Examples of Gentry, Commoners, and Victims in Everyday Life

Over at The American Spectator we have two pieces that allow me to interpose my reductive Three Peoples theory (or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory) to explain the world.

First, Tony Woodlief takes out after Vanity Fair writer James Woolcott in "In Praise of Commoners’ Sense — And Against Liberal Elitism." James Woolcott took after the "common sense" of the American people with regard to the China Flu epidemic. In other words, Woolcott goes with the experts on the response to the epidemic.

I realize that Woolcott must live in a different universe than me, because I believe that nobody has had a clue about the epidemic, not experts who have been all over the place, and not Commoners who commonly latch onto whatever meme suits their fancy.

Come on, James. Experts have recommended everything from Do Nothing, in Sweden, to allow the disease to work through the population until "herd immunity" is achieved, to total lockdown as practiced in China.

In my expert opinion, I would say that probably seniors should all be locked up and everyone under 60 forced to intermix in all normal ways except late-night parties and infect each other as efficiently as possible so that, in a month or two, herd immunity is achieved and we can let the seniors out of jail.

Also, I would say that any fool can see that President Trump has a political interest in getting the economy back on track as quickly as possible, so as to get re-elected, and the Democrats have a political interest in shutting down the economy as long as possible so they can blame Trump for it. If I can see both ways on this, as a reckless Trump partisan, what does it say about Vanity Fair writer James Woolcott?

What I would expect, using Three Layer theory, is that educated Gentry Vanity Fair writers would likely want to believe the judgments of experts because experts are Gentry like them. And Commoners would likely want to believe in common sense and make some sensible precautions against infection short of destroying the economy. So you tell me which is right.

We have another Three Layer issue in the question of "The Trayvon Hoax: Are Young Blacks Weary of Being ‘Played’?" by Jack Cashill. Young Blacks are encountering Joel Gilbert's film The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America on youTube. And one young Black woman wrote in the comments section "I can't bring myself to press play." Because, of course, it would be a glitch-in-the-Matrix moment for her.

Here we have a conflict between the Victim world where everything is the fault of the white oppressors and the common sense world of the Commoner, where you let the facts fall where they may. Or the members of the jury set aside their tribal loyalties for the evidence presented to them.

In my judgment the vast majority of Blacks are a generation away from becoming Commoners. I base my judgement on the US white working class that was basically abandoned by the Democrats in the Sixties and didn't give up on Democrats until the Trump election of 2016, fifty years later.

Blacks are supposed to have died and gone to Heaven with the election of the First Black President. The fact that they didn't ought to mean something to them. It will, I predict, but not yet.

And I base my judgement on the British working class that voted Labour until the 2019 General Election when the "red wall" fell in the north of England, home of coal mines and steelmaking back in the day. What took you so long, workers?

In other words, once an economic class has identified itself with a particular party it will take a political earthquake to dislodge the relationship. This should not be surprising: humans are groupish, and they substitute groupish loyalty for a serious discussion of the issues. Blacks are very groupish, particularly Black women, as witnessed by their 90 percent vote for Democrats in recent decades. So are feminists, who all vote Democrat even though you could argue that their economic interest does not really lie with Democrats. It's a tribal thing.

Now I argue, with my Little Darlings notion, that any group politically favored by the ruling class is heading for disaster, because politicians don't really care about you, they only care about your vote. And the day will come when they no longer care about your vote, because they found some fresh voter meat. But, as with many women in an "abusive relationship," or any employee in a dead-end job, it is really hard to give up on the benefits of a steady paycheck.

But there is this. I am sorta watching the Democratic Convention this week, and the TV stream is full of helpless women, victims of some health tragedy or spousal abuse who are eternally grateful to Joe Biden or to the Democratic Party for helping and protecting them. Do you see what I see here? I see Victims, that look to a powerful lord to protect them from the tempests of life. And that is what the Democrats are all about. Providing for the Victims.

But when you get to the point that you figure that politicians are in it for themselves, that is when you become a Commoner. 

I am reading an astonishing book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang from The Wall Street Journal. We are talking about teenage girls that leave their rural villages and take the train to the big city like Dongguan or Guangzhou just outside of Hong Kong and get jobs in the most appalling sweatshop factories. But these girls -- teenage girls -- have the most amazing courage and determination. Are they downhearted by their appalling working conditions? No! If they can't take it any more, they don't! They quit, leaving behind unpaid wages and go get another job.

Yes, that's the thing about the migration from the country to the city in China over the last 20-30 years. It is teenagers! With the most amazing courage! And making it, crawling their way up from the assembly line to clerk jobs, or higher. Just on pure determination and grit. And these are teenagers!

Do you see the difference? Here we have uneducated kids from the countryside dropping into the middle of an industrial mega-city, where the bottom factory jobs are all set up so that it always costs you a bundle to quit, or to go to the bathroom, or to take a couple hours off instead of working from 7 am to 10 pm day in day out. And they make it! And in the developed West we have everybody acting like helpless victims expecting the government or the employer to look after them.

It's the difference between Commoner and Victim, between Responsible and Subordinate. And I maintain that you can't begin to thrive in the city until you cast off the shackles of subordination and put on the armor of responsibility.

It's a choice. You can live at the whim of the local boss man. Or live at the whim of the market. You would think that relying on a human lord would be safer, more prudent. But it isn't. Rely instead on your smarts and the sway of the market; that's the way to live.

But it is a hard lesson to learn. Because there are sweet political talkers out there all over that entice you to put your trust in a politician.

The Terminal Bossiness of the Educated Gentry

A while back I did a piece on the problem of life as a creative person, "The Conflict of Interest of the Educated Gentry." Life is hard for the would-be creative person. Real creativity is almost certainly a road to failure.

So what does the Educated Gentry, my People of the Creative Self, do? It fakes it; it plays at being creative, ringing the changes on sex, fiddling with a thousand activist projects from automobile safety to trash Nazism. And the nauseating yard-sign virtue-signalling of the #WeBelieve and #BLM set.

There are, I believe, two agendas in our educated Gentry. Part One is the loot and plunder operation, buying the votes of the "oppressed peoples" with the taxes of the "white oppressors." Nothing new here; ruling classes have been playing this game since forever.

Part Two is the bossiness agenda, that we experience mostly through the Activism Culture. If you have been watching the Democratic National Convention this week you will notice that almost all the actors in the videos are "activists" that are passionately and selflessly advocating for some vital moral goal.

We are utterly inundated with the urgent projects of educated Gentry activists. There is the issue of auto safety, triggered in the 1960s by über-activist Ralph Nader. The result is that automobile manufacture is festooned with ten thousand regulations affecting safety, gas mileage, fuel composition, and now climate change. I wonder what the net effect of all that regulation is in lives saved and energy transformed. Trash collection is transformed by the agenda of a generation of environmental activists that want you to sort your garbage into at least three bins: yard waste, recyclables, and trash trash. Every coffee house has at least two bins for garbage festooned with incomprehensible instructions as to what belongs in each bin. Now we learn that it costs more energy to recycle than is saved by recycling. Especially since the Chinese are not accepting our recyclables any more.

Washers and dryers and all other home appliances are subject to energy-saving regulations. Roof-top solar cells are given astonishing subsidies, including paying the homeowner for energy generated at the retail rate. Home construction is subject to ten-thousand regulations, from earthquake strengthening to multi-pane windows to energy-saving insulation.

There is the urbanist movement that pushes regulations to encourage high-density housing, mass transit, and discourage suburban "sprawl." Whatabout bike lanes and transit-only lanes? Bike lanes are mostly used by single young men. Bus lanes take lanes away from ordinary commuters who might be lower-middle-class workers that can't afford gentry-neighborhood homes and commute an hour a day to their construction jobs in the city.

And of course all electronic gear is subject to various regulations designed to save energy.

And that is just scratching the surface.

Is all of this a Good Thing? Could be. Or not. How would we tell? For instance, it might be a good idea to mandate robust home construction with 2x6s instead of the old 2x4s. But whatabout the poor? Are the poor best served by cheap construction that gets them a home or by expensive construction good for the next century?

But we don't really get to have an opportunity to have a frank and fair discussion of the issues on any of these topics, because when it comes to political and moral dialogue the educated Gentry pretty well has the whole thing locked up, in part through their communication skills, in part through their effective moral posturing, and in part from their connections with politicians and bureaucrats in the deep state.

We libertarian types like to say that the market can make most of these decisions without the need for activist soyboys getting into the action. Let the market decide, we say, with the qualification that, of course, we should deal with "externalities" that enable market participants to push costs onto others without paying for them.

But, I like to say, we humans are not automatons going around experiencing life as a profit-and-loss statement. We search for Meaning. As Jordan B. Peterson says in a bunch of videos, you need an "Aim" for your life.

And one of the characteristics of our age is that educated Gentry are forever thinking up a thousand ways to make our lives "safer" and the planet "greener" -- and their own lives more Meaningful.

Ah yes. But what do we do about it? Good question.

I know what we need. We need the educated Gentry to get themselves a new religion, one that emphasizes the right of other people -- Commoners -- to live their lives according to their lights. We need something like the situation that arises in the novel Quo Vadis where the Roman high muck-de-muck sneaks into a Christian meeting outside the walls of Rome and is flabbergasted by the notion of forgiveness and the rejection of vengeance. And then he gets forgiven by a bunch of Christians that he has been harassing. What? It is just beyond his ken. Only of, course, he is in love with Ligia, a Christian girl princess from Lygia, so he has to try to understand.

Yeah. Imagine the flabbergastedness of an average educated Gentry grandee when first introduced to the idea that white-supremacist Commoners have right to live according to their lights, dim as those lights might be. You can't be serious, you racist-sexist-homophobe!

Actually we are seeing this flabbergastedness right now with the Trump Derangement Syndrome among the MSNBC watchers. They can't believe it. They can't believe that Americans could elect a guy like Trump. Forget a glitch in the Matrix. How about the dimming of Betelgeuse?

But really, are they dumb or something?

The Trump phenomenon is pretty simple, if you step outside of your educated Gentry bubble. Trump represents the average Commoner, a voter that is neither educated and plugged into the educated gravy-train nor an "oppressed peoples" victim looking for handouts. That is all. Not remarkable at all.

But if your reality is liberal bubble, then you are talking existential shaking of the foundations.

On the other hand, if you can't see what is right in front of your face you must be as dumb as an ox. Or at least an educated ox.

Yes. Until the day that the educated Gentry can see past their noses and understand that there are people out there that just don't see the world the way they do, we are going to get more of the same: more terminal bossiness from the folks that know that they have our best interests at heart, and know better than we do what is good for us.

See here liberals and educated Gentry and all the ships at sea. There is a word for people like you that know what is good for the rest of America: Oppressors.

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.