Why Does the Left Insist that Race is a Social Construction?

I just got through Ron Unz's review of "White Racialism in America, Then and Now." A large part of his article related to the fact that you are not allowed to say or write that race is real and has an impact on IQ.

I wonder why?

Is it because the left's power depends on the notion that everything especially intelligence, is culture driven, and therefore malleable by education and therefore by a wise and educated and evolved elite?

I had a discussion with a liberal friend about this. She said that race was a social construction, and I said so why does 23andme.com purport to be able to tell your ethnic origin by testing your genes? 

In other words, if we said that humans are what they are, mostly defined by their genes, and then by their peers, and then by their parents, could there be an intellectual foundation for the current religious doctrine of All Power to the Educated Gentry? Or should we just give up on the progressive project and let people be who they are.

By the way, some researchers have done research that says that a population's IQ goes up as they become more prosperous, or, I imagine, integrated into the modern market economy.

But you have to wonder. What does it mean when an idea is so scandalous that you are not allowed to hold it and publish it? Obviously, I would say, it says more about the cancelers than the canceled.

What I wonder is: how much does it really matter if blacks have a lower IQ than the average white American? For instance, I have read recently that East Asian Americans have a higher average IQ than Jews. And, as we know, American Jews have a higher average IQ than white Americans. But does it matter?

Suppose it does matter. Does it matter enough that any discussion of IQ by race is forbidden and anyone that publishes an argument that IQs really do vary by race should be canceled? Does it matter enough to cancel the heretics?

I get the notion that there is a political dimension to this, that educated Gentry power to some extent depends on the right of the Gentry to order us all around, and this is helped by assuming that race is a social construction.

But why does this practical consideration get elevated into Holy Writ? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

OK, I get the need to rile up blacks at election time, because without blacks voting 90% Democrat, Democrats lose power.

I get the need to insist that the argument for equality -- and the need for educated Gentry power -- depends on all humans being alike and all differences in outcome the result of oppression and exploitation.

I get that for small minorities like Jews and blacks, there is a need for unity, and a corresponding need to divide the majority.

Wait: I would say that for the leaders of small minorities there is a need to flog the members of the minority community into unity and the way to do this is to create a culture of danger, of possible attack by the majority culture. Therefore the leaders of the minority should be strive to maintain a culture of unity; therefore it doesn't hurt to try and divide the majority.

But I wonder why, say, Jews are still organized in a culture of unity and innocence after a century in the US. And why blacks have a culture of unity 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

All this, to me, is matter of fact and by the way.

I still don't really understand why the issue of race and IQ has to be radioactive. I suspect that I am missing something, but I don't know what it is.

The Problem of the Left's Woke Religion

It is a fundamental part of my faith that every human has a religion -- especially the people that insist they don't.

In the writings of Nietzsche he maintains that now that God is Dead we are going through decadence and then nihilism in a process that will end in the Revaluation of All Values.

But surely he is wrong. The decline of Christianity as the faith of the educated class immediately prompted replacement religions, most obviously Marxism and Communism. In fact what is interesting about the Left is how it has picked up the essential content of the Axial Age religions. 

First, there is Original Sin, the idea that there is an essential flaw in human nature that humans must work to repair. Obviously, the new Original Sin is racism. Or, in the words of a journalist supporter of Britain's lefty Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can build a world free of injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence”

Yep. There's a lot of Original Sin crashing around these days.

Second, there is Heaven on Earth. The cunning of Christianity is that is does not promise Paradise except after death. But the modern religions promise Heaven on Earth, just like the quote above: "a world free of injustice, oppression," etc.

But I think that the old Sin of inequality and oppression is clearly in the process of being replaced by Climate Change, which also includes both Original Sin and Eternal Redemption.

In Climate Change the Original Sin is the "carbon pollution" of the Earth with the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is peculiarly similar to the original notion of Original Sin with Adam and Eve becoming conscious of their nakedness, their sexuality. For sexuality is central to living things, just as carbon is central to all life on the Earth.

In Climate Change the attainment of Eternal Redemption is obtained, just as under Christianity, by enormous acts of penitence and denial, to retreat from lives of consumption and luxury and instead live a Buddha-life of contemplation under a Bodhi tree.

So nothing has changed.

What Climate Change provides, of course, apart from the penitence of the Commoners, is a magnificent scope for heroic deeds for the activist class. Just as in a world war, the rulers get to direct traffic and conjure forth prodigious efforts and march enormous armies across the world.

OK. So far so good.

Now I think our educated Gentry believe in a false religion. I just don't believe that any true religion can possibly be constructed to encourage a ruling class to admire itself in the mirror for its eternal fight against oppression and climate change. There is a word for that: self-conceit.

But what will it take to explode the conceit and the self-delusion of our ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters?

I have two analyses I use to help me on this. The first is Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. He says that the frenzy of heretic-hunting peculiar to Inquisitions and Reigns of Terror and Great Purges tends to collapse after a season because humans cannot live at that level of frenzy for too long -- any more than people can live in a perpetual sexual orgasm. At some point the frenzy collapses and normal life resumes.

So, we can say, eventually the present cancel culture will burn itself out. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

The other analysis is from When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al. This is an examination of a small cult in the US that flourished shortly after World War II with people that believed that they were going to be visited by UFOs on a certain day and carried away to Paradise by the aliens in their UFOs. So what happens when the prophecy fails? Initially, the believers amp up the intensity of their belief. But then, eventually, the members of the cult start to fall away and the cult breaks up.

Yes. And then there is Jim Jones in Jonestown, where the leader gets the whole cult to commit suicide.

The problem that I see is that it is not clear to me that we can ever get past the modern Original Sin of racism. Lefties will be descanting on "injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence" till the end of time.

Maybe the answer on this front is for Blacks to start voting Republican. Could it happen? Who knows?

And whatabout Climate Change? What would it take to discredit the prophecy of runaway climate change? Would it take a collapse of electrical generation when it is all wind and solar and a day dawns when there is no wind and precious little sun? Or will it take a sharp drop in global temperature in association with the current solar minimum?

Or will Woke Hegemony collapse in the face of the current surge of "populist nationalism" which, I would judge, is a revolt of the Commoners against their educated Gentry rulers?

Or perhaps, like the Roman emperor Constantine who switched Rome from paganism to Christianity, the day will come when the educated ruling class decides to lead the Commoners rather than oppose them. I wonder what that would look like.

The problem, of course, is encapsulated in Ben Franklin's maxim, that "Experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other." Our rulers will not change until they have experienced a very nasty knock on the head. Unfortunately the knock on the head will not be confined to the conceited educated Gentry but will also affect the lives of ordinary Commoners. And, I dare say, women and minorities, the "oppressed peoples," will be hardest hit.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

Oh No! I've Been Banned By Google!

Yesterday I got an email from "Google Publisher Policy" telling me that my page christopherchantrill.com had been in violation of its "Google Publisher Policies." As follows:

• New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found. 

Who, me? I thought? Let's look at Google's "Google Publisher Policy." For instance: "We do not allow content that:

• incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.

Examples: Promoting hate groups or hate group paraphernalia, encouraging others to believe that a person or group is inhuman, inferior, or worthy of being hated

I think that what Google didn't like was my blog post "My '1584 Project'" from a couple of days ago. In that post I made the argument that, if Nikole Hannah-Jones was going to push her "1619 Project" that dramatized the arrival of the first slaves in North America as the true founding of the US -- Talk about inciting hatred! -- then I had the right to come up with a counter-narrative.

If NHJ was going to represent 1619 as the true founding, how about 1584, which was the date that the Roanoke Colony was founded. And what was the Roanoke Colony all about? It was all about cleansing England of its "waste population," according to scholar Nancy Isenberg in White Trash. So you tell me which is the true founding of America? Sending the waste population of Europe to the Americas or sending slaves to North America? Both pretty shameful if you ask me.

But here is what I think triggered Google's hate speech AI thingy. I included a paragraph from Isenberg's book that listed all the pejoratives used over the years to describe White Trash:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [N-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

[My bold]. In the original I did not use "N-word." I used the original unredacted text -- once used by white supremacists and now by black rap artists -- in the interest of scholarly accuracy. But, of course, Google's Department of Ideological Conformity would have found [N-word] and flagged it as an example of "incites hatred..." and so forth.

Truth is, of course, that the noble task of purging our society of hatred and all the rest is not quite as simple as flagging banned words, Google. And I suggest to you, Google, that you are starting down a rabbit hole that will end in nothing but hate and violence, and you will find yourself, Google, in the middle of the cross-fire.

Indeed, as we hurtle into what seems like a revolutionary and inquisitorial maelstrom, with defenders of the establishment like Google trying to push back on the barbarian hordes, the only question to me is the size of the butcher's bill.

But, of course, the midwits operating the Google Publisher Policies have No Idea about this. Defending the ruling class and its orthodoxy and its perquisites is just what a good Googler does, instinctively, because that is what he or she has been carefully taught, from year to year, in his or her dear little ear.

The only good thing about this, I reckon, is that the folks at Google and elsewhere in tech are flying blind. Or, to change the metaphor, they are like a colonialist army marching up some mountain valley in Afghanistan, utterly blind to the unseen bandits watching from the heights.

The Google guys really do not know what they are getting into. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else.

Ch4: But How Does a New Regime Come into Being?

Now that Curtis Yarvin is well into his Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince I think I am ready to start making a critique.

And I think my basic problem is the idea that the Nihilist Prince could actually know what he is doing. As I understand Macchiavelli's The Prince I believe that his notion was to teach princes how to maintain and hold power: what worked and what didn't.

But Yarvin is going deeper. For instance in his Chapter 4 on Principles of the Next Regime he is getting into religious and cultural matters: should the new ruler be running a zoo for humans, a video game to let people get off on their natural aggression, or putting people to work doing satisfying work?

But this assumes an almost totalitarian concern for peoples' moral welfare as well as physical welfare.

And I would say that the lesson of the 20th century is that governments that get into the details of welfare, whether physical or cultural or moral, are setting themselves up for failure because the scale of the job is too big for a top-down social structure. The regime just doesn't have the bandwidth.

Yarvin writes about the "Cathedral" and its top-down structure of moral and cultural control:

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

But I think that, as with the physical medieval cathedrals, the ruling class builds the structure of the Cathedral after it has gained religious and cultural power. The Cathedral is the method of maintaining power.

But when putting together a new regime? What does anyone know, except that the old regime has to go?

And in the old regime, what does anyone in the Brain or the Voice know except that any new regime would be worse -- especially for the rulers and their supporters. For in the old regime, the Brain is not really thinking but only defending the orthodoxy, the correct opinion, of the existing regime.

And this is as it should be. Nobody goes out looking for new knowledge unless there is a problem, a glitch in the Matrix.

In normal times the ruling class and its Cathedral are unopposed. Everything is working as it should be: God is in His Heaven and the King is on his throne and the people prosper.

But if things seem to be going wrong: defeat in war, bad harvests, financial crises, mobs in the street; why, then people start to ask what is wrong and What Is To Be Done. But only a very few people.

Moreover, I suggest that the "very few people" are regarded by all sensible people as complete idiots, not really worth taking seriously. Why? Because for all sensible people everything is still working as it should. No glitch in the Matrix here, no sir.

But what if the Cathedral detects dangerous heresy and the Brain and the Voice and the Conversation swing into action to destroy it? 

I wonder. I wonder if, usually, the hierarchs and heretic hunters will really understand that, if there is a problem, it is probably not that the heretics are evil monsters, but that the apparent smooth surface of the glorious ruling class doctrine and its Cathedral and Cathedral spires are all an illusion. That there is, in fact, corruption and decay, and the foundations are undermined.

We see this is the current situation in the United States. Our ruling class and its educated Gentry cannot see that it is producing less than optimal results for great numbers of the people. That's because the whole job of the Cathedral is to demonstrate to the world that everything about the regime is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

So when the American Committees of Correspondence started talking to each other in the decade leading up to 1776 dear old King George and his courtiers didn't really take them seriously. And anyway, did the Committees really know what they wanted?

Or in the run-up to the French Revolution, did the chaps in the cafés at the Palais Royal really know what they wanted and why, and did Louis XVI's courtiers really have a firm grasp on the problem? Life was good under the old regime, according to Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. 

Look at the current situation in the US. In the debate on September 29, 2020 candidate Joe Biden railed against the white supremacist Proud Boys but said that AntiFa was "just an idea." But President Trump said of the Proud Boys that basically there was nothing to see here, while AntiFa was a problem.

So the two main political parties can't agree on who the current "peaceful protesters" and/or rioters are, who is behind them, and how significant each group is. But each party agrees that the people in the streets identified with the Other party are clearly a menace.

So what is the solution to the problem of the Next Regime?

Well, I would say that it starts with religion, with people that find the current moral framework ill-adapted for the needs, the meaning of life for people like them. So they start bumbling around trying to create a new religion.

Then there is the broader cultural question of a general moral framework, in which, I would say, the great mass of educated and suburban women establish their expectations of each other and the men that protect them.

And then this cultural framework starts to influence the politics.

And the beginning of wisdom, I believe, is for the folks developing new religions and moral frameworks to recognize that different people need and respond to different religions and moral frameworks; there is no one size fits all.

And the beginning of wisdom in our current left-liberal Cathedral is to understand that its Religion of Creativity doesn't really work for the rest of society. In my reductive Three Peoples theory this means that the religion of the Creative People looks like evil to the Responsible People. And vice versa.

And if the Creative People keep ramming their religion down the throats of the Responsible People they are cruising for a bruising.

Just sayin'.

First Principles of Yarvin's Next Regime

After telling us all about the "System" and the "Cathedral" political philosopher Curtis Yarvin wants us to think about what the Next Regime is going to be all about.

Today, "In 2020, we are all nihilists." Because, whatever we have inherited from the 20th century, "almost none of us has any significant positive belief in it."

What does that mean? I suppose we can say that it means that almost everyone is extremely dissatisfied with the political status quo. Only, we all believe that it is the Other guy's fault.

But nihilism, for Yarvin, involves both detachment and absolutism. What on earth is that all about?

Detachment... means disengaging, detaching, withdrawing or resigning from every form of power, or ambition for power, influence or relevance, under the present regime. 

This is, if nothing else, practical, because it reduces the likelihood that the regime will come hunting for you. It has other fish to fry.

Absolutism... means thinking ex nihilo: from scratch, from first principles, not relative to any specific past or present reality.

OK. Fine. So what's that when it's at home? Well, it recognizes that, while anyone trying to develop new knowledge is standing on the shoulders of giants, we have to recognize that a lot of knowledge these days is baloney, and if we carelessly accept it, we will be standing on the shoulders of ogres instead. So we have to climb down and step back and reevaluate all the knowledge extant to determine what is good giant stock and what is useless ogre stock.

For instance, suppose we had to choose between "government of the people" and government for the people," what should we choose? Yarvin says government for the people is a necessity, while government of the people is a luxury.

Government for the people ideally means an overlord that makes the "justest laws and enforces them efficiently and impartially".

Government by the people could easily mean "chaos and anarchy, in which we are bullied, assaulted, extorted, beaten" by our crazy cousins.

Simply put, Yarvin is arguing that no-one has a moral right to political power. In fact the world is full of Hamlets, Prince of Denmark, that imagine that they are born to rule. Hello wokies!

Our modern system is based on the notion of vox populi, vox dei that the people are the voice of God. Only, of course it doesn't quite work that way in practice. Our real ruling principle is "the people are always right, if rightly educated." That way, of course, the powerful only have to deal with the teachers, rather than the people. And if the rulers have all the teachers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats on their side...

So what we have is an oligarchy, with the Cathedral of moral teachers defining orthodoxy and using Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance," "So we tolerate everyone, except the intolerant." That, of course was the argument of Herbert Marcuse in his doctrine of "repressive tolerance." Says Yarvin:

Popper’s advice is pure Machiavelli. Its message to any regime is: take and hold the levers which control public opinion, before someone else does.

And that is what our Wokie cancel cultists are all about. Fire the heretics before they do any more damage.

But what the "if rightly educated" hierarchs are really doing is handing out goodies to the people: the greatest good to the greatest number? Utilitarianism. Only, it ends up as luxury. It makes sense when we humans are scrabbling around for basic necessities, but not when we are, like the Crazy Rich Asians, engaged in an orgy of  name-brand luxury. Luxury, in the hands of Kevin Kwan, becomes a major motion picture joke.

A political system devoted to delivering luxury is not government for the people.

If we now examine the Latin tag Salus populi, suprema lex, or "the health of the people is the supreme law" we see we are dealing with the luxury problem. But it ain't that simple for "while the health of a body can be quantified, sort of, the health of a soul is a qualitative and aesthetic judgment."

OK, so if we have a government for the people that is truly devoted to the health of the people what would it look like?

Would it be like a zoo, with a worthy zookeeper devoted to the health of the people in it? Not really, because in a zoo, the lions are not really living as lions, dealing with "the real challenges of being a lion."

Would it be like a video game? Well, the experience of video games is that what gamers want is a game of total intensity, and that means "virtual worlds with only violence." That might be too much of a good thing. We could put individuals into video game pods, and harness their energy to do stuff in the real world. Or we could combine people into village pods.

But we still have a situation where the video game producer is directing traffic according to his own notion of what people should be doing.

Maybe we should reimagine the economy and throw away all the cheap plastic toys and put everyone to work making good old-fashioned wooden toys. That way people could once more become artisans rather than mere industrial labor. But that gets awfully close to Bastiat's notion of creating work for glaziers by breaking windows.

But that, it appears are Yarvin's three options to make human health, physical and spiritual, the purpose of government for the people: Put humans in a zoo; put them in a video game; put them to work making toys by hand.

But I would say that if this is the three possible modes of "absolutism" then Yarvin is missing the point, for he is assuming the one thing we do not know, and that is "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." In every generation, in every era, we cobble together some religious and cultural and political answer to this eternal question, but we never get close to answering it.

And he seems to be imagining a closed system: that is what a zoo, or a video game, or a toy manufacturing program is all about.

And I would say that the truth of existence is that it is an open system. We men all thirst for challenge and adventure, which we used to get from defending the border, and more recently in global world wars. But there are alternatives, like exploration. We men had a grand old time between 1500 and 1900 exploring and colonizing the world. The 20th century has taught us that the exploration game is over. No doubt that is why tech billionaires are planning the exploration of the solar system.

And then there is the question of women. Oh yeah. Because the point of men defending the border is to provide a safe place for women to have babies, and the food-growing land to produce the food to feed the babies until they are full grown.

And in the last 200 years we have converted the energies of men from fighting on the border to fighting for market share, or fighting to supply the consumers with the best products. I think that the future of politics and governance and culture and religion and economy is to find something for men to fight about that, like fighting for market share, actually benefits mankind.

Women, as ever, will do exactly what they are carefully taught while simultaneously manipulating the world of men to supply them with the protection and the support they need to bear and nurture the future of humankind.

For me, I don't believe in going back to first principles. That is the error of the whole progressive project. As Yarvin says, each of us live by standing on the shoulders of giants, and hoping to avoid getting tangled up with ogres. The task before us is to tag the ogres and build upon what we already have been given by the giants.

We all start from where we are: in this age, this decade, this day, this moment. We never get to start over.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020"

How can one begin to deal with the prophecies of Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020" just out at American Mind?

Where he says that, whether they intended it or not, America's ruling class has declared the Deplorables beyond the pale and therefore ordained a totalitarian future in which nobody will be allowed to dissent from the orthodoxy, or hold an opinion at odds with the orthodoxy, or hold a job if they they are not orthodox.

The point is that Donald Trump represents an inchoate rebellion against the supremacy of the ruling oligarchy:

More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Because, of course, to oppose the oligarchy's "monopoly access to truth and goodness" is the very definition of Satanic evil. And it must be stamped out, in every detail of its satanic systemic racism.

And, of course, once you get the whip in your hand, there is no end to it.

Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

Codevilla laughs at the pompous notion of the "resistance" to Trump's 2016 election by the ruling class. Yes, of course, the ruling class resisted; it is still resisting.

In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy.

And, let us be clear, this resistance of the general population is barely organized or led by anyone. It is inchoate, instinctive, organic.

The warrant for the ruling class oligarchy's power has always been its self-image as certified experts, as truth-telling scientists, its moral concern for "education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health." And of course, it moral stand against racial and sexual oppression.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power[.]

In other words, the oligarchs have wrecked education, demolished the poor, used environmentalism to oppress ordinary people, and used oppression narratives to oppress the deplorables. No wonder the deplorables are rising up.

As with Crane Brinton's notion in An Anatomy of Revolution, the need for totalitarian domination arises from just this failure, of political action failing to achieve its promises -- even producing "the ostensible objetctives' opposites." When your revolution fails to create the Promised Land, that's when you have the choice to admit your failure or double down.

But the ruling class has a problem. The mostly peaceful protesters of the Summer of 2020 have inadvertently made it clear that their real enemy in not Donald Trump but the whole race of deplorable Commoners.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. 

But, if Trump wins in 2020 and the Republicans maintain their position in Congress, what then?

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

So, the question is whether the oligarchy, the educated Gentry, decides on a truce with the deplorables, to let them go on being deplorable if they don't make too much trouble, or whether the oligarchy truckles to the "intersectional" extremists and goes for broke. Right now, I'd say that the Chucks and the Nancys are finding the AOCs and AntiFas a bit to hot to handle. So there is the temptation to loose them upon the American people as a whole.

And maybe it would work, for a while. But as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." What prompts people to form a head of rebellion is perceived injustice.

Oh, and there is one other thing, that women expect to be protected. If you don't protect them, dear oligarchs, then they will look for another protector.

And I suspect that our oligarchic rulers have no idea, literally No Idea, of the depth and breadth of the injustice they have loosed upon the land. Rulers seldom do, until the peasants with pitchforks show up at the door.