Abolish Cops and Billionaires? Oh Please!

I was walking around Green Lake in super-liberal North Seattle, and noticed a "tag" on the path. It said: "ABOLISH COPS & Billionaires." Oh, and "Defund / SPD / ^^ / (100%)."

 

Aren't they special, those highly intelligent AntiFa types!

Because that slogan encapsulates exactly what we should not do.

COPS: Imagine no policemen / It isn't hard to do. But what would it mean?

Why does a society create a police force? The answer is that if you don't have a police force then people will enforce the peace with vigilante groups and gangs -- where the gangs could be criminal gangs or clan enforcers. Oh, and lynching. 

OMG! I can't even! Yes did you know that back in the day, whites were lynched as well as blacks. You didn't?  OMG! Like, Whatever! Sure, blacks were lynched more than 3 to 1 over whites. But still! OMG! Here are the numbers on lynchings from The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School. If you want more details the original table breaks the numbers out by states.

US Lynchings: 1882-1968

White	Black	Total
1,297	3,446	4,743

To give you a flavor of what a world without cops means, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali in on "Tribalism has come to the West."

Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

See what I mean? To the pre-urban human, you only get protection from the people related to you by blood, your kindred. Or we would say, your clan, your tribe, your ethnic group. And the idea that there is any other way is laughable.

The whole point of a police force is to take the maintenance of the peace away from warring kindred groups -- or in US cities ethnic gangs -- and give the job to boring bureaucrats. Or Mr. Plod, as they say in Britland.

So, if you turn the clock back, and "ABOLISH COPS" then you are going to find that the maintenance of law and order will devolve upon the enforcement arms of other groups. Actually, we already know how this works, because in many US lower-class urban neighborhoods the police hardly dare police; the local ethnic gang is the de facto government and police force. This is clearly happening in so-called "no go" areas where Muslim immigrants live in cities like Paris and Stockholm. It also occurs in US cities where the citizens are afraid to testify in court -- because intimidation from gangbangers.

The point is simple. One way or another, somehow, someone will enforce the peace and go after peace-breakers. And one way or another those peace-breakers will be the kind of lawless young men that our liberal friends have recently canonized: the George Floyds of the world, the kind of guys that Curtis Yarvin calls the "human rubble of the old regime's failed experiments." And you aren't going to like the rough justice of gangs and lynch mobs, you nice liberal ladies.

BILLIONAIRES: Imagine there's no billionaires / You can do it if you try. But what would it mean?

It would mean that nobody was creating businesses that made a really significant improvement over the status quo. You know the stand-out guys of the last 200 years. The chap that invented the steam engine used to pump out the mines in Cornwall. The chaps that invented steam railway locomotives. The guy that turned the Bessemer process for making steel into a mega-business, mining coal and iron ore and then transporting them to the smelters to make steel. The chap that invented the modern business of refining and distributing illuminating oil for lamps. The guys that systematized the manufacture of automobiles. The guys that invented and manufactured electric generating equipment and electric motors. The guy that paid $50,000 for an operating system that he modified and sold to IBM to power its IBM PCs. And so on.

These millionaires and then billionaires made staggering fortunes not because they "accumulated" wealth from the surplus labor of workers but because they created businesses that utterly changed the world for consumers. And the consumers flocked to buy their products and the workers flocked to work for the billionaires.

We know what happens when you ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES. You get the Soviet Union, in which millions died in a government-induced famine, and millions were sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. You get Mao's China, in which about 30 million died in a famine when Mao decided that the farmers were going to make steel out in mini-furnaces in the countryside.

And when you decide to allow billionaires again then your economy revives a bit, as in today's capitalist -- but KGB-ruled -- Russia. Or it takes off, like in capitalist -- but Communist-ruled -- China.

Now, the real question is: how do AntiFa twerps come to believe the twerpish things they believe? How can they believe five impossible things before breakfast, and imagine that there were no policemen. And no billionaires? And not know that that would be a really bad idea?

But that is a topic for another day.

The People of the Creative Self

Most ordinary Americans do not raise their sights above the notion of ordinary life: following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. You might call it the agenda of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. 

But some people, as Charles Taylor writes, yearn for something higher, fuller -- you know -- creative. In his Sources of the Self Taylor calls this experience "expressive individualism." These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't just want to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. In their religion humans, not gods, are now become the creators of the world.

I call such people the People of the Creative Self.

It is important to understand how radically new and revolutionary this is.

Back in the old days humans understood that they lived under the sway of powerful gods and spirits that might, at any moment destroy them, just because. Then, in the Axial Age, humans invented new gods that created the world, announced a book of rules -- a Ten Commandments or a Hammurabi's Code -- and left humans to get on with it.

But now, with the marriage of science and technology, it seems that humans can create their own world, that with human intelligence and creativity and scientific knowledge we can fashion the world ourselves. we don't need a god to create the world and then set forth the rules; we can invent the future; we can set the rules. Gods need not apply.

But not everyone. It is clear, from the fact of oppressed peoples and other marginalized humans, that some people still experience the world as a chaotic place under the sway of malevolent forces. It is clear from the emergence of middle-class populism that there are a lot of people that just want to be told the rules so they can get on with it.

So the People of the Creative Self are a minority, but an influential minority, because they are the most educated, the most evolved. And, since their culture encourages them to create and imagine they naturally reinvent everything, from architecture to business to politics to sex. 

There is a tendency in creative people to imagine themselves as "free spirits" as opposed to the rest of mankind's "fettered spirits." As Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, 

He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule[.]

Nietzsche doesn't like the "fettered spirit," especially because of its tendency to anathematize the "free spirit" and the "free spirit's" tendency "to shock and offend... in actions incompatible with sound morals." 

As a rule, though, [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least the spirit of inquiry after truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith.

Thing is, of course, that any creative work, successful or unsuccessful, will cause what Joseph Schumpeter so famously called "creative destruction." Creative destruction means that people are going to get caught in the undertow. If you start a business with a brilliant new invention, then it is likely to put people out of work in other businesses. If you implement a brilliant political idea, it may change the world for the better and inaugurate a glorious era or peace and prosperity, or it may change the world for the worse and cause millions of deaths and ruin tens of millions of lives. Moreover, it is also true, for instance in business startups, that many are called but few are chosen. Most creative endeavors, whether in business or politics or the arts, end in failure.

As Nietzsche teaches, if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else. 

This truth has not yet penetrated to the heart of the People of the Creative Self. They are creative because they were raised to be creative. To them, a normal life is a creative life, full of interesting challenges and projects. Nobody has taught them that creativity is hard, and likely to fail. They tend to think of themselves as the beneficent Oz spreading goodness and light everywhere. They are concerned about the Precautionary Principle where fossil-fuel companies are concerned, but not with respect to their own creative plans.

But creative people run the world: get used to it.

Capitalism Isn't Accumulation. Get It?

Because I've been reading around Marxist economics recently I have developed an allergic reaction to the word "accumulation." Marx and his epigones are always using the word in respect of capitalism, as in:

Primitive Accumulation: Marxists say this started with the enclosure of land and the expulsion of the resident population to create a landless proletariat. OK. Good point. Only it wasn't the capitalists that did this but the feudal nobles who, upon being disarmed by the absolute monarchs, kicked the peasants off their land because they couldn't use them as soldiers any more. By the way, Sir James Steuart, quoted by Marx, was a mercantilist who believed in a ban on the export of gold and silver (thus encouraging their "accumulation.")

Capital Accumulation: In Marx's notion (from La Wik), 

capital accumulation is the operation whereby profits are reinvested into the economy, increasing the total quantity of capital. Capital was understood by Marx to be expanding value, that is, in other terms, as a sum of capital, usually expressed in money, that is transformed through human labor into a larger value and extracted as profits.

Do you see the problem here? Marx and his epigones assume that capital accumulation is simply a mechanical or hydraulic operation. You pump your profits back into the economy and it accumulates as more profits. But it's not that simple.

Let us start with the profits from an investment. What should the capitalist do? Should he spend the money on a yacht? Should he reinvest it in his existing business? Should he put the money into creating a new line in his business? Should he start a completely new business? Should he invest the money in stocks and ETFs? If so, which ones? Should he invest the money in government bonds? The point is that his profits from this year do not just "accumulate." They must be spent or invested in a good idea, a good idea that works. To talk about this as "capital accumulation" completely misses the point.

Over-accumulation: According to the Marxists "A crisis of overaccumulation of capital occurs when the rate of profit is greater than the rate of new profitable investment outlets in the economy" and this is what causes capitalism to self-destruct and lead to socialism. I think that what he means here is that opportunities for profitable investment tend to reduce over time, leading to a crisis of capitalism.

Of course, there is a grain of truth in this. A General Motors may grow itself into the biggest automaker in the United States, but then what? What does it do for an encore? What does it do when the profits in auto-manufacturing start to level off and even decline? What does it do when business turns down and it can't afford to pay the above-market wages its workers have come to regard as their birthright? What does it do when the talent of its CEOs and managers reverts to the mean? 

We see this all the time in business. Any big corporation tends to be tuned up to do one thing. And then the world changes. And the corporation drops out of the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 30 top corporations.

OK. Enough about Marx. Let's talk reality, and the reality is that accumulation has nothing to do with the case.

"Intangible Capital:" The naked truth about capitalism is that that it bares the facts of human cooperation. Nothing is guaranteed; nothing works forever; even hard work isn't enough; good luck doesn't go on forever. You must serve the consumers or go broke.

And the biggest fact of all is the fact in the World Bank's study of capital: "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" Guess what: in the advanced nations, 80 percent of "capital" is so-called "intangible capital."

In other words, if you want to understand "wealth," the biggest part of it is not "natural capital," like oil or gold or silver or land. It is not "produced capital," like factories and industrial plants. It is the knowledge and know-how, the "intangible capital" that humans carry around with them between their ears.

Let's create a little table from the World Bank's Appendix 2 on the Per-Capita Wealth of Nations in 2000.

National Capital in $ per Capita

Country	Natural Capital	Produced Capital	Intangible Capital	Total Capital
Iran	$14,105	$3,336	$6,581	$24,023
Ireland	$10,534	$46,542	$273,414	$330,490
United States	$14,752	$79,851	$418,009	$512,612

Yipes. Notice how our three candidate countries all have about the same amount of "natural capital." But that don't mean nothing. Hey, "produced capital" ain't beanbag, but it is still second tier. The only thing that matters is "intangible capital."

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Chuck old chap. And the same to all you Marxists and lefties and all the ships at sea.

The Importance of "Victims with Attitude"

I had a minor Aha! moment over the weekend. It had something to do with the Hamas rocket attacks in Israel and the Associated Press's Sergeant Schultz moment when they said that they Knew Nothing about the Hamas offices in the same building as theirs.

In other words, what's with the left that they are so wedded to victim groups like the Palestinians?

And then I realized that for the Allyism thing -- oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors -- to work the oppressed peoples can't just be sitting around like slaves on a plantation or touching their forelocks like the folk on Bathsheba Everdene's farm in Thomas Hardy's Wessex.

The victims need to have Attitude. They need to be protesting; they need to complain about the cops; they need to make "the boss" into a villain; they need to burn it all down. Otherwise the lefty process doesn't work.

So that's why our lefty friends have continued to radicalize blacks in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Revolution. That's why all good BDS believers think that the Palestinians are helpless victims and the Israelis are Literally Hitler.

Blacks are "victims with attitude." Palestinians are "victims with attitude." And so are all the Islamist communities in Europe and Britain. So are "trans" people.

You don't count as a registered "oppressed people™" unless you have "attitude."

Hispanics in the US need not apply. They are too busy getting on with their lives, urging their children to go to college, starting a small business, rising up the social ladder.

East Asians need not apply. They are Ice People. Not enough attitude. They just get on with life, working hard every day and helping family and other East Asians.

Brahmins? They seem to be auditioning in the US as Allies. Not victims, but leaders of the victims. Although, of course, Dalits, untouchables from India, need not apply.

When you think about it, the need for "victims with attitude" is essential. And really, not just for lefty Allyism, but for all politics.

The point is that, unless you are making a ruckus, and telling the ruling class that unless they trim their sails you very well might bust up the place, then you don't exist in the political firmament. Because politics is all about Us and Them, how We are the noblest, most innocent, most virtuous people since the Creation. And those Them, they are rascals and monsters, and if we don't take arm against that sea of troubles, we will get run over and demolished, maybe even annihilated.

The trick of our lefty friends is that they are the ruling class, but justify their power because they care about the helpless victims. Only, of course, they need to select as victims folks who are not just victims -- after all, slavery has existed since the dawn of time -- but  victims with attitude who are not going to take it any more.

And guess what: if the victims du jour don't have enough attitude we activists and advocates and Rules for Radicals chappies will teach you the rules of Attitude. We will lead you into a glorious future of perfect equality and justice. And hey, you deserve that 50-inch 4K TV down at Walmart!

Note that all politics needs this dynamics. It's just that populist nationalist politicians don't need a local source of "victims with attitude." They assert the innocence of the nation and then blame the Russkies or the Chinese or the Deep State for all our problems.

So, a candidate for president like Donald Trump represents himself as the leader of the Commoners against the overclass of the Deep State. He is almost playing the same game as the Allies of Allyism. Because, of course, in reality Donald Trump is part of the overclass and when he represents himself as a Commoner he is pulling a fast one. He is no more a Commoner than Bill Gates, billionaire son of an establishment lawyer.

So what is the difference?

Donald Trump advertises himself as the leader of the American Nation of Commoners against the Deep State: the leader of the whole nation of ordinary Americans. Anyone can be an ordinary American, even members of the overclass that have half a brain.

The liberal overclass represents itself as a avant-garde of Allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

So what's missing? In the Trump version, he is missing the fact that there are a lot of lower-class Americans who identify more with their class or ethnicity or religion than as American.

In the lefty Ally narrative, everything is a lie, including "and" and "the." The Allies are not the allies of the oppressed peoples. They are simple power-seekers using the oppressed peoples as their political foot-soldiers until they degrade into "human rubble." The oppressed peoples are not really that oppressed, except as being enslaved by the welfare state and its failed programs run by the Allies. The white oppressors are not really white oppressors: they don't have the power. In fact, like the LTC in the Space Force they can be fired for any crime against the narrative right here right now. 

So. The left's politics requires victims, but victims are no use unless and/or until they have attitude. Thus the importance of "Victims with Attitude."

You read it here first.

The Left: Just What Is Their Problem?

I've been reading a number of books that deal with the lefty mindset, not exactly in an organized project to dissect the lefty world view, but just because.

For instance, in Ellen Meiksins Wood and her The Origin of Capitalism she is trying to advance the notion that things were pretty good before agrarian capitalism came along and marketized the agricultural sector. OK, so in the modern era people live under a "market imperative" instead of what I would call a feudal imperative. Instead of having to keep a weather eye on the local lord and his use and abuse of power we moderns have to think about our skills and how they are priced in the market. The Horror.

With Marx and The German Ideology we get another directed analysis of the move from feudal to market society. Marx's intent is to unearth the secret of how the bourgeoisie with their money and their capital and their circulation got to turn the world upside down and put the working class into wage slavery. The Horror.

Now I am reading Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin. The premise is that Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not really about the philosophy of language but is an ethical commentary on the decline and fall of the Hapsburg empire. What the heck does that mean? Well, Vienna in the pre-WWI decades produced a gaggle of commentators who wanted a moral revolution away from the bourgeois ethos of late-19th century. 

There was Karl Kraus, the polemicist and satirist, who, the authors assert, held that the "tender fantasy [of womankind]... forms the unconscious origin... of all inspiration and creativity." And what he hated was the hypocrisy of the bourgeois culture that harassed prostitutes and homosexuals.

There was Adolf Loos, the father of modernist architecture, who hated decoration and the bourgeois "craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration" in their houses, "all purely for show."

There was Arnold Schönberg, the composer that gave us "the twelve-tone row" and whose music represents "attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois aestheticism." See, Schönberg, like the critic of Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, "considered the question, how a composition sounds, as having no importance."

So the "beautiful" in music is, for Schönberg, a by-product of the composer's integrity, a function of his search for truth[.]

Just what is their problem?

And just what is the problem, in our own day, of the academicians and Wokeys and activists whose whole world view is about The Horror! The Horror! of ordinary middle-class people and their "systemic racism?"

Here's a piece on "The Paranoid Style in Progressive Politics" by Lee Siegel echoing the famous book of Richard Hofstadter's essays on The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You know: Red Scares and McCarthyism. It was the status anxiety of small-town America wot did it, according to Hofstadter. Maybe, just a teeny bit. But maybe the opposite is true, in spades.

Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left.

So maybe the feverish anti-bourgeois culture of the educated rich kids of the late 19th century is reflected in the feverish anti-deplorable culture of the educated not-so-rich kids of the early 21st century. It is good old fin-de-siècle all over again.

In The Soul of the World the recently departed Roger Scruton cuts through all this. What does it mean, he asks, to be a human in human society?

I exist as a subject, that is, as a self-conscious being with immediate knowledge of an inner realm, which defines my point of view of the world... [But then there are] others, with whom I share language... And language presupposes a shared world, a Lebenswelt, in which others are represented as subjects like myself.

The beginning of wisdom, in his understanding, is to step outside of your own self-obsession and think about other people from their own point of view. The amazing result is that you may find yourself able to share that world with others.

Do you see how the lefty world presupposes that the world cannot be shared? Not with those capitalists, not with those stupid Viennese bourgeois and their over-decorated houses, not with bloody Wagner and his reduction of music to pure emotion, not with those deplorable racist-sexist-homopbobes?

Just what is their problem? 

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.