Not Civil War, Not Revolution, But "Social War"

The Zman just put out about the best thing I have ever read on our current situation. He calls it "Social War in the Synopticon."

He says that our current online social media world is not like Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" where the state can watch the peasants. Or like Orwell's 1984.

It may be closer to Huxley’s Brave New World, but our managerial class is nothing like the World State, in terms of intelligence and purpose. There is no Mustafa Mond in our ruling class.

In other words, I assume, there is nobody at the top that knows what they are doing, Joe Biden. No, our world is different from both Orwell and Huxley.

While Orwell could imagine a world where everyone is watched by the state, he could not imagine a world where everyone is watched by everyone. Huxley could imagine a highly ordered society controlled by a few; he could not imagine artificial intelligence.

It really is a Brave New World.

America is now a synopticon. This is a term coined by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen to describe a society in which the few are watched by many. 

Everything we do is watched, not just by the state and its secret police, as in the movie White Nights, but by everyone. The cancel culture works by a nobody accusing a somebody of a moral crime, like the prep school kids that got NYT reporter Donald G. McNeil fired. See, Good LIttle Girl Sophie Shepherd was talking to McNeil about education and:

He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.” 

Can you imagine how unsafe a Good Little Girl from a private school would feel if anyone said that within her hearing or the hearing of her friends and the friends of her friends?

The point is that the synopticon allows everyone to get in on the action.

Another key concept to this new world is the social war. In agrarian and industrial societies, civil unrest leads to civil war or possibly revolution. A civil war is when factions within the elite draft the population into their dispute. A revolution is when a new elite rises up outside the old elite and attempts to overthrow them. A social war is one in which all participant groups can be at war with one another, but also in league with one another, for reasons they do not necessarily understand. [my bold]

Obviously, the ruling class, sitting at the top of the synopticon or at least with the power to turn off peoples' ability to broadcast to the synopticon, has significant advantages. But this is nothing new; the ruling class is always in the cat-bird seat.

But in the current situation, everyone thinks "they are losing control of the social code that shapes behavior." So maybe wokism is a flailing attempt by the liberal elite and its bribed apologists to regain control of the social code.

A civil war is about control of the state. A revolution is about the same thing, with the added aspect of ideological conflict. A social war is about control of the social code, the invisible set of rules that govern human behavior.

And, I would say, nobody really knows how to fight this kind of war.

Modern society is looking like a boiling pot. The more it boils, the tighter the lid is drawn down. Inside, the increasingly aggressive and antagonistic conflict is causing the pot to boil more violently. 

Wow. This is a truly remarkable analysis of our current situation. And, I emphasize, nobody, from the glorious leaders to the deplorables down to the meanest gangbanger, has a clue how to play this game to win. If, indeed, the purpose is to win, if it is even advantageous to win. 

I gotta think about this. When you butt into a new idea you have to release it to your unconscious and let it process it, and dream about it, and spit out something back into the conscious mind. At 3:00 am.

The Kids Are Not All Right?

Because I have a strong animus against gubmint schools -- for many years I have called them "government child-custodial facilities" -- I am rather taken aback by the current conventional wisdom that kids are depressed and suicidal because they can't go to school.

Wat?

But here is Salena Zito writing about the travails of the daughter of a "hospitalist," Dr. Paul Carson, of Pittsburgh, who has gone from an A student to a D student, because "I have nothing to look forward to."

Wat?

So, Doctor Paul, whatabout a spot of homeschooling? Whatabout a micro-school with your Doctoral pals? Whatabout a "learning pod," whatever that is? A month or two ago, on my regular evening walk, I came upon a couple of families -- with kids roaring around before my eyes completely out of control: yay! -- who were sending their kids to a "micro school." And these were doubtless completely conventional gentry liberals of North Seattle.

Here's the problem for me. In my reading about homeschooling, I get the impression that kids that are homeschooled are streets ahead of gubmint-schooled kids when it comes to social skills and learning skills. They are self-motivated. Because, I assume, they have not been kept in gubmint child-custodial barracks during their impressionable youth where all they had to do was follow orders.

But if kids that normally go to gubmint schools go all to pieces if they can't go to their gubmint schools... Well to me it says that the problem is bigger than I thought. I mean: to me, schools with their ranks of desks and their teachers up front and their tests and their grades -- well, in my dotage, where I am always trying to think Bad Thoughts, I am coming to think that schools are military basic training for... For what? Life as a cubicle worker?

As a kid born to Brits in India, I am sensitive to what generally used to happen to Brit kids in India. They were sent home to Britland, maybe to board with a relative, and sent to boarding school.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling and his sister that were sent home from India and spent years boarding at the "house of desolation." Boy, can you spell child neglect?

On the other hand, my mother, born and raised in Japan, always regretted that her parents did not send her back to Britland to go to boarding school.

Now, my parents moved from India back to Britland when I was two, and I went to private schools, going to boarding school from the age of 10, I think. It all seemed perfectly natural to me.

My only regret in my youth was that I feel that I would have preferred to be around adults more instead of around kids my own age. When you go to boarding school you are around kids your own age 24-7. See, I tended to think that kids my own age were idiots, and I might have learned a lot from being around older people. By the way, there was almost no bullying, as I would understand it.

See, I tend to think that, given how we treat kids -- following the latest religious or political fad -- it's a bloody miracle that kids grow up to have a decent adult life at all.

And then there is the curious phenomenon that IQs in the western world are going down. Whereas, earlier in the 20th century, according to the Flynn effect, IQs were going up. Until they started down.

You think that there is a problem? If so, I wonder what it is.

But Tear Gas and But Hate

I had my jolly little phone chat with Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss yesterday, and here are my takeaways.

When it comes to policing, Year Zero for Strauss is the occasion of the mostly peaceful protests in Seattle in 1999 against the WTO. You can see what the ruling-class conventional wisdom is, from La Wik's "1999 Seattle WTO protests" with a picture of Seattle Police doing a spot of pepper spraying.

That's interesting to me, because Dan Strauss, born in April 1986 according to La Wik, would have been 13 at the time of the riots. Was he on the street back then? Or his social-worker parents? Why exactly would a 13-year-old be exercised by the WTO protests? Was he pepper-sprayed? Or one of his parents?

So Dan Strauss is interested in reducing the Seattle Police Department use of violence and tear gas and pepper spray. At least, that is what I understood from his comments.

Later on I introduced the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral narrative -- Allyism -- and proposed that it was problematic to describe the world with a moral narrative before you have described the world with a descriptive narrative. 

I advanced my reductive Three Peoples theory as an example of a descriptive theory, that tries to understand the world before judging it. Mind you, the idea of a descriptive narrative rather than a moral narrative is incredibly modern and progressive. If we are dealing with ancient religion, the whole of creation is subject to the wrath of the gods, and, as Mircea Eliade argues in his Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

See, I'm so sophisticated that I hesitate to blame my neighbor's malevolence for all the sins of the world.

And the narratives that arose later in the Axial Age are all moral narratives, too.

I went on to mention to Dan the virtue-signaling yard-signs so common in the gentry liberal neighborhoods of North Seattle that Dan represents: the Black Lives Matter, the #WeBelieve, the Hate has no Home Here signs.

In response Dan Strauss muttered about Hate. At least that is what I understood him to say.

Unfortunately I did not get in my Hegel zinger, that Hegel says that the thing is the same as its opposite, as in the north pole and the south pole of a magnet: the same, only opposite. On this notion, when you are exercised about racism as an noble anti-racist you are really putting yourself on the racist's level: obsessed with race. And if you are fighting Hate, you are probably a hater, because after all, you hate the Haters. Right?

The joke, to me, is that our liberal friends have become precisely the people they have criticized all these years. They used to rail against McCarthyite witch-hunts -- although back in the day Hollywood actually took fairly good care of the Commies in their midst. Now they get people fired for their political beliefs. They used to rail against censorship: now they applaud it. They used to sneer at enthusiastic Christianity and its obsession with sinners. Now they are obsessed with sinful racist-sexist-homophobe Haters.

Like they say: be careful who you choose as your enemies, because you will become them. 

Well, well, well. It's Nietzsche who said that:

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.

Or Marcus Aurelius arguing the opposite:

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Or Sun Tzu:

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. 

Golly Geewillikins. Who knew?

But it does raise the question of how we deal with our liberal friends. Really, we don't want to wipe them and their hatey-hate Hate from the face of the Earth. We know that if we were to wipe out all liberals they would just be reborn as something just as foolish and knavish. Correction: as something more foolish and knavish.

Hey liberals! Ever thought that if you utterly cancel all the bitter clingers and deplorables they will return as something far worse?

And, of course, it is my conceit that I understand liberals and the left, that they are reactionaries lurching back to the past, that their activism culture is a kind of neo-Quixotic movement, pretending to be revolutionaries way after the end of the Age of Revolution.

And it is my belief that liberals, devoted to the idea of the creative life, of making a difference in the world, have totally misunderstood how the creative life works. It is not a triumphant bending of the arc of history, but a harrowing journey into the unconscious that, if successful, may well end in the death of the Sacrificial Hero rather than the applause of a grateful world. As I rehearse in my Good Life concept.

But hey, if the gentry liberals of North Seattle want a councilman concerned about police brutality and Hate, why, they got exactly what they want in Dan Strauss. Bless their hearts.

What Do You Say to a Progressive Seattle Politician?

I'm scheduled to have a phone conversation this afternoon with my progressive Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss, who was elected in 2019 over a slightly less progressive Heidi Wills. Heidi showed up at my yoga class, where I used to like to zing the teacher Jim, who would always have the conventional wisdom line from The New York Times or The Atlantic.

What should I say to Dan?

I think that I will ask him about Defund the Police.

First, I will ask him which activist groups are pushing it. Is it just Black Lives Matter, or is it a whole phalanx of activist groups?

Then I will ask him what he thinks is the problem? Police brutality? Gang warfare? Systemic racism?

Then I will tell him about my understanding of the problem, from liberal journalist Jill Leovy, author of the 2015 book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. I'll tell him that I wrote about the book back in 2015 "The Real Problem 'Ghettoside.'" See this is how Leovy reports it.

1. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because murderers never get caught.
2. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because the police are always harassing young men on the street.

There is a very good reason why murderers don't get caught. It's because of "snitches get stiches." The gangs intimidate witnesses so they won't testify at trial, although "everybody knows who done it." BUt everyone is still mad that the perps don't get perped.

The police react to this situation in a sensible way. Since they "know who done it," they harass the guys "who done it" for minor street crimes. And everyone is mad about that.

What to do? Well there is something. I read once from a policeman that the dirty little secret of successful policing is informers. If you have informers you can bust up the gangs. And the murdering is all about gangs defending their turf and conducting border warfare. Also, of course, since a lot of economic activity in the inner city operates outside the law, the folks in the inner city can't call on the police for help when illegal activity is involved.

And that includes simple off-the-books employees.

Yeah, that's a problem. The gangs exist because of the marginal economy in the inner city that operates on the edge of legality, because uneducated people and unacculturated people often can't get well-paying jobs above the minimum wage, or union jobs because they don't have the connections.

Gotta be careful not to get too far into the reeds.

But maybe I'll tell him the story of Lady Marjorie's fencing contractor. See, Marjorie had some fencework done and was not happy with the work so she stopped the check she had just written to the contractor. A short while later, a check-cashing facility called! The contractor was getting cash on the check with which to pay his off-the-books Mexican workers. So I wrote about this at American Thinker and pretty soon got an email from an auto mechanic in Florida. He said that it was almost impossible to get and on-the-books job, and that was a problem because he needed a credit record to get a home mortgage, and for that you need an on-the-books job.

Oh well, it's an imperfect world, and it's tough trying to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Then, I think I'll ask him about Allyism, about the three layer social analysis of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Where does he fit in there? As an Ally? Or as a "white oppressor?" And what about tech billionaires and CEOs? Are they white oppressors or are they allies because they donate to BLM and censor "far right" insurrectionists?

Then, maybe, I should ask him about Defunding the Police now that we know from January 6 that the real problem in  America is "far right" insurrectionists, which are so big a problem that the usual practice of freeing people accused of crimes without bail has been suspended. And we need 30,000 National Guardsmen in Washington DC, while we didn't need them in Seattle and Portland last summer.

Don't you think, I'll ask him, that the post January 6 events are something of a "tell" from the ruling class? Are they not saying that BLM and AntiFa are nothing to worry about, because they are the street thug of the ruling class. whereas Trump insurrectionists are an existential threat that needs immediate action and overwhelming force.

Maybe I'll even have time to offer my reductive Three Peoples theory that experiences America not as a moral drama but as just three kinds of people trying to live their lives: Creative people that want to make a difference; Responsible commoner that want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law; and Subordinate clients that want their lives protected by political power

I wonder how it will actually go down.

Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"

Way back in the 1990s Charles Murray was the second tier in Herrnstein and Murray on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

The point of any Bell Curve is that if you measure anything about humans in a human community, most people will cluster towards the average, with less and less people as you get away from the average. Thus, there are a ton of people with average intelligence, a few with above-average and below intelligence, and only one or two complete geniuses and one or two complete idiots.

Herrnstein and Murray "noticed" that humans are not all alike. In particular different "races" have different "bell curves" where intelligence is concerned. And, given that, as we now say, "experts agreed" that jobs in the modern economy were increasingly requiring cognitive skills rather than manual skills, that could result in a bit of a cock-up on the race front, because blacks present a bell curve on intelligence shifted quite a bit to the left -- i.e. lower -- when compared to whites.

La Wik: "Murray's work has been and remains highly controversial."

Er, no, Wikkie. His work is only controversial to liberals and lefties, because it drives a stake into the heart of their belief system, and they can't deal with that. Because safetyism.

You can see why liberals jumped all over The Bell Curve at the time. Their religion said that humans were equal, and that any inequalities between person and person and between black and white were due to discrimination. But if Herrnstein and Murray were right then we would never get to a perfect world where the racial breakdown of everyone from CEOs to garbage workers would match the racial percentages in the nation.

So Charles Murray had to be racist-racist-racist and sent to the academic equivalent of Outer Slobbovia.

Murray's response, ten years later in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, was to show that if you purged race out of his Bell Curve prophecy -- and racistly only racistly analyzed racist whites -- the argument about cognitive skills still applied. In today's America the white cognitive elite, with degrees and credentials and careers up the ying-yang, are doing fine. The white commoners in the middle are doing so-so, and the white underclass, the bottom 30 percent, are really sucking air: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The liberal response to Coming Apart was basically not to respond.

But you will notice that liberals today are basically conceding Murray's point. Today's liberals say that IQ tests are racist. And they say that whites do better in school and life because of "white privilege" or, failing that, because of "systemic racism." Rather than admit that, not surprisingly, people with different backgrounds, different origins, different genetic inheritances (i.e., race) have different capabilities, as common sense would suggest, they say that it's all a conspiracy of white males since the dawn of time.

So why do East Asians have the highest IQs in America? Huh? White privilege? Mandarin classism?

So now lefties are saying that teaching the classics of Greece and Rome is racist. And getting coverage in The New York Times. Mind you, I am all in favor of increasing the teaching of the classics of South and East Asia. We systemic racists might learn something from them.

Anyway, Charles Murray, now age 78, is publishing one last broadside, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It looks like he is taking the bull by the horns. Or double-shotting his guns, etc. From the blurb at Amazon:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

I.e., The Bell Curve, dummy.

You did know, didn't you, that East Asians have a higher average IQ than Jews have a higher average IQ than "whites" have a higher average IQ than "Blacks." But race is a social construct.

My theory is that average IQ is a measure of the time that a particular cultural group has been literate. And, of course, literacy parallels involvement in Axial Age religion and commerce. I suspect that East Asian elites -- mandarins -- and South Asian elites -- Brahmins -- have the longest experience of literacy. So they are the most intelligent. Not exactly rocket science.

Only, recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria apparently have higher IQs that native American Blacks. Could that be a benefit of Brit colonialism compared to All-American plantation slavery and Jim Crow and unionized public education? You tell me.

I tell you what I really think. I think that our liberal friends are half way into an intellectual collapse. They don't study history and philosophy and politics and economics any more, because if they did they would face irreconcilable differences with their lefty secular religion. Case in point, Jan Psaki challenging a reporter's question on the $15 an hour minimum wage. But the CBO says that increasing the minimum wage would cost up to 1.4 million jobs. This is not rocket science. But I'll bet that a whole generation of Democratic political activists have just steered away from ever dealing with the question. So that they literally know nothing.

The reason that elite scions went to college back in the day, and studied the classics, was because the ruling class wanted their young sprouts to know how the political power game was played back in the day. They figured the young'uns would learn something. When young scions of the ruling class don't learn all that hard stuff they remain ignorant of the nuts and bolts of ruling.

Here is something from Ben Stein about recently deceased George Schultz that I didn't know.

When he was secretary of State under the great Ronald Reagan, Eretz Israel was struggling with intense inflation. Secretary of State [Schultz] sent my father [Herb Stein], along with a super smart economist named Stanley Fischer, to Israel to help.

After many meetings with top Israeli officials, Pop and Dr. Fischer created a plan (kindly called the Stein Plan), to reestablish a new Israeli Shekel backed by the United States. The plan worked like a charm. Even now Israelis — thanks to Secretary Shultz — consider the Stein Plan salvation.

See what I mean? Those clueless lefties running Israel back then Literally Had No Clue about a functioning monetary policy. But the knowledge of How to Do It was right there, if only someone had opened an economic textbook. Only, if your entire leadership had been to activism school rather than economics school, well, then you need to send Herb Stein over there to teach 'em how to do it. You get the point.

And I suspect that the same is true about all the swamp creatures in the Biden administration. Only, the lefty geniuses that rule us would rather die than take advice from a conservative economist.

Dueling Three Layers: Allyism vs. Americanism

I was doing an American Thinker piece about my brilliant notion of "fake tribalism," that all tribes and tribalisms are fake because humans didn't develop tribes until they started living in villages/towns of 2,500+ inhabitants.

One of my present obsessions is the Allyism notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." It comes from a piece by Matt Taibbi "On White Fragility" where he takes down Robin DiAngelo's megahit On White Fragility. He writes, of progressive ideology:

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

You can see that this is all about the epidemic of virtue-signaling in our ruling class. We rulers are the Allies, les chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. We are so special it makes your head spin. But, of course, it is all a lie. Let us count the ways.

Members of oppressed groups. Yes but just how oppressed are the oppressed groups? Compared to conquest slaves captured in West Africa? Compared to Brits captured by Vikings in 1000AD and sold in the slave market in Dublin? Just what are the roadblocks to any human in America that sticks around for an average public school education and gets some sort of a skill? Oh yeah! Credential laws that discriminate against new entrants; high payroll taxes on wages; mortgage subsidies that benefit existing homeowners and boost house prices for aspiring oppressed groups; minimum wage laws; anti-gig economy laws. I could go on.

Allies. Just who are the allies helping? Are they really helping oppressed groups by encouraging them to gather in identity politics enclaves? My line is that the best thing you can do for minorities is to teach them the skills and the culture of middle-class life, as per my Road to the Middle Class. But, in fact, the policy of our ruling class for the last century has been to lure the "oppressed groups" off the road to the middle class and into the brambles of free stuff and subordination. And how much of being an Ally means getting Jobs for Gentry in government regulating business and doing climate change?

White Oppressors. Just who are these white oppressors? Tech billionaires? Heavens no! @jack and the Zuck are Allies, censoring "far-right" conservatives on social media and donating hundreds of billions towards getting out the Democratic vote. Good old Jeff Bezos has rescued the liberal Washington Post from oblivion. Are they Trump Car Parade enthusiasts? Really? And how much power does a Ford F-150 driver have to oppress oppressed groups? OK, not much. So how about Ford F-350 drivers. Boy, there are guys with more money than sense!

Pretty obviously the whole Allyism thing is a fake doctrine intended to make ruling-class activists feel good about themselves. But, let us not forget Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dictum enshrined in my Maxims:

Never virtue-signal; never rent-seek; you must start a business.

Hey Allies! Allies? Anybody there?

Now my Americanism retort to the Allyism is short and sweet. There are Americans, known to each other as 'Muricans; there are Emerging Americans, not quite ready to fly the Trump flag. Then there are Anti-Americans, who are above the commoner culture of Americanism. Shall we go into more detail? I think we should.

Americans. Today’s America is the greatest country in the world, and the American people are the best people in the world. Most of us are straight-up Americans: we go to work, we obey the law, we follow the rules. And we thrive in the best country in the world. Go ’Muricans! 

Emerging Americans. Some Americans, the “Emerging Americans,” are not so sure about America. They have heard tell that the suburbs of America are teeming with racists and sexists, human werewolves and the like, that wish them harm. But we Americans say to the Emerging Americans: come on in: the water’s fine and the membership is open to all that came here legally.

Anti-Americans. Hoo boy. They Anti-Americans hate America; they despise ordinary Americans -- on a good day -- as “bitter-clingers” and “deplorables.” On an average day they are inventing corrupt Jobs for Gentry programs like climate change, the great reset, critical race theory and 1619 Projects. On a bad day they hate ordinary Americans as racist-sexist-homophobes. And they lie to Emerging Americans, telling them that they are doomed unless they hunker down in their identity-politics enclaves. So there you have it: the Anti-American politics of Hate and The Big Lie. Why, that is Literally Hitler!

Of course all these Three Layer theories are absurdly simplified rubbish. Or are they?

I would just say that Three Layer theories -- my prize collection is here -- are the minimum social theory that makes any sense. If you say that all humans are alike, you learn nothing. If you advance to a two layer theory, then it becomes Us vs. Them, which has use only for the War of All Against All. If you go beyond three layers to multi-layer theories like Piaget and Wilber, you lose your general audience and appeal only to obsessional people like me.

Yep. Good old Americanism. What's not to like?

We Can't Go Away and Hide in our Little Platoons

We humans naturally prefer our own kind, for "man is by nature a tribal creature," writes Robert Stacy McCain, approving of Burke's "little platoons."

How, then, has this principle of group loyalty become so wickedly warped, and turned into a weapon destructive of all social order, by the contemporary practice of progressive identity politics? Why is tribalism in America now asserting itself in such toxic and ferocious ways?

Actually, I would say that all group loyalty has been "wickedly warped" since, well, since humans started to live in communities bigger than "Dunbar's number" of about 150 people. La Wik:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

I am relying on the anthropological writings of C.R. Hallpike. In his How We Got Here he argues that hunter-gatherers were pretty relaxed about tribe. They were pretty individualistic, except about sharing food. And they would change from one "band" to another without much fuss.

According to Hallpike, humans didn't start getting really tribal until they started living in village of 2,500+ people.

I take Hallpike's ideas and propose that all modern tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up to unite people against a real or perceived threat. Read La Wik on "Clans" and tell me what you think about clans, bands, and tribes.

So I say that all modern tribalism is "fake tribalism," whether tribalism of religion, of class, of nation, of race, of tribe or clan or band, of occupation, of level of education. All fake. All tribes, all identities, all groups are artificial, using the natural groupishness of humans for a political purpose.

Here is an example of what I mean. America's "Blacks" -- once "black" and then "African American" -- are descended from a whole bunch of tribes in western Africa. Each individual Black got enslaved by some tribal incident of conquest slavery and then sold to a white European slave trader. Yet now, we are told by our betters, all Blacks belong to one race -- except that race is a social construction. Anyway, if you disagree with any American liberal on race you are a "racist." Barack Obama, son of a white mother and a well-born East African, is America's First Black President.

Obviously the invention of "fake tribalism" is the most important thing since sliced bread. Or before sliced bread.

But when McCain proposes that we check out of the crazy world of "victims" and "oppressors" and "get through the week, pay our bills... by clinging to those 'little platoons,'" and when Jackie Gingrich Cushman says our problems must be "conquered in a bipartisan way," I say fuggetaboutit.

All politics is "fake tribalism." All religion is "fake tribalism." All culture is "fake tribalism." There is no checking out of the game and going back to your "little platoon." If you want to be a "man in the arena" then you are a player in the "fake tribalism" game.

There is only one way forward: to create a "fake tribalism" that is better and nobler and more popular than the left's "fake tribalism" of race, of gender, of identity politics, of "allyism." And let it be said right here that Donald Trump's MAGA movement, based on the idea of America as a nation and the American people as one American people, was the first shot fired in developing this new -- better, nobler, popular -- "fake tribalism," No wonder our liberal friends want to kill it in its cradle.

The question is: on what principle do we raise our banner? Our liberal friends have based everything on the concept of victimhood. Whether it was the industrial workers of the nineteenth century or the unemployed of the 1930s, or blacks suffering under Jim Crow, or women from an eternity of patriarchy, or gays suffering from ages of homophobia -- did you know that Edward II of England was gay? -- or oppressed peoples in general suffering under white oppressors but for the heroic "allies:" it's all about the victims.

And about the "fake victims." I buy slaves as victims; I buy blacks under Jim Crow as victims. But post 1965 Civil Rights Act? Well-born educated feminists as innocent victims? Well-born gays as innocent victims? Ahem.

There is, I think, an eternal temptation to don the mantle of "innocence." I say that it is almost universal that small minorities use a "culture of innocence" to maintain tribal unity. But that is not for us; innocence is for the Garden of Eden, not for life in this vale of tears.

I don't think the victims narrative works for us. And the reason is quite simple. We middle-class Americans are Commoners, what I call, in my reductive Three Peoples theory: People of the Responsible Self. Responsible people cannot be victims.

I think it is pretty obvious what works. We need to base our politics on the "fake tribe" of nation, and the "fake tribe" of the middle-class Commoner, responsibly getting a job, getting married, raising a family, and providing for our own.

And we must stop apologizing. A good start would be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Every Republican and every American Commoner should be saying: "hey Dems: come and talk to us when you have dealt with the poisonous racists and sexists and anti-semites in your own party. Period."

President Trump fired the first shot heard across America. It is up to us and to a new generation of politicians and culture warriors to continue the fight.

And that means having the zingers ready when the liberals come with their pejoratives. Such as this on the accusation of systemic racism.

So, pal, what is it about the Civil Rights Acts you don't understand? It is illegal in the United States to discriminate on the basis of race. So, if you see discrimination, report it to the police. Don't complain to me. I ain't the system. You are.

And so on. I was talking to a nice liberal lady the other day and she talked about race as a social construction. So what is 23andme.com all about, I asked? Profits, she said. Oh yeah, I said, of course. Silly me.

What is about America as the best country in the history of the world, and the American people as the best people in the history of the world that our liberal friends don't get?