The Crisis of White Liberal Hegemony

There are a lot of end-of-the-world opinion columns out today. I wonder why.

Why is the world apparently coming to an end?

Of course, the world is not coming to an end. But politically, culturally, economically?

I think that what is coming to an end is the rule of the white educated middle class.

You can say that the rule of the educated middle class goes all the way back to the late Middle Ages when educated priests in the Roman Catholic Church were setting the agenda.

In the early days, the question was how to wrest political power from the landed nobles and give the educated middle class their rightful place in history.

Then, let us say, it was about bringing the ordinary middle class into the equation. Then the working class.

Because politics is politics, this process always involved a fair amount of loot and plunder. You don't get the political support of people by descanting on noble ideas. You need to address the question of "what is in it for me."

And, in the current era, the government and ruling class have had a lot to give away. Until now.

Call it the Law of Overhanging Fruit. Over the past century, as government expenditure in the US has gone from about 7 percent of GDP to the present 35-40 percent of GDP, the rulers have handed out loot to the parents of school children, to workers for their old age pensions and health care, and welfare for the workless. And lots of jobs for the educated in the various bureaucracies in government, education and corporations.

But now all the low-hanging fruit has been harvested. If we increase government spending to 50 percent of GDP and beyond it is not going to be pretty.

Also, the over-under coalition preferred by the educated ruling class started out with a small educated class and a large working class against a modest sized middle class. It made political sense.

But now the educated ruling class is fairly big -- and that means a lot of Jobs for Gentry are needed before getting down to distributing loot to the lower class. And the middle class is much bigger.

So the voting arithmetic doesn't work as well as it used to.

You can see how this works by comparing the old Marxist equation with the new Wokey equation.

Marx proposed that the poor helpless proletarians should be helped by the Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, in their existential fight against the bourgeoisie. Back then there was a ton of proletarians, a fair amount of bourgeoisie, and just a few Communists.

Today our wokies propose that the helpless "oppressed peoples" should be helped by their lefty "allies" in the fight against "white oppressors." The "white oppressors," I assume are the white working class voters that are presently most notable for their Boat Parades and Car Parades in support of President Trump.

I mean who else could they be? Not the nice liberal ladies in gentrified neighborhoods sporting their #WeBelieve yard-signs. Not the university professors and administrators. Not the corporate execs down for Black Lives Matter. Maybe the local home-builder or construction-equipment rental operator.

The old Marxist political narrative was problematic, starting with the fact that the bourgeoisie was not, in fact, organized for the plunder and oppression of the workers. Indeed the story of bourgeois supremacy in the latter half of the 19th century is that the bourgeoisie was open to satisfying the political agenda of the working class.

Today, the wokey narrative is a lie from start to finish. "Oppressed peoples?" Would they be women who earn almost as much as men, even though they tend not to work at dangerous jobs? Would they be the Hispanics that are working willingly away all over my neighborhood building and remodeling homes? Would they be the Black women working in government bureaucracies and in healthcare? Would they be gentry gays and transgenders?

Whatabout "allies?" You mean gentry liberals in their professorships and activist groups and professional careers and nice liberal ladies with their yard-signs? And how do we know that the "allies" are really helping the "oppressed peoples" and not just using them in their own power project?

And are you seriously suggesting that the folks in those Trump Boat and Car Parades are really the "white oppressors" of the narrative? Do they really have any serious political power?

So my explanation for the current political crisis and the end-of-the-world rhetoric on all sides is that the political and cultural narrative of the educated ruling class is falling apart. So they are reduced to upping the ante to preserve their political hegemony. In an era where racial discrimination has been outlawed they accuse everyone of being a racist. In an age where gays get to marry they are accusing everyone of being a homophobe. In an age when young black men are the principal authors of violent crime they make a global issue out of police brutality against young black men. In an age where global termperatures are modestly increasing they demand to save the planet from runaway warming.

So I decree that the reality of the moment is that our current white liberal ruling class is facing an existential crisis, a terminal collapse of their authority, and, as Linda Lamont said, they cain't stand it.

The only question is: will the white liberal ruling class go quietly, or not?

Dems are for the Allies; GOPs for the Commoners

You know me. I see everything through the lens of my reductive Three Peoples theory. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory.

But our Democratic friends see the world through something close to another Three Layer theory.

In my theory and Yarvin's theory we have the Creatives or Gentry on top; we have Responsibles or Commoners in the middle; we have Subordinates or Clients on the bottom. This is a descriptive theory.

In the progressive or Democratic theory we have "oppressed peoples" who are championed by "allies" who fight against "white oppressors." This is a moral theory; I call it "allyism."

However both theories are kinda all about the proper role of the ruling class. It's clear that my theory suggests that the job of the ruling class is to provide a helping hand to all three Layers: to help Creatives be creative; to help Responsibles be responsible; to help Subordinates climb out of subordination into responsibility.

The lefty theory proposes a moral war, by the ruling class allies against the white oppressors on behalf of the oppressed peoples. That, of course, is what we are seeing on the streets right now as mostly white "allies" are mostly peacefully protesting against... Yeah, what exactly? The police? The businesses that they have been torching? Or what?

Now I think that both the party conventions have perfectly illustrated all this. 

The Democratic convention was all about young people and their activism on behalf of helpless oppressed peoples. 

The Republican convention was all about... Well, if you ask me it was all about persuading Black Subordinates that they really belong in the party of Commoners and that their struggle and sacrifices are understood and valued and that, if they make the awful decision, and #WalkAway, they will all live happily ever after.

All lies, of course, from both parties. Life is not that simple, and politics certainly is not the answer to your problems. But we humans are social animals, and politics is unavoidable.

So the question is really: how do the Americans in the middle react to all the play-acting? My judgement is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are really Commoners, people trying to Responsibly live the lives they are given and trying to make something good out of it all.

I think that the allies and oppressed peoples narrative is a conceit of the educated Gentry. It makes human life into an opera with the educated Gentry as the stars singing the most glorious arias and the oppressed peoples as the chorus of peasants. (It's amazing how many 19th century operas had a chorus of rural peasants).

My analysis of history is that, ever since the French Revolution, we keep getting outbursts of Creative conceit, that the educated Gentry are going to save the world with politics by bending the arc of history towards justice. And it always ends up with a very large body count.

Although, I would say, in the United States it has tended to result in the repudiation of the Creative Gentry by the middling sort of Commoners.

So here we are, at Labor Day, with another presidential election campaign before us. Will America elect to let Commoners live their ordinary lives or will we empower the educated Gentry to fight glorious wars against systemic racism and climate change?

That is the question.

We All Live in a Bubble

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me you are struggling to figure out the Democrats.  Really? They think they can get elected "defunding" the police? Really? They can call riot and arson a "fiery protest?" Really? They think they can win elections by insulting non-liberal whites as "white supremacists?"

I find myself asking myself: what planet are they living on?

The answer, though, is simple. They are living in their liberal bubble.

And everyone lives in a cultural bubble.

And in my gentry liberal neighborhood there are no Trump signs, not one.

• There are Black Lives Matter yardsigns.
• There are hand-drawn Black Lives Matter signs.
• There are #WeBelieve signs, mark one and mark two.
• There are Hate Has No Home Here signs.
• There are Be The One signs.
• There are Biden 2020 signs.
• Oh, and there is a Bye Don sign. Get it?

There is one, very modest, house with a Thin Blue Line flag.

This morning I went by a house with a hand-lettered "I Can't Breathe" sign. That, I assume, is predicated on the notion that George Floyd was being prevented from breathing when he was being restrained while police were waiting for the Medic One to arrive. Only, his autopsy established that his lungs weighed twice the normal, because of the weight of foaming water, probably due to Fentanyl.

One of the things that has struck me during the recent George Floyd era is the bullshit that police have to put up with from Black men that they stop and interview. Their arrestees seem to be expert in a just-short-of-active resistance to arrest. 

And then, a lot of the time, the arrestee is strung out on drugs.

If I were a cop, it would drive me crazy.

But, as we know, if the police don't treat their Black arrestees with the utmost patience and courtesy they will get the book thrown at them.

Of course, I live in my bubble. But there is a difference between my bubble and the liberal bubble.

I always know what is going down in the liberal bubble, because the liberal bubble is the default cultural norm. It's what you get in school. It's what you get on TV. It's what you get from The New York Times.

When you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me you have to know what is going on in liberal land. Just like you have to pay attention to the weather forecast.

But you can still hope.

And what I hope is that the present liberal craziness is like the liberal craziness of the Sixties, when liberals thought that they were riding a cultural revolution that was going to bury the horrid Fifties middle-class suburban conformism forever.

Only the American people elected Richard Nixon, twice. In 1972 Nixon won with a 61% to 38% of the popular vote.

As I say, it took until 1992 for Democrats to say, No, we've changed, we are New Democrats now. Then they got elected and immediately proposed to nationalize healthcare. So Americans elected the first Republican Congress in 40 years. Then the Democrats got moderate, for a season.

Is history repeating itself? No, of course not. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

Ever since the Obama election in 2008 Democrats have started to believe that this time is the time when we will transform society with politics and activism and programs and peaceful protests.

Are they right?

We Don't Know.

So we will have to wait until election night to find out.

My guess is that on election night my gentry liberal neighbors will discover that they have been living in a bubble, and that ordinary Commoner Americans will vote for law and order.

And then, as seems to happen whenever a Republican wins a presidential election, all across the nation therapists will be discovering a new post-election stress disorder.

But I could be wrong.

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.