'Splaining the Democrats for Deplorables Like You and Me

Well. Now we know. After Super Tuesday and Mini Tuesday, now that Joe Biden looks like the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democrats in 2020. In the Democratic Party, the party of equality, there is too a hierarchy.

It goes like this.

Top dog is the old hand-out-the-free-stuff guy still keeping on keeping on: that's Joe Biden. And it makes complete sense that he is barely able to put a sentence together. Because the program of the administrative welfare state has really got past its sell-by date. We know that slowly and steadily bringing everything under the aegis of political control really does not work. It usually buys the next election, but at what price?

Second-in-command is the politics-as-religion guy, who is trying to make the ancient practice of border defense amped up into loot and plunder into a sacred faith: that's Bernie Sanders. Interesting that the Kidz are the key supporters. What is it about our normal religions that does not speak to the educated young'uns?

Third is the high-status feminist woman: that's Elizabeth Warren. It's interesting to me that her line is part free stuff, part the moral necessity of free stuff, and part identity politics where you are sexist if you don't support her.

Back of the bus are the varous Coalition of the Fringes candidates: the gay guy, the minority woman, the black guy, the fake Hispanic guy.

Do you mind if I say that all these notions are bankrupt?

Look, I can understand that, back in the 19th century, it seemed like a good idea to bring the working class into national politics by offering them free stuff. On a modest scale it doesn't hurt too much. But if entitlement programs add up to 20 percent of GDP then, old chap, we are pushing it. In particular we have a problem because it becomes impossible to reform the entitlements, the free-stuff handouts. That means that they will only get fixed when we have a generational economic crisis, one that makes the 2008 crash look like a walk in the park.

Look, I get the moral framework of socialism -- in the context of the mid 19th century when it seemed sensible for a chap like Marx to imagine the future dominated by power-hungry capitalists like the feudal era had been dominated by power-hungry lords and barons. Only it turned out that the capitalists were not that interested in power. Indeed, the lesson of the last century is that the socialists are the power-hungry monsters, not the capitalists. And the socialists refuse to learn the basic lesson that it is not a good idea to combine politics and religion. I mean, how dumb-or-somep'n can you be not to see that ideological political regimes that totalize religion into politics are a recipe for global human disaster?

Look, I get the ambition of high-status women. Why should high-status men get all the power and the adulation? Hey! I'm as good as any man! Look at my degrees! Well, I would say that there is no privilege in America that comes close to the privilege of high-status white women. The feminist idea that women are helpless victims is a bunch of baloney. Oh sure, low-status women have it pretty rough, and one of the reasons is the sexual revolution advocated by high-status women. Ever thought about that girls?

Look, I understand the logic of identity politics. The Frankfurt School guys were bloody geniuses to convert Marxism from the dialectics of class to the dialectics of race and sex. And if you look at the story of America for the 150 years you see that in wave after wave of immigration the immigrants camped out for a couple of generations in ethnic ghettoes in the cities, each with its private army of criminal gangs. Politicians understood this from the earliest days, and appealed to immigrant voters on the basis of their ethnic origin. So we had the Irish vote, the Catholic vote, the Jewish vote. And now the Hispanic vote and the black vote.

But I say that all this is rubbish, to be tolerated as inevitable survivals from the pre-industrial past. That's why I call it a Great Reaction, a foolish and ignorant return to political and religious memes that had their day but are now worn-out husks.

We must backtrack on entitlements for all, because all economic relationships need to adjust to new social realities, from decade to decade, and the whole point of government programs is to protect favored people from change and make other people pay for it.

We must, all of us, even Good Little Girls like AOC, realize that combining moral ideologies with politics is a recipe for disaster. It leads directly to slavery and economic failure, and millions of dead. Look, our Founders knew that 250 years ago, because they had learned the lessons of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. Then we had a global test on human subjects, something that would never be allowed if we were testing vaccines, that caused the deaths, probably, of 100 million souls.

High-status women need to get a grip and stop mean-girling the rest of society.

We need to understand the sub-national loyalties of people newly arrived in the city. But we need to teach them to leave the culture of Subordinates and become Responsible Commoners that have learned to wive and thrive in the city. Did I tell you I wrote a book about this, Road to the Middle Class?

The amazing thing about the present moment is that President Trump, coming out of nowhere, has invented the politics of catering to the Commoners, the vast world of ordinary people that just go to work, follow the rules, and obey the law.

Instead of the politics of the Democratic Party that caters to the conceits of the Gentry and to the tribal loyalties of the Subordinates.

Golly Geewillikins! No really! Why didn't anyone put this together before. It's so obvious! The very idea! Centering politics and economic policy on the needs and aspirations of ordinary Commoner Americans!

Why in the world did it take a businessman with a flair for reality TV to figure this out? Where were all the intellectual geniuses? The political scientists? The moral philosophers? The political consultants?

Well, I guess the answer is pretty simple. It never occurred to anyone because the thinkers and philosophers and intellectuals and politicians are all educated Gentry. And really, none of us can think outside the box of our own class interests and think about how life looks to the lowly Commoner.

What is Best in Life for Children of the Privileged?

Back in the old days things were simple. What is best in life?

For a male chimpanzee: Get to the border with two of your pals and kill any chimp from another troop that shows up.

For a hunter-gatherer: Have a jolly good hunt, and, by the way, keep the other tribe on their side of the border?

For a medieval romance hero: Make sure it is your opponent's lance that shivers into splinters. And then head for bed and hope to wake up to discover some sweet damsel dressed in green samite bathing your face in her tears.

For Conan the Barbarian: To drive his enemies before him and hear the lamentation of their women.

For a feudal aristocrat: To boldly outdare the dangers of the time and get to wear that kingly crown.

For a post-feudal aristocrat: Get a seat in the House of Commons and make a name for yourself.

For the sons of the bourgeoisie: Become a lefty activist, like Marx and Engels and Horkheimer and Marcuse and Bill Ayers.

And now this kid, one of a generation of "Liberal Children of Privilege" that are having a grand old time acting like the tribunes of the marginalized.

[Carlos] Maza, who goes by the name “gay wonk,” is known for whining about people who’ve earned a lot of money and trying to “cancel” conservatives for making fun of him.

HIs mother and her fiance made millions with a software startup. So the kid has plenty of money to get on social media and "cancel" people.

Actually, I think that this highlights the Great Problem of this age, and indeed all previous ages.

Whatabout the children of the rich and powerful?

We all know that What is Best in Life for Conan the Barbarian. But whatabout his son? Yeah! You ever thought about his problem? What does he do, given that his dad already did all the enemy-driving and lamentation-of-women stuff?

In The Millionaire Next Door social scientists Stanley and Danko proposed that what millionaire moms do is they send their kids into the well-paid professions, like doctors and lawyers, because to repeat the millionaire success of dad goes against the odds. And, of course, that solid professional life starts with the most selective college possible.

But obviously the hands-down favorite for rich kids is to become a lefty activist. And it obviously appeals to the young: see the Bernie Bros and the enthusiasm of lefty college activists to descend on their cancel victim of the day. Like that girl student who dared, dared to say that socialism was more deadly than the Wuhan Flu. Well, the activists taught her a lesson!

But let us be serious, for a change. Our era is a revolutionary era, meaning that in the last 200 years we have utterly transformed society from agriculture to industry. And now, it seems from industry to the knowledge game.

In the old days the future of rich kids was clear. You inherited the lands of your father; you made a good marriage; you jostled with the other grandees at Court. Second sons and daughters, of course, had a harder time of it.

But now the war cray is "to become creative." An artist, a writer, an activist. It all sounds pretty straight forward, only it ain't.

The problem is that the whole point of being Gentry or being a People of the Creative Self is that just having a good job, good marriage, home and kids is not good enough for someone that wants to differentiate himself or herself from ordinary Commoners. Gentry kids want to be something special.

Only, being something special is really hard.

Here's the deal. And the philosophers and psychologists and mythologists are pretty clear on this.

To be a shooting star, a Hero, means becoming not just a tin-pot dictator or social-media "cancel" artist. It means being a Sacrificial Hero. It starts with the perilous journey into the underworld of the unconscious, from which you probably won't return. And if you do return from a successful encounter then, following Joseph Campbell, you may indeed return with a "Boon" for mankind.

"The Ultimate Boon" is the benefit, favor, or blessing that is bestowed on the hero figure. There is a drive for the hero to share the boon with humankind, whether it is an elixir of immortality, a holy grail, true love, perfect knowledge, or the meaning of life.

Or, in the version from Jordan B. Peterson, you return as the Sacrifical Hero, dying on the border between Order and Chaos while converting a small area of unknown Chaos into known Order.

Or, you become Nietzsche's Übermensch and that means stepping out of the "herd" and daring to go where no man dared to go before, stripped of all the comforts of home and the swaddling blankets of religion.

In other words, a real creative life is not Sunday in the park. It is a confrontation with demons; it is being "stressed" to the limit. It is to submit yourself to the Ultimate Truth -- and certainly not submit other people to your Ultimate Truth.

And that is one of the reasons I say that everything about the Left is a lie, including "and" and "the." In the narrative of the left the Noble Activist gets to bend the arc of history towards justice and the activist or the progressive politician, participating, as AOC recently said, in a mass movement.

No it ain't. They lied to you, honey.

White Trash: The View from Mt. Olympus

I had been thinking I ought to read White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg ever since it was published in early 2016. Naturally, I was afraid that it would be just the usual liberal rubbish. But you never know: I might learn something!

Yes indeedy, the Better Sort of people have every been worried about

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.

And the Better Sort has been worried about them for centuries.

But who are they, these problems? How, for instance, do they fit into a three-layer social theory like Curtis Yarvin's Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

Well, I have to admit they don't. They are lower-order people that aren't part of the system. They are "off the grid." And that is what is so threatening about them. They are living in the swamp, in the woods. They are people who upped and went "out west" and now they are living in despicable shacks up in the hills, multiple generations in one room and who knows who is shacking up with whom. Of course, they don't work. Instead they forage, or hunt, or steal, or... well, who knows exactly how they manage?

But what are we going to do about them? I guess when you are the ruling class, or the Gentry class that does the ruling class's bidding, the fact of an unorganized rabble out there that isn't connected into your power tributary system is clearly a problem. Suppose they get out of control?

Obviously the solution to the White Trash problem has changed over the years. Back in the day, they got shoved off the land they occupied as it got scarfed up by politically connected gentry. That was when agricultural land was the foundation of wealth.

At the turn of the 20th century Gentry people were into Darwinist eugenics. So the solution was the stop these defectives from breeding.

During the New Deal the solution was to try and round them up and put them into model communities funded by the government. Or build bloody big dams with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In the Sixties, it was time to make fun of them with TV series like The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Or was it? After all, by putting hillbilles into Beverly Hills, you get to hit two birds with one stone, White Trash and Movie Moguls.

ON the other hand, with NASCAR and 1970s TV series like Smokey and the Bandit we are starting to celebrate hillbilly values. Or with the movie Deliverance showing the country hicks as dangerous monsters threatening young male city-slickers.

Or, with the 1980s, we get Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at their PTL Club evangelical TV show. And later reality shows like Here Comes Honey Bo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

The truth is that Our Betters really don't have a clue what to do with the out-of-control White Trash. And Isenberg reflects that truth. She's a professor at Louisiana State University and her book carefully hews to the liberal line.

So she's outraged by the snobby attitude towars mudsills and clay-eaters in the 19th century. She is appalled by eugenicists in the early 20th century. She is understanding about the New Deal effort to clean up the dirty whites. But then what?

Thing get complicated in the Civil Rights era. Because the victims du jour are now poor blacks, not poor whites. So the helpless victims of the New Deal era become the racist followers of Southern segregationists. And Sarah Palin, who came up from pretty humble beginnings to get elected Governor of Alaska and GOP vice-presidential nominee, is dismissed as an ignorant simpleton, the "first female redneck on a presidential ticket... [that] had attended six unremarkable colleges."

Look, I get it. You wanna get a book published by Viking; you gotta toe the ideological line. And these days, we Gentry chappies are concerned about our intersectional Little Darlings, from upper-class women sobbing about sexism in politics to blacks to helpless gays and transgenders, the homeless, and migrants.

So Isenberg gives us a helpful look at conventional Gentry wisdom about the white underclass. In today's Gentry firmament the white underclass is a bit of a bother.  It is, you may think, a "glitch" in the Matrix, something that does not compute with your world view. You brush it aside as an annoying interruption of normally scheduled service. So you understand why President Obama talks about bitter clingers and Hillary Clinton about a "basket of deplorables." And why the media condemned the tiki-torch bearers of Charlottesville as white racists.

Nothing remarkable here. We humans have to brush off things that don't conform with our view of reality. Otherwise we'd never get to work in the morning. Indeed, scientists say, there is no reason to bother about any unexpected informaiton unless it looks like it is going to kill you.

And that is why everyone from professors to activists to the media are out to get Trump. Because if Trump suceeds then he is going to damage their nice comfortable world of sinecures and cultural hegemony.

But White Trash for me points out that all the upper class frenzy down the ages about the fractious lower class is just so much idle chatter. Instead the upper class should just do its job: don't get into stupid wars, don't loot the economy to reward your supporters; don't allow people to scam the system and erect privileges for themselves; don't fall down on the job in the next credit crisis.

Looking at the bigger picture I'd say that every time you have a big event, whether the Industrial Revolution or a big war or a big credit crisis then millions of people are going to be thrown out of the system; many of them will never get their lives together again. But it certainly helps to hand out money to the victims: keeps them from tearing the whole thing down.

Can we do anything else? Education? Training? Model communities? Maybe. But I'd say that 97 percent of all government programs is the Gentry wanting to feel good about itself.

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.