Is This The Week That Changes History?

Couple of minor items today: They say that Joe Biden didn't get the traditional "convention bounce" last week. And, as some joker said, it looks like the daily Dem memo that goes out to all the ships at sea is saying "hey, we better stop these riots!" cos they are costing us and may lose us the election!

You think?

Or you can look at it another way. Suppose that the Dems and the lefties and the cancelers can't redefine reality and gaslight and force their radical culture down our throats forever. Suppose at some point the American people upchuck. Not because they consciously can't take it anymore but because their cultural gut instinctively just vomits the whole thing up?

If you read the Zman or Vox Day you get taught that there is almost nothing we can do. The ruling class can't be beaten. we tried it areddy, and it doesn't work. The rulers always win in the end. Unless...

Or suppose, as Zman says today, everyone, left and right, is playing at revolution, but really trying to relive the imagined glory days of yesteryear. For the left it's nostalgia for the Sixties. For the right it's nostalgia for the Eighties. But in both cases the nostalgia is for a past that never happened.

So what happens when the music stops?

Now, yesterday, on Day Two of the Republican National Convention, the agenda was filled with good old American nostalgia for just good old Americanism with a full-press Trumpian bid for the minority vote. The Sandmann kid; various youngish black politicians backing Trump; Trump doing a surprise pardon on a black guy; Trump doing a special White House citizenship ceremony for a Bolivian, a Ghanaian, an Indian, a Lebanese, and a Sudanese. I kid you not. And the five new citizens were all what I call "nobodies," ordinary people that are plugging into the ordinary American economy doing ordinary middle-class things.

That's not what we are used to. Our liberal friends are always trying to ram whacko stuff down our throats, like the idea that BLM represents the Black Community. Like the notion that LGBT should be normalized as not just part of America but as bringing a special fragrance to the American home. Like the notion that the whole mess since the death of George Floyd -- a drugged out criminal that was passively resisting arrest -- is just regular old "peaceful protesting."

At some point, I'd say, an ordinary American nobody can't help noticing the glitch in the Matrix. All this stuff we are getting from our educated Gentry betters: it's too weird; it's too fake. It just doesn't add up. I don't get it.

Of course, if you look at the world through the glasses of my reductive Three Peoples theory, this glitch in the Matrix all makes sense.

If you are a Responsible you want a predictable world in which you can get a job, buy a house, get married and raise a family. Everything else is noise, a frightening whirlwind that just doesn't make sense and threatens to demolish your carefully built world.

Indeed, the whole whirl we experience today is all about Creative people having the scope to be experimental and creative.

I'm all for Creatives getting to be creative, but not to the extent that they marginalize ordinary Responsible nobodies as haters and bigots for not understanding, and not supporting and celebrating, the creative experiments of their Creative betters.

Here is something I got from new-age "integral" philosopher Ken Wilber and his take on developmental psychology. He points out that people in one developmental stage cannot understand people in another stage. They think that these other people are crazy or stupid. Only highly evolved "integrated" thinkers -- people like you and me -- can get their brains around the notion that other people are different and they live in a different psychological reality, and this is the way the world works.

Our liberal friends are not "integral" thinkers. They cannot get their brains around the idea that the dreaded bitter clingers and white supremacists just do not live in the same world as they do. And that they have a God-given right to live in a different world.

So they do what religious people have always tried to do when faced with the incomprehensible: they name and shame and shun them. Or, as we now say, "cancel" them.

Maybe our liberal friends are right, and the bitter clingers are evil and should be cast out of polite society.

Or maybe the liberals are fools and knaves that have never read a book, and don't intend to start now. Maybe they have gone about as far as they can go with their Creatives-only culture. Maybe we have got to the point where average people push back.

Or maybe not. That's why we have elections.

Whatabout the Greek Australian that says "Australia Belongs to Europe"

The American exile in Italy, Vox Day, likes to rail against what he calls "civic nationalism." La Wik defines civic nationalism vs. ethnic nationalism as united by values, such as liberalism, rather than by identification with a ethnic group. So civic nationalism is

an inclusive form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights.

So Vox Day rails against a Greek Australian, son of immediate post-war immigrants from Greece who identifies as Greek and thinks of Australia as belonging to Europe. But, 

Stefanos stated with great confidence that the recent Indian and Asian arrivals to the country were not Australians.

Vox Day piles on and says 

As long as you, your children, or your great-great-great grandchildren retain any shred of attachment to your home nation, you cannot be considered anything but a guest, at best.

The only thing is that while, say, all good patriotic Americans deplore the hyphenation of America, the brutal truth is that humans are a migratory species. We are never going to keep humans in their current boundaries maintaining their nations or cultures or whatever till the end of time. And we are never going to stop people having a nostalgic affection for their past.

And the brutal consequence of this is that "migration is invasion." Or at the very least, migration will change things.

In our case, in the good old US and A, the educated Gentry are trying to change the culture and politics of the US away from a nation based on the culture of northwest Europe and its Christian religions towards their own preferred "creative" culture of educated-class hegemony. They are doing this by buying the support of their recent immigrant voters and Blacks in whom they encourage a culture of retribution against past sins.

See, I don't think there is one kind of nationalism that can keep a nation together. I think that all nationalism is fake nationalism, that is, a myth, a narrative that declares some people to be "the" people and rightfully occupying their patch of ground and rightfully inheriting it from past generations and charged with preserving the patch of land and its people for generations yet unborn.

But then there is politics, and politics is the art of division. So even if some people experience themselves, today, as one people, you can be sure that there are politicians at work dividing them into "Us΅ and "Them." 

Right now we have two politics fighting it out. One of them says Americans are good and globalists are bad; the other says that oppressed peoples are helpless, their allies are good, and white oppressors are bad.

There is no way to stop humans from migrating and stop politicians from dividing us.

So what do we do? Well, I'm not sure that we can escape a future that Vox Day warns us against, that

in another 250 years or so, the globe will be divided between the Han and the Indians while every other nation is effectively eliminated through subsumption.

Except that I expect that this Han-Indian -- or rather Confucian-Hindu -- domination will turn out completely different than we expect.

My view of the last century is that the Hans and the Hindus have been desperately trying to play catch-up, trying on Nationalism and then Socialism and now predatory international trade on for size.

Right now we have a rather big Asian diaspora, for the Hans it is the educated stratum that is heading out across the world and in India is seems to be mostly Brahmins heading out to take over Big Tech.

I wonder what that does to the Chinese left behind and the lower-caste Hindus in India?

And then there are the billions of Africans. I wonder how they will mix it up with, say, our own Blacks from the west African slave trade.

And I wonder how an educated elite of white liberals and Brahmins and Confucian Hans in the US will do with respect to the rest of the US.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that it is all very well to sneer at civic nationalism or predict disaster unless we stop immigration. Maybe they will end in disaster; they probably will.

Or maybe our current educated Gentry masters are all idiots that really, as the Brits say, are "not fit for purpose."

You tell me: Is Nancy Pelosi fit for purpose? Is Joe Biden? Is the 1619 New York Times? Are the wokey professors? Are the safe space feminists? Are the soyboy Antifa rioters? Are the BLM urban arsonists? Does the Brahmin Kshama Sawant here in Seattle know what she is doing other than reading of the lefty wokey script?

Or are they all singing from a hymnal and don't have a clue what it means?

I think that we are at the end of an era, the era of the educated administrative elite and the lefty intellectual prattlers. But I also think that nobody has a clue how it will all turn out and what comes next.

The only thing I am sure about is that our educated Gentry rulers will not like the future, however it turns out.

The Two Kinds of Slavery

I just had an epiphany over the weekend with respect to slavery. And it came to me as I puzzle over my Great Reaction notion that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

But, of course, under feudalism they also had slavery: voluntary slavery. It is described in The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. You could go to your feudal lord in Britain in the year 1000 and place your head in his hands and become his bondsman. The lord gave you a bill-hook and three squares for the rest of your life. It was called "head for food."

So there are two kinds of slavery: conquest slavery and voluntary slavery. You can become a slave in the aftermath of your tribe being conquered. Presumably all the adult males would be killed and the women and children sold into slavery. But you can also place yourself into slavery, and say "I give up. Look after me, Master, because I can't take it any more."

Yes, but we are beyond all that, right?

I don't think so. Let's rewrite my Great Reaction maxim like this.

Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to conquest slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; welfare is a return to "head-for-food" slavery; identity politics is neo-tribalism; etc.

I have done a piece or two on welfare that indicates how close it is to slavery. In "A Brief History of Welfare" I note the various stages in England since the year 1000.

• "Head for food" slavery.
• Early vagrancy laws.
• First Poor Law in 1597.
• Workhouses in 1830s: "indoor relief."
• Modern welfare: "outdoor relief."

Let us try to think what happened between each stage. I imagine that in the "head for food" slavery days that there was no social space outside being the vassal of your local lord. And if you caused any trouble the lord had no trouble in dealing with you. But in the Tudor era of the 16th century two things were going on. First, the feudal monarchies supported by feudal nobles were turning into absolute monarchies financed by merchant credit. This meant that monarchs could finance their armies through the credit system rather than the private feudal hosts of the nobles. So the nobles weren't interested in "head for food" slaves eating their heads off that might be useful in the odd little war.

Second, the feudal lords themselves got involved in the money economy and started to "improve" their lands by draining the swamps and trying new agricultural methods: the agricultural revolution. Oh, and also by "enclosing" common lands. This created a "surplus population."

The first Poor Laws at the end of the 16th century were a way to keep the poor out of the cities, and dispersed in the countryside. Each parish had to look after its own poor, and the poor were not allowed to move around. Then, by the early 19th century, there was enough money to build "workhouses" to imprison the poor and put them to work. Was this just "head for food" slavery by another name? You tell me.

But really, the problem of the poor and vagrancy didn't get solved until the Industrial Revolution put the poor to work in factories. Then the landless, starving poor headed for the industrial cities where they got jobs. But here is a question: in the disciplined work of factories are things any different? Workers are extremely disciplined and ordered around, and after a while they start to believe that their employers "owe" them their jobs and benefits as a lifetime obligation. Is this that different from "head for food" slavery? You tell me.

In our age, with its real per-capita income about 30 times what it was two centuries ago, we can afford to throw our hand up with regard to the poor. So the poor apply to their local social-services bureaucrat for welfare and housing vouchers and EBT "cards for food." Is this not a kind of slavery? Do not the modern welfare recipients place their heads in the hand of the social worker in return for three squares a day?

And how different is this from the situation of the average corporate or government worker that works under an informal job-for-life contract? When a corporation or a government "down-sizes" do not the workers feel betrayed? Have they not, in fact, enslaved themselves to their corporate or government master in return for three squares?

This is thrown for me into stark relief with the situation of teenage migrant Chinese workers -- described in Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang -- that have left the farm, because nothing is happening -- for the crazy world of the big city factories, where they learn that it is up to them to get ahead, because they are on their own.

It makes me wonder what the English factory workers of the early 19th century thought about their lives and their work.

In our day we make a big deal about the conquest slavery of the plantations, where West Africans were sold by African chiefs to Brit and Dutch slavers and sent to the Americas.

And we've made a big deal about freeing the plantation slaves and how we owe them reparations.

But we don't make much of a deal of the hundred million Russians that were bundled into slavery in the Soviet Union. And how Mao Zedong enslaved hundreds of millions of Chinese into his slave-state hell. It seems, to our more advanced citizens, that these horrors are just "stuff happens."

But I think that subordination, slavery if you will, is still very much alive today, and for two reasons. First, there are a lot of humans that get off on subordinating other humans to their physical and moral hegemony. Second, there are a lot of humans that prefer to live as subordinates rather than accept the risks of responsibility.

So I think that we should be careful about patting ourselves on the back for "ending slavery." I think there is still a lot of slavery around. We just don't call it "slavery" and we don't call the subordinates in question "slaves."

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.