The MLK Legacy

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day we honor the man that led a non-violent movement for black civil rights.

What is extraordinary is that a minority of former slaves could persuade the majority to grant them full citizenship and civil rights. For the granting of such rights was not an expression of political power, but a forebearance, a majority declining to press its power to the limit.

In our day we are all taught to believe that slavery is a monstrous evil. And equality is good. Actually, there is no such thing as equality. There is always an order of rank, and the folks at the bottom have the worst of it.

The question is not that slavery is evil: it had been normal and ubitquitous down the ages. What is remarkable is that slavery became scandalous. Why? Because of evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce? Because of the equality ideology of the Enlightenment? Because slavery doe not pay, compared to free labor? Because of the actvism of the left? Because of the hatred between North and South in the 1850s?

Yet it is the left that inspired the greatest slave societies in all history. And, you may say, in the last century the common man has been re-enslaved by the taxes and the regulations of the modern administrative state.

Is civil rights the forbearance of political power, the forbidding of government by race? And is the politics of quotas and diversity a fight against racism or a resumption of racist politics under another name?

My take is that the civil rights for blacks campaign felt so good to liberals that they decided to make everything into a civil rights issue. And I'm here to say that is not a good thing.

Because there is a difference between liberating a previously marginalized minority and the politics of quotas and timetables.

In my reductive Three Peoples theory, and in Curtis Yarvin's three-layer Gentry-Commoner-Client notion, the common concept is the idea that the upper class (Creatives/Gentry) obtains its political power by recruiting the lower orders (Subrodinates/Clients) with the promise of loot and plunder. But when you have a politics you must have an "us" and "them." Thus we educated and evolved creatives/gentry combine with our supporters, the subordinates/clients, against the "them" of responsibles/commoners. "We" are evolved and progressive and marginalized; "they" are superstitious and narrow-minded.

I don't suppose our liberal friends really imagined that they were changing the politics of the US in a way that would stigmatize and marginalize the white working class for ever more. After all, they were bending the arc of history towards justice. But if you are going to do politics you are going to be doing "us" and "them;" you may not think you are going to need an enemy, but you will.  Because politics is civil war by other means; it is a fight, a brawl.

And it is no longer possible to have a frank and open discussion of the issues in America, because the "right" that used to occupy a space in the public square has been drubbed out of it, particularly in the academy, the media, and the arts.

This mean that there is no way to "rebel" except in the streets.

You see the problem everywhere. There's the new urbanism that is forcing all cities to densify and build up rather than out. This is very amenable to educated gentry, but ordinary people -- especially ordinary women -- like to live in a place with a bit of green. There's the environmental and climate change movement that is designed to put people into mass transit and fence in all kinds of economic activity with regulations and restrictions.

And it is very difficult to get another voice into the process, because the educated gentry is pretty well unified on this, and where are the alternate, commoner voices going to come from? Who listens to them?

And I blame all this on the civil rights movement, in which liberals got the idea that they were the most moral, ethical, and evolved people in the world. And what the world needed was civil-rights-style activism from sea to shining sea.

This is a terrible and collosal error, and we are nowhere seeing ourselves to the end of it. Indeed, all the best people think we need to apply the civil-rights paradigm everywhere, and especially against dull commoners that are really white nationalists and racists.

The point is that when you are the gentry you are close to political power; you have access. So it looks to you as if all the world's problems can be solved with a bit of access.

I don't know what it is going to take to disabuse our liberal gentry friends of this collosal error.

All I know is that none of them have the least idea there is a problem. Except that racism, sexism, homophobia is a bigger problem than ever. Oh, and we are killing the planet.

Our Elite's Crimes Against Humanity

What? Our noble elite and our creative Educated Gentry? Crimes against humanity? Isn't that putting it on a bit thick, old chap?

Not if you subscribe to my notion of the Great Reaction, that socialism is gussied-up slavery, the welfare state is gussied-up serfdom, and identity politics is gussied-up tribalism. Etc.

Not if you subscribe to my notion of "Little Darlings," that our modern ruling class cultivates client groups to increase its power and then dumps the Little Darlings when it is time to move on to a new, lusciously curved, younger and innocent Little Darling.

Whatabout women? Christopher deGroot has a long piece on how the feminists are making things worse for most women. And men too. Oh, things are pretty good at the top for Gentry women that can afford careers and marriage and children and cheap immigrant servants. But whatabout the rest of women, for, as he quotes G.K. Chesterton:

“Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

Wait! I thought that only approved Educated Gentry intellectuals had the right to opine on slavery!

But I think this is a very good way of approaching "issues." You should ask: "in what way is this better than slavery?" Or, alternatively, "in what way is this better than serfdom?"

Our Democratic friends on the presidential campaign trail are outdoing each other in various "Something for All" comprehensive and mandatory programs, from Medicare to College to Childcare.

So, in what way are these programs different than life in the good old agricultural estate, with the noble lord enserving his underling famers in exchange for free benefits? Or, if you prefer, the good old slave plantation and the good old slave driver with his cowskin whip.

See, I interpret the history of the last century or so in this way.

Part One: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the workers. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to balance what the Gentry thought about the helpless workers with what the workers thought about the workers and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the workers? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine what "we" wanted the workers to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that the Educated Gentry won the votes of the workers by offering them free stuff, and things were copacetic for a while as certain workers obtained above-market wages, and everyone's children got rough, tough education in the Three Rs from rough, tough schoolmarms in government schools. But in the end the workers all lost their high-paying manufacturing jobs and the schools became mere government child-custodial facilities doing useless fad-following.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that the workers were developing on their own, from unions (without special privileges) to mutual-aid societies to mechanics' institutes to the Christianity of the kind practiced by the hero and the heroine of George Eliot's Adam Bede.

Part Two: The Educated Gentry declared themselve the protectors and the liberators of women. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless women with what women -- high, middle, and low -- thought about their lives and also what the taxpayers thought about helping women? And did the feminist activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted women to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that Educated Gentry women set the agenda, and basically forcing the rest of womankind into their notion of what women needed. And what women needed, according to Gentry Women was to have fascinating careers just like the men in their lives. Er, did they ask their men about just how fascinating those careers were? No, I thought not. Then Educated Gentry women wanted all women to have access to abortion and divorce and the right to have sex without humiliation. Yep, it turned out that Gentry women in the workforce -- and the right to have their incomes counted when applying for a mortgage -- has made everything more expensive, so that, while it more or less works for Gentry women, it doesn't work very well for Commoner women. And let's not even think about lower class women where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Oh, and, girls, how great is it when the sexual revolution means that women are expected to "put out" in the immortal phrase of Tennessee Williams. And when women are expected by their lovers to "get rid" of the products of liberation? And when divorced women end up as cat ladies?

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that worshipped women and wives and mothers and put them on pedestals. Because, after all, "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. I think that we should have patted the Educated Gentry women for their conceits about career and "leaning in" and wanting to be in politics, First Woman President, etc. But whatabout Commoner women that want marriage and home and children? And whatabout lower-class women that just want a male provider, thank you very much? Gee, I wonder what they want?

Part Three: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the blacks -- and subsequently every imaginable oppressed group under the sun. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless blacks with what the blacks thought about themselves and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the blacks? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted the blacks to be in 100 years?

Well, we started out right, with a genuine civil rights movement that used non-violent protest to demand equality of rights. And we passed a Civil Rights Act and Sen Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) promised to eat the paper the bill was written on if it led to quotas. But, of course, in accordance with the divine law divined by longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, every political movement ends up as a business or a racket. And we have had quotas, timetables, diversity, inclusion, and flat out racism ever since.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been for Hubert Humphrey to spend the rest of his live advocating against quotas and timetables, and for the Supreme Court to retire all the activist groups that supported the civil rights movement. And I think that the right thing would have been not to have the welfare expansion under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and I think that blacks should have been encouraged to develop the responsible culture already flourishing in their black churches. Instead Educated Gentry activists have whipped up racism into a national crisis, decades after the passing of the laws that made government and corporate racism illegal.

And let's pass over in silence the question of Latinos and LGBTs, etc. Not to mention the nightmare of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Now Christopher DeGroot finishes up his piece worrying about single women electing more Democrats, and how stopping that

may be just as important as checking excessive immigration and trying to preserve what Peter Brimelow calls the Historic American Nation, each essential if there is to be an American right in the future.

But I don't think it is a question of "an American right." I think it is a question of forming a head of rebellion, civil or otherwise, against the monstrous and heedless Educated Gentry that, as they say, "literally knows nothing." Except the selfish status  and power games it plays within its Educated Gentry bubble and expects the rest of us to ooh and ahh over. Or regret it.

Look, as Bismarck said: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

And I would say that the emergence of Donald Trump as the champion of the Commoners is another proof of God's existence, and Bismarck's claim to wisdom.

All we need to do, as "an American right" or anything else, is march towards the sound of the guns. That is all any man, since the dawn of firearms, has needed to know.

Deep State: Follow the Rules, You Fools and Knaves

Yesterday I wrote about the folly of the current administrative state model. Being a government by, of, and for the Gentry it cannot know what the ordinary Commoner wants. And, blithely ignoring the world view of Commoners, one day it wakes up and gets Trump.

But now I want to look at the other problem. It is the reason why we have rules of procedure, "due process," and laws in the first place. And how our Gentry and the administrative state that it inhabits has been ignoring this notion.

Again, returning to yesterday's piece, I argued that the whole point of politics is to avoid civil war.

The whole apparatus of elections, of separation of powers, of throwing the rascals out is so that the overwhelming majority of people are content enough with things as they are that they do not feel that a head of rebellion is required to defend themselves from a tyrannical government.

But there is another angle: having a government that is seen to obey the laws and the rules of "due process."

Obviously, what governments have done since time out of mind is to bend the rules and even break them for reasons of state. Or raisons d'état as you you would say if you were French. And they invented the administrative state.

The reason that governments do this is to protect their power, to squelch rude underlings that are threatening its power and its continuance. And that is, rather obviously, what the Deep State has been doing ever since 2015. (Never mind what went on previously).

For instance, it is pretty obvious that in 2015-16 somebody decided they wanted to spy on the Trump campaign, for reasons of state. The means obtained to do this was to get the FISA court to approve surveillance of Carter Page as a possible spy for the Russians. Only, it turned out that Page was already a CIA asset! And some FBI operative failed to note that in the FISA court application for surveillance.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the applications to the FISA court that failed to mention that the Steele Dossier -- that accused Trump of various offences -- was mostly uncorroborated.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the leaking by FBI/DOJ officials of stuff about the Steele Dossier to the media in the fall of 2016.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was FBI Director's cutesy meeting with Donald Trump that he used as a pretext to get a Special Counsel investigation of the president.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the packing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team with Democrat partisan operatives.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the FBI entrapment of Gen. Michael Flynn, whose main crime was disagreeing with Obama administration strategy in the Middle East. And then alteration of documents.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the Special Counsel's report that reported no Russian collusion but couldn't say whether the president obstructed its investigation.

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

Then there was the changing of the rules for whistlblowers coincident with whistleblower Eric Ciaramella deciding to report Trumpian Ukraine skullduggery that he only heard second-hand. (Hey, Google, how come that your Search doesn't autocomplete when I get to "whistleblower eric c"? Cat got your lefty tongue?)

Hello! Can you spell breaking the rules, Deep State?

And never mind about Nancy Pelosi's derisive impeachment investigations in the depths of the basement run by the Intelligence Committee instead of the judiciary, and the whole laughable delay over transmitting the articles of impeachment.

My point is that the way we avoid civil war is not merely by following the rules, but by being seen to follow the rules. As in Caesar's Wife.

Because if you are a stickler for following the rules it makes it much more difficult for your political opponents to paint you as scoundrels, and it makes it much more difficult for revolutionaries to get up a head of rebellion.

The problem is, of course, in any political context, whether at the local non-profit or in the United States House of Representatives, there is always a temptation to use your power, whatever it is, to slide around the rules to get your way.

But the problem with breaking the rules is that it encourages people to say, with Shakespeare's Casca: "speak, hands for me."

And, I think, breaking the rules is the tactic of weaklings. The manly thing to do is to follow the rules, and accept the result like a man. But the cowardly thing to do is to sneak around the rules, to avoid embarrassment and reversal.

And the truth is that the Deep State is composed of late-dynasty weaklings, scions that have got their positions because of Daddy or Mommy or connections begun at some selective college, or having the right opinions. They are like the inheritors of a thriving corporation that don't really know how and why the corporation flourished, and how to redirect it in a changed world. And when things go wrong they start to cheat.

Yeah, that is the foundation of most financial scandal. A bet goes wrong, and the executives try to hide the losses, and make it all back on the next play. Only that one fails too. And so on.

I suppose we should all be glad, because the Deep State shenanigans show the weakness of the late-stage administrative-state dynasty. It shows that the dynasty is losing the Mandate of Heaven. But late dynasties are always full of fools and knaves.

Only, my hope is that we can go through a Time of Troubles and get to the next dynasty without an open civil war.

Hey, I guess I'm an optimist!

My Advice to the Administrative State

I started out this morning reading piece by Charles Lipson about "Impeachment and the Fight over the Deep State." On the day that Speaker Pelosi sends the Articles of Impeachment over to the Senate.

Does this mean that the party out of the presidency will be harrying presidents from here on in with impeachments? Maybe not, if Donald Trump gets a thumping reelection and the Dems lose the House.

Because if Trump thrives on the Pelosi impeachment the Deep State conventional wisdom for the next 20 years will be that impeachment is a mug's game.

Lipson's argument is that President Trump presents an existential threat to the administrative state of the 20th century that rules through the federal bureaucracy and the tradition that the courts get to fill in the details of legislation. Naturally, the Deep State doesn't like Trump.

They oppose Trump because he threatens their once-secure political world. He is abolishing long-standing regulations at an astonishing clip and appointing federal judges who, for the first time in decades, refuse to ratify far-reaching regulations and executive orders that are only loosely tethered to statutory laws. 

What a world if the norm were to be that federal judges got to put down laws that were too vague about the details! Why, the whole gentry class lives its life as wise and educated "fill in the details" experts.

This judicial challenge to “bureaucratic delegation” is being led by Neil Gorsuch at the Supreme Court and Neomi Rao at the Court of Appeals in D.C. They acknowledge that bureaucracies can fill in the “details” of laws, but only if the laws offer clear guidance. Liberals correctly say that enforcing this criterion retroactively would abolish the modern federal government. They know it is a tissue of regulations loosely based on underlying laws.

Now, I argue in my Four Laws that the administrative state cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth to do it. The complexity of our society, or any society, means that courtiers in the king's court and bureaucrats in the administrative bureaucracy cannot know enough to instruct the whole nation on how to tie its shoe-laces.

But there is a bigger issue. It relates to the fundamental philosophy under any political system. That is to avoid civil war. The whole apparatus of elections, of separation of powers, of throwing the rascals out is so that the overwhelming majority of people are content enough with things as they are that they do not feel that a head of rebellion is required to defend themselves from a tyrannical government.

The problem with an administrative state is that it sets up a regime where the Gentry gets to monopolize the sinews of government, and not just by occupying all the positions of power by monopolizing the ideas that inspire government. What do ordinary Commoners want? Good question, Senator.

And moreover, given the modern complexity of government, it becomes almost impossible to reform the government. With hundreds of programs -- let alone the big ones like Social Security and Medicare -- where do you start? And now much reform can you do in a session of Congress, let alone a two-term presidency? And that is without considering the problem that, since the administrative state is necessarily of, by, and for the Educated Gentry class that has the credentials to occupy high administrative positions, the administrative state is blind to the lives and the concerns of lesser mortals, such as Commoners and Clients (or Victims).

Let us review the obvious agenda of the three layers of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Gentry. Because we are educated and evolved we should be in charge of the country and direct its affairs in matters large and small.

Commoners. Leave us alone to live our lives, but make the trains run on time and be there when we need protection.

Clients. Life is rough and we expect our chieftain to protect us and take care of us.

You can see how the present regime is fine for Gentry and Clients, but not so good for Commoners, because the whole point of the Gentry administrative state is to be poking Commoners in the ribs for their moral edification and to cure them of their deplorability.

So that's why we got Trump.

The interesting thing, to me, about the administrative state of, by, and for the Gentry, is the way it needs to demonize the Commoners. OK, it's not interesting, it is inevitable. If government is force then all government requires an enemy to justify the use of force. QED.

But this is a lie. The whole point about the Commoners is that they are Commoners, neither rich nor educated nor eminent nor notable nor powerful. To make Commoners into vile racist sexist homophobes and white supremacists and haters is a monstrous injustice. Because Commoners aren't much engaged in politics, aren't thinking up new ways to do activism and save the planet. And they don't get up each morning with a new plan to beat up blacks, women, and gays. They aren't doing much at all except going to work and raising families. So when the Gentry makes war on the Commoners, mucking about in their modest businesses with demands they make cakes for gay weddings, or accusing them of being patriarchs, or of being vile racists, the Commoners ask "what's this all about? I was just ordering in pizza."

That's how we got Trump.

My advice to the administrative state and to the Gentry in general is: Cool It. No matter what happens we are going to be giving you chaps lots of jobs and power in the administrative state. And just because of your education and interest, you chaps have an influence on politics and culture way bigger than your numbers. And, need I add, you deserts.

But supervising the mundane details of Commoner life, from bathrooms to "hate" to recycling to tree regulation, is a bridge too far. It's going to force the Commoners to push back. Not because Commoners have better ideas than you Gentry but because there comes a point where the humiliation of being poked and prodded becomes intolerable.

See, this is what I think. I think you Gentry already have it pretty good. Because of the credentials you earn you get to live really safe working lives, often with tenure and with lavish pensions, and little impact from the business cycle. And you often get to feel that you Made a Difference. Commoners, on the other hand, are not so well protected. Their jobs are often at the mercy of the business cycle, they often work in jobs that are "employment at will," and have to start small businesses and the like if they want to live well. And, at the end of their lives the only way they Made a Difference is that they have grandchildren.

But there comes a point at which the Commoners say: I can't take it any more. And you Gentry types really don't want to provoke the Commoners to that point. Life's pretty good for Gentry. You really don't want to risk a Commoner rebellion.

See, if we had a Commoner rebellion it might, just accidentally, abolish the whole administrative state. Because I'd say that the administrative state doesn't do anything that couldn't be done at half the price by the private sector.

And what would you Gentry do then, poor things. Hey, you might have to get real jobs.

Trying to Read Our Nance

So, what's the real story on Nancy Pelosi? Is she just an old woman, past her prime, hanging on as Speaker of the House of Representatives because she can?

Is she losing her marbles, as her recent appearances on TV seem to suggest?

Or is she still the cunning political manipulator that has brought the Democrats to a House majority in two elections, 2006 and 2018?

Is she hanging on, trying to keep the crazy lefties like AOC's mentor Saikat Chakrabarti from taking over the Democratic Party?

Or is she trying to blind-side Commie Bernie and favor Joe Biden for Democatic nominee as GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy proposes?

Is her delay of sending the impeachment articles over to the Senate a brilliant tactical move, as her supporters seem to think, or dumb and stupid, and my kind of racist sexist homophobe tends to think?

Or, as I wonder, is she, as a woman, just not up to the knockabout playground bully WWF style of partisan politics? I mean, women play a different game, of naming, shaming, and shunning, rather than the male approach of a sucker punch to the solar plexus.

And is that why Donald Trump won the 2016 election, because he fought the election as a man with flat out imsults while Hillary Clinton fought it as a woman, naming and shaming ordinary Americans to a gay audience as a basket of deplorables.

I don't know.

I just think that the Democrats have come out of hiding in the past few years. Back in the Bill Clinton years they were making like they were New Democrats and moderates. Then Barack Obama campaigned as a moderate and once in office unleashed the lefties. Now the lefties are everywhere, pushing their modern politics-as-religion on the rest of us.

And we don't like it. Nobody likes having someone push their religion on me. Lefties especially hated it when they accused conservatives of "legislating morality." But when you are forcing your religion on the other guys...

See, everything that the Democrats do is really pushing their religion, whether it's abortion for all, saving the planet, ending the gig economy, regulating firearms out of existence, open borders, you name it. But they don't think that. They think they are building a just and ethical world, bending the arc of history towards justice. Bless their hearts.

I tell you, the more I live the more I realize that our Founders were the geniuses of the ages.

I mean, what a concept! Separation of church and state so that people can go off in all directions with their crazy cults, believing whatever they want and creating a moral community that does not get to impose its morality on other people. But, when it comes to the nasty stuff, like robbers and murderers and cheats and frauds. Well, for those guys, we got politics, government, hangmen and jailers.

I was reading a piece today about black conservatives and how, if you didn't know they were black they would sound to you just like regular conservatives, the kind our liberals know and love as "white supremacists."

Of course, my line is that -- especially with the Trump Prosperity -- blacks are starting to transform themselves from Curtis Yarvin's Clients (or Victims) into Commoners. And as Commoners they think and live as American patriots: American nationalists if you like. Nothing fancy or remarkable about this. It's just that modern Commoners experience their tribe, their sense of political belonging, in the Nation.

Maybe the chaps that invented the notion of the Nation knew that, and instinctively molded the nation state to be a place where Commoners felt at home. I was reading about Sir Roger Scruton, RIP, that one of the keenest human yearnings is the yearning for home. At its most trivial it is the desire you feel on a trip to get back home. And Commoners feel politically at home in a nation.

But the fact is that the Democratic Party, led by centi-millionaire Our Nance, is an anti-Commoner party. It looks down on Commoner culture of work and family, Commoner politics of nation, Commoner religion, the whole arc of Commoner life.

And that, I suspect -- OK, I hope -- is going to cost them.

Roger Scruton RIP

The most important thing to know about British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton who died January 12, 2020, aged 75, of cancer is the way that he met his Sophie, the future Lady Scruton. He was riding his gelding Sam in the Beaufort hunt and happened to be standing next to Sophie, riding her mare Petra. Says he in his autobiographical Gentle Regrets,

Usually [Sam] puts his ears back if a horse gets too close to him, anxious to preserve the distance that will preserve safety; on this occasion, however, he stood quietly beside Petra, and then followed her as the hunt moved off. The next Saturday he caught sight of her across a field of 200 horses, seized the bit and cantered across to where she stood, fulfilling simultaneously his desire and mine.

But here's the thing. Not only was Scruton's horse named Sam, but also his family dog when he was a boy and his son. His son. You tell me! Perhaps there is a connection, that Scruton loved his dog, his horse, and his son, so why shouldn't they have the same name?

And another thing. It turns out that his surname Scruton is made up. His great-grandmother, born Lowe, had a son surnamed Lowe, that she decided should be surnamed Scruton. So perhaps his grandfather was conceived on the Scruton estate while his great-grandmother was in service there.

Of course, all this has nothing to do with Trollope's Sir Roger Scatcherd, railway engineer, drunkard, and father of the illegitimate and practically-perfect-in-every-way Mary, in Doctor Thorne. Nor would Trollope, a famous hunter of foxes, ever have dared to introduce a ridiculous plot device like a horse selecting his owner's wife for him.

Roger Scruton was an immensely learned philosopher and writer, son of a left-wing teacher father and a respectable middle-class mother. Born in 1944 he became a conservative in the 1968 student riots in Paris, and throughout his adult life was on the receiving end of the tender mercies of the left. The latest incident was a 2019 New Statesman interview conducted by a young lefty -- who no doubt literally knows nothing -- that monstrously edited and misrepresented his remarks. And got him sacked from the Tory government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for a season.

Scruton seems to have been a gentle soul, according to many that knew him, and also a courageous one, who went into Eastern Europe in the 1980s to meet with the dissidents that became the government leaders in the 1990s.

Scruton visited Prague [in 1979] to give a secret lecture with the dissident Czech philosopher Julius Tomin. 

When he accompanied Tomin back to his apartment, he found waiting for them at the door a secret policeman who refused to let Scruton in, and then pushed him down the stairs. He was eventually arrested and thrown out of the country. 

“I realised that this was a situation that was completely outside anything in my experience,” he remembered. “And at the same time this was a place which was dear to my heart. The intellectual life was genuinely dangerous. They were being put in jail by a Left-wing police force.”

But actually, Scruton was "put in jail" multiple times throughout his adult life by the left-wing police force of the academy and the culture. It is just that the left-wing police in Prague were a little more direct than our left-wing police in the university and in the culture.

What is wrong with these people? Don't answer that.

Scruton has written about many things, principally in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy. So I thought I would check his notions of my current enthusiasm, Nietzsche. He notes, in A Short History of Modern Philosophy, that Nietzsche, in common with Aristotle, "found the aim of life in 'flourishing':  excellence resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim." Thus,

In each case pride, self-confidence, cheerfulness of outlook, and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man.

The drawback is, of course, the accusation that this is why Nietzsche is "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." But whatabout Marxism, with Marx "the Commies' favorite intellectual?" As Scruton writes in Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey:

If you happen to believe that you are, deep down, an Übermensch, whose powers, energies and talents are frustrated by the little people who tie you with their Lilliputian web of obligations, you will gladly endorse Nietzsche's vision[.]

Or if you believe that you are an activist, fighting for justice for all the oppressed peoples of the world, you will gladly endorse Marx's vision that appoints you as the vanguard of the proletariat.

The massive excuse prepared by Marx for the crimes of the international socialists, was prepared by Nietzsche for their nationalist opponents.

And this makes me think that Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic and Nietzsche's Master and Slave morality are missing the middle.

Both Marx and Nietzsche are trying to find a Master morality for my People of the Creative Self, today's Educated Gentry. Nietzsche is sneering at the Slave morality of weak people, who just want to combine against the strong.

But I think Nietzsche is missing the middle, what we might call Commoner Morality. In other words, when he complains about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, he is complaining about the self-reflection that the Axial Age religions promote for commoners. It is a middle way between the self-justification of the "creative" and the collective protective morality of the slave. It is the thought that, in the give and take of commoner life, well, maybe the problem is me.

So that would fit my reductive Three Peoples theory and Yarvin's Gentry, Commoner, Client layers.

Creative/Gentry morality: Creativity involves creative destruction, perhaps of me, perhaps of lesser folk. Too bad.

Responsible/Commoner morality: Life is an interaction and we need to think about how our actions impact other people so we don't have to come to blows.

Subordinate/Client morality: Life is a bitch and we the people have to combine against the powerful to protect ourselves.

Sir Roger Scruton was a remarkable man, gentle, learned, courageous. We shall not see his like for many a year. 

It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.

I'm reading Why Liberalism Works by economist Deirdre McCloskey that celebrates her three "Bourgeois Era" books. In those books she establishes the remarkable Great Enrichment of the last 200 years and attributes it to the bourgeois ethos of the seven virtues and also the "have a go" ethos of ordinary people starting in 1800.

Basic to this notion is that "capital" is not something that accumulates, but is created when something new and useful is invented and produced and sold out of a clear blue sky. I suppose the fundamental case for that is the creation of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil. Rockefeller created a company that reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents per gallon to 10 cents per gallon. Not surprisingly this astonishing achievement shot the stock of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into the stratosphere. Why? Because the present value of Standard Oil discovering and producing and selling oil was enormous. And that was before they discovered oil in Texas in 1901.

I mean: what is the value to the average housewife of the oil that she bought for those cute oil lamps later featured in western movies? That were much safer and useful than the wax candles that really only rich people could afford? (Check out various recent TV series of the candle era in which typically the producers have decided to show the indoor lighting just by candle. Rich-people parties have veritable galaxies of brutally expensive candles. Almost everyone lights themselves to their bedrooms with a single candle.)

Apply the same logic to all the other astonishing things of the past two centuries: trains, steamships, cars, electricity, safe childbirth, computers, internet. This is not accumulation but explosion.

However, I am not sure that I buy the Bourgeois Virtues argument and the celebration of bourgeois culture. I am more inclined to go with the verdict of George Eliot in Adam Bede where she celebrates ordinary rural carpenters and farm girls getting the ethos of Methodist Christianity and the sense of directing their own livesunder the inspiration of God and his divine laws.

In other words, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris were graduating out of the subordinate peasant mentality to think and act as Commoners.

And there is the peculiar marriage of elite science and commoner mechanics marrying science to technique and turning ideas into useful products.

I am more inclined to attribute the Great Enrichment to the ordinary people "having a go" and the elites and governing classes not seeing what was going on until it was too late to stop it.

Think of the Trump election in 2016. The elites thought Trump was a rube and a blowhard. They just had no idea that he could and would connect with the ordinary American Commoner and win their votes and now their trust. If they had known... they would have made sure that Trump got nobbled before he got out of the starting gate. Indeed they did nobble him with the Steele Dossier, but just didn't press home their spying operation, probably because they thought to themselves that "this clown will never get elected."

I guess my point is that it is past time for defending the market system and its recipe for baking the cake of a world without poverty. If you don't get that, lefties and gentry, after all these years, you are a fool and a knave.

When the elite and the left make that elite guidance is needed to keep capitalism just and moderate I think that they are not quite lying but certainly covering their eyes to the reality of the market economy. Certainly any fair-minded judge has a right to feel that the eye-coverers have a vested interest in their blindness.

It is past time to be understanding. I think we should be on the attack, as in this from my Maxims page:

Crimes of the Left: Driving working class off the road to the middle class; misdirecting women in the public square; making war on middle class culture and values; taxing business and ordinary people and enslaving them to ruling-class crusades to save the world.

See, I think that the argument of Marx and subsequent lefties to teach the working class that "we wos robbed" is one of the great crimes of the ages. All in the interest of political power. And then teaching women to have "careers" rather than run the culture from their traditional base in the home, the famiy, and the neighborhood. Now we have the gentry class saying that we need less prosperity! Because Saving the Planet.

Here's a piece about how the Democrat judges are using blatant devices to stall and stymie anything that Trump proposes with tricks like "nationwide injunctions." I don't think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and allow that the poor dears just don't understand. If the Obama judges don't understand the monstrous injustice of their actions -- and I dare say they don't -- then they really don't understand law and don't understand that the whole point of law is to be a brake on ruling-class power.

It is far more likely that the Obama are deliberately blind to the injustice of their actions, because they don't want to know, because they have been carefully taught, because to seriously think about their political agenda, to seriously allow that others -- their political opponents -- might have a valid point of view, is not to be endured.

In other words it makes more sense to believe that our liberal friends of all kinds are merely Educated Gentry responding to ruling class anthems that appeal to their taste for ambition, their need for honor, and their consuming vanity. And that the don't have the education, the understanding, and the judgement to think any other way.

When you look at our liberal friends, let's face it, it's all about them. That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about, the utter demolition of the decades old liberal comfort zone.

I mean, anyone with half a brain should have at least considered that 2016 was a change election, after two terms of Obama and certainly after 8 years of very slow growth out of the 2008 Recession, and given the rather limited political skills of Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The very fact of the post-election hysteria was a dead giveway that the average Educated Gentry voter had been led by their leaders and the liberal media into a political La La Land. Because what grown-ups do after a failure is suck it in and determine to do better.

No, the only thing that will teach our Educated Gentry that they have a problem is nothing less than the school of hard knocks, of a 55-45 loss in 2020, a sold Republican Congress in both houses, several high profile criminal prosecutions of Obama administraion officials involved in the spying on the Trump campaign and the half-hearted coup attempt since the 2016 election.

Our Democratic friends have to be treated to the famous line that the coach delivers to his football team after a stinging loss: "Let's get back to basics. This is a football."

And nothing would communicate that something is completely out of joint than for a significant chunk of black and Hispanic voters to start voting like Commoners rather than Victims.

It's past time for merely defending the market system. It is past time for merely defending the American way of life. It's past time for assuming that the Educated Gentry will ever give the Commoners a fair shake. It's past time for cringing before the accusation of racism, sexist, homophobia.

It's time to go on the attack. For the simple reason that all sectors of American society have a right to be heard and to have their needs factored into the political auction.

It is not true that the market system is unjust. It is not true that Commoners are bigots and white supremacists. It is not true that women and gays and blacks and Hispanics and Muslims are helpless victims and need special privileges to get justice in America. And it is not true that Educated Gentry have a right to order the rest of America around.

Until that is conceded, things are going to continue to get pretty hot around here.