Separating Church and State in Woke America

Courtesy of Instapundit I got to read a Cosmopolitan piece by a woman, Amanda Litman, telling how she felt after the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The night Hillary Clinton lost, I was in the staff section behind the stage at the Javits Center in New York City. Before the grief really hit me, before I took a cab home, sobbing so hard, I had to pull over to throw up, and before the physical toll of two years of working on a presidential campaign overwhelmed me, I remember standing with a coworker, each of us folding our arms in front of our bodies, as if trying to contain all the feelings from flooding out.

And then she babbles on and on about Elizabeth Warren and the Question of the First Woman President, and whether now "'They' would have called it a rule: Women can’t win."

Hey Amanda, you sexist you, how come it matters whether a woman can win or not?

Or this babbling about "A Closer Look at 'White Fragility'Theory," by Valerie Tarico going on forever about white people choking on workplace accusations of racism. Well of course they do, because they can't win against HR and the DIE committee, so they know which side their bread is buttered.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves that we are underlings.

But the bigger question is this. Is racism/sexism/homophobia a Crime, that is a job for policemen, judges and jailers? Or is it a Sin, that is a job for "the priests" and a question of confession and absolution?

Oh well, we don't believe in absolution where racism is concerned, do we, dear liberal friends?

The question of Crime or Sin provides another answer to Nietzsche's problem, about what happens when God is dead.

Nietzsche says that it creates decadence and nihilism and the Eternal Recurrence of the same-old same-old. Until cometh the Übermensch!

Obviously, he lost the plot on that one. Because what has happened is that politics and religion have coalesced into a single totalitarian dictatorship where the police and the priest are combined in one Committee of Public Safety, now known as the local Human Rights Commission in cahoots with the Twitter mob that uses the combined power of government force and social pressure to determine whether you are a sinner against the state religion.

In fact, it is not that hard. Government is what we use when force is required to restore order to the Cosmos. To use an older American argot, Government is what we use to deal with knuckleheads.

Religion is what we use to deal with lesser affronts to social comity. Obviously it is what we should use against fragile whites and their concealed racism. Because it takes a religious expert to see into peoples' hearts. Policemen and jailers, not so much. Policemen are good at dealing with situations where a baton -- or in India a lathi -- would be helpful. Jailers are good at dealing with situations where a lock and key would sort things out.

Now, in my opinion, the reason that President Trump is such a success with the deplorable Commoners is that he doesn't pretend to be anything other than the chap carrying Theodore Roosevelt's Big Stick. Make America Great Again! Keep America Great! Any tribal leader down the ages could have come up with that slogan to keep the young men in the tribe ready for action against the dastardly tribe next door.

But everything else that government now does is girl stuff. By which I mean that when we say that we ought to help the elderly with pensions and health care; we ought to educate the kiddies; we ought to help the poor; we ought to save the climate we are making a moral point. All good people should help the helpless, and if they don't they should be named and shamed and shunned. And serve them right.

But put them in jail and fine them?

And the point is that if we try to deal with knuckleheads using the name and shame method of religion we are going to make fools of ourselves. And if we try to deal with moral lepers that won't help little kiddies with batons and lathis and jail cells we are going to make a complete dog's breakfast of things.

Actually, in the universe imagined by Michael Novak in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, there are three sectors, not two: political, economic, and moral/cultural. And when you combine them you into one you get totalitarianism, straight up.

And that is something about which most people, and especially our emotional lefty women friends, have no idea.

Not surprising of course. Because nobody ever sat them down like good little girls in class and taught them.

Explaining the White Wokerati

I've been complaining for a while about the post-civil rights racial culture. Because I say that if racial discrimination is illegal in these United States then that is final. Any time someone commits a racist act then prosecute them and name and shame and shun them. And yet the interest in "racism" has soared in the post-civil rights era as this Google Ngram chart shows.

I know. How could it be that people have got more concerned about racism since the 1960s, the decade when the US made racism illegal?

(Ngram only goes up to 2008. Lord knows where racism has gone since.)

Up until now I have credited the notion that, once a political movement gets power it can stop being nice and really set about driving its enemies before it and enjoying the lamentation of the women. Or, when the Revolution fails to bring on the millennium, the believers ramp up their belief in a frenzy similar to the Reign of Terror and Virtue in the French Revolution.

But Christopher Caldwell, in his new book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, has another explanation. He has written an article about his argument in Age here.

Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 amounted to a new Constitution. That's because the ruling class decided that it wasn't enough to pass laws against racial discrimination. It had to stamp out the glowing embers.

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964... 

It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.

The point is that the tools that the Civil Rights Act created were thought of originally merely as a tool to humble the South. But that's not what happened.

If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination. 

Wow, the activists realized. This is a tool that we can use to drive our enemies before us. And so,

other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism—ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it. 

And then LGBT got into the action.

Basically, if you are a white male under the new Constitutiojn you are guilty unless proven innocent. And, of course, this guilt falls on ordinary Commoner male whites, folks whose parents might have been the immigrants of the late 19th century that came over in steerage and struggled through two wars and a Great Depression to get their heads above water.

And now, it turns out they are bigots, baskets of deplorables. Shame on them!

OK. Too bad for us Commoner male whites.

Now, according to Caldwell, this new regime goes beyond the normal government sphere of hunting down malefactors. It contains a "moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics."

Do you see how this changes the game for all male whites?

When you have a moral regime you have good and evil, you have saints and sinners. Nobody wants to be a sinner. Heavens no. So what do you do to become a saint and purge yourself of your racist sexist guilt?

Perfectly simple. You join the woke left. You damn everything about white northwestern European culture and become a flagellant monk in the Holy Order of the Bernie Wokerati.

But if you are a dumb Commoner you just go on living your life as a racist-sexist-homophobe deplorable.

However, for the wokerati, this really is a matter of life and death, because a white male cannot get on in a career in the professions, in public corporations, in the arts, in education and especially higher education unless he is a fervent believe in the wokerati faith.

So of course all your educated Gentry are driving Priuses and Leafs and making a public display of their wokeness, and eagerly read their New York Times for new memes with which to sneer at President Trump. That's how you prove that you have acknowledged your sin and been baptized in the River of Jordan, and been born again and saved your evil racist soul from eternal perdition.

Yeah. Funny how it all echoes the moral framework of fundamentalist Christianity that our wokerati absolutely despise! But as Hegel wrote, there's really no difference between the north pole and the south pole of a magnet except that they are opposite.

But how can we escape this moral Underworld? Well, I think that President Trump has made a start. He has stood tall for average Americans, and he has invited blacks and Hispanics into his America First tent. He is inviting them to become all-American Commoners instead of being unequal and separate and Little Darlings in the woke plantations of the educated Gentry.

If that happens that the moral anchor of lefty wokism will be destroyed. Because then lefty wokism will be all about special privileges for upper-crust women and Gentry LGBT, the most privileged people in America.

Gosh. Privileged people defending their privilege. Where have I heard about that before?

Democrats Pivot to Biden in Two Days

Well I Never! To think that the notably independent and farseeing and evolved voters in the Democratic Party could all suddently change direction and march in lockstep and vote for Joe Biden all across the land!

Except in whitish places like Vermont and Colorado and Hispanic places like California where the wokerati went for Bernie.

Over at Unz, fellow Ex-Brit John Derbyshire explains Bernie through his experience with the housing market. Back in 1967 he and his then girl-friend just out of college bought a house -- in London.

We were two working-class kids not long out of college. (We’d both graduated in 1967.) Our two families had a combined net worth of … zero. And we bought a house—in London! The asking price was three times my annual salary as a young cube jockey.

Good luck for any Learn To Code guy trying that in London or Bay Area or Seattle in 2020!

Right there you have an explanation for the radicalism of young adults and the “OK, Boomer” sourness.

Granted, Derb. But with Bernie these clueless youngsters are voting for more of the same. Because it was Gentry liberalism tied into the administrative state that rolled money into higher education and forced kids into debt. And it is the administrative state, goaded on by the educated Gentry, that has made housing unaffordable, partly by subsidizing mortgages and partly by land-use restrictions -- which in England are insane, because we can't destroy our wonderful English countryside can we?

Anyway. The comparison with the GOP in 2016 is glaring.

Back in 2016 the GOP bigwigs hated Trump and did all they could to delegitimize him. But the GOP faithful were utterly fed up with being sold down the river by their leaders and so they voted for Trump anyway. And so now the old GOP establishment is done for.

And un-opposed Trump is scoring vote totals about equal to the total vote in the Democratic presidential primaries.

In 2020 the Democratic voters are responding to their leaders and voting for the clueless -- but establishment -- candidate Joe Biden. So you tell me how Democratic voters are educated and evolved and special and #WeBelieve and all the rest of the rubbish.

And tell me how noble and wise the Bernie voters are voting for socialism. Look. Socialism, or the administrative state or whatever, does not help young people trying to start out. Because the more power you give government the móre it is going to sell its soul to existing interests with money to burn.

Take California and its AB5 bill to torpedo the "gig economy." It was promoted by State Representative Lorena Gonzales who was responding to the union movement.

Hello millennials and Gen-Zers. The unions are not your friends! They are all in favor of crystalizing the economy and handing out the bennies to people that have paid their dues.

If you are a young person you want an open economy open to talents. You want lazy old "OK Boomers" to be taught a lesson and retired early so you can get their jobs. You want an economy where old tired workers that aren't worth their salaries get dumped so you can step into their jobs at a fraction of their salary.

If you are a young person you want to be able to work for anything or nothing -- also known as internships -- so you can get your foot on the ladder. But if the unions are running the show, and if there is a minimum wage and if there is an AB5 that stops you working as a contractor then the first rung on the ladder has been sawn off.

If you don't realize that then you are a fool and a knave and  you are going to get what is coming to you.

And if, in addition, you are a Bernie voter you are advertising to the whole world that you are a knucklehead and a fool and a knave what don't know nothin'.

Actually, what we are seeing is that the Democratic Party is split between its Gentry and its Clients. The Gentry voted for Bernie and the Clients voted for Biden.

The problem, I think, is that the interests of the Gentry and the Clients are in conflict.

This has been happening slowly over the decades. After all, in the beginning a century ago the lefty progressive Gentry were just a few elitists and the Clients were the whole working class.

But now with widespread higher education the Gentry is a fair sized voting bloc that expects sinecures in the administrative state and also expects to impose its secular religious views on the whole country.

Over the same time the Commoner segment has been growing as more and more Americans have grown out of the Client sector and become modestly independent people that don't want to truckle to a lordly Gentry.

I'd say that the potential loot for the Gentry and the Clients is limited. Because it has to come out of the hide of the Commoners and the Commoners have had it with paying for Gentry in the administrative state and education and the non-profit sector and they are fed up with paying loot to people that vote for the Gentry.

Look, I'm just a deplorable what don't know nuttin. But I find it odd that the Dems are going flat out for total government health care, total student debt relief, and complete demolition of the economy with the Green New Deal. That's not what I expect from a crafty Machiavellian ruling class that knows its stuff.

Something does not compute in Liberal Land. It seems that all the batters are wildly swinging for a home run instead of just trying to get on base.

You tell me what that means.

What Next in the Battle of the Sexes?

Oh for the good old days, when eevil right-wingers were all sexist aggressors and progressives were all noble allies of women!

To think that Harvey Weinstein, producer of progressive movies, was a sexual predator! And remember NBC News host Matt Lauer? I can't believe what he did!

And now Chris Matthews, "retiring" from his Hardball show! Apparently he was in the habit of making aggressively sexual comments to female guests while they were both in make-up. And, of course, Chris went off the reservation this weekend, politically speaking.

Oh. And Michael Bloomberg, he of the "kill it" to a pregnant female staffer at Bloomberg.

To tell the truth, all this has been a little surprising to me. The Weinstein thing exposed the utterly crude modus operandi of the corporate sexual predator. It was revolting to me on this level: why would you want to relate to a young woman on those terms: a quick champagne and caviar at a restaurant followed by a visit to the office and... stuff? And Matt Lauer and the remote door lock if he was in his office with a babe and didn't want to be disturbed. And so on.

I guess I'm a patsy, because for me, I want that soft look in a woman's eye before proceeding to the other stuff. Otherwise, for me, what's the point?

OK. I get that if you are an aggressive, ambitious man, then life is all about driving your enemy before you and hearing the lamentation of their women, then the more lamentation the better.

And I get that, for non-powerful people, you hold your grudge for years, and then when there is blood in the water, you strike! Otherwise, the blood in the water is yours.

But, of course, with my conceit that I have a strategic mind, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

Because, as I read the feminist movement, the original idea was that women had been held in purdah for centuries and only needed the right to vote and the right to work in order to "hear me roar" and all that rubbish.

And the idea of the sexual revolution and "choice" was to free women into a sexual life that was much more like men. They could have a sexual life without being stigmatized as whores. Etc.

How's that working out, girls?

I'd say that things are getting pretty clear, right about now.

First of all, women don't like the open-outcry life of the corporate career. Why?

Well, I like to explain that by saying that men have a Culture of Insult, which is attached to the male concept of honor, which is courage in battle. Thus, men are forever testing themselves and other men on the question of courage and got-what-it-takes.

And women have a Culture of Complaint, which is attached to the female concept of honor, which is chastity. Thus women are forever judging another women in their "Well I never" and their "I can't believe she..." remarks. They are rehearsing her chastity -- or lack of -- by which I mean the large sense of always being a Good Little Girl.

So, most women are just not going to want to dominate a meeting full of aggressive a--holes. And bid for a higher hiring salary. And women do not want to develop the toughness of telling a Harvey Weinstein or a Matt Lauer to "put that thing away if you don't want to eat bratwurst for lunch."

(Actually, men really love a woman with the ability to exchange one-liners. They love the challenge of it.)

And then the sexual revolution. Come on, girls. When are you going to admit to each other that it has been a disaster for women? Maybe there are a few women that love to mix it up with the guys. But I haven't met one. What women want is to be loved, and then when, in the fulness of time, she announces a future event she wants that man to melt in gratitude.

(I was watching the second half of Spartacus in memory of Kirk Douglas last night, and Kirk -- Spartacus -- did exactly the right thing for 1955 women when his slave wife made the announcement. Who knew that Roman slaves were good at this?)

But the sexual revolution makes it very hard for women to say no, and gets them very angry when they get dumped -- hello Mattress Girl -- and wounded forever when told to "get rid of it."

Hey! How about Emma Sulkowltz today: libertarian, reader of Jordan B. Peterson!

Thing is, I don't know what it is going to take to move the question of women in the public square to a mode that actually is comfortablle for women other than crazy feminist activists. That's because women don't do politics by open outcry, as per the Culture of Insult.

You can see why when you look at presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. People hate the aggressive woman trying to act like a man, trading insult for insult with the guys.

So, women trying to change the rules from female superheroes and a-career-for-every-woman and let-it-all-hang-out sexuality aren't going to do it with conferences and activism and funding from billionaires. Because that's not the way that the overwhelming majority of women interact with the world.

No. What will happen is lots of women networking together and talking to each other and agreeing with each other and "well I never-ing" the women that think otherwise and one fine day we will wake up and find that the culture has changed and nobody will know why.

Here's an example of how this works. Black women vote not just at the general election but in primaries almost in unison. How do they do this? Because black churches? Or because of the women's gossip network? You tell me.

Or maybe they will will make the change with one canceled progressive media a--hole at a time.

Cloud People vs. Dirt People is Three Layer Too

I stumbled over Zman grumbling about Cloud People today and thought I'd better Google the Cloud People vs. Dirt People meme.

Why? Because I can't believe that it is really a two layer theory. There must be a third layer in there hiding. I thought.

The top billing on Google Search is a Medium piece by Dennis Price: "CLOUD PEOPLE, DIRT PEOPLE," in caps.

He describes the Cloud People as "generally" believing in:

• Open borders/ globalism
• Pro-choice
• Atheism
• Climate Change
• Pro-LGBTQ
• Pro Euthanasia
• Liberalism
• Big Government

And the Dirt People "generally believe" in:

• Controlled immigration/ nationalism
• Pro-Life
• Theism
• Climate Sceptic
• Traditional Family Structures
• Anti-Euthanasia
• Conservatism
• Small Government

So, his two layers pretty well equal Curtis Yarvin's Gentry and Commoners, and my Three Peoples Creatives and Responsibles.

Are there any other people? Sorta. He quotes Thomas Sowell on the bad effect of liberal policies on black people, and then suggests the notion that the Cloud People are interested in 

creating a sub-class of voters that are dependent on the State and therefore will always vote for the side of politics that will likely vote for the political wing that will perpetuate those systems.

So that agrees with Yarvin's Clients and my Subordinates. But then he heads off into reason and science vs. postmodernism and how postmodernism leads the Cloud People into a wilderness of lies.

Zman gets an entry on "Cloud People Blues" from June 2016 and then "A New World" in October 2016. But he has two pieces in 2015 on Cloud People: "The Cloud People" in January and "The Cloud People" in July. Thus:

The global elites are the cloud people. They float above us, detached from language, culture and history. They have no loyalty to a country or the people and traditions of a country. It’s like the British Raj. The people in charge are fine with the rest of us engaging in our quaint customs, as long as it does not interfere with their looting of the resources. When the ground people cause trouble, then the cloud people step in to remedy it.

So, at this point the Dirt People were still "ground people."

Whatabout the victims? In a reference to lefties and their notion of "alienation" he notes it didn't apply because:

the lower classes always had other primary identities that trumped all else. The neighborhood, the gang, rooting for a particular football team are all ways working men give their lives meaning.

They are, in fact, "sub-national."

It is interesting that both Price and Zman don't really show the lower classes as actors, but as adjuncts to the Cloud People.

And that accords with Yarvin's three layers and my Three Peoples. Yarvin's Clients are the clients of the Gentry. My Subordinates are subordinate to their lords. They do not act in society; other people act for them.

Now, I'd already put the Zman's theory in as a three layers theory with Dirt People as the lower class. That was wrong, and I'll fix it.

Why is Everyone Going Crazy?

Back in 2016 it was the Republican Party that got blindsided by a outside candidate, Donald Trump.

All the wise heads agreed that it just didn't make sense that everyone should be going crazy. Except it did make sense. Trump appeared and put himself at the head of a disorganized rabble of ordinary Americans, people that were neither educated swells or subordinate serfs: call them Responsibles, Commoners, Yeomen, whatever.

The point is that in the last 50 years the ruling class and the educated Gentry -- or Creative Class or clerisy -- has been implementing a cultural and political agenda that makes the ordinary American the scapegoat, because racist, sexist, homophobe. And Trump came along and made himself the leader of those selected to be scapegoats.

Today, in 2020, the Democratic Party is falling apart as Bernie Sanders, unreconstructed Sixties Commie, is the leading candidate for president. What is going on?

I mean, come on chaps! This is crazy! Nobody really believes that socialism works do they?

Sorry, but they do. And I would say that it is a consequence of the educated Gentry playing with gasoline for almost a century.

What the Democratic Party and the educated Gentry have been selling since, say FDR and the New Deal, is Oh No! We are not crazy lefty socialists, but boy, how you poor victims have been screwed by the system! And how about some free stuff if you vote for us!

The problem is, of course, that to win elections you have to promise free stuff, and the free stuff you handed out at the last election doesn't count.

As I say in my reductive Three Peoples theory and as Curtis Yarvin says in his three-layer theory, the current political setup is that the educated Gentry gets to occupy the commanding heights of the culture and education and the bureaucracy by organizing the Clients -- or victims or serfs -- against the ordinary middle who are racist sexist homophobes.

Plus, because the educated Gentry is also a kind of priesthood, a clerisy, it promulgates from a thousand cultural pulpits its religion of woke virtue. Due to the internal logic of such sermonizing you get to a point where ordinary Commoners that don't intone the correct responses to the Creed get named and shamed and shunned: canceled.

Now it is my belief that the current religion and culture of the educated Gentry is is fact a peculiarly nostaglic longing for the good old days, the prehistoric days: a Great Reaction. To use a Jungian notion, the educated Gentry is rediscovering the hidden harmonies and resonances of the old archetypes.

One of the points of the Jung doctrine was to say: don't you imagine that you are a modern that is all about logic and reason. Those ancient prehistoric archetypes are still at work in your unconscious mind, and don't you forget it.

Thus when I say that socialism is a return to slavery, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a notable in the Gentry, to ordering the plebs around.

When I say that the welfare state is a return to feudalism, I am saying that there is a peculiar satisfaction, if you are a functionary in the Deep State, to sashaying around like the local lord in caring for your flock of peasants.

When I say that activism is a replay of medieval knight-errantry, I mean that there is a peculiar frisson from pretending you are a brave revolutionary waving the flag of revolution on the barricades.

My belief is that the Left and its culture and its instantiation in the United States in the Democratic Party is a reactionary movement that is really cool for the educated Gentry, spending other peoples' money on themselves. But it is not good for the Commoners and Yeomanry.

And it is not good for the serfs, the Clients, the subordinates. Why? Because it does not help them master the Code of the City, that you leave the comforts of your ethnic tribe in the city ghetto and bravely, one step at a time, learn how to master life in the city as a contributor and cooperator in the market economy. The Gentry says to the victims, oh, don't worry about silly little things like getting a skill or learning how to be a good employee, or how to use the finance system. Just vote for us and we will take care of you.

Only the day comes, as it did for the white working class, when the Gentry reneges on its promise to its "Little Darlings" and leaves them by the side of the road. Sorry about that.

But that is not all.

The day also comes when the whole progressive project starts to split at the seams. You see that with Our Nance and Chuck the Schmuck. This week they are issuing crazy pronouncements blaming President Trump for his Coronavirus response. You mean, instead of going to the White House and saying: "Mr. President. How can we help!"

In other words, they don't have a clue what they are doing and where they are going. They are just reacting to the latest news and blaming it all on Trump.

Let us give the educated Gentry its due. Back in the day it made some kind of sense to imagine that the destiny of educated children of wealthy businessmen ought to be to help the workers in the city, who would otherwise die of "immiseration" among those Satanic mills.

Actually, they turned out to be wrong about that. The Industrial Revolution saved the peasants from starvation and gave them jobs in the cities and then the workers could climb up from being mere "hands" to a modest respectability as, in the 19th century, the Irish in America rose in half a century from "shanty Irish" to "lace-curtain Irish."

But whatabout the blacks? We need to give them their rights and end the shame and injustice of slavery and Jim Crow.

OK. Done that. Yes, but whatabout institutional racism, and disparity and exclusion? And toxic masculinity! And homophobia!

Oh yeah. I see. You chaps want a job. You want to maintain meaning in your Gentry lives. You are looking around you and want get your name up in lights again.

Well, now the whole project is in ruins. Actually, in this situation, Bernie Sanders makes sense. As developmental psychologists like Clare Graves and Don Beck and Ken Wilber say: when your life seems to be failing then you reset back to a lower developmental level. So if the woke-and-identity politics seems to be failing let's go back to the class politics of our fathers!

Of course, I know exactly what should happen next, because I am all-wise and all knowledgeable.

First, the educated Gentry should actually think about how to help the serfs, clients, and subordinates. My advice is to help them to get out of the victim culture and become Commoners and Yeomen and middle class.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about how to help the Commoners, Yeomen and deplorables. My advice is to help them imagine that they could step out of the set routines of middle-class life and become just a little bit creative. But nobody should pretend that the creative life is just a walk in the park.

Then, the educated Gentry should think about themselves. What does it actually mean to be woke and evolved and creative? My advice is that the real creative life is the life of the Sacrificial Hero, that descends into the underworld of the unconscious to confront the truth about himself, and if he survives that journey he may return to the world to live on the border between Chaos and Order and try to explore that terrifying land -- and hope that his experience will be a boon to his fellow humans. And to recognize that there will be no hosannas and statues and adoring crowds. In other words, better leave ambition and vanity and honor at the door.

But back to the excitement of today.

Conrad Black says that the Dems need to commit (temporary) suicide.

An ineluctable process of national political renovation is proceeding apace... the Democratic Party will... slouch off to Milwaukee to consummate temporary suicide, enabling a sensible resurrection worthy of that historically great party.

And if their wise heads plump on my suggestions above, then future generations will sing hosannas to their vision and their wisdom.

Another Three Layer Theory: From Joel Kotkin

Really, anybody that has half a brain understands human society in some kind of a three-layer theory. Now Joel Kotkin joins the party. In "The Two Middle Classes" he divides the middle class into clerisy and yeomanry. Then there are the serfs. Actually he also has a class of oligarchs on top. So does Curtis Yarvin with his three layers system. Thing is the top class, whether you call them oligarchs or ruling class, aren't a lot of people.

But Kotkin describes his clerisy in the same way that Yarvin describes his Gentry.

[T]he clerisy [is] a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.

Just like Yarvin's Gentry. Back to the clerisy.

Although certainly not unanimous in their views, the clerisy generally favors ever-increasing central control and regulation...

Today’s clerisy are concentrated in professions whose numbers have grown in recent decades, including teaching, consulting, law, the medical field, and the civil service... Some professions that were once more closely tied to the private economy, such as doctors, have become subsumed by bureaucratic structures and—in the United States, at least—shifted from a dependable conservative lobby to an increasingly progressive one.

Yeah, like my yoga teacher, a retired physician.

At its apex, the clerisy today is made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent. This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.

That is one of the findings of Charles Murray in Coming Apart. But you knew that.

Enough about the bloody clerisy. Let's talk about the yeomanry.

The perspective of the traditional middle class [yeomanry] generally differs from that of the clerisy, and constitutes what Piketty labels the “merchant Right.” These people make their living in the marketplace, and that often places them in conflict with both the oligarchs, who continually seek to crush or absorb their businesses, or with the clerisy, which hands down environmental and other regulations that inhibit their activities. 

Yeah!

Now Kotkin has a basically pesssimistic outlook on things, that unless we do something...

An independent and assertive property-owning middle class that can thrive remains the only force able to challenge ever-growing centralization. Without them, there is likely no way to prevent a new feudal order from emerging in the future. As the radical social theorist Barrington Moore suggested a half-century ago, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” 

But I am more optimistic. That's because my world view says this essentially Marxian view, that the workers and the petite bourgeoisie will be "immiserated" as profit margins decline, has been proved wrong by history.

Why? Because the story of the last 200 years is that the forecast "immiseration" has always been liquidated by yet another technological revolution that upset the apple cart and removed the "ever-gowing centralization."

Of course, maybe This Time is Different, and we have reached the limit of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years in which real per-capita income in the rich countries has increased by 30 times.

But maybe not. And the truth is that nobody knows. The neighbor across the street is doing a fusion-power startup. And down in California Lockheed is doing the same. What happens if and when those chaps come on line? Does Google get even bigger, or does an ageing Google get pushed aside by the young upstarts figuring out how to leverage fusion power into the stratosphere and beyond?

And another thing. One of the problems with a clerisy sitting in the catbird seat protected by government power and perquisites is that it loses its sharpness. The whole point of going into the clerisy is to avoid the greater risks of the market system and its startup culture and Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. But that means that you are choosing the easy path instead of hiking out into the unknown.

It's a sensible choice, to stay safe. And most people that hike out into the startup jungle are never heard from again. But the ones that do make it change the world, and put the old oligarchy and its fawning clerisy out of business.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.