Trump Against the World

Our lefty friends like to tell us that Trump is an incompetent bumbler that just doesn't have the chops to be president. But Michael Anton, Mr. "Flight 93 Election," begs to differ in "The Case for Trump." Yes, he writes,

The presidency is hard enough to manage with decades of experience in politics and a series of elective offices under your belt. It’s that much harder when a president assumes the office not merely from the outside, but politically speaking, from out of nowhere.

In that case, it would be remarkable if President Trump even survived politically to run for re-election. For a big part of the Republican Party establishment is against him.

Then factor in all his open enemies from the other party, and virtually every other power center in our society, plus the steadfast opposition of the so-called “deep state”—i.e., the very federal bureaucrats whom he was elected to oversee and direct. Viewed from this angle, one may fairly wonder how it’s been possible for him to accomplish anything at all.

And yet he has achieved a lot. He's built a couple hundred miles of wall, in the teeth of Democrats that regard it as "a moral atrocity." He has pushed his trade deals, reversed Obama Mideast foreign policy -- so that now there is peace breaking out between Israel and the Sunni Arabs. 

[T]here’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve. More populism. More nationalism. More patriotism. More law and order. More full-throated advocacy for the neglected American people, for the working class, for the Rust Belt and rural America, for religious believers and law-abiding gun owners. More defense of free speech against tech and corporate censorship and suppression, more support for his voters when they or their interests are viciously attacked.

Then Anton goes into a long analysis of how to move the Republican Party to the center to represent the interests of ordinary people. In other words, using Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory, to represent Commoners rather than globalist Gentry and the Gentry's Clients. Then, in "A New Message" he goes into the details of his Commoner-friendly agenda.

But how do you bridge the "Red-Blue" divide, the present culture war?

You know, Anton's article made me think that the problem is that the present educated Gentry is not being properly educated to be a ruling class, but as merely as shock troops in a religious war.

But this is crazy. If you are the ruling class then Job One is to understand the people that you rule. But under the influence of identity politics and cultural Marxism our educated class knows only its own world view and the world view it has imposed upon its clients. It looks on the world view of Commoners as bigotry, unworthy of serious consideration. And the attitude of the liberal in the street is that the average bigoted Commoner needs to be canceled.

For me, this is rather startling, because if I were the ruler of America I would want to know the culture and beliefs of my subjects, and I would want to understand them, all the better to rule them.

And indeed, with my reductive Three Peoples theory I understand that it is right and proper that there are People of the Creative Self that would naturally think and act like our current liberal educated class and even be inclined to occasional woke ideological frenzies. I would understand that there is a large middling sector of People of the Responsible Self that go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. And there are People of the Subordinate Self that look to some powerful figure to protect them.

So, with my Three Peoples theory it would seem pretty dumb for the ruling class not to understand the culture and the self-perceived needs of the Responsibles, the Commoners. And yet that is where our current rulers live. They are appalled and disgusted by the ordinary sort of people.

That is why I am fairly optimistic about the future. Because I think that a ruling class that does not understand its Commoners and allow them to live, more or less, in their own way and according to their lights is really not long for this world.

But that is the wages of the current woke culture in the university. It does not attempt to understand anything except the precepts of its own woke religion and agenda. So the university graduate getting ready to step into the "deep state" knows nothing except how right he is and how bigoted the "bitter clingers" are. You see this in the texts of Strzok, Page, Clinesmith and the rest in the plot to get Trump. Those young'uns know nothing except what they have been carefully taught.

Yet the strategists from Sun Tzu on down insist that Job One is to get inside the mind of the enemy.

The impression Trump gives me is that he understands the Commoner mentality and also that of the educated Gentry. Who else would have thought of a Presidential Pardon for Susan B. Anthony?

Thing is: once you say hey, there are all kinds of different people in America and we ought to try to help all the different kids flourish each in their own way as far as possible, then the frenzy of our cultural elite just seems crazy. And President Trump seems like the voice of sanity. No doubt:

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

But which God? The god of creativity or the god of the various Axial Age religions? Or both? 

Hey Liberals and Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

OK. Nothing new. The whole point of my Great Reaction and my Activism Culture notions is that politics is not the answer. And these two pieces, "Suppose We are Approaching the End of the Age of Politics" and "Two Centuries of the Great Reaction," say it all.

The Age of Politics is Over.

But why?

Let's reduce the whole thing to a Three Stages concept. 

Back in the day, we humans lived in the Age of War. That's when "land was the only thing that lasts," according to the fictional Gerald O'Hara. You had to have strong leaders to defend your food-growing land and protect you from pirates and plunderers. Call it the feudal system, if you like. Although when the real thing, like Genghis Khan, happened the usual kingly king wasn't up to snuff and everyone got killed or enslaved.

Then came the Age of Politics. The perfect instantiation of this age was the American Revolution. I am reading a history of the run-up to 1776 -- Desperate Sons by Les Standiford -- all about Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in the decade between the Stamp Act and the battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775. What comes out at me is that the Yanks were objecting to the top-down "we know what is good for you" stupidity of the Brits. The Brits were forever writing laws that screwed up the economy of their North American colonies, because reasons. But the colonials were middle-class Commoners and working-class mechanics, not serfs on the farm. They wanted, they expected, to govern themselves, being the men on the ground that knew what needed to be done and accepted the responsibility to do so.

But once the post-feudal political order is established, with a separation of powers in government and a Greater Separation of Powers between economy, politics, and religion, then the need for political organization and the fisticuffs of revolution is over. You just need someone to man the front desk and make sure people sign the register.

A characteristic of the Age of Politics was the nostalgia for the good old days when knights were bold: the Tournament and the Medieval Romance. Both were favorites of nobles that had become courtiers in the early years of the absolute monarchs but longed to relive the glory years of rough tough warriors.

Now we have the Age of Trust. Do you realize how much you can trust that everything will work? We assume that we can work anywhere in the world. We assume that corporations produce good products at good prices. We assume we can jump onto an airplane and go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice, and when we get there our credit card and debit card establish our trustworthiness anywhere in the world. A teenaged girl can drive across three states to go visit the family of her prospective roommate in college, and think nothing of it.

Who needs politics when we have trust?

But now we have two nostalgic movements. First, we have the Activism Culture that is trying to relive the glory days of revolution, when revolutionaries were out in the streets, Les Mis style, outdaring the dangers of the time. This, I propose, is like the medieval romance, spinning stories about the good old days. Second, we have sports, which is a second iteration of the retreat from the Age of War. Instead of the clash of arms in the Tournament we have sports, where men can relive the glorious days when courage and perseverance were the only thing that mattered.

The point is that in the Age of Politics you don't need war anymore. Because you have politics to resolve disputes. In the Age of Trust you don't need politics anymore because all the trustworthy people are identified by their carte de confiance -- I made that up: It means trust card -- so you can live happily ever after just dealing with trustworthy people and steering clear of the rest.

OK. So you and I are convinced: politics is so vieux jeu. Now, how do we persuade our wokey Gentry friends, whose homes are presently festooned with #BlackLivesMatter and #WeBelieve signs, and for whom political virtue-signaling is the meaning of life? 

I propose we leave the solution of that problem for next week.

What Does Soros Want?

Over a century ago, it was Oscar Wilde (no, Freud) who worried about "what do women want." Now, the question is what does billionaire speculator George Soros want? And why?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and was prompted to focus my mind on it over the weekend when I read a piece about Soros and his Open Society operation: "Mapping the Open Society Network on Soros’s 90th Birthday." Hayden Ludwig dismisses Soros thusly:

Each group in the Soros Network is a cog in the larger “open society” machine, so named for Soros’s affinity for the philosophy of the communist-turned-lefty-libertarian Karl Popper, Soros’s professor and personal mentor during the young man’s time at the London School of Economics...

Their vision of an open society is globalist and utopian, rejecting both objective truth and established tradition in favor of technocracy: rule by the “experts.” The net result is open borders, supranational governments such as the European Union, enforced secularism, and dissolution of the U.S. Constitution by a new American Revolution designed by plutocrats to wipe away the republic and replace it with socially engineered tyranny.

OK, I decided, let's check out Karl Popper and George Soros and try to understand them. I have several of Popper's books and my rough feeling is that Popper isn't quite as eager to pull down the USA as George Soros. 

But there is this. Both Popper (b.1902) and Soros (b.1930) are assimilated educated Jews from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These folks all tend to be anti-nationalists and supra-nationalists. Like Stefan Zweig (b. 1881) in The World of Yesterday, they believe in Europe. It makes sense, of course, especially when you consider the opposing view of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ethnic Germans were getting the shaft in multi-cultural Austria-Hungary before World War I. The supra-national Austro-Hungarian Empire worked well for assimilated Jews, until it didn't.

You can see this attitude working out in Soros's equivocal attitude to Israel. His Jewishness wants to support it, but his anti-nationalism wants to deplore it. So he kinda sits on the fence.

I've always been a bit flummoxed about Soros and his anti-nationalism because I didn't read Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies as an indictment of the nation state, but as a broadside against totalitarianism from Plato to Marx and Marxist historicism, that "history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws." Popper believes in the transition from

the magical or tribal or collectivist society [that] will also be called the closed society, [to] the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

So he believes in the opposition between magical thinking and logic and reason. But, of course, so do Plato and Hegel and Marx.

And I'm sure so does George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. But then, you might ask, why does the Open Society Foundation support the "trained Marxists" of Black Lives Matter?

I suppose because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." If Soros experiences nationalism as the enemy, then the Marxist enemies of the nation state are his friends.

Yes, but can't Soros see that the trained Marxists are just taking him and his money for a ride? It's a good question. I answer it by invoking my idiot theory of conspiracy. Don't think that there is a dark conspiracy out there that is cunningly planning the destruction of all we hold dear. The conspirators are probably bumbling idiots; they imagine themselves a lot smarter than they really are. I suspect that Soros, like the rest of us, has not really thought through exactly what he wants, and is reluctant to change his plans in the light of mistakes and new information. Plus, the guy is 90. His sons, that are already in charge of the Soros empire, seem to be ordinary woke members of the educated Gentry.

It comes down to this. Soros, like many of his generation in the educated Gentry, thinks that nationalism is the foundation of all our miseries. For him, the lesson of World War II is "never again." And I get it, for central European Jews like him, that the nation state is problematic.

How about another idea? The rule of the educated supra-national Gentry is problematic? That, to me, is the meaning of the populist nationalism of which we've heard tell. It is saying: hey wokies: you may think that you chaps are the first and the last in human wisdom and ordained by Gaia to bend the arc of history towards justice, and you may be right. But meanwhile, we Commoners think we are getting screwed.

See, what is going on right now is that the educated Gentry is just dismissing the critics of its rule as far-right, or white nationalist, or systemic racist, or whatever pejorative comes to mind. You can see this in its Three Layer theory of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Who says that the "allies" really have the interests of the "oppressed peoples" at heart? Oh, the "allies" say that. Could it not be that the "allies" are interested, first of all, in their power and status and vanity? Just sayin'.

And that's the problem with George Soros. He's concocted this Open Society notion from his understanding of Karl Popper. But suppose that his understanding of Popper is mistaken and that his notions would lead to a closed society of lefty neo-tribalism and magical thinking? How would we know? How would he know?

Is all the "mostly peaceful protesting" and liberal prosecutors that Soros is funding going to lead to the political destruction of Donald Trump and systemic racism? Is the current Thing about mail-in voting and protests at the home of the Postmaster General really going to advance the Democratic cause? Or will it inspire a counter-movement?

Does George Soros really know what he is doing? Does Nancy Pelosi? Does anyone?

I'm reading Desperate Sons by Les Standiford about the Sons of Liberty in the ten years leading up to the American Revolution. It suggests to me that the opposition to British rule was deeper and wider than I had previously understood. One of my takeaways is that the Brits in London -- that were passing Stamp Acts and Quartering Acts and banking laws that resulted in severe deflation in the colonies -- really had no clue about what was going down in the colonies.

Same thing applies to George Soros and our global elite. They know they are the good guys, the evolved and educated guys, but they really do not know what is going down on the ground. They do not know whether their policies help or hurt. They just know that they are the good guys, so shut up, peasant.

The Wokies Really Do Have a Beef

Over at American Greatness Ned Ryan sympathizes a little with the Wokies that are having such a great time ripping up downtown all over liberal America in "The Misdirected Rage of Young Rioters."

Problem is, he says, that they have been taught all their lives that they are special, that they are winners, and they aren't. Most of them are just average.

Then they get shipped off to 

indoctrination centers of higher learning where they are spoon-fed all these lies about how evil our country is, that this place is rotten to the core, and that it should just be burned to the ground.

No wonder they are angry.

They can’t find jobs, so they rage against the system they’ve been indoctrinated to believe is the source of all their troubles: that evil, free-market capitalist system that has betrayed them. They’re blaming the wrong system.

Instead, they ought to be blaming the indoctrination centers and the flawed parenting methodology according to which they were raised up to believe these lies. 

Well, allow me to disagree. The young'uns ought to be angry, but not for this reason. Indeed the foulest injustices have been committed against them. But it is not the fault of systemic racism or eevil capitalists. 

No indeed. It's all the fault of the liberal educated Gentry that has run things for the last century. What else could it be?

Nothing remarkable here. Government is force; there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. So you would expect that after a particular ruling class had been in power for a while the result of its governance would be an accumulation of injustice. I am not saying that the injustice was deliberate. Mostly it is just the result of "unanticipated consequences" of government action.

But you would also expect that they young sprouts, while feeling the chill, would not really know enough to figure out where the arctic blast was coming from.

Here kids, let me help you. Here is what you should be mad about.

Government education. If you are half paying attention, you might notice that the union ladies that currently run the government schools don't want to open school this fall. But they still want to be paid. It is a profound injustice that your parents do not get to send you to the school of their choice, or, even better, club together in their neighborhoods to set up mini-schools that can cost a mere $5,000 per year per student. And, when the government runs the schools it is not going to tell you that it makes a dog's breakfast of education. Hey kid! The clients of government education are not parents, not children, but union teacher ladies.

College for All. Back in the day youngsters got their start in life through an apprenticeship. Sometimes, the apprenticeship amounted to "indentured servitude," where the apprentice was the virtual slave of his master. But once you had served your time you were now a "journeyman" and free and clear of educational expense. Not like today where college is "free" or funded by a student loan that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and may hang around your head for decades. Hey kid! Do you realize how unjust the current university system is? And how it screws you and benefits the professors and administrators?

Immigration. The labor market is simple: supply and demand. The more immigration, the lower the wages for everyone, including native-born Americans. Moreover, the benign neglect of illegal immigration encourages under-the-table "informal" employment which also undercuts wage rates, if you are an employer that doesn't mind not paying taxes on your employees. Hey kids! Don't you realize that immigrants are your direct competitors in the labor market?

Home mortgages. Ever since the 1930s, the government has subsidized home mortgages in various ways, including providing a secondary market in mortgages, particularly 30-year mortgages. It also encourages low down payments. The result is to allow more people to bid for houses. Back in the day you couldn't get a loan with more than a 10-year term, and you couldn't often get away with less than 50 percent down. Do you see how the old system helped frugal savers and the new system allows everyone to bid up the price of houses? Of course, the current system has benefited the World War II and Baby Boomer generations because they bought their houses before prices really took off. Hey kids! Wouldn't it be cool if the OK Boomers experienced a 30 percent drop in their over-priced homes and you could afford to buy?

Social Security. The way Social Security works is you pay a tax on your earnings for 40 years and then the government gives you a pension based on political considerations. Suppose instead you saved your own money and kept it at Fidelity or Vanguard. Then you could use the money to start a business or send the kids to college, and finally you could retire whenever you had accumulated enough and the SPY and QQQ had grown your savings enough. Instead, the government sequesters your money in a so-called "trust fund." I wonder what the government does with that money? Build highways that grow the economy? Or bike paths that don't. Hey kids! Do you realize what it would mean if you could save your own money instead of the government taking it, in your own best interest?

Medicare. Actually, Medicare is probably not too much of a problem, because most of its funding comes from the federal income tax which means that most of the money comes from rich people. But, no doubt, Medicare rules tend to make the health care system more expensive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people. Hey kids! Government health care means that you are not the client: Big Health and Big Drug and the Medicare bureaucracy set the rules!

Welfare. Welfare is not all that expensive, at least, not compared to the expense of Social Security and Medicare, but there is the little problem that welfare encourages poor women to have babies without fathers. Something like 70 percent of Black babies don't have fathers around. You think that might have something to do with the fact that over 50 percent of murders are committed by Black men? That's what the experts say when they are not writing for The New York Times. Hey kids! How about the biggest systemic racial injustice of them all: to deprive Black kids of fathers?

Economic Regulation. The science is clear on this. Economic regulation of business does not work, as first pointed out by George Stigler, because "regulatory capture." This means that all regulatory agencies eventually become "captured" by the industries they regulate.Think railroads and trucking, back in the day. Think doctors and lawyers right now. Think environmental regulation. Hey kids! Don't believe the activists promising to protect you from Big Business. All they do is make it impossible for Little Business to compete.

Gentry Activism. The higher orders of our society are full of ideas to "benefit mankind." Mostly, these ideas do not benefit mankind, but they do make the educated Gentry feel good about itself. And our economy is riddled with ideas that some Gentry-funded and Gentry-staffed NGO has advocated. An easy example is ethanol in gasoline. It makes cars more expensive; it tends to corrode engine parts; it makes cars less efficient; it benefits Big Ag; it increases the price of corn which hurts poor people; it puts more land under the plow. There are thousands of regulatory interventions like this that well-meaning activists have introduced into our economy. And the trouble is that, according to Chantrill's law, it is nearly impossible to walk these programs back. Hey kids! Do you realize how much goody-goody regulation costs you?

Race Politics. I wonder how much of the present rage is due to the straight-up racial and sexual discrimination against young white males, the youngsters we call beta-males and soyboys. We made discrimination illegal half a century ago. We said, if you discriminate on the basis of race or sex it is criminal. But that wasn't enough for our moralists. They had to go to work to change the effects of discrimination with quotas and Affirmative Action and Diversity and Inclusion. I agree, morally, that we ought to have a society where every race and group is properly represented in the structure of power in every walk of life. But should we use the apparatus of force to do that? And would it make things better? See, it is one thing to say: hey, you discriminated in this instance on the basis of race. It is another thing to say, well, we should put a thumb on the scale for a while until this or that classification of human is no longer "underrepresented."

The problem with all populist explosions is that while the people are rightly angry, they usually have no clue about why things are all screwed up.

And when you are the ruling class, the fact that people do not know what is screwing them over is not a bug, it is a feature.

And so, the angry kids lash out, not knowing who is really screwing them over. If only they could listen to people like me!

Nothing New: Movements that Decide to Cleanse Society of Evil

The indispensible Angelo Codevilla, pseudonymous author of "The Flight 93 Election" back in 2016 has another one. It's called "Millenarian Mobs" and it's about the movements that arise all the time to cleanse and purify a fallen world.

Our present movement of purifying wokies are nothing new.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness...

Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them.

And the toppling of monuments is nothing new: "Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare."

But down the ages the social-cleansing have been attacks by subordinate revolutionaries on the ruling class, today's revolutionaries are not exactly opponents of the ruling class. As we would say, the wokies are youngsters often from the educated Gentry class that, in normal times, would expect to ascend in good time into the ruling elite. But, 

Always, millennial movements grow out of ordinary struggles. A few firebrands interpret the struggles radically, gather followers, and lead them along their own apocalyptic logic to bloody disaster. Social dislocations, as well as injustices, failures of leadership, and excessive expectations have been like tinder waiting for sparks.

In our time these millennial movements have tended to be "violent, revolutionary totalitarianism," combining political hegemony with a secular-religious puritanism.

Almost invariably the leaders have been outcasts, or what Marxists call “lumpen-intellectuals.”... Their initial focus was some obvious evil. As often as not, they claimed heavenly messages or apparitions as their authority. Their audience was twofold: those who saw themselves as the evil’s primary victims and those who wished to shed their responsibility for it. To the former, the prophets promised redress and immediate relief, while to all, and especially to the latter, they promised a role in a holy enterprise. Some sort of confession of sin and cleansing ritual would follow.  

 "Those who had undergone cleansing believed themselves so pure that they were no longer capable of sin." But there was work to be done: cleansing the rest of society. And lower down the scale it was simply a question of killing your enemies.

I think this is the key point of the article. Educated people don't justify just going out and killing people; they have to persuade themselves of their innocence; they need to rationalize their revolution. Only when educated people feel that they have cleansed themselves do they proceed to the vital task of cleansing others. Don't they just!

But the rioters that plundered the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, they are just looking for an excuse to lurch to the primitive, back to good old loot and plunder and vengeance. As one BLM organizer put it: "That's reparations."

In our day we have a political elite concerned with holding onto power, and apparently using "the revolutionary movements as allies against their socio-political competitors." As I would say, they are Gentry using their lower-class Clients to sock it to the Commoners. Thus we have the rulers joining with the wokies to make ideological war on the Commoner middle class that, led by Trump, is getting restless.

Don't be fooled by the talk about the "oppressed" and the "oppressors," says Codevilla.

Today, we need not imagine that the corporate magnates, the hard-bitten politicians, the FBI officials, who kneel draped in Kente cloth in penitence for “white racist America,” who declare solidarity with the mobs that deface statues—that any of them believe in anything other than their own power and advantage. Nor need we imagine that the majority of those mobs’ members are doing anything other than enjoying a holiday from the law.

 These people are playing an old, old game, the game of divide and conquer to stay in power. And the only thing to do, the only thing that would ever do, is "to treat the millennialist mob as the enemies they are" and do something about it.

It may just be necessary to win an election or two. Or not.

The Moment Before Wile E. Coyote Falls to Earth

The recurring drama of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner is that the Coyote keeps coming up with a cunning plan to blow up the Roadrunner, but every time the cunning plan blows up in his face.

I am reminded of this as the unremarkable Joe Biden picks the unremarkable Kamala Harris as his running mate. They are both, I think, caricatures of who we do not want as president.

I wonder if that has been true about the Democratic Party for the last 50 years. Let us suppose the Democrats were genuinely shocked when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968. But hey, accidents happen.

Then Nixon won a second term, going away. Well, the Democrats taught him a lesson and booted him out of office. But then came Reagan, the "amiable dunce," in swampy Clark Clifford's memorable phrase. And a Republican Senate.

OK, so things returned to normal in 1992 with Bill Clinton, the master politician of the ages. But the next thing was the first Republican Congress in 40 years!

OK, so we got the First Black President in 2008. But the next thing was a Republican House in 2010 and a Republican Senate in 2014.

What in the world is going on? 

What is going on is that the Democrats are becoming more and more desperate to hold onto the reins of political power that they had come to regard as theirs by divine right -- or at least the arc of history -- and the good old ways just aren't working any more.

Let us say that the problems began when working-class Americans first started breaking away from the New Deal coalition and voting Republican. It started with Nixon's Silent Majority, and reasserted itself with the Reagan Democrats.

I experienced the Reagan Democrats directly in 1980 at a Republican presidential caucus in Kent, Washington. There was I and another gentry guy as Bush supporters. But on the other side of the room were guys that looked like phone-repair technicians: they were Reagan supporters and they carried the day. On that day I knew that the world had changed.

Democrats have been pretty cunning about neutralizing this trend, by increasing immigration and turning a blind eye to illegal immigration. They understand that most immigrants start out as Democrats until they find their economic place. And they respond to a racist appeal until they experience themselves as Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

The problem is that this approach to politics requires that you taint all ordinary un-hypenated Americans as white supremacists. Thus the progressive three-layer theory of politics, as suggested by Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

So, in this lefty world there are the innocents, the good guys, and the bad guys. 

Contrast that with my reductive Three Peoples theory, which has People of the Creative Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Subordinate Self. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory, which has Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

In the Chantrill/Yarvin world, there are special people, ordinary people, and subordinates. It is a world which naturally has different kinds of people, but they ought to be able to rub along, with a little give and take.

But in the lefty world, things are black and white. And the only thing to do is for the allies to defeat the white oppressor monsters with the votes of the oppressed peoples before they grind the noses of the oppressed people into the dust.

I don't think it is that tendentious to suggest that the left's three-layer theory is, as lefties like to say about other people's ideas: Overdetermined.

And the Democrats' politics seems to have got them to a weird place, where the leading candidates for the presidency were a couple of old guys, one a socialist and one an old wheel-horse of the New Deal era. The rest of the Democratic candidates were diverse caricatures from central casting. The gay guy Buttigig! The fake Latino O'Rourke, the black guy Deval Patrick. The fake Indian Elizabeth Warren.The hedge-fund guy Tom Steyer. The Jewish billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Who among them could you say "cares about people like me?"

Let us notice the Big Lie at the heart of the three-layer "members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors."

It is that the ordinary white middle class, the Commoners, are in fact implacably powerful "white oppressors." Really liberals, are you sure? The conservative guys that I had lunch with last week are a cabal of white oppressors just back from their white-supremacist meeting?

And yet this is the lie that powers the whole Diversity and Inclusion politics of today's Democratic Party, and what prompts corporate America to immediately side with Black Lives Matter upon the death of George Floyd -- who, it turns out, was resisting arrest, was clearly under the influence of drugs, and was being restrained merely until the emergency medical folks got there.

When you play ducks and drakes with the truth, you get Trump. Because Trump is the candidate of the Commoners, of ordinary Americans without gorgeous qualifications, without access to power, without special privileges.

More and more I get the point of Curtis Yarvin's notion that the ruling class strokes the "ambition, honor, and vanity" of the Gentry layer. All the folderol about the First Black President, the First Woman President is all bubba bait for the Gentry. Oh yeah! We are so evolved! Isn't it wonderful that we elected the First Black President! Finally, gays get to marry! We are so evolved! So compassionate! So inclusive!

But, it seems to me, this politics gets you the present gargoyles on the Democratic ticket for president. Joe Biden, the underwhelming senator from a tiny state, Delaware, Chosen By Obama so as not to outshine the underwhelming guy at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris, who made her way to headline politics as the creature of Willie Brown, the Mr. Big of California politics, and has clearly not developed an essential instinct for what to say and what not to say.

The question is: how do these gargoyles get to be presidential candidates? The answer, I think, is the poisonous race and gender politics of the Democratic Party that cannot let ordinary politicians make their way to prominence, but must be always putting the race/gender finger on the scales, must always be reducing everything to good-guys/bad-guys race war.

And the bottom line of their politics is that if the rulers can get the votes of the Gentry and the votes of the Clients then who cares about the Commoners?

Well, nobody cares until the Commoners rebel, because of the injustice of the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" theory of politics.

And then the Democratic Wile E. Coyotes are stunned when the latest cunning product from Acme Corporation blows up in their faces.

Message to Lefties: The Age of Politics is Over

So, yesterday the Seattle City Council decided to Defund the Police. Next year. When you think about it, this is exactly how politics works. 

Some interest group gussies up a bunch of rage, and the politicians realize they have to Do Something about it. But they know, in their heart of hearts, that it's all baloney. So what do they do? They pass a bill to make it look like they are doing something but push the big stuff off till next year when, maybe, the patient's fever will have subsided.

Anyway, the black woman Seattle chief of police Carmen Best resigned. Or rather, retired.

Doesn't that make the whole Seattle City Council into racist sexists? You tell me.

But I think there is a bigger issue here. And I think it is this:

The Age of Politics is Over. 

You think? I think that the Age of Politics ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts 55 years ago.

I went to the website of my Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss and he says this.

My priority as a Councilmember will be to create bold solutions at the scale of the problems we are seeking to address. I will fight to ensure Seattle is a healthy city, one connected by transit, that supports our small businesses, that has accessible and affordable childcare, and has safe, affordable places to call home.

Know what, Dan? The Age of Bold Solutions is over. What we need is an absence of bold solutions, a long withdrawing roar of undoing the Bold Solutions of yesteryear. For the only Bold Solution worth thinking about relates to my maxim that "Government programs cannot work because you cannot reform them." Which is to say: don't even think of a bold solution.

Of course, you can reform government programs, but only when they are broken -- completely broken, as in government can't borrow money any more. 

But we are better than that. 

This is why I say that the left -- liberals, progressives, choose your poison -- is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is a return to slavery, the welfare state a return to feudalism, and the activism culture a replay of the medieval romance, when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

See, the whole point about humans is that we are social animals. That means that we do a bunch of things in order to reduce violence and conflict. One of those things, highlighted by Jordan B. Peterson in his lobster thingy, is hierarchy. Male lobsters don't fight over every little thing; instead they have a hierarchy. So unless a male lobster just can't take it any more, he accepts his place in the hierarchy. Lobster Lives Matter.

Now, one of the Big Problems down the ages is that humans have lived by the food available to them on the land. They have attempted to secure this food supply be defending a territory. Men have specialized in territory defense. Because land, and the food grown there, was life.

But now things are different, as I keep saying. It doesn't matter where food is grown. You can buy it. You can buy it thousands of miles away and have 100,000 ton grain ships move it all over the world from where the food is grown to where it is wanted. It doesn't matter where any product is produced; it can be loaded into a container on a container ship and dispatched across the world.

The only real wealth in the world is "intangible capital," the knowledge and knowhow in human minds. And this knowledge and knowhow can create incredible fortunes: the Microsoft fortune, founded by a guy that bought an operating system for personal computers and sold it by the item to IBM; the Apple fortune, starting with the iPod music machine and culminating in the iPhone that has transformed the world.

Notice what is missing from these tales of fabulous wealth? Force. Government. Politics. Bold Solutions.

Now, all is not completely copacetic, not yet. It is true that we no longer need to live as the underlings or the thralls of a Strong Leader that will protect us from all the dangers of the world. Instead we now are subservient to the market, what other people are willing to pay for our services and our products. It is, many people think, a worse slavery than the old household slavery or plantation slavery. For there is no hiding from the market in some rural paradise. We must all mark to the market every day. We must all keep updating our skills and improving our products. If we don't then we will find that the market no longer rewards us very much for our trouble.

And we need police to bash the heads of knuckleheads that haven't yet got with the program. That still like to loot.

But is the new market order unjust? Does a social animal deserve to thrive even if it is unwilling to serve its fellows with services and products that those others want to buy? That, of course, is the Great Question that all of us are confronted with every day. By what right can and should we demand to be supported by others when we cannot provide for ourselves?

There's a yard-sign on my morning walk that declares "Equality Hurts No one" and it features the clenched fist of Black Lives Matter. Well. So equality doesn't hurt anyone but if you don't provide it we have a clenched fist ready to enforce the notion. Thanks, pal. 

I would say that the only way to have equality is to enforce it. And you'd have to do it every day because tomorrow some entrepreneur will have a remarkable idea that is worth millions -- or maybe trillions. And that would be the end of equality until you enforce it. So equality needs a clenched fist.

In fact, though, social animals have found that equality is impossible. The only thing that works is a benevolent form of hierarchy, just like the lobsters. In our society the chap that ascends the hierarchy is often an entrepreneur with a good idea that turns out to be worth trillions. Then there is the politician that ascends the hierarchy by promising Bold Solutions.

And there is the fact that young men are programmed, coded to be defenders of the border. That is what all the LARPing AntiFa warriors are doing. They are doing what comes naturally.

Only, in our day, we don't need no stinkin' border warriors. We have road warriors, professional sports stars, the chance to found a new business and take it public in an IPO, instead.

And a glorious thing it is, to be, not a pirate king, but a software billionaire.

But you tell Councilman Dan Strauss. Or Councilwoman Brahmin-from-Puna Kshama Sawant about that.

Because I don't think they would understand. They still live in the primitive world of the Age of Politics and don't understand that the world has moved on.

Think of them as primitive savages, or primitive progressives. What does a primitive progessive understand about the market and the idea of trusting anyone that acts trustworthy?