While our Ruling Class Runs Out the Clock

My big problem is life is that rulers gotta rule. If you are in the ruling class what you do when you get up in the morning is think about some new way to direct traffic and harvest loot and plunder. You do not just go out to lunch with your political pals and plot how to stick a dagger in their backs and wait for a crisis to boil up. You actually create crises out of whole cloth.

So, 97.2 percent of what ruling classes do actually makes things worse. And yet nothing happens.

Thus, our heroic Seattle City Council had a meeting Tuesday on the vitally important issue of defunding the Seattle Police. But what were they actually discussing?

A Seattle City Council committee will look to take a step Tuesday toward making good on moves made last year to move operations out of the police department after mass protests in the city called for a vast defunding of law enforcement.

So what does that mean, in practice?

The city’s 2021 budget brought a cut of about a fifth of Seattle’s more than $400 million annual outlay in police spending along with changes to reduce the size and power of the department by moving 911 and traffic enforcement operations outside of the Seattle Police Department and spending more money on social, community, and BIPOC services and programs.

Oh, I get it. We are talking about taking police union jobs away and giving them to other unions. The "Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers’ Guild" wants the jobs to go to the new Community Safety and Communications Center. No kidding! So the meter maids have their own union? But Mayor Jenny Durkan wants the meter maid jobs to go to the Department of Transportation.

So this is just business as usual, moving the deck-chairs around on the Titanic, and responding to the various public employee unions demands. Meanwhile the bright and shimmering stars in the political firmament of the Seattle City Council pat themselves on the back for Defunding the Police in accordance with the non-negotiable demands of the progressive and race activist groups for justice.

And so it goes. Until crime really starts to build in the nice-liberal-lady #WeBelieve neighborhoods.

Then there is Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm telling us that if we were only driving electric cars we wouldn't be bothered by the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. 

Never mind that electric car are powered, probably, by natural-gas powered electric power stations, and guess how natural gas gets to the power stations? Never mind that in the future it is physically impossible to replace oil and gas with renewables -- even assuming that, at some point, activist liberals don't decide that the moral safety of the planet requires that we stop uglifying the landscape with wind turbines and solar farms. Remember the horror of paving the nation over with freeways? I used to look out of the windows of airplanes and ponder about that. All in all, it seems to me, the paving companies did a pretty poor job of paving the nation over. Today I look out of the window and am staggered by the number of gigantic wind turbines on every ridge between Seattle and Chicago.

But let us talk about California going to war against charter schools.

New legislation would clamp down on all charter schools — and would target those schools that specialize in providing distance learning. 

You would think that the one thing that minority parents would want for their kids would be good schools, as the road to a better life, and the one thing they would want was to be able to send their kids to the school of their choice. And that would be the one thing that would determine their votes.

Actually, they don't. That's what Michelle Rhee found out as Chancellor of the DC schools. Minorities think of the public schools as a jobs program.

And when minorities finally follow the white working class out of the Democratic Party it will be half a century -- or even a full century -- since the ruling class had started to make them into "human rubble" with their failed programs.

The trouble is, as Pareto argued in his theory of the "circulation of elites," that

Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.

And if you ask me our elite is pretty united on the fact that we "ordinary people" should shut up and just follow our betters.

Trouble is, I don't see a new elite forming that could replace the current elite. I wish I could, but I don't.

A Strategic Appreciation of Where We Are

What does it all mean? What are the Biden people trying to do? What are the Wokies all about? What is the meaning of the populist phenomenon and the working class move away from the left in the UK and here? Will the GOP ever get a clue? We all would like to know what is going on, and what is coming next.

And, of course, nobody knows, for sure. Hey, nobody even knows a thing.

For me, it all starts with the basic need of every ruling class. It has to have a political formuls, a narrative -- a Mandate of Heaven -- that justifies its power. In the good old days the justification centered around protecting the people from foreign threats and from domestic troublemakers and rebels.

Since today there really aren't any foreign and domestic threats, our rulers have to make it up out of whole cloth.

That's what the whole climate change thing is about. It's a global, planetary threat to everyone and everything. Therefore we must mobilize as if for war, and everyone must do their part to fight climate change. Oh Boy! What fun we will have directing the armies of climate warriors in their sacred quest.

On the domestic front, the rulers need a doctrine that justifies their power. In the old days the aristocracy just were. They were the best people and the best people were the obvious people to rule. But things changed with the rise of the educated class in the 19th century. Ever since the educated class has justified its power by some sort of over-under narrative. For Marx, it was the Communists fighting for the proletarians against the bourgeoisie. For the US liberals it was the progressive educated people designing and implementing a New Deal for the workers devastated by the Great Depression and moderating the power of the malefactors of great wealth. 

In our day the rulers justify their power because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors. That is what Critical Race Theory is all about. It is about affirming the truth of white supremacy and the truth of the oppression that traditionally marginalized people have suffered throughout the history of the United States.

This switch is not remarkable, it is makes complete sense. If the white working class no longer feels particularly oppressed and no longer feels that the Democratic Party is its ally, then the progressive rulers need to find a new doctrine to justify their power, and they need to develop pejoratives to replace the old ones about malefactors of great wealth, about Big Business, about WASPs, and about exploitation of the workers.

In the UK the process is a little behind the US. Our white working class has felt unhappy with the Democratic Party at least since Nixon -- that's what the Silent Majority and Reagan Democrats were all about. So it is utterly shocking, beyond comprehension, for the North London sophisticates that the working class in the North of England (where the workers of the industrial revolution once did their thing) has switched parties. Expect that the North London luvvies will embrace a more direct Allyism, and completely dump the working class so that the helpless victims are no longer the workers at all but the traditionally marginalized non-whites, helpless professional women and gays, and all the rest of the woke agenda.

Let us say that, back in the days of Obama, there was a fair amount of concern about not appearing too radical. And Nancy Pelosi's two big mid-terms, 2006 and 2018, were all about electing nice moderate Democrats who were people just like you. Only, when it came to the crunch, those moderates voted the party line.

I suspect that the cooler heads in the Democratic Party have lost control of the process. I suspect that today they have to package all the crazy wokey agenda items into their legislative agenda because there is no moderate faction left to balance the crazies.

In a way, the Democrats seem determined not to learn the lessons of the past 50 years: not the lesson of the Silent Majority, not the lesson of the 70s stagflation, not the lesson of Reaganomics, not the lesson of the Trump populist phenomenon.

Because here they are doing a full court press as though they owned the Congress with 70 Senators and 350 Representatives. And, as we see, the Biden agenda is already coming unglued, with chaos at the border, hedges against inflation -- from housing to crypto -- going crazy, and employers bidding in vain for workers who would rather enjoy their unemployment benefits than go back to work.

For a guy like me, it is all rather surreal. You mean you guys didn't see any of this coming? Really? For Sure? 

But that's the point of a religion, of a cult. It is to advance a narrative about the world and keep its believers believing through all hardships and reverses, and to teach them that there is no way back, but only forward.

One of the naughty little lies that our liberal friends tell themselves is that the AstroTurf groups like Occupy Wall Street and BLM and AntiFa are the authentic voice of the people, the oppressed peoples. In fact there is no real oppression for the oppressed groups, unless you reckon that the oppressed peoples mainly consist of what Curtis Yarvin calls the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments."

Here's something I want to suggest. The populist groups going all the way back to the Tea Party of 2009-10 are not AstroTurf. They are organic groups organized by ordinary Commoners. And I think that the Trump Car Parades were such a phenomenon. Here's a report on one such.

You couldn’t miss them. Hundreds of vehicles paraded up and down Texas Avenue in College Station on Sunday to rally and show support for President Donald Trump... In all, it’s estimated more than 1,200 people were part of the event that was organized by Luke Holland. "I posted the idea on Facebook last Monday, and now look at this," exclaimed Holland[.]

And now we have reports of people spontaneously organizing to push back on Critical Race Training in schools. Our liberal friends have exhumed their favorite word from the Seventies: "Backlash." 

The thing to remember is that activism is what liberals do for a living; it is what gives meaning to their lives. They have activist groups up the ying-yang and the highest and best thing for a liberal is to be a national-headline activist. Their activism is, of course, all about advocating for the oppressed peoples. And so it has nothing to do with the oppressed peoples, except the importance of the oppressed as stage machinery. Look, the main problem with the oppressed is that they are the human rubble still bouncing after the latest failed program advocated and rammed down our throats by our liberal activist friends.

Ordinary Commoners do not do activism for a living or for an avocation. But, they do have the skills, if motivated to do so. They can get up a car parade on Facebook. They can give 'em hell down at the school board. And when they do, the liberals are shocked, shocked, at the "backlash," and go at once to the dictionary to find a new pejorative ending in "-phobe" with which to malign them.

So what happens next? I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.

A Marxist Misinterprets History

I first read Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view back at the end of 2015 and wrote my review here. But then a month or two I picked it up again. Because.

It's an odd thing, to read a book by a Marxist, because Marxists live in a different universe, and they use the language of Newtonian mechanics -- moments, laws of motion -- that Marx used when he wasn't being all materialist with Feuerbach. Oh and "self-reproduction," presumably as in Darwin.

Oddly, when I reread the book I seemed to have no recollection of reading it previously!

Wood's narrative is basically this. Back in the old days, humans lived through "non-market access to the means of self-reproduction, and specifically land." Thus, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." But then, with the "improvement" movement, in which landowners started to want to make money on their land, people became proletarianized, they became "market-dependent;" they became wage slaves. Today people live under a "market imperative."

But, Wood notices, the English aristocracy was "demilitarized" before the lords in the rest of Europe.

I can see why I reread The Origin of Capitalism with new eyes. Because, you see, in the intervening years I have read about what this demilitarizing of the aristocracy was all about, and why it led to "improvement."

See, back in the day the feudal lords were basically mini kings and ruled their estates as royalty. And the peasants that tilled the land on their estates were not just there for the convenience of "passively appropriating" rents. The peasants, or at least the male ones, were there to constitute the army of the lord, what the notables in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays call "our powers."

But when Henry VIII disarmed the nobles he effectively dissolved their mini-kingdoms and their mini-armies. See what that means? Back in the day, the idle peasants were useful as cannon- or at least arrow-fodder. Not any more. So that's when the lords started kicking their peasants off the land and enclosing the common land, and trying to make money with "improvement." As Marx put it:

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

Well, they were useless now, but not back in the day when they were part of the feudal host, available to march to the battlefield. Then they were useful as soldiers, as part of the lord's power projection.

Wood talks about how the proletarians live today under the "market imperative." So they do. So we all do. They must prostitute themselves in the labor market and work for wages -- and the wages are determined by the market, the ebb and flow of supply and demand for human labor, and not justice. 

Yes, but back in the day, "traditional ruling classes... passively appropriat[ed] rents from dependent peasants." So they did. And they allowed to peasants to scratch around and utilize "common lands" and the peasants worked out a communal approach to share the use of the common lands. And everything worked out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Until the day that the lord needed the peasant and his billhook in the lord's army. Jolly good fun, unless the lord lost the battle and some other lord came to lord it over the peasant, and maybe loot the lord's land and kill the peasants and sell the peasants' wives into slavery.

Of course, in our day the peasant is not completely living under the "market imperative." He or she can subordinate himself or herself to the ruling class and get passively appropriated benefits from his or her loving lord. Call if living under a "political imperative."

The last word in Wood's book is telling.

The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic. But although the alternative is unavailable, there remains the real alternative of socialism.

 Do you see the utter head-in-the-sand determination not to see what is right in front of you?

For I would say this:

Two steps forward and one step back, the economy of the free market has performed the miracle of increasing the real income of humans by 30 times in 200 years. Meanwhile all experiments in socialism have been criminal, murderous failures. What is wrong with people that can still conjure up a vision of "the real alternative of socialism" despite the evidence of 100 million dead in 100 years?

 Socialism is not a "real alternative." It is not sitting there, waiting to be tried. Instead it is a proven failure. Because every time it has been tried it has been a failure. No, not just a failure, but a bloody failure, a starving failure. And it's about time that lefties admit it.

Narratives: 1776 Commission, McClanahan, Gottfried, and Anton

There's been a little spat in intellectual conservative circles lately. I caught up with it by reading Michael Anton, who was criticizing Paul Gottfried who was criticizing Brion McClanahan who was criticizing Trump's 1776 Commission report. Or the other way around.

McClanahan didn't like the 1776 Commission report because it advanced the "proposition nation" notion that "all men are created equal" that was advanced by President Lincoln. The Founders, he writes, were not particularly interested in phrases from the Declaration of Independence. 

In McClanahan's view the Americans involved in the Founding of the Constitution were interested in state sovereignty and that "the people had a right to “alter or abolish” either a state government or a central government." Nor was anyone that interested in the "proposition" that "all men are created equal" in the 1850s.

The question is whether this is an original sin or not, whether the Founders should have known that slavery was the great sin of the ages etc., and whether the Founders are to be eternally banished for not endorsing the modern agenda of rights including votes for blacks and for women.

I think all this misses the point. First of all, back at the Founding, the various actors were politicians, playing both ends against the middle as politicians did then and do now. A lot of people wanted a Constitution, and so they looked to what would get a Constitution written and ratified.

By the 1850s there were different issues moving men's minds, and so the argument was different. And in the Civil War and afterwards the various participants were creating narratives to justify the war and the regime that came after it. 

The ruling class of the Founders was pretty well a ruling class of landowners, and in the South those landowners were slave-owners.

By the time of the Civil War a new ruling class was arising in the North, around the new economy of industry and steam transportation.

Our present ruling class is an educated upper class of credentialed bureaucratic careerists, and they naturally think that the old landowners and the industrialists that replaced them were moral cretins compared to themselves. So any pejoratives or insults that diminish the guys of the old era are just part of the narrative that extols the present rulers as moral and political giants.

In our time we are faced with easing our present corrupt ruling class out of its sinecures and power positions and encouraging them to get a real job. One of the things we need to do is create a new narrative that damns the present rulers into the moral basement as people who have created "human rubble" with their failed government programs and created a new lower class where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. That's how you play politics; you try to put your adversaries on the back foot.

In other words, one of the things we need to do is to create moral fairy tales that teach the young'uns to hate the moral turpitude of the present rulers just as the present rulers regale the kiddies with their moral fairy tales about racism and white supremacy as Literally Hitler.

I have a fantasy that helps me get up in the morning. It is that we are transitioning to a new era in which the ordinary Commoners that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, are reaching critical mass and are beginning to demand that the rulers take account of their needs and their right to live their lives according to their beliefs.

My fantasy is that if you want to understand Brexit in Britain, and Trump in America, and the movement of the white working class in Britain from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party and the movement of the white working class in the US from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, then you need to understand the phenomenon of the rise of the middle-class Commoner.

There's a good piece by Melanie Phillips on Substack about the recent by-election in Britain where a solid Labour constituency just elected a Conservative woman to Parliament. She points out that in Britain the "working class people are deeply attached to their country as the place where they know they share basic values, traditions and assumptions[.]" But the Labour Party

had become instead the party  of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.

Sound familiar? That's exactly what we have here in the US. We are ruled by an urbanist educated elite that doesn't get that the world is full of people that are not like them, and have a right to live their lives just as much as educated liberal activists.

My view is that all the talk about the Founders and racism and equality misses the point; they are old narratives heading for the scrap-heap of history.

What we need is a narrative that glorifies ordinary middle-class Commoners living ordinary lives. And I believe that the narrative has to start with the proposition that you can take your pejoratives, your accusations of racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and put them where the sun don't shine.

Are We Heading to Civil War II?

I just finished up two books prophesying bad times ahead. The first was The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It advances a cyclical theory of history using Jungian archetypes; there are "saeculum" cycles -- lasting about 80-100 years -- and then there are generational cycles with Prophets, Nomads, Heroes, Artists. Here's La Wik.

The second was Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin, which proposes a secular cycle based on demographic data like GDP and immigration and intra-elite competition. Peter Turchin was born a Russian; he came to the US in 1977 when his father was exiled from the Soviet Union. Here's La Wik.

Both of the books propose that we are heading for a crisis that may well involve a civil war in America.

I'd say that The Fourth Turning reduces to the notion that we all tend to turn to squabbling in times of peace, leading to a crisis. And then in the crisis we all have to unite and pull together. In the aftermath of the crisis successfully concluded we all sit around for a while telling each other how nice we are. Until people start to squabble again. Right now we are headed for a crisis, because it is 75 years since we were united by the experience of World War II.

Ages of Discord proposes that people get angry in tough times. Thus, for the ordinary commoner, things get tough when real incomes are flat or going down; so people get angry. For the average elitist things get tough when there are too many people competing for elite jobs like politician and doctor and lawyer; that's what makes elitists angry with each other. Right now everyone is angry. Commoners are angry because incomes have been flat ever since 1970; Elitists are angry because the explosion in college education means an explosion in people that think the world should listen to them.

I am reminded of radical Randolph Bourne's maxim that "war is the health of the state." People come together in a crisis. In other words, a war. Another way of saying this is that politicians are always looking to fight some frightful foreign foe. They instinctively know that their dream of leading their people depends on there being a threat to overcome. Alternatively, if there isn't a foreign foe, then you lead your partisan faction to battle against the other partisan faction who, as everyone knows, are monsters.

Incidentally, this is the meaning of the two front war proposed by the Biden Administration. The first is fighting climate change, a very cunning way of mobilizing the whole country as if to war. The second is fighting "systemic racism," fighting for "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors."

And again, this reflects the truth about government, that its only warrant is to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. Real or imaginary.

Let us analyze things using Turchin's "Well-Being Index" and "Political Stress Index." Back in 1820, the "Era of Good Feelings," ordinary Americans felt pretty good. The Well-Being Index was high, and American had united during the Indian Wars. And there was no real conflict in the elites.

But then began the great wave of 19th century immigration, and wages suffered. Then began the rise of the North with manufacturing and railways challenging the dominance of the South's cotton economy. So, by the 1850s the commoners were pissed off by the Irish and German immigrants pulling wages down and the Northern industrialists were pissed off by the lordly South that had dominated politics and government since the Founding. It was time to teach the other guys a lesson.

And everyone stayed pissed off until after World War I. But then Congress wrote a bill to sharply curb immigration and real wages started to rise. The crisis of the Great Depression and World War II inspired everyone to pull together under the brilliant leadership of FDR and Jobs for progressive intellectuals. By the end of WWII we were all united, and in the 1950s and 1960s commoners benefited from a surge in real incomes.

But all good things must come to an end. In 1965 Congress passed a new immigration bill that sharply increased immigration. And real wages stopped climbing in the 1970s. The sharp increase in college education meant that more would-be elite people were competing for doctor jobs and lawyer jobs and political jobs.

So now you come to today, where the commoners are rebelling against half a century of no real increase in income, and the cognitive elite is pushing back against the nerve -- the noive -- of the commoners critiquing their wisdom.

I have two ideas. First, let's limit immigration (hey, I'm an immigrant, but I got mine). Then maybe the incomes of ordinary Americans will start to rise. Second, let's replace college with technical schools and apprenticeships and internships for most Americans. Then there won't be so many people educated for political leadership competing for the same glorious prizes. And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Could it work? Maybe.

But first, I suspect, our glorious elite will have to screw up big time -- like they did in the 1970s. Politics does not proceed on the well-tended garden of good ideas, but on the bonfire of bad ideas.

I just hope we don't have a civil war.

Implementing a National Liberation from Lefty Colonialism

Over at American Greatness Stephen Balch comes up with a good idea. He says that we the people are presently suffering under a colonialist regime, and we need a national liberation project.

To be sure, the colonial analogy is far from perfect. Western colonies often gained from being colonized; for us, it’s a dead loss. But there are enough similarities to help us understand the strategies our elites are following, how they could be better resisted, and why, as with most colonialists of the past, they’re likely to fail.

If we are to neutralize our colonialist ruling class we need not just "mass activism" but also "mass education and inspirational ceremony," Balch writes. Yes. Ceremony.

We should also organize mass observances of traditional and newly created holidays, commemorating events like the Yorktown surrender and D–Day, or solemnly memorializing the victims of totalitarianism... so let’s consider the creation of a counter-calendar to our elite’s parade of apologetic commemorations, filled with holidays reinforcing national consciousness and pride.

Brilliant idea. Actually, when you are talking ceremony, you are talking religion, the celebration of the sacred. And we need to re-sacralize our national myth, to make holy again the sacred history of the American Founding. I say, for instance, that we should counter the lie of the 1619 Project with my "1584 Project." In case you didn't know, 1584 was the year that the first shipload of White Trash arrived in North America.

Yes, let's celebrate the "waste population" of Europe that was cast upon these shores by the hoity-toity ruling classes of Old Europe. Instead of sneering at white trash and rednecks.

This is all part of the downstream notion: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

When we are not celebrating America in religious ceremonies, like President Trump at Mount Rushmore, I think we should push back on all the lefty pejoratives.

Racism? There's nothing more racist in today's America than Black Lives Matter. Period.

Sexism? There's nothing more sexist in America than the old tired movement of feminism. Which has done what, exactly, for women lately?

Violence? There's nothing more violent in America today than a lefty Antifa "mostly peaceful protest."

Homophobia? What could be more oppressive than the brutal cancel culture promoted by Big Gay? Imagine what would happen to you if you got up at a Critical Race Theory session at work and said: "you know, I think we should teach children that, while gay is all very well, you will probably live a better life if you act hetero, and marry and have children.

Slavery? Apart from the fact that the biggest slave states in all history were founded in the 20th century in Russia and in China there are other questions to consider. What do you call a regime that forces its people to go about wearing masks? What do you call a regime that taxes over a third of its peoples' income? What do you call a ruling class that metaphorically flogs any impertinence from the plebs with cancel culture? What do you call a regime that drafts the whole nation into a Green New Deal to "save the planet?"

Hate? I'll tell you what. Every politician, at every level of government, is in the hate business. That's because, stripped of all its fol-der-ol, politics is about two things: foreign war and civil war. In the foreign war the politicians teach the people to hate the horrible Frogs, or Krauts, or Nazis, or Commies. In civil war the politicians teach the people to hate the N-word, the white trash, the white oppressors, the white supremacists, the robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, the conspiracy theorists, the armed insurrectionists. Etcetera.

Colonization? There is nothing more colonizing that the rulers and the swells telling ordinary American commoners that they are subhuman white oppressors or deplorables or bitter clingers or white racists. There is nothing more colonizing that the top-down administrative state. There is nothing more colonizing than forcing workers and students to attend diversity training or critical race theory sessions. Colonization of the Curriculum? Yeah. Starting with the uber-colonizing 1619 Project.

We all of us need to be ready with the comeback. Racist? I'll tell you what's racist: BLM. Hate? If you are in politics, you are in the hate business. White Oppressor? Yeah, and I could be fired tomorrow for saying the wrong word -- in private. There's always the Mary McCarthy line. Everything the left says is a lie: including "and" and "the."

Yup. First we celebrate America in every way possible. Second, we push back whenever the left uses a pejorative. Onwards and Upwards

Transportation and the Lower Classes

For years I've been quoting the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to railways. My quote has been that "railways would encourage the poor to travel around needlessly."

Because there is nothing worse than ordinary people traveling around needlessly and distracting from the vital importance of important people traveling around importantly on important affairs of state.

But I could never find the original quote, and I worried that maybe I was imagining things. Now I understand why. Because in a piece by Will Lloyd at UnHerd.com about the decline and fall of the English eccentric there was mentioned a Col. Sibthorp who, as soon as railways were invented,

began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

Only, when I Googled the quote, I found Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw, and he writes something a bit different.

[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways -- 'the Steam Humbug' -- which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."

Hmm. It just shows how things can get all bollixed up. Bit of a cock-up on the quoting front.

The funny thing is that, today, the Col. Sibthorps and Dukes of Wellington worrying about "moral ruin to wholesale slaughter" are our liberal friends that want to keep the deplorables in high-speed trains and light rail and TGVs and not in their evil SUVs on the nation's highways where they are emitting CO2 and pitching the Earth into runaway global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind that the cities with mass transit -- along with women and minorities -- were hardest hit by the COVID epidemic.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the book North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, about the textile industry in the north of England in the 19th century, the climactic scene between hero Mr. Thornton and heroine Margaret Hale takes place in a house in London. But in the 2004 BBC TV serial they meet at a train station somewhere between London and Milton where their trains, going in opposite directions, have stopped. So, back in the day, Mrs. Gaskell never thought of a climactic train rendezvous. But in the modern BBC adaption brought to you by North London luvvies, what could be more romantic!

What appeared to be a horror back in the nineteenth century to the high and mighty seems like a walk in the park to today's haughty ruling class. And don't get me started on the eevils of unrestricted airplane travel! Why, I was to Denver last weekend and, let me tell you, the hoi-polloi are back to traveling around needlessly. The concourses are full, the planes are full, and the carbon emissions are outtasight.

Just wait till the cruise industry starts up again. The Horror!

Earth to liberals. Humans are a nomadic species. We like to go walkabout. You liberal swells "fly private" from one vitally important global conclave to another to plan your next "Reset." We lesser mortals fly the commercial airlines, because that's all we can afford. And the average deplorable drives his F-350 crew-cab truck.

Now go back to your regularly scheduled activism and don't let me hear from you again until next time.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what I think. I think that planes, trains, and automobiles are the best thing since sliced bread. There is nothing I like better than driving north on I-5 and looking at all the folk driving who-knows-where in their personal transportation, unless it is walking down an airport concourse looking at all the average folks waiting for their flight. As far as I am concerned there is a clear penumbra and emanation in the US Constitution that makes personal transportation a basic human right, and I like to see American citizens exercising that right.

And, frankly, I can't wait for the chance to fly to Mars. On vacation.