Europeans I am deeply conscious and proud of the remarkable contributions to humanity made by northwest Europeans, from limited government to finance to science to understanding and developing the concepts of the market economy and the nation state, and getting embarrassed about slavery, that ultimate expression of hierarchy, and doing something about it.

As an American I am deeply proud of the Founders, those remarkable men that seized political power and then walked away from it, in part with their separation of powers doctrine and in part with the repeated actions of George Washington, man on a white horse that twice walked away from a kingly crown: first as the victorious commanding general of a revolutionary war; and second as a two-term president.

As a white person I am deeply proud of the civil rights revolution that extended to a subordinate minority, blacks, the promise of equal rights under the law. In what country, ever, has the dominant majority ever extended the hand as the Americans of the 1950s and 1960s extended the hand of equal rights to African Americans, because they thought it was the right thing to do?

Look, I get it. In politics, the whole point is to divide the world up into Us and Them, and we humans are groupish, we identify with groups: with our immediate family, with our kindred, with our city, with our nation, with our identity as educated globalists. I like to say that we are all tribesmen, except that back in the day of the hunter-gatherer the boundaries of tribe were much more flexible than, say, the boundaries of American citizenship.

Every war leader, rallying his people to the defense of the homeland, automatically encourages his people to identify as members of a fake tribe, the community of people that need to band together to defend the homeland. The tribe might be a hunter-gatherer band; it might be a horticultural village; it might be an agricultural fiefdom; it might be a nation state. And in the modern era of identity politics, the war leader may call upon our identity as black, or white, or male, or female or gay. Doesn't really matter. Humans respond to the call to arms, and form themselves by instinct into ranks and files, and believe the things that their leaders tell them. There is no difference between any of these tribes, called into existence to meet the threat. We humans are groupish; we establish our identity with our group memberships, especially in the hour of need.

Our lefty friends, it must be said, have become the world champs when it comes to discovering new ways in which to form humans into ranks and files and set them against each other. And what they have learned from the military leaders, or instinctively stumbled upon, is that you cannot really form a strong group unless that group is experienced as being under attack. Thus, to get African Americans to vote 90 percent for Democrats, you must terrify African Americans into believing that Jim Crow is just around the corner. This is, of course, no different that rallying Americans to fight in World War II by terrifying them about Nazis. Or rallying them to fight the Cold War by terrifying them about Commies. Or rallying them to occupy the Middle East by terrifying them about Muslims. Or rallying rich-kid white activists for the #Resistance by terrifying them about white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

So yeah. Call me a racist. I don't care. Because all the vile accusations flying around are merely the crude attempts of political activists to divide people and conquer them. But accusations only work when we cringe. If we do not cringe, then the accusation starts to lose its power.

OK, OK. It's easy for me to say that, because I don't earn my living in the public square: I can't be "canceled."

But right now the accusation of racism is an accusation against which there is no defense. You cannot say: no I'm not! And you certainly cannot throw the accusation back into the face of an African American.

So really, the only thing to do is to own it. Yes. I'm a racist. Whaddya going to do about it, pal?