The Third Imperial Age Is (Was) The Lefty Age

A couple of days ago I was commenting on a piece by Financial Times conventional-wisdom journalist John Lloyd that maybe we are entering the Third Imperial Age. His notion is Russia and China taking over the world.

Where the Second Imperial Age was the European imperialism of the last 500 years. But a sharp-eyed reader emailed me to say:

The power seeking imperial types turned their attention from conquering neighbor lands in 1917.  The Russian Revolution launched the third imperial age of socialism.  Power seekers expanded their power and wealth by attacking with taxes the productive endeavor of wealth creators.  Imperial government expanded and their welfare clients bred themselves into over supply.  The peak occurs when government harvests near half of all wealth created.

Hey! How come I didn't think of that! Is he right or is he right?

Yes indeedy. Lefties are all about power, political power, and only power. Talk about imperialism! The worst: the very worst.

Now let us rehearse imperialism down the ages.

First Age of Imperialism. It features chaps like China that believed -- when not distracted by a Time of Troubles -- in conquering neighboring states and making them into tributary states, states that send tribute to the Son of Heaven at the center of the world in Beijing. As it should be. Also Rome, which believed in sending the legionaries out every now and again for a spot of loot and plunder and slaves. But most of the rest of the time they let the folks trade to and fro. Except for the Carthaginians. Carthago delenda est. When the Romans ran out of loot and plunder and slaves they inflated the currency and slowly deflated the Roman Empire so that Edward Gibbon could write a book about the whole procedure.

Second Age of Imperialism. It features European nobodies heading out across the world to trade. Christopher Columbus, son of a Genoese wool-worker that owned a cheese stand. Robert Clive, son of a small landowner. A troublemaker, he was sent out to India and started out "as little more than a glorified assistant shopkeeper." But then he learned a spot of soldiering and went on to win the battle of Plassey. Captain Cook was the second son of a Scottish farm laborer. He began his naval career as a merchant navy apprentice in coasting ships carrying coals from Newcastle. Alexander Hamilton, "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,"was a teenaged businessman in St. Croix, and was so smart the local gents sent him to New York to go to school, where he taught the Yanks how to do the National Debt. Cecil Rhodes, son of a curate, was asthmatic and was sent out to South Africa for his health. He and his brother failed trying to grow cotton, but then he headed out to the Kimberley diamond fields. All these nobodies were advancing the frontiers of trade, and if they made a spot of money they often returned to the home country and were stigmatized as "nabobs." Not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

Third Age of Imperialism. It features rich kids with a faith in the power of politics to bend the arc of history towards justice. It has featured the two biggest slave states in history. Karl Marx, son of the top lawyer in Trier. Friedrich Engels, son of a textile manufacturer. Vladimir Lenin, from "a moderately prosperous middle-class family" got kicked out of university for mostly peaceful protesting. Mao Zedong was the son of "one of the wealthiest farmers in Shaoshan." Frankfurt Scholar Max Horkheimer was the son of "a successful businessman who owned several textile factories." Herbert Marcuse, of "repressive tolerance" was the son of "a well-off businessman." These intellectual giants advanced the idea of societies that were, at very least neo-feudal, with the ruling class taxing 35-50 percent of income to hand out to its supporters, and at the worst, as in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the most savage slave states in history.

So, on this notion, we would say, pace John Lloyd, that the Putinist regime in Russia and the Xi regime in China probably represent the "Autumn of the Third Imperialist Age" as the internal contradictions of big government and its force and the divisiveness of politics-with-everything combine to inspire educated rich kids in general -- and foolish young women at The New York Times in particular -- to indulge in witch hunts and cancel culture to force the world to bend the arc of history towards justice, or else. Until we normals get a clue and tell them to go drink their fair-trade coffee where the sun don't shine.

See, my impossible dream is that maybe, maybe, we are entering a post-imperial age based on the principle that loot and plunder does not pay. I'd say that the First Imperial Age proved the limitations of the loot-and-plunder model; that the Second Imperial Age proved the potential of the trading model, especially when led by nobodies; that the Third Imperial Age proved beyond a doubt that we humans should be better than loot-and-plunder lefties.

But that's just my opinion. You opinions may differ.

When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once

I watched the Ken Loach movie Kes last night, because I'd read a piece arguing the child actor actually was viable. Usually, child actors are hopeless.

Kes is the name of Billy Casper's trained kestrel, that he took from its nest as a chick and trained up all by himself using a book on hawking he stole from the local used-books store.

Billy is a "hopeless case" kid whose Yorkshire mining village is a hopeless case in the 1960s as oil takes over the world from coal.

So Billy is a "hopeless case" going to a hopeless case gubmint school where the kids all sit around like zombies, living in a hopeless case gubmint "council house" in a village where the men all work in the gubmint coal mine, a hopeless case industry that you will remember blew up during the Margaret Thatcher years.

The school Billy attended and that is featured in the movie is a "comprehensive school" built in 1963 and demolished in 2011. Comprehensive schools were a hopeless idea of the Labour left that helped demolish the "grammar" schools that had provided a route up out of poverty for British youngsters since before the days of William Shakespeare, son of a glover that went to the grammar school in Stratford on Avon.

I say all this because it seems to me that the current cancel culture frenzy really comes down to the fact that the whole gubmint-program world that our liberal friends have created for our benefit is falling down around their ears. And they cain't stand it, as Lina Lamont would say.

Ken Loach is a lefty film director whose "socially critical directing style and socialist ideals," according to La Wik, "are evident in his film treatment of social issues". I suppose the idea back in 1969, when Kes came out, was to highlight the injustice suffered by the Working Class in the Tory years of the Fifties and early Sixties. Of course, today a Ken Loach would be directing movies showing how the white working class in the North of England were a bunch of racist-sexist-homophobe haters as proved by their recent shift to the Conservative Party in the latest "Get Brexit Done" election.

What struck me in Kes was the hopelessness of being on the receiving end of lefty politics and government. Back in the immediate post-WWII era the left was serving up gubmint education, gubmint housing and gubmit nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy. And the poor working class was on the hopeless receiving end of it all.

But whatabout Reform? Can't we reform all those well-intentioned programs and make them work? I doubt it. Because of the fourth of my Four Laws. It says

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

And you can see the truth of that in the current presidential election campaign here in the good old US and A. Our liberal friends are not proposing to reform education or housing or union-blighted industry. They are merely proposing new stuff, defunding police and ramping up racist DIE and going full bore on the Green New Deal.

And who is going to get screwed into hopelessness by the current lefty agenda? Why, almost certainly black voters. Defund the police? That'll really improve the safety of inner-city "communities." Kill school choice? That'll really brighten up the scene in inner-city schools. Green New Deal? That'll really help the workers that depend on trucks and diesel-powered equipment to do their construction and technician jobs.

You can read about this all the time: Stephen Greenhut writing about California's "absurdly high cost of living, driven by a host of progressive policies." Do you think our liberal friends have a clue about this?

Then there is the nearly two-century cultural effort to steer the subordinate class away from middle-class values. There's the absurd effort of the Smithsonian -- now taken down -- to identify middle-class values such as "rugged individualism... emphasis on scientific method... protestant work ethic" with "whiteness." Do these progressive nut-cases not understand that these "civilized" values are exactly what they say they are: the kind of values you need to wive and thrive in the city. "Civilized" means "citified" because the Latin "civis" means "citizen." Get it, wokies?

Actually it all makes me realize that I need a "Four Laws Explained" maxim. As in:

Four Laws: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). But socialism means More Jobs for Gentry.

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). But the administrative state means More Jobs for Gentry.

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). But regulatory agencies mean More Jobs for Gentry. 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill). But government programs mean More Jobs for Gentry.

Yeah. Who knew? Cui bono? I could go on.

Marxism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Universities mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Safe spaces means more jobs for Gentry. 

Think tanks mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Climate change means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic racism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic oppression means more jobs for Gentry.

I never would have guessed. Government, any government, means more jobs for the educated Gentry. So you know what side they are going to come down on any issue. Does it mean more jobs and more power for the educated Gentry?

What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.

Will There Be a Third Imperial Age?

We are at the end of the Second Imperial Age, dominated by European powers who determined that land "designated terra nullius (“no-one’s land”) could be taken" -- should be taken. Writes John Lloyd of "the Financial Times and co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford."

They did so in pursuit of precious metals and stones, for settlement and defence (of other lands already seized), for points of supply to their ships, in order to demonstrate their power, and [to Christianize the heathen.]

Actually, the imperial age started with the Portuguese and the Brits trading with India, because it was cheaper to run the new ocean-going sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope to India and back than pay for the camels and taxes of the overland route through Arabia etc. Indeed I had it confirmed from a guide in Jaisalmer, in the desert of western India a couple years ago, that the whole place went to the dogs once the Portuguese and the Brits appeared on the scene. Nobody needed their stinkin' camels and gorgeous havelis any more. So John Lloyd got it a bit wrong.

Yes, there was a lot of terra nullius argument where the humans in question were pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. But not in India and China.

Where India was concerned the Brits were forever dealing with the predatory robber lords just out of town of Calcutta or Madras. Like the Maratha Confederacy. Or the princes just up the road from Bombay in Pune, who were no doubt advised by the Brahmin ancestors of Seattle Brahmin politician Kshama Sawant.

The point is that the Brits weren't in India to loot and plunder it. They were there to trade.

But, of course, the Brit ruling class still lived in a feudal culture. So in due course you got Brit imperialists in India saying, up at the Royal Simla Club in the usual haze after tiffin, "Good Lord chaps, we've got to pacify Afghanistan before the Russkies get there."

It is my belief that the old order of loot and plunder is over. The reason is simple: wealth no longer adheres in land and "precious metals and stones," but in intangible capital, ideas and processes that create the stuff we buy in stores and the SUVs we take it home in. After World War II the Soviets looted and plundered eastern Germany of all its physical capital, factories and machines, and took the whole caboodle off to Russia. How did that turn out, Tovarich Brezhnev? Yeah. German per-capita GDP in 2018: $46, 241; Russia per-capita GDP: $11,289.

All we need is for our politicians and activists to catch up with us, and stop playing at chimp border warfare.

The point of empires is to send the Roman legionaries out for loot and plunder and bring the plunder and the slaves back to Rome and parade them through the streets in a Triumph. And it worked a treat for the Romans until the borders of the Roman Empire were so far from Rome that the old system didn't work any more, probably because the slaves all died on the journey back to Rome.

Now that the US is withdrawing from its post-WWII imperialism, John Lloyd writes, we may be at the dawn of a new imperial age dominated by China and Russia.

Russia’s authoritarianism and China’s totalitarianism (the second a harder version of the first), now allied, present a formidable front of two states dedicated to increasing their global power, in a fashion increasingly similar to the imperial strategies of Europe.

Now President-for-almost-life Putin is a former KGB guy, and President-for-life Xi is a Commie apparatchik. What the heck do they know about the modern world?

Most likely they are like the Brit chaps at the Club up in Simla in the 1830s worrying about Russkies after tiffin. Or they are like the idiots-all-round in the run-up to World War I. They only know politics and political power. They do not understand that wealth and power do not come from a big fat empire with ostrich-feather hats and impressive parade uniforms, or from regime-sponsored "activists" painting the streets with trite slogans. Or from gubmint programs that take from productive people to give to regime supporters.

But the problem is that, if you are a politician or an activist, the only thing you know is the game of political power. If the game of political power and empire is over, passé mon vieux, what does the poor wren do then, poor thing?

Well, that is what we are setting up the bleachers right now to find out. My feeling is that Russia and China are backing the wrong horse. I think that Russia and China are going to find out that the the whole world will combine against them. Because whether you are Vietnam or the Philippines or Australia or Japan or Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore, or the poor bloody Germans in Central Europe, you don't want to be under the thumb of some thug Commie bastard from Beijing or Moscow.

And, of course, now we don't care about Mid-East oil any more, because fracking. Yay frackers!

No, the Big Problem of the coming era is what to do with people that have a mania for social moralizing. See, I think that primitive men were all about defending the border -- or looting the neighbors -- and primitive women were all about naming and shaming and shunning that awful witch living alone just out of town.

I think that we have about pacified men and taught them to fight for market share instead of their share of slaves. But women? 

The problem is a bit like the problem with Harvard graduates: You can always tell a Harvard man; you just can't tell him anything.

Just Who Are Those Horrible Systemic Racist White Supremacists?

As we watch all the mostly peaceful protesters protesting against systemic racism and proposing to defund the police, we have to wonder. 

Just who are the monsters, the patriarchs, the white supremacists, the systemic systemists, the racists, of which we've heard tell?

Are they privileged corporate CEOs? No. Everyone from Amazon to Walmart has clearly declared their support for Black Lives Matter, and some have actually paid good money to back up their words.

Are they privileged college professors? Heavens No! College professors are all down for the movement, and are willing to DIE on the cross of Diversity, Inclusions, and Equality: for Blacks, and maybe for the odd Hispanic and certainly for all the non-cis-gendered in their many LGBT flavors.

Are they writers and intellectuals? Certainly not! The whole point of the Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto was for the intellectuals to declare themselves firmly on the side of the GoodWhites and absolutely opposed to President Trump's assault on democracy.

Are they Hollywood types? No indeed. In fact Hollywood is so determined to get woke that it looks like you ain't gonna work in this town again if you are a middle-aged white guy.

Are they root'n toot'n feminists demanding that that the marginalized women down the ages have the right to own their own bodies? I can't believe you said that. Feminists demand that marginalized women have the right to choose just like well-born academic women.

Are they nice liberal ladies preening themselves behind a forest of social-moralizing yard-signs of the #WeBelieve and #BlackLivesMatter variety? Absolutely not. Nice liberal ladies always take care to model the proper moral attitude.

Are they the activist college kidz that we see marchin' and protest'n in mostly peaceful protests across this great land and that are absolutely not spreading WuFlu with their protests? Of course not. You must be crazy to think that the kidz, perfectly programmed by two decades of regime propaganda, would have a white supremacist bone in their bodies.

So obviously there is something really weird going on. Some Deep Thinking is required.

Let's get a little more intellectual and apply this question to my reductive Three Peoples theory or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer "Clear Pill" notion.

Are we talking about the educated Gentry or my People of the Creative Self as the cause of all this Police Brutality and white supremacy? No indeed. The Gentry is all down for the movement, committed to Justice for the historically marginalized.

Are we talking about the Clients, the Victims, or my People of the Subordinate Self. Certainly not! They are the very people that have been enslaved and enserfed and dominated and marginalized since the Dawn of Time and very likely earlier and for whom all good people demand Justice and an end to Police Brutality!

Then, we must be talking about the Commoners, the People of the Responsible Self, that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.

Really? Now I don't claim to know everything, just almost everything. And I cannot see how the average Commoner can be the guy that's to blame for all the problems of the world.

You know why? Because he doesn't have any power. He doesn't have any privilege. He can be fired in a moment for an ill-considered comment. Nobody pays no nevermind to his opinions and his beliefs. And as for his clothes and his baseball caps! Darling!

Let us create an image of this guy. He is the guy that you see in a Trump rally that forms the backdrop of Trump's performance.

Does he have more privilege than a CEO?

Does he have more privilege than a college professor?

Does he have more privilege than a famous writer?

Does he have more privilege than a Hollywood producer, or even a Grip, whatever that is?

Does he have more privilege than a feminist?

Does he have more privilege than a nice liberal lady?

Does he have more privilege than a mostly peaceful protesting college kid?

The question answers itself.

Now this notion, this scapegoat for all the sins of the world, goes back to the original Marxian narrative, in which noble educated youth and helpless proletarians would unite to scupper the bourgeoisie that was hell-bent on immiserating the working class due to the inevitable workings of classical economics and the neo-feudal instincts of the capitalists.

Of course, the Marxian narrative was just an update of the scapegoat of primitive humanity as outlined by Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred.

It had a point, back in the day, when the bourgeoisie and even the petite bourgeoisie, whatever that is, were a minority compared to the masses of workers. Yeah! They were an exploitative minority that was exploiting the workers. Down with the capitalists!

But today, I'd say, this narrative has passed its sell-by date. Because, for one thing, the middle class Commoners are probably a majority of the adult population. I'd say that a politics that blames a majority of the population for all the sins of the world is probably heading for a bruising.

I mean. Suppose a politician came along and told the middle class Commoners that they were the greatest people in the greatest nation in the world and that the Stuck-ups in the Swamp and the criminals in the streets were the guys that were really to blame for all the sins of the world.

Now I don't know where such a politician might come from or what he would look like. No Idea!

But you can see that there is an opportunity there for some courageous and adventurous soul that is not afraid to incur the wrath of all the Great and the Good.

Look, this scapegoat thing is as old as the hills. We humans have been doing the Scapegoat Waltz since whenever. But to compose a new tune to the Scapegoat Waltz and push it to the top of the hit parade. Well, that takes talent. And also a lightning strike.

What do you think?

The Crimes of the Wet-Noodle Manifesto Signers

Yesterday I sneered at the nice liberal signers of the Harper's Manifesto. But now I want to cut a bit deeper. And I echo Angelo Codevilla, who calls the current political regime a "Scamocracy in America." He refers to "the long-running race and poverty scam, the education scam, the environmentalist scam, the sex scam, the security scam, and now the pandemic scam".

All have been based on propositions touted as scientific truth by the most highly credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S government, enshrined by academia as science’s spokesmen, and fawned upon by the media working in concert to forbid any disagreement on the matter whatsoever. Yet virtually all their propositions have turned out to be false, and indeed have produced effects opposite to those claimed.

 Or, as I like to say, our ruling class has made things worse. Actually, I divide the "scams" of the ruling class into two categories, the Left's Crimes and the Left's Errors.

Under the Left's Crimes I adduce that:

1. The left led the workers into the wilderness
2. The left led women into the wilderness
3. The left led minorities and LGBT into the wilderness

The left separated all these folks away from full membership and allegiance to the nation state. And that is a crime because the nation state is the best thing going until the planet unites to battle the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

Under the Left's Errors I adduce that the following programs do not work. But nothing is done to reform them.

1. Social Security
2. Medicare
3. Medicaid
4. Public Schools
5. Welfare
6. Economic Regulation
7. Racial Preferences

There is a reason why nothing is done to reform them. It is that you cannot reform government programs, not until they collapse and run out of money.

But then I have written about "The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination,"

1. The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture
2. The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class
3. The liberal ruling class has wrecked education
4. The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care
5. The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement
6. The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity

Want some more? How about "The Left's Syllabus of Errors, Part One."

1. The French Revolution
2. The socialist communities, like New Harmony.
3. Marxian economics
4. Top-down administrative government
5. Interventions to favor the left's Little Darlings, from workers to women to minorities to LGBT
6. War on religion
7. War on the nation state
8. Support or large-scale migration
9. Climate change
10. Oh, and Postmodernism

The point, and I do have one, is that the problem with the left is its worship of political power, the faith that justice rides on the back of political power, wielded by the right people.

But humans are social animals; we thrive by reducing the amount of force, because force is destructive and expensive. That is the point of all social animals, to reduce force. And the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has demonstrated that we can transform the world without politics by letting nobodies define the future with technological and non-political innovation, penalizing people only for untrustworthiness and failure to contribute.

Meanwhile, here are the Four Stages of Marxist Takeover, from a KGB-trained Russian, Yuri Bezmenov:

1. Demoralization
2. Destabilization
3. Crisis
4. Normalization, with a "new normal."

The good thing is that you can stop the process anywhere you want.  And, it seems to me, that the Brinton Thesis, in Anatomy of Revolution, is that the Crisis is also the point where the Thermidorean Reaction takes over. Why? Because people cannot live forever in the white heat of a revolutionary Reign of Terror.

Most normal people want to live normal lives, working and wiving and thriving.

Hey, isn't it great that we have a Trump here in America and not a Kerensky, as the Russkies had in 1917. It's another proof of God's existence. Or, as Bismarck is supposed to have said: "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."

The Usual Suspects and Harper's Wet-Noodle Manifesto

Earlier this week, on July 7, 2020, the unwoke sector of the educated Gentry issued what I would call a Wet-Noodle Manifesto through the website of Harper's magazine. 

All the usual suspects have signed the manifesto: from Margaret Atwood, she of the clueless Handmaid's Tale; to Deirdre McCloskey, whose helpful Bourgeois Era books dissolved in the end into LGBT advocacy; to Gloria Steinem, she who needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle, but ended up marrying a rich guy.

And so on. The only signer that I half respect, as someone that mildly rows against the current, is John McWhorter.

The manifesto starts by praising the mostly peaceful protests following the death of a career criminal during his arrest  -- and makes no mention of riots and looting. This man allegedly passed a fake $20 bill and, if you believe the postmortem, was suffering from heart disease and various comorbidities and had high levels of the post-heroin drug fentanyl and other mind-altering drugs in his body.

Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

Let's translate that shall we?

Regime-sponsored rioters and looters have demanded we turn the clock back on sensible "broken-window" police reforms and further break the spirit and letter of the Civil Rights Acts of the Sixties with straight-up racist quotas and jobs for gentry.

 Then we get to Donald Trump:

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.

Just what planet are you usual suspects living on? I presume this is really saying that Donald Trump represents a threat to supra-nationalist educated gentry in "education, journalism, philanthropy... the arts" and global corporations. as in:

All across the world nationalists and populists are rising to political power, representing in general the ordinary middle-class commoners that get short shrift from the educated gentry in the ruling class that has plans to rise to glory on huge programs of political power from tackling climate change to continuing the failed program of international development. These populists are threatening jobs for gentry.

Listen, usual suspects. Donald Trump rose to power by beating more than ten other Republicans in a fair fight. Then he beat Hillary Clinton in the general election by concentrating on winning Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Rust Belt states are home to millions of people that have not done well in the last 50 years. Meanwhile the Obama administration was spying on Trump's campaign using the "intelligence community" and a faked up "dossier" provided to them by an agent of a foreign power.

Hey, remember when Nixon spied on the Democrats, using not the intelligence community but a few ex-cops and former IC guys?

Then, usual suspects in the ruling class have spent three years conducting an unprecedented campaign to destroy President Trump personally and politically. And you say it is President Trump "who represents a real threat to democracy."

I don't know what Kool-Aid you usual suspects are drinking, but the biggest lesson I ever learned about politics was from a Greek friend expatiating on the end of the dictatorial rule of the Greek colonels. What was needed, he said, was for the center-right to win the election and for the left to accept the result and then for the left to win the following election and for the right to accept the result. 

That, usual suspects, is the basic ground rule for "democracy." Do you understand what I mean? It means that when the other guys win the election, your candidate steps up and concedes, and says "we are all Americans" and we all revere the same Declaration of Independence, the same Constitution, and the same Founders.

But you chaps have contested the last two change elections, in 2000 and 2016, when your guys were voted out in a normal change election. That, usual suspects, is "a real threat to democracy."

But you will talk to a thousand usual-suspect gentry liberals before you will find one that understands such a basic notion.

I've been reading and commenting on Curtis Yarvin's work-in-progress Gray Mirror in recent days. He proposes that political action, for or against the regime, is meaningless, because the regime always wins. "Detachment" is what he recommends, doing something orthogonal to the power regime.

I've been worried that there is something missing in his analysis. And I am coming to think that the missing link is that he assumes that the ruling class is functional, knows what it is doing.

But what can you say about a ruling class whose usual suspects put out a Wet-Noodle Manifesto like the one they put out this week?

You say that they really don't have a clue. That they are like the ancien régime in France in the middle of the 18th century, fumbling and bumbling from one cock-up to another.

Then, you say, someone is going to knock over these Klueless Klots some day soon, and it might as well be us.

Then, of course, the educated gentry will have to get a real job.