Cleaning Up Afer Hurricane Lefty

After the destructive winds and flood tides of a great tropical storm comes the cleanup.

And that's what came to me in the early morning today as I thought about the century-long hurricane of the left. I got to thinking about it after reading a piece in American Mind by Jeremy Carl writing that ordinary America is now "culturally conquered territory," and it will take a "reconquista," like the Spanish reconquest of Spain from the Moors, to restore America.

Quoting Hunter Hearns, he writes of the liberal cultural hegemony,

Republicans have controlled the presidency for 32 out of the last 52 years, appointed 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices, and controlled much of Congress for the last 25 years as well. “For a party to be so remarkably successful politically while losing on practically every issue requires a deep rethinking of where things have gone wrong.”

There is a lot of woulda coulda shoulda like this going on in the scattered homes of Conservative-ville: the assumption that someone has failed. That Bill Buckley should have done better than make the Republican Party into an Outer Party to the Democrats' Inner Party. That the Bushes should not have been such squishes. That the neoconservatives ended up betraying us in the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq. That the billionaire libertarian globalists should not have hollowed out the manufacturing economy. Etc.

But I think all that kind of thought misses the point. It assumes that, e.g., government coulda woulda shoulda take enough precautions so that, when a hurricane shows up in Florida, that everything should already be hurricane-proof. And Someone Is To Blame if a few roofs blow off.

But when there is a hurricane or some other great storm, it really is not possible to take enough precautions so that there is no damage. You board up the windows, you encourage people to drive their SUVs inland, and then, after the storm, you go to work and clean up.

The basic problem we righties have on the "far-right" of which you've heard tell is that we don't really believe in politics. We think government is a necessary evil to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic, and beyond that it goes south pretty quickly.

Wanna protect seniors with retirement income? Well, pretty soon it takes over the budget, and one thing it does not do is save present income to provide the jobs for the kids that will be working when we geezers are retired. Wanna educate the kiddies? You end up with an education bureaucracy that is messing around with diversity and inclusion and bathrooms and pensions and not doing much about educating the kiddies. Wanna curb dangerous monopolies? Great, except scientists say that the regulated monopolies end up "capturing" the regulators.

And that is just the boring part of government. The truth is that, for many people, politics is their religion. They practice politics as part of a movement to save the world and give meaning to their lives.

We have a rather terrifying word to describe the combination of politics and religion. We call it "totalitarian." And there are 100 million graves in Russia and China that bear silent witness to the horror of this toxic combination.

To say that we woulda coulda shoulda stopped all this is to say that, when a new religious cult forms we should send wise men to talk the cultist out of it, before they become a problem.

Who really could have known that the minor kooks Marx and Engels with their shabby critique of classical economics would have spawned the Bolsheviks and the Maoists? Who was anticipating The Sixties and forecasting a sexual revolution and the sacrament of abortion?

And who forecasted the Woke Revolution of the present time? And who can keep track of the follies of progressives in government, proposing stupid de-carbonization, ridiculous regulation of the workplace, and the use of words as weapons in the pejorative search-and-destroy mission of canceling all the racist-sexist-homophobes?

The truth is that all we can do is batten down the hatches when the storm clouds threaten and hope we are still alive after it has spent its force so we can help the Cajun Navy rescue people and clean up afterwards.

The thing is that every successful religious and political enthusiasm ends up as a manifestation of my maxim: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." Every great political movement and every great religious movement leaves devastation in its wake. Or if you prefer, victims of injustice.

One of the things that our lefty friends are very good at is reminding us how the gales of economic change cause suffering and heartache: the closed manufacturing plants, the ruined lives, the hollowed-out cities. It's true; we can do more to help those whose boats have ended up holed and beached on the headland.

But when you have politics you have a war of words. When you have religion you have a battle between good and evil. And when you have government you have force.

So when a religious movement or a political movement or a combination totalitarian movement reaches hurricane strength, thousands, maybe millions of people are going to be flung around like matchsticks. That, in any language, is injustice. And injustice builds rage and pushback.

I don't think that people like me -- who, using Curtis Yarvin's language, are "gentry" that try to understand the point of view of "commoners" -- can expect to anticipate and head off the latest politico-religious enthusiasm from the left. But we can champion the right of "commoners" to live their modest lives in their own way without being drafted into the ideological army of the lefties.

And without being send to reeducation camp for failing to get with the left's program.

And the least we can do is help clean up after the storm has passed.

Politics and Honor Among Thieves

The point about the Horowitz Inspector General report is that it didn't offer a narrative. It just discussed the various ways in which the FBI violated its rules in gussying up documentation for its FISA applications to surveil the communications of Carter Page.

One of those violations was not to mention that Carter Page was a CIA guy. That is, the CIA used him because of his Russian connections.

Really? The FBIs didn't know that Carter Page was supposed to be mixing it up with the Russkies, because CIA. Or they did know, but "forgot" to tell the FISA court? Really? Stepping on the CIA's toes? Where's professional courtesy, not to mention honor among thieves?

Here's my problem with all this munching over the details of coulda shoulda woulda. Someone, somewhere in the "intelligence community" or the Department of Justice should have said: "hey kids, let's cool our jets for a moment. Do you realize what we are doing here? We are spying on a presidential campaign. Are we really, really sure we want to do that? Hey, I know! Let's give Donald Trump a heads-up on this."

Because, you see, I'd say that the intelligence community ought to presume that any ordinary US political campaign is on the up-and-up.

Call it honor among thieves. You don't snitch on your fellow thieves.

Hey, there are all kinds of shenanigans in every political campaign, and all kinds of marginal characters that want to get involved. But if there really is some connection with a foreign power, you want the campaign managers to be warned. You want to say: "Hey, Bill, did you know that Sam has been a bit too close to the Russkies over the years?"

But the Obama Justice Department and the Obama FBI didn't do that. Really?

Now I just read a guy that said that all organizations are like a living organism:

Take a few individuals and put them together in an organization of almost any sort and an amazing thing happens. The organization effectively becomes alive. It now has a heartbeat of its very own and it, the organization, will fight to stay alive from that point forward.

So, somehow, all the folks at the DOJ and FBI knew what was expected of them. And they just went along. Whether there was an explicit order from the top, or just a nod and a wink, like the famous line about "who will rid me of this turbulent priest." Most of the time, the monarch doesn't have to issue a specific order. People just intuit what is expected of them and get on with it.

So. I don't know if President Obama personally unleashed the FBI on the Trump campaign, but certainly someone in the chain of command intuited what was expected of him. Maybe they just knew that Donald Trump was a threat to the "living organism" we call the "deep state." And certainly, people in the FBI would understand that such behavior would be rewarded by a President Clinton.

What bothers me is the utter stupidity of all this.

If the folks at the top of the food chain had half a brain, they would have been saying, well, the Dems have been in power for two terms so we are almost certainly looking at a change election, and if we start mucking about with that we will create more problems than we solve.

It's the same with Supreme Court nominations. Back in 1987 the Dems decided to "Bork" the Supreme Court nomination of conservative Robert Bork. Why? Because Bork threatened all the liberal agenda they had "legislated" through the Supreme Court. So they stopped him. Bully for them. But now every GOP Supreme Court nominee gets Borked, and Republicans have learned to resist, and now have a conscious policy to replace all retiring justices throughout the federal court system with reliable, vetted conservatives. And so Democrats have upped the ante every time, so that now we are dragging up alleged misbehavior in student parties from 30 years ago, as in the Kavanaugh nomination! Really Dems? Did you really want to go here?

Do you see what is happening, Dems? You are teaching us deplorables how to do "activism" and go mano-a-mano against you guys. Is that what you really want?

What bothers me is the utter stupidity of this.

Now we have the impeachment of President Trump on the flimsiest of pretexts. I get why we are getting this, because Hillary Clinton didn't properly concede the 2016 election, and because there has been a revival of left-wing activism partly encouraged by President Obama. I also understand that Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to lose control of the lefty activist wing of the party, so she is playing the Duchess of Plaza Toro and leading her regiment from behind.

But is this really what you Democrats want? Routine impeachments of presidents because the activists are mad about losing the last election, because you didn't have the cojones to tell them to cool their jets?

I was talking to my Greek friend this morning, and he mentioned that a few years ago some Greek priest from Buffalo wanted to change the bylaws of the US Greek Orthodox Church to make the priest the president of each local church governing council. But then some bishop intervened. No! He exclaimed. The priest is the spiritual leader in the church, and the council is the "corporation." Forget it! Golly. Imagine! Separation of powers, even in a local church.

Here's the problem. You get traditions, like the separation of powers. Like alternation in office and conceding of elections. Like only using impeachment for really egregious "high crimes and misdemeanors."

But over time people forget why. Separation of powers? But we want abortion, because justice. Concede an election? But Trump! Using the FBI to spy on an election campaign? But Trump!

The point is not that these people are evil. I could live with that. The point is that they are stupid. They are breaking up the furniture and using it for firewood and they have no clue what they are doing.

I suppose I should be grateful. I should be grateful that the boobs that have turned Supreme Court nominations into straight partisan dogfights are idiots. That Hillary Clinton is a corrupt fool. That the woke left literally knows nothing, AOC. That the global elite just talks to each other and has no idea how it is screwing up the lives of ordinary deplorables.

Because if the "deep state" had a brain they would have the whole world locked up, instead of stumbling and bumbling from one stupidity to another.

Still, the whole Trump surveillance thing puzzles me. I thought there was supposed to be honor among politicians, as among thieves.

But maybe the current generation of thieves didn't get the message from their seniors.

The Weird Benefit of the NYT "1619 Project"

As you would expect, conservatives have been in the forefront of mocking the New York Times "1619 Project" that proposes that African slavery is the story and the meaning of America.

But I must say that it helped me think a bit more deeply about slavery.

Because it encouraged me to think instead: why should we, in the last two centuries, have been the ones to experience slavery as a scandal, and do something about it?

And it encouraged me to think up a counter-narrative, that we might call the left's "1848 Project" to reinvent slavery as socialism and to create the two biggest slave states in history.

Anyway, now the Wall Street Journal has published a pay-walled opinion piece "The '1619 Project' Gets Schooled," in which it takes the NYT to the wood-shed on the 1619 Project with the help of historians and Trotskyites.

The project's creator, Mikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it "decenters whiteness" and disdains its critics as "old, white male historians."

It would be funny, if not so serious, that this woman, who has "an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master's in journalism", is so up-front and, dare I say, mindlessly racist.

But, in a way, it is helpful for The New York Times to front such a superficial project, because it makes people like me think about the issue. Why did we, the paragons of "whiteness," abolish slavery?

Was it because of moral superiority of our white patriarchal culture? Was it because of the moral fervor of Christian evangelism in the 18th century? Was it because slavery does not pay, compared to free labor? Was it because the North hated the South and cooked up the slavery issue in the 1850s as a club to beat the South?

Or was it because of popular literature like Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin? Or was it because of black Americans that, according to Hannah-Jones, "fought back alone" against racism?

Whatabout a Brit sailor like William Richardson in A Mariner of England that in 1790 joined a slaver bound for Guinea as Fourth Mate, and spent six months at anchor slowly buying slaves on the Bonny River from the local African chief?

Or whatabout the white slave trade in Circassian beauties from the NE coast of the Black Sea -- sold by their families into slavery -- that were trafficked to harems in the Middle East?

The truth is that, when we construct our historical narratives, whether as a credentialed historian or as a young journalist that "literally knows nothing," we are picking documents to tell a story. Some people want to celebrate the glorious arc of "white" progress; others want to "decenter whiteness." We all pick the items that help us tell the story we want to tell.

My own approach is the notion that slavery does not pay, compared to free labor. So no moral story. Just bottom-line thinking. Just as, in WWI and after, the Germans changed the basic organization of the battle by assigning responsibility downwards from commissioned officers to NCOs because, in the "lethal battlefield" of machine guns and artillery, there was no way for the higher officers to supervise every detail of the battle.

In other words, the world does not change from brilliant strategic thinking. It just reacts to the facts on the ground.

You could have the same argument about labor unions. Some people say that it was unions that raised the wages and benefits of workers; others that it was "productivity" and the simple action of supply and demand for labor. Some people say that it was unions that forced companies to treat their employees like human beings; others that unions make a company so inflexible and uncompetitive that unionized companies just can't survive in the global marketplace.

Hey, whatabout my argument about the welfare state being neo-feudalism? You can argue that the serfs of the old feudal system, abandoned by their lords in the agricultural revolution of the 16th century, voted for a resumption of feudalism in the modern administrative welfare state that tasks the ruling class with looking after the welfare of the workers. So you have the voters of Britain voting for a little more NHS from Boris Johnson rather than a lot more NHS from Jeremy Corbyn. But nobody is proposing to put the responsibility for health care on the shoulders of each individual citizen.

So, is the modern feudalism a step towards slavery? Or what? I doubt if the young journalists of The New York Times would have a clue about that, beyond what they had been carefully taught in our nation's schools and colleges.

Applying Yarvin's Gentry, Commoners, Clients to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart"

Writes Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill:" all societies have three layers. So it turns out that almost everybody from George Orwell to me has a Three Peoples theory. Let's make a table of the correspondences.

Author	Top	Middle	Bottom
George Orwell	Inner Party	Outer Party	Proles
Karl Marx	Bourgeoisie	Communists	Proletarians
Auguste Comte	Positive	Metaphysical	Theological
New Left	Activists	Racists, etc.	Victims
Charles Murray	Belmont	??	Fishtown
Curtis Yarvin	Gentry	Commoners	Clients
J.R.R. Tolkien	Elves	Hobbits	Dwarves
Joel Kotkin	Clerisy	Yeomanry	Serfs
Z-Man, Z-man	Cloud People	Dirt People	[lower classes]
Dennis Price	Cloud People	Dirt People	[dependents]
David Goodhart	Anywheres	Somewheres	[Inbetweeners]
John Derbyshire	Ice People	??	Sun People
Vikings	Earls	Peasants	Thralls (slaves)
Christopher Chantrill	Creatives	Responsibles	Subordinates
Christopher Chantrill	Ruling Class	Middle Class	Little Darlings

Some people only have two layers in their system, and they are wrong!

But let us think a little about Charles Murray and his binary of Belmont, a suburb of Boston where Mitt Romney used to live, and Fishtown, the working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia along the Delaware River.

In his Wall Street Journal précis of his Coming Apart he notes how the Belmont folks are doing fine, with great careers and merger marriages; the middle not so good, and then the Fishtown folks where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Note that the libertarian Murray doesn't really give the middle a name. But we now know who they are. They are the Trump people, left out of the equation.

Interesting, isn't it, that Charles Murray was just presenting what he regarded as a problem, that the top and the bottom of white America were drifting apart, and while things were great for the top they weren't so great for the bottom. And then Donald Trump solved the problem, by assembling a new middle that is sorta left out of the Belmont-Fishtown binary, and is now gonna fight to Make America Great Again. What a concept!

And now Boris Johnson has done the same thing in Britland.

Hey! Wasn't the left supposed to be all about advocating for the downtrodden? What happened there, lefties?

Actually, when you think about it, Donny and Boris have solved the political problem for the next 30 years. Are they geniuses or just cunning rascals that saw their opportunity and they took it? Never mind.

Truth is, we have needed this for a long time, because the Big Game of the 20th Century was the game of the Inner Party bribing the Proles with the money they taxed on the Outer Party. That worked a charm when the Outer Party wasn't too large. But now that we have progressed to Yarvin's world where the old Inner Party has expanded into a gentry class polluting the Proles, now their multicultural clients, with the idea that the Outer Party, now commoners, are the enemy. Well, one fine day some damn politician was going to figure out that there are a lot of votes in those deplorable commoners, and that he could rally the commoners against the gentry.

See, in Orwell's 1984 the Inner Party was less that 2 percent of the population and the Proles were about 85 percent. So the Outer Party was about 13 percent of population. But now, according to Charles Murray, the gentry in Belmont is about 20 percent of the population, and the Fishtown population is about 35 percent. So there's a much bigger middle. And then there are class traitors like me that believe that the Belmont guys are cruel and unjust and so vote with the Outer Party become commoners.

So now you got a rough balance of power.

And wot I say is: surely some of the Little Darlings of the ruling class are about ready to flip the bird at their gentry officers, desert the woke colors and become commoners.

And it serves the gentry right!

With Trump and Boris, Time for a "Rectification of Names"

OK. Now the Brits have gone and done it too. They have elected a "buffoon", Boris Johnson, to be Prime Minister, just as we Yanks elected the clown Donald Trump to be our president.

What is going on?

Well, when things appear to be confusing, the first thing to do, Confucius says, is a "Rectification of Names" to make "words correspond to reality."

So here is my contribution.

Stop talking about "white working-class" Trump voters. They are not working-class workers. They are "commoners" of the nation state of the United States of America.

Stop talking about "working class" Boris voters in the old Labour heartlands. They are "commoners" of the nation state of the United Kingdom.

So let me explain what I mean. My use of "commoners" follows Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill" over at American Mind.

As Orwell wrote, all societies have three human layers. We may call ours 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.

Yarvin is a Three Peoples guy, just like me.

When you look at the folks attending Trump's rallies, you are not seeing the working class. You are not seeing people that have been bused to the rally by "activistes" and Soros money. You are seeing ordinary Americans, commoners, that drove to his rally in their SUVs. They have had some education, and are probably working in the trades, or as technicians. And they consider themselves Americans, proud and free. That, in part, is what the dreaded "gun culture" is all about, that I take care of mine. They go to Trump's rallies because they feel he "cares about people like me."

When you consider the Brits that voted for Brexit and for Boris, you are not seeking the working class, satirized by Peter Sellers in his "what about the workers." You are seeing ordinary "commoner" Brits that have been voting Labour for generations because that is what people like them did. Labour represented the "workers;" the Tories represented the "toffs." 'Nuff said. They voted for Boris because they cannot stand lefty Jeremy Corbyn.

By the way, the lefties I heard on the BBC last night were all still talking about "Thatcherism" and "austerity," just like they were a generation ago.

And really, all this is because the "gentry" in the US and the UK is no longer trying to communicate to the "commoners" that were once workers. They have gone on to bigger and better things: the identity politics of race and gender; helping helpless migrants; saving the Earth from climate change. And the commoners-that-were-once-workers are not to be the beneficiaries of this new politics. No, the beneficiaries of the new politics are to be the gentry themselves and their new "clients" the traditionally marginalized and oppressed.

Look, let's give the gentry their due. Of course they are internationalists: they have the education and qualifications to work anywhere in the world, and they do not experience the nation state as protecting them from the cold winds of the world. Of course they are totalitarians, combining religion and politics, for everyone needs a religion and with God dead, they are picking up the secular religion of the left and carelessly mixing it together with their politics. But they need something to make themselves feel special. And because an advanced education does not really equip you to make better products and services in the market economy, they gravitate towards government, the administrative state, and the education state. And because they need to be "leaders" they need followers, the current "clients:" the migrants just off the farm, "uneducated and/or dependent" who need protection and look to a powerful lord to protect them from the cold winds of the market economy.

One result of the Trump/Johnson effect is the moving of the Republican Party of the US and the Conservative Party of the UK from the Reaganite/Thatcherite minimal state and free trade agenda towards a more protectionist politics, in the sense of protecting the commoners from the cold hard world with Trump trade deals, and cranking up the NHS in Britain. We libertarian conservatives regard protectionism of all kinds as a fool's errand. We say that you are fooling yourself if you think that "protection" will actually protect you. But the truth is that "commoners" expect the government to protect them. And they have a point. What is the point of government if it does not protect you?

But is the expectation of the commoners any worse than the expectation of the gentry that the government should provide them with magnificent careers in the Deep State to match the depth and breadth of their cultivations and ambitions?

The cunning thing about Trump is that, under cover of helping the commoners he is doing libertarian things like dismantling job-killing federal regulations and lowering marginal tax rates. Without making a big ideological point of it.

Boris says he is going to build hospitals for the NHS -- including in his own constituency -- and do climate change. But I wonder what he will be doing without actually making a big deal of it.

I also think that the Rectification of Names should extend to calling our "progressives" and "democratic socialists" as "reactionaries," following my notion of understanding the left as a Great Reaction.

But that is another story.

What Happens to Democrats When the Pelosi-Biden Generation Retires?

OK, I know. First of all, what is left of Republicans when Trump leaves the scene? Never mind! That is a question for another day.

Seriously. All the Democratic presidents we grew to know and love were elected as mere pikers. FDR was elected at 50, JFK at 43, Carter at 52; Clinton at 46; Obama at 47.

Only Harry Truman was over 60 on becoming president. That just shows it!

Now we have Joe Biden, who will be 77 on election day. Elizabeth Warren, who will be 71. If we look at Democratic leaders in Congress, we have Our Nance, from a distinguished Baltimore political family, who will be 79 in March. Chuck Schumer will be 70 next November.

If you ask me, this is an unfortunate consequence of modern health care and medicine, that politicians live a lot longer than they used to. And since politicians never retire, it means that the younger set now grow old waiting for their olders and betters to retire. Perhaps we should bring back the smoke-filled room to hasten our politicians on their way.

I remember back in the day when the MSM was scandalized by all those ancient Southern Democrats occupying chairmanships of Congressional committees that should have been going to worthy young northern liberal Democrats.

The problem is, of course, that when the current crop of veteran Democrats retires the folks that step into their shoes will either be vile monsters like Adam Schiff, 59, or minority members from inner-city one-party districts.

I know that we are all supposed to be thrilled by multicultural America, but I have a feeling that it will be nasty, brutish, and short compared to the current America that we have been taught to hate.

In other words, I think that multiculturalism is all very well when liberal professors are instructing their students at Deep State U, but not so much fun when open racist sexist multiculturalists are practicing what they have been carefully taught on the political stage.

See, I know that all the good people know that nationalism equals Hitler. But I think nationalism is one of the most remarkable ideas ever, to persuade a motley crew of people that really have nothing in common to believe that they are all joyful members of the fake tribe of the nation.

And I think that when you do the reverse procedure and persuade men and women and LGBTs and various racial and ethnic minorities that they have nothing in common.-- Well I think you are sowing the wind and will shortly reap the whirlwind.

But what do I know!

Here's another problem that I don't think our Democratic friends have thought about. We all had a grand old time in the 20th century cranking government spending from 10 percent of GDP up to the present 36 percent, as below:



But do you see what has been happening? The growth of government spending has been slowing, except for that blip in the Great Recession. I just think that the good years of bribing the voters will lovely free stuff is coming to the end of its useful life.

That's why Elizabeth Warrn has run into a buzz-saw with her Medicare-for-all thingy. Most Americans don't think they will benefit. Right now a lot of Americans are all in favor of climate change policy. That's because they don't understand that the money is going to billionaires and bottom feeders not to good ordinary Americans like them.

And when it comes down to it, the basis of modern democracy is that voters believe that the free stuff should only be going to people like them. And we have carefully taught folks to believe in this. There's the geezer saying that "they'd better not cut My Social Security" because he paid in all his life. Or the girl geezer just flat out saying "they'd better not cut My Medicare." Just sayin'.

Somewhere out there is an newly fledged politician in the process of figuring out how you play free-stuff politics when all the good ones are taken.

That guy is a genius.

I wonder what he is doing right now? Maybe he will sweep in and send sweep the current crop of septuagenarians out to the retirement community.

But is the Deep State up to the Job?

The ZMan has a trio of pieces about whether the Deep State can sink Trump and reform.

In "Our Revolutionary Age" he writes about the similarities between the "decadent and indifferent ruling class" in the lead-up to the French Revolution and our present Deep State. Our present rulers are "hot house flowers;" the intelligence community that spied on the Trump campaign imagines it is playing "a game without consequences." Only they are idiot Marie Antoinettes saying "let them eat cake."

In "The Community" he writes about why "reform is impossible" because everyone who is anyone is a member of the informal community of the ruling class, the "party" if you like. For instance, the folks who did the dirty on spying on the Trump campaign think they are going to be taken care of.

If these people had any fear of Barr or Durham, they would be lying low. Instead, they are doing the same service for the community they were doing before all this. They are members of the community in good standing. They have nothing to fear.

And Zman thinks that when impeachment gets to the Senate "Trump will be given a list of things he must sign in order to avoid conviction." Reform? Fuggetaboutit. Because the ruling class is a closed society that won't allow it.

In "True Reform" he writes about how the current ruling class is not going to allow genuine reform, for

no reform that would work against the interests of the ruling class will ever see the light of day. These people... are not stupid or naive. They understand perfectly well how they remain in power and it sure as heck is not by allowing social reformers to strip them of their authority. So any reform would have to come from the billionaires who control the political class... [S]ome crisis will have to scare the global pirates, who run the West, into hiring a new political class. If that does not happen, then we are headed for a revolutionary moment when this order is violently overthrown as a matter of survival.

OK. But if the ruling class has a high percentage of Marie Antoinettes, are they really up to the job of stamping out reform? Maybe, but I would say that the story so far is that the efforts to stomp on Trump haven't exactly taught me that the ruling class is up to the job of heading off the deplorables. They look to me to be like the stupid generals that liberal historians keep telling us about that are trying to fight the last war.

Actually the squib about generals fighting the last war is a cheap shot. Of course the generals don't  know how the fight the current war until battle in joined and the generals and the colonels and the politicians in charge learn from bitter experience and the deaths cemeteries full of young men how to fight the current war.

And I have a feeling, based on my judgement about the performance of ruling class types like Pelosi and Schiff and Nadler and the MSM, that they are really not ready the fight the war on Trump and the deplorables. I feel that they are a day late and a dollar short trying to play the role of the Duke of Plaza Toro and stay one step in front of the left-wing army of woke-aholics.

For instance, suppose the Dems had conceded the election to Trump? Then the left-wing crazies wouldn't have started their #Resistance and, if they had, the Pelosis could have disciplined them by saying that we are all Americans and we must all accept the results of elections. Then the Dems could have mounted an offensive of moderates against Trump, as they did when turning the House Democratic in 2018. On this notion, the Pelosis shot themselves in the foot by allowing a #Resistance to form that seems to be forcing them into an impeachment to prove that they have hair on their chests.

So I don't think that the ruling class really knows how to deal with the Trump phenomenon. They are pressing the familar buttons in the control room but they are not getting the result they expect.

And whatabout the billionaires and the "pirates?" The thing about them is that they are not all that sharp when it comes to politics. Soros? Helluva speculator, and a fiend when it comes to funding left-wing activist groups, and an avowed enemy of the nation state, but I wonder if he is really getting the results he intends? And other billionaires, like Bloomberg, Gates, the Google guys, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos? I don't think those guys are really playoff material. Maybe there is some Dark Lord directing traffic behind the scenes, but I doubt it. The fact is that, when it comes to politics, the politicians are the experts, and if they don't know what to do, then I doubt if the billionaires do either.

And whatabout the Crash of 2008?  Does the ruling class really understand what happened, and how it was their foolish policy of subsidizing housing loans, and allowing low down payments and loans to high-risk borrowers? Does the ruling class understand that the problem was not "greedy bankers?" Suppose the real ruling class understands what happened. OK, great. But does the liberal gentry class understand? I doubt it. A wise elite would have kept the lid on home mortgages, would have warned the congressional advocates of more mortgage subsidies to cool it, and would not have allowed this to happen:


"Agency" debt is more or less Fannie and Freddie, the government mortage twins that, at their peak just before the 2008 crash, had issued debt of about 55% of GDP. Good idea, ruling class? I don't think so.

See, I don't think that the ruling class is smart enough to see around corners and avoid easily avoidable problems. I think that they are losing control, of their own crazies, and of the economy and the loyalty of the "commoners" that they have humiliated as "deplorables."

So I think, despite what the Zman says about the ruling class, that our rulers are not that smart, and not really able to steer the ship of state to keep themselves in power, and not really able to keep the deplorables down.

And if Trump gets to a Senate trial, I don't know that the Republican senators are really going to give Trump "a list of things he must sign in order to avoid conviction." I think that the Republican senators are going to be more interested in making sure that their supporters know that they aren't buyin' nothing that the Democrats are selling. From what I understand about vote-buying, from The Calculus of Consent by Buchanan and Tullock, the question would be what the pro-removal forces would have to offer Republican senators on the fence that would compensate them for losing their seats.

None of these guys are willing to boldly outdare the dangers of the time. They want to keep their current positions and their influence, and I doubt that many Republican senators are much tempted by the prospect of removing Donald Trump. They want to stick around and become committee chairmen some day.

Hey, if I were a Republican senator right now I would be rather enjoying watching the Democrats in their present difficulties, and I would be saying to myself: "serves them right, the a**holes. They think they are smart, but that's just because the media tells them they are smart. And the lobbyists. And the academics. Reserve my ringside seat."

When the world changes, it changes from bigger things that ruling-class power and conceit. It changes because, as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." By that I mean that the best a government can do is to keep 'em down on the farm, muttering about their grievances. Because there are always grievances, for govenment is force, and anyone on the receiving end of force is experiencing injustice.

The problem about being a ruling class is that everyone is sucking up to you, telling you what geniuses you are, telling you that the opposition is just a bunch of whiners and deplorables, that really don't amount to much.

And you believe them. Until it is too late.