Reign of Terror Means the Revolution is Failing

One of the conventional wisdoms on the right these days is that the Conservative Establishment failed us. It failed to fight against the left. And now look where we are, with the left canceling everyone in sight, and Big Business keeping its powder dry by mouthing conventional platitudes about Black Lives Matter.

So argues Julie Kelly at American Greatness.

The argument of the Conservative Establishment, on the other hand, is that Trump's crazy chaos politics radicalized the left. But for Trump, we would all be getting along.

I think that both arguments are wrong. I believe that what we are experiencing is the classic case of a religious movement dealing with the impossible situation, that its faith is not moving mountains.

Do you realize the impossible place our lefty friends are in? The whole arc of leftism is that, with a new politics, we could create a heaven on earth, free of hunger, free of poverty, free of discrimination, free of oppression, free of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other -phobias in the dictionary.

They said that their labor laws would revolutionize the workplace. Oh yeah, how are the workers doing these days? Dying of despair? How come?

They said that their Civil Rights laws would transform race relations and lift African Americans up from centuries of slavery and Jim Crow oppression and segregation. Oh yeah, how are the blacks doing these days? Still getting killed by police for resisting arrest? How come?

They said that feminism would liberate women from the patriarchy of the ages. Oh yeah? Then how come women reported themselves happier in the 1950s than today?

When the revolution fails to deliver the promised Paradise, the revolutionaries do not just give up and go home. They redouble their efforts. And redouble them again.

Eventually we get the Reign of Terror, Great Purge, Cultural Revolution, Great Awokening.

And then comes Reaction.

That's the model proposed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. And I like it.

But why Reaction? Why don't the wokies keep on keeping on naming and shaming and canceling from now until forever, or until the last Deplorable Statue has been erased from history and the last "far-right" activist has been fired from his job and divorced by his wife?

Because, Crane Brinton writes, humans cannot live forever in the frenzy of white hot religion. Eventually we relapse back to normal life.

The classic Reaction is the end of the French Reign of Terror in July of 1794, the so-called Thermidorean Reaction when Robespierre was removed from office. And it led to the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of course, Bonaparte then led France through the disaster of the Napoleonic Wars from which France has never really recovered. Some people think that is a good thing.

But I think that, because the United States is a proof of God's existence, that we in America will get through the Reign of Wokeness without the bloodbath of the Reign of Terror.

And that is because the voters of the United States elected Donald Trump in 2016.

Yes, of course Conservatism Inc. is really resentful about Donald Trump. Hey, he's managed to do what they failed to do for 60 years, ever since William F. Buckley Jr. decided to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. Wouldn't you be angry?

Yes, of course the left is fit to be tied by Donald Trump. According to their arc of history, Donald Trump ought to be impossible. Yet here he is. 

And One Million people have signed up for his June 20th rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although the top Tulsa city health expert wants Trump to cancel the rally, because health.

Do you see why that would be? Why a million people might have signed up for Trump's rally in a stadium that holds 19,000? 

It's because the vast majority of people just want to live their "humdrum lives" -- immortalized by Lina Lamont. They don't want to bend the arc of history towards justice, or stand athwart history, or amaze their college classmates with a brilliant career, or get into activism, or even go to Mars with our tech billionaires. They just want to live and work and get married and have a family and live to enjoy their grandchildren.

And let it be said that this simple agenda has never been easy, down the ages, on account of the Four Horsemen representing pestilence, war, famine, and death.

In a way, it is appropriate that President Trump has been assailed non-stop by a series of harassments from the ruling class, starting with surveillance from the intelligence community, then an effort to take out his advisor LTG Flynn, then the Special Prosecutor investigation, then the impeachment effort, then the hyped-up WuFlu epidemic, and lately the faked-up riots over the death of a black career criminal in police custody.

Really, what president in our history could have stood up to all this abuse the way Trump has done?

Now I believe, following my research into Jungian psychology and his concept of "archetypes," that the proper role for the man who wishes to change history is the role of the Sacrificial Hero, one who probably perishes on the border between Order and Chaos trying to understand and stand for new ideas and knowledge despite the baying of the mob.

Donald Trump is, of course, an improbable candidate for Sacrificial Hero of the Year, since he is a proud and boastful egomaniac, thrice married, and I know not what.

And yet he has stood against the rage of the mob for nigh on four years, standing for Making America Great Again and promising to Drain the Swamp of the Deep State.

Will he succeed or will he go down to ignominious defeat at the hands of the wokey mob and the devious wranglings of the Deep State?

Nobody can tell, but I believe that he has changed history to this extent. He has redefined the Republican Party as the party of the ordinary American Commoner. As opposed to the Democratic Party that is clearly the party of the educated Gentry and its Clients.

In my view the only question is now how the left in its current Great Awokening will go down the tubes. Will it be at the hands of Donald Trump, as the Sixties went down the tubes with the two elections of Richard Nixon, or will it be at the hands of a future Reactionary that seizes the reins of power at the next Thermidorean moment?

You tell me.

Jews, Anti-Semitism, and the "Other"

One of the astonishing things about the Jews is how they have managed to maintain a religious/tribal identity from whenever.

And, remember, for most of this period, Jews have maintained this separate identity as tiny minorities within larger, hostsile political units.

How did they do it? Because, if you look at the broad sweep of history, all the eternal nations and tribes and empires and religions are not eternal at all. They are born, they grow, they squabble, they divide, they combine, they die. 

But the Jews have kept their identity going against all odds, let us say, ever since the Romans made Palestine a part of the Roman Empire.

How do you do that, when you are a tiny minority in a much larger political unit?

I think the answer is that you create a culture of perpetual innocence.

Of course, all nations and cultures do this. And I supposes it relates to the notion of "fault" in the primitive mind. If something goes wrong, there must be a fault. And the fault must be the other guy.

But if we, whoever we are, are perpetually innocent then whatever happens can't be our fault. Therefore we should soldier on, and never falter.

Of course, the Jews, who, we can say, came out rather on the wrong side of the nation-state movement of the last millennium, have now created the most nationish nation state in the world with the nation of Israel.

But when your define yourself with such determination, you define yourself as the "Other" to the rest of the world.

And when things go wrong, people usually blame the "Other." Because there must be a fault, and it can't be that "we" are at fault.

Having a bit of a problem with the Black Death? Blame the Jews. Or, as a convenient backup, the witches.

Having a bit of a problem in Germany after the disaster of World War I? Blame the Jews.

You see this with the current WuFlu. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories flying around, from the Chinese did it deliberately in their Wuhan lab in Wuhan to the US did it and seeded the offending viruses in the unsuspecting Chinese lab in said Wuhan. And then all the blame games, from Trump doing too little or too much, too early or too late, to the Dem governors deliberately wrecking their state economies in order to get Trump defeated in November.

And don't get me started on all the mostly peaceful protests over the death of the black innocent George Floyd.

One of my tentative notions is that the innocence culture of almost all left-wing groups issues from the fact that intellectual Jews have been their leaders, from the workers and communism and socialism to blacks to the current wokey AntiFa and Black Lives Matter.

See, I have a problem with innocence culture. I think that in the modern era with the market economy and the city culture people have to get beyond a reactive innocence culture and grow up a little. Because nobody is innocent; nobody is perfect. We all have to rub along and put up with people that, given our druthers, we would rather not.

Hmm. Maybe I need another leg in my Great Reaction concept, something along the line of "identity politics is a re-assertion of innocence."

Notice that one of the things in Christianity is its notion of Sin, that we are all sinners, and that we all have to work for salvation. Nobody is an innocent. The Jews have a similar concept, the Book of Life, in which God records who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

The point is that all politics depends on "Us" and "Them." And all politicians establish their tribe by demonizing the "Other."

Obviously, if we humans are to ascend from the dusty plain of political conflict to the ethereal heights that soar above such petty squabbles, we all have to shed the armor of innocence.

And I don't know how that works. Well, I do, but I don't know how to get there.

Saying the Unsayable on Race and Slavery and Police

As the Zman writes this week, “The thing that white people never quite get about black people is black people, especially the talented tenth, obsess over their blackness.” Especially if they work for The New York Times.

See, white people don’t usually get paid to write about their whiteness, don’t really think too much about their whiteness. But blacks… You get the point.

Now, I just take it as given that the lefty obsession with race as well as the black obsession with blackness must be part of the whole lefty program of the Great Reaction, the lurch back to the primitive. Or rather, now I think about it, a staged re-enactment of the primitive: LARPing the good old days.

That, I think, is my takeaway from the classic -- and mostly indigestible-- Autumn of the Middle Ages by John Huizinga. The elite upper-class were in the middle of converting from root’n toot’n medieval warlords into good, well-behaved courtiers to the emerging absolute monarchs. So they really loved the tournaments and medieval romances that gave them a nostalgic look back to the good old days when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

But now I am in the middle of The Broken Spell by Pieter Spierenburg, another Dutch historian, and he seems to get the modern age completely. First of all, in the old days, a thousand years ago, almost all people in Europe lived in a "household" of masters, servants, and slaves, in which both production and consumption were combined; people lived almost entirely within the boundaries of their household. Today, households are merely units of joint consumption. Production takes place elsewhere, so people have to go out into the larger world, away from the protection of their household and deal with the world out there.

Secondly, there is the question of security. A thousand years ago Europe was “stateless.” That means that safety and security of individuals were managed by the patriarchs, heads of households and kinship groups. A wrong was righted by vengeance and vendetta. But with the formation of states in the pre-industrial period, “pacification” occurred.

Violence and supreme rule were monopolized [by the state], which generally facilitated an increase in restraints upon the violent inclinations and the emotions of individual persons… Eventually this resulted to a certain extent in a society free from violence, except for the relations among states.

Notice that when security is enforced by the household or the kinship group people tend to confine their economic and social activity within the household. But when it becomes society-wide then people interact economically and socially with a much broader range of people, as white people do in America. Because they feel safe. Why, it’s so safe that people can elect a woman to be their mayor and appoint a woman to be police chief, as in nice safe Seattle.

But that chap who’s the capo di tutti capi in Seattle’s CHAZ. He is a man.

We see this safety and pacification process work itself out after the industrial revolution in the story of the American city. Ethnic groups arrive in the US and settle in ethnic ghettos, often protected by an ethnic criminal gang. Only after they learn the ropes of life in the good old USA do they emerge from under the protection of their ethnic “household” into the wider world.

Now, I propose that it is shameful to be an ethnic group locked up in its ghetto; it means they are not yet up to snuff. When people are screaming “racism” and “discrimination” they are admitting that they are inferior, afraid to submit themselves to the judgement of the rest of society. And the problem is compounded when well-born liberal activists advocate for them with convenient insults, like the meme-of-the-week, “systemic racism.”

And that, I think, is the meaning of Candace Owen’s recent George Floyd video. As an American, she is ashamed of her fellow blacks that are afraid to come out into the broader society.

Hey, let’s have a slavery minute! Back in the jolly old Roman Empire, Spierenburg writes, when slaves were plentiful, the Roman patriarchs kept them in barracks and wouldn’t allow them to marry. But when the slave supply dried up, the Romans started to think it was OK for slaves to marry and have families. Hey, they even started to let them live in individual housing rather than barracks. 

Now, my take on the end of slavery in the industrial world is that the eevil capitalists decided that free labor is more profitable than slave labor. I wonder if even Stalin might now agree about that.

But here's the point. If the "pacified" societies of state regimes reduce the need for patriarchs managing the safety of the women and children, then isn't the city police a Good Thing? Because it permits women, especially, to venture out beyond the protection of their lords and masters and husbands into the public square, confident that the police are out there to make them safe.

Of course, the police are a problem if you are an unpacified minority young man that has not yet acquired the skills to thrive in the city economy and if you are a young man that still adheres to the old pre-city culture of vendetta and vengeance. For instance, the notion of "dissing" in black male culture is obviously a pre-city cultural thing, of men whose reputation in the world is not what they can do for you -- which is what a man in the city is all about -- but what they can do to you -- as a warrior on the border of the household's territory.

Are you thinking right now about the contradiction in the world view of our lefty friends? On the one hand they are utterly against eevil patriarchs and toxic masculinity, the culture of the the pre-state world when the patriarch protected you from the baddies. On the other hand they are against the police forces that pacify the city and make it safe for women and soy boys to live and work and move about the city.

So which is it, lefties?

Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery

Since we are all in the middle of being carefully taught to hate the 400 years of slavery and oppression suffered by African Americans, let us just review a curious tale of slavery, in the naval novel, The Privateersman, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Marryat, all you wokies will know because you are all so well-read, is the chap that invented the naval novel genre, that we now enjoy with Patrick O'Brien and a host of others. Marryat was an actual naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for all the heroes of O'Brien and the others.

In The Privateersman, our hero works for a shipowner in Liverpool -- a port that you scholars will know was a notorious slave port. The shipowner, father of the most perfect girl in the world, used to make lots of money in the slaving line, but now prefers the less abominable trade of privateering.

Privateering, all you scholars will know, was a second-tier thing in the Napoleonic Wars, where ship captains with "letters of marque" were licensed to prey on the King's enemies for loot and plunder.

Our hero is the captain on a couple of privateering voyages but then, partly influenced by the daughter, he tells his boss that he's not going to go a-privateering again.

One thing leads to another, and he goes down to West Africa and gets captured by West Africans and made a slave -- to the lovely concubine of a West African chief. But eventually the Brits come and free him.

Then he makes another trip to West Africa, this time to trade goods -- for gold dust and elephant tusks -- but one thing leads to another and his ship gets taken over by a villainous Portuguese who puts him in irons and exchanges the tusks for slaves. When the ship arrives in Brazil with its African slaves, our hero gets imprisoned and sent as a white slave for life to the Brazilian diamond mines.

Hmm. I wonder what Captain Marryat means by that.

One thing leads to another and our hero gets freed after a couple of years, and sets sail in a xebeque for North America, on the way home to Britain and the most perfect girl in the world. But the ship gets wrecked on the coast of North America and our hero gets captured by Indians and forced to marry an ugly old Indian squaw.

One thing leads to another and our hero escapes and presents himself at a small tobacco plantation in the wilderness run by a six-foot woman and two indentured servants, criminals branded on their hands, and forced to work as virtual slaves. She decides she wants to marry him and puts him in chains until he agrees. Well, but soon enough the Indians attack their log cabin and set fire to it. But our hero manages to escape in all the smoke.

One thing leads to another and our hero climbs on board a pirate ship, and is more or less forced to become a crew member because if he didn't agree to become a pirate the crew would kill him.

But one thing leads to another and the pirate ship gets captured by a Royal Navy ship, that just happens to be commanded by our hero´s younger brother. Everything ends happily ever after, including getting the most perfect girl in the world.

Now I don't know exactly what Captain Marryat was trying to say, but I'd guess that he was trying to make the point, in 1846, that there was a whole lot of slavery going on back in the day. And just about everyone was doing it, from Liverpool merchants to West African chiefs to Portuguese colonial regimes to native Americans to white women running tobacco farms in tidewater America. And anyone could be taken into slavery. For the rest of their natural life.

Now, I'm bound to admit that the slavery of African slaves on North American plantations was a particularly villainous kind of slavery, because the capitalist plantation owners made it pay, as capitalists are wont to do. Usually, slavery was a muddle, a sign of status, rather than profit, for you either were a slave or you owned slaves. Back in the day.

But soon enough lots of people, including many of the most perfect girls in the world, got to feeling that slavery wasn't really Christian. Even William Wilberforce, the son of a merchant in Hull, England, agreed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the Americans of 1860 decided to have a war over it.

Then one thing led to another and the socialists of the world decided to give slavery another try in the two biggest slave states in history. Guess which states I am talking about.

Then our progressive friends decided to go half way to slavery with neo-feudal welfare states in which about 40 percent of peoples' incomes are extracted from them by force for the ruling class to give out as free stuff to the supporters of the progressive regime.

I wonder what our progressive friends will come up with next. In the slavery and feudal line.

To Be Continued.

Insurrection in Seattle

Well, well, well. The AntiFas and wokies have taken over a six block area of wokey Capitol Hill in Seattle, the place where all the 20-somethings in artistical black live.

And the first thing that happens is they erect barricades. Otherwise known as a border wall. Imagine if Trump...

And the first thing their police force does is rough up a guy doing an unapproved "tag." Imagine if the Seattle Police Department...

Well. 

I called my Seattle city councilman this morning, axing what his 5-point Plan was to end the insurrection. I suggested to his voice mail, as an example of tough action, the Clinton-era attack on the Branch Davidian compound that, I believe, resulted in the whole compound of the religious cult being burned to the ground and several Branch Davidians and federales being killed. It all started when the Bureau of Tobacco and firearms came to get the guns of the cultists.

So. They came for their guns and the followers of David Koresh said, out of my cold dead hands. Thank goodness there wasn't a Republican president at the time or everyone would have thrown themselves on the ground wailing and gnashing their teeth at the end of "our democracy."

Since I'm a mere 5 miles from the center of insurrection, you might think I am concerned, and I am, of course, because you never know.

But maybe we need this, because, as Edmund Burke said, "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." Borders. No kidding. Police doing a bit of the rough stuff. No kidding.

This is the sort of thing that President Trump is rather good at addressing, and I dare say he will when he addresses the Republican National Convention and gets on the road again with his Trump rallies.

The point is that the educated left in this country are ignorant idiots. They, in the words of Ben Rhodes, literally know nothing.

Here they are returning the nation back to vigilante justice, justice by vengeance rather than bureaucratic law and order and police restrained by actual laws and rules.

Here they are returning to naming and shaming and shunning, as practiced down the ages by the women, and latterly in church communities and their "dis-fellowshipping." Oh and by the Kidz in Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Here they are, proposing to "defund the police" and spend the money on social programs. Oh please. Don't you idiots realize that the social programs are the problem?

The problem, dear liberals, is that you are trying to combine your religion, the religion of woke equality and justice, with the prosaic system of law and order, which tries not to take a position on the question of "the meaning of life" but merely to remove some of the primitive cultural practices like outgroup hate and vengeance with police and law courts.

The point about police and law is not that they are morally superior, but that they remove the older practices that we colloquially refer to as "the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The point about the separation of church and state is the idea to separate the search for meaning from the prosaic question of keeping the peace in the city.

And there's another question, that appears in black and white to me, as a profound sexist. A lot of the naming and shaming and canceling is being done by women. I believe this is because naming and shaming is part of the women's instinctive community culture, the way that women have interacted since the dawn of women living close to their mother-in-laws.

I am here to say that I don't think this women's cancel culture works in the so-called "public square" of the modern world.

Put it this way. Just as men have had to modify their instinctive male honor code from vengeance and the duel to merely insulting each other in public forums -- limited in places like the House of Commons and Congress by rules against insult -- so women need to civilize their culture of name and shame, of "I can't believe she said that" and getting the other women on your side against the neighborhood woman that offended you.

Right now our wokie women and the nice liberal ladies have No Idea that their Culture of Complaint is a problem. No Idea.

And I don't know how we are going to educate them and the SJW kidz educated in our lefty seminaries, except by the Burkean concept of the School of Example.

The whole purpose of knowledge, of course, is to limit, at least in part, the brutal lessons of the School of Example.

Meanwhile Long Live the Revolution of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone!

Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction

Dennis Prager recently put out a piece "The Four Horsemen of America's Apocalypse." That is:

1. Victimhood: "People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions -- especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.
2. Demonization: "demonizing a group as inherently evil."
3. A Cause to Believe In: "The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots -- feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, antifa -- has filled that vacuum."
4. Lies: "Lies are the root of evil."

Of course, I interpret this through the lens of my Great Reaction idea. That the left is a lurch back to the primitive.

Thus, of course the left deals in victimhood. As I keep quoting, from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

Right. So the troubles of the poor are all the fault of the corporations, or the whites, or something. For Hitler, the poor suffering Germans were the victims of the Jews. "There is always a fault at the bottom of it."

Thus, of course the left deals in demonization. This goes back to the notion of the scapegoat that was given a recent push by René Girard. The point of the scapegoat is to unite the community and put all of its divisions and arguments on a single person or group and then banish them from the community.

Thus, of course the left comes up with a succession of causes, socialism, feminism, climate change: a cause to believe in. We all are tormented by the need to know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." That is what religion -- and science -- are all about. They are an effort to try and figure out what the heck is going on in this town, this world, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe.

Notice how the boundary of the Will to Know keeps expanding. Used to be that people were really concerned about the spirits in the local trees. Then they started worrying about the moon and the sun and the stars that revolved across the sky. Then they started worrying about the Sun as the center of the solar system. Then the Sun as just a medium star in the galaxy. Then galaxies in a universe of galaxies.

I predict that one day we will be worrying about a universe, or multiverse, or something, bigger than our current Big Bang created universe.

Thus, of course the left deals in lies. Because the lie is the shortcut to the truth. In truth, the truth is unknowable, or at least unfathomable. And all religions, philosophies, cultures, narratives are a shortcut to the truth. All of them, therefore, are lies. The only response is the classic line of Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken," that all knowledge, all ideas, all everything is incomplete, less than the truth. And that the beginning of wisdom is to understand that, deep in your bowels.

Now I maintain that the modern age is an astonishing miracle, that has repressed -- in the sense of Schopenhauer and Freud -- the basic primitive instincts that Dennis Prager listed. The point is that we can't have our larger society, our market economy, our multicultural cities, unless people repress their basic human instincts, to think that "someone is to blame," to want to punish the scapegoat, to believe, to jump to a cheap explanation that justifies your action.

But, you would expect, our ascent from the dusty plain to the current heights would not be without incident and setback. And, as new-age philosopher Ken Wilber has written, when things go wrong we regress to our old ways and consciousness. Of course we do. If our new ideas seem to falter we go back to what is old and familiar.

And that is why we have the left. Because there is a constant nagging feeling that in all our progress and modernity we have lost something, something that we imagine we used to have in the old community. Thus the left's nostalgia for the solidarity of olden days. Only, of course, life then was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And you tell me why the left, that imagines itself a movement of rebellion against the injustices and repressions and intolerance of the modern age, is so devoted to political power and fault and vengeance.

It could be because they are idiots.

Gee, Why Would These Folks Be Rebelling, Liberals?

Yesterday I was bemoaning how politicians only know politics, and politics is always about loot and plunder: vote for me and you will get free stuff.

But then I read this Joel Kotkin piece in American Mind: "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass," and it nicely illustrates the problem.

I mean the problem of the "unanticipated consequences" of political loot and plunder.

Kotkin notes that the young are the particular victims of the current economic lockdown:

• "Many young people, including college graduates, are now often employed in these low-wage ['personal contact'] industries.
• "privileged...  radicals... putting into action the political indoctrination they imbibed in college and, increasingly, even earlier."
• "the end of a remarkable period which saw, first, the ascendency of the middle class and then, particularly after World War II, the steady improvement of conditions for the working class."
• "urban renaissance... at the cost of 'the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.΅
• "Particularly impacted, first by lockdowns and then by the riots, have been urban small business owners."
• "Particularly vulnerable are the two thirds between 25 and 32 who lack a 4-year college degree."
• "Yet even educated youth now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations"

And of course what these young people want is loot. As offered by Bernie Sanders and so forth.

Gosh! Now this couldn't be the fault of our ruling class, could it?

It couldn't be that college has become ridiculously expensive, powered by student loans that have absolutely no connection with marketable skills?

It couldn't be that a lot of kids are kept in school when maybe they could be doing better by working in apprenticeships at low wages building up skills.

It couldn't be that the importation of low-wage furriners has the double effect of pricing student-debt-loaded Americans out of the job market while providing serf labor for big business, because H1B-type workers cannot easily change jobs, like the agricultural serfs of old.

It couldn't be because of tons of occupational licensing that serves to prop up the old guys and keep out the young competitors.

It couldn't be because of the substantial taxation on labor with various payroll taxes that can add 30 percent to the lost of labor.

It couldn't be because of minimum-wage laws that prevent youngsters without connections from getting a start in the labor market (while rich kids get to do unpaid internships).

It couldn't be because of complicated zoning laws and the expensive development process that obviously privileges existing developers against new entrants.

It couldn't be because the whole education system is a government loot-and-plunder operation privileging government workers and resistant to change and reform.

It couldn't be because energy is getting more expensive as electric utilities are forced to load up on expensive and unreliable and subsidized "renewable"energy.

It couldn't be because the current welfare system discourages the two-parent family and encourages young lower-class women to have children without benefit of father, so that in the white underclass, at least, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

It couldn't be because liberals have been teaching the lower classes for over a century to believe in themselves as victims rather than get on the Road to the Middle Class and learn the ways and the skills of the city.

"Only by restoring broad upward mobility can we hope to maintain a healthy democratic society", writes Joel Kotkin.

But he really doesn't have a clue. The way to restore upward mobility is to prevent the established -- government union workers to licensed physicians to Social Security recipients -- from taxing and looting the youngsters.

And all the "it couldn't be"s that I have listed above, or almost all, derive from the left and its religious faith in the power of government programs to "bend the arc of history towards justice."

No! The great lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was always a surprise. Nobody saw it coming, not machine textiles, not steam power from coal, not oil from under the ground, not even Amazon and its on-line marketplace.

I mean. Who among us bought Amazon stock the day it went public in 1997 at $1.97 per share (in today's shares)? Today Amazon is at $2,618 per share. So, suppose you bought $5,000 of Amazon on a flyer in 1997? Today it would be worth $6.6 million.

But who among us ever imagined Amazon would end up like this? I certainly didn't. Hey, I bought books on Amazon, but never imagined what it could become, now with a fleet of 80 aircraft delivering goods!

But that's my point. The whole of the last 200 years of astonishing economic growth has been on the backs of the Amazon of the day, that nobody saw coming.

And that means that, Rule One is: nobody has a clue. 

Especially politicians. Especially activists. Especially journalists. Especially professors. Especially nice liberal ladies with social moralizing yard-signs out front.

Now. Who amongst us is going to go first and tell the liberal Emperor he has no clothes?