The Politics of Sticking It to the Other Guys

The basic format of US politics for the last 100 years has been the elite, the Gentry, advocating on behalf of the Subordinates: workers, women, minorities. The basic game has been to guilt-trip the ordinary middle class into funding various government programs to deliver loot and plunder to the said workers, women, and minorities.

With the middle class getting a cut of the action in accordance with Irving Kristol's rule that if you want to help the poor you have to deal in the middle class.

Notice that there was a cunning indirect approach in this. The Gentry did not tell the Commoners: you are scum, now give us more money. No, they set up their Clients -- workers, women, minorities -- as helpless victims, liable to enternal oppression and marginalization unless we act now. And then they handed out some of the loot to the middle class.

But I think in the last 10 years or so that the Gentry has changed its front. Now it is not so much doing a guilt trip as saying: You Commoners are dirt, and we will run over you.

An obvious example is the newly Democratic state legislature of Virginia passing a bunch of gun-control measures. These measures are not exactly a response to a crisis in the streets; they are not an effort to come to a compromise that lets all parties go home and feel that they got something out of the deal. It seems to me that the purpose of these measures is not to make Virginia safe but to stick it to the rubes.

It all makes sense when you call the opposition, as a matter of routine, racist, sexist homophobes: in a word, deplorables. You are good; they are evil. They deserve everything you shovel at them.

Suppose we presume that, all along, the strategy of the Gentry was to stick it to the Commoner rubes. In that case the strategy to say that, hey, we have no beef with you middle-class folks; we just want justice for the helpless victims: that is brilliant. It is, as they say, an indirect strategy that deceives the targets into believing that they are not targets.

OK, maybe after half a century of this, the people on the receiving end are going to be wondering about the shells landing all around them all the time.

But when you actually start saying that all white people are white supremacists, and all white men are toxic masculinists, and all ordinary middle-class people are a basket of deplorables, then you have switched to a direct strategy. And you shouldn't be surprised that people on the receiving end start to take notice and start to organize against you.

Only you are surprised. More than surprised, you offended and outraged! Why, we are the good guys, the educated, evolved, ethical guys! How dare, how dare the rubes, the ignorant and bigoted rubes, dare to answer back!

And in Virginia, a day after 22,000 people demonstrated against more gun control, the Democratic state legislature went ahead and passed more gun control measures.

To say that this is worse than a crime, it is a blunder misses the point. It is a deliberate attempt to humiliate and marginalize the other party. It is not an attempt to find some sort of a compromise that everyone can live with; it is a statement of "our way or the highway."

OK, OK. I get it. For a generation and more all the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls of the Gentry have gone to college-as-lefty-seminary. They have not been exposed to "the best that has been thought and said." They have instead been rehearsed in lefty apologetics. So all they know, like AOC, are the memes of the lefty Gentry culture.

And that means that they "literally know nothing" about the larger world. It means that they don't know how to deal with other world views, except to shut them down.

The point is that when your politics is reduced to sticking it to the other guys, because they are scum, then you are prodding the other guys into forming a head of rebellion against your regime of injustice. That is why people form a head of rebellion: they feel that they have been ignored, humiliated, and robbed, and they decide that they have nothing left to lose so they might as well burn it all down.

But, if my understanding is correct, our Gentry friends have no idea what they have been doing to average Commoner Americans for the last 50 years. They have no idea that people are angry, and why. They have no idea that their diversity and inclusion philosophy is a monstrous injustice. They have no idea that their identity politics is dividing the country like you wouldn't believe. They have no idea that President Trump, far from being a bumbling oaf, seems to be a man with an extraordinary ear for the voice of maligned Commoner.

The best we can hope for is for the impeachment trial to go down pronto. For Trump to win decisively in 2020, for the Republicans to win the House and for Democrats high and low to ask: What Went Wrong? And then come up with a New Bill Clinton in 2024 that declares himself a New Democrat just as the original Clinton did in 1992.

But I doubt if things will be as simple as that. They seldom are.

Liberals with Nowhere to Go

Right now I am thinking about what comes next. I take it as given that the Enlightenment mechanical world-view and its notion of a final paradise on Earth, whether of the right's market equality or the left's political equality, is a dead end.

In particular I react against the notion that we are all alike and all want the same thing, or should be forced to.

That's because the billions of humans on this Earth all want different things.

However, that is much too complicated. We need to simplify. And what humans do when thing are too complicated is we simplify things down to a Rule of Three: Past, Present, and Future. Garden of Eden, The Fall, and Heaven.

That is why I have come up with my reductive Three Peoples theory, reducing all the billions of world views down to three. I know, what presumption!

But I think it makes sense. Creative people want a chance to create a new world; Responsible people want a chance to make work the existing world, the world they are given; Subordinate people just want to be able to hang on to some powerful patron and shelter from the storm till the next check arrives.

Now, a couple days ago I commented in the American Thinker on a John Gray piece in The New Statesman in which he told the cultural wokies that in the wake of Boris Johnson's "stonking" victory their world view had "melted down into a heap of trash."

But then I stumbled over another couple John Gray pieces in UnHerd.com. In first he tells the greenies that, even given that their scientific analysis is correct about climate change -- and he thinks it is -- their strategy for dealing with it won't work. We should be adapting to the changes we have created, not curling up in the face of "unstoppable climate change."

But in 'Liberalism: the other God that failed" Gray goes further and argues that all the Enlightenment ideologies are finished. In the old days, people could import their Christian values into Enlightment equality, and ex-Communists in the late 1940s could return from the Communist ideology and its revolutionary forced march to the perfect future to ordinary liberalism, left or right, and its gradualist walk to the perfect future. Not any more.

When ex-communists became liberals, they shifted from one secular faith to another. Troubled liberals today have no such option. Fearful of the alternatives, they hang on desperately to a faith in which they no longer believe. Liberalism may be the other God that failed, but for liberals themselves their vision of the future is a deus absconditus, mocking and tormenting them as the old freedoms disappear from the world.

Actually this is not surprising, at least not to me. Because I moved on from the mechanical Enlightenment world and its logic and reason view years ago. We are not moving along an arc of history, not towards justice, and not towards universal prosperity. We are living things struggling to live in a changing world, adapting it if we can, and adapting to it if we must. We do not know the correct strategy for survival. Never did, never will. What we will do, what we have always done, is stumble along day to day, and hope that we didn't make a fatal blunder. Some people don't make it, sometimes a lot of people don't make it. But the world goes on.

Actually, the whole history of the last 200 years and its Great Enrichment on the economic front tell us what is happening. From time to time there are world-changing economic revolutions, started by some nobodies, that change everything. Machine textiles, steam power, world transportation, wood to coal to oil to electricity to nuclear, personal powered transportation, computers, internet, smart phones. Each of these has been an astonishing transformation, and yet we are all still here. Do you see how remarkable this is? We have had economic revolution after economic revolution, and yet almost everyone has kept up. More than that, the left-behinds, in China, India, and Africa, are catching up, even as the developed West keeps reinventing the economy. What is going on?

What is going on is humans analyzing the situation, coming up with 101 different plans to Do Something about it, and then letting the chips fall where they may, so that the two or three chaps with plans that actually work get to be billionaires and own the future. For a season.

And that is where my reductive Three Peoples theory comes in. The Creatives are the people that are going to be coming up with the 101 plans for the future. Good for them. Let them experiment with their own money and money that investors and speculators give them, and let the rest of us sit in the bleachers and see who wins the race. The Responsibles are the people that just live their lives as best they may and hope to adapt in a competent way to whatever the Creatives come up with. The Subordinates just sit there and shelter from the storm in the retinue of some great lord or big government.

The problem with the current situation is that the Creatives, the educated gentry, are forever coming up with plans that they want to force the rest of us to pay for and submit to. Because they are special.

They get to create the plans. We get to pay for it. They get the credit if it goes well, and robber barons take the blame if it blows up. Thanks very much.

Obviously, they "literally know nothing" because modern psychology, Jung version, has rediscovered that the way to the future is the Sacrificial Hero living and exploring on the border between order and chaos, and giving up his life so that others may live. The Sacrificial Hero is not the proud activist that gets to create a totalitarian regime that sacrifices everyone else's life so that the proud activist and his minions can live the life of Riley. Not at all.

We will know when our liberal friends come up with a good plan. Because it will be a plan to recognize that the highest and best thing to be is a Sacrifical Hero, and not a revolutionary activist or carping moralist. The plan will make it clear that it will be the Creatives that will do the sacrificing, not the average Commoner or the average Subordinate.

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.