Hey Transgenders, Don't Frighten the Horses

Yesterday, June 29, 2021, the US Supreme Court voted not to review a transgender bathroom case in which a transgender high-school student (girl turned boy) had sued and won in federal court to be allowed to use the boys' bathroom. MSNBC :

Grimm’s right to use a boys bathroom was upheld in rulings by lower federal courts, which had ruled that he was protected by a federal law that bars school programs from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex.

No kidding!

But I would suggest to my liberal friends that this development runs afoul of two principles that, in my opinion, trump the holy writ of non-discrimination.

The first is the Mrs. Patrick Campbell principle. It is is said to be in answer to a young actress that complained to Mrs. Pat about two male actors being a bit too friendly with each other. Said Mrs. Pat:

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

I would say that the whole point of current LGBT politics and activism is precisely to frighten the horses in the street: and not in the sense of frightening them into stampeding, but to frighten them into shutting up or else they will lose their jobs. Which suggests one of my main maxims:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

In other words, when you have climbed into the ruling class power seat and you start to have the power to reverse decades, or centuries, or eons of injustice, I tell you that the people on the receiving end of your "justice" will experience it as "injustice."

The other important point is that gender specific bathrooms are not there in order to discriminate against transgenders. They are there to protect women from male harassment. Why in the world should we worry about that, you may ask? Because of Freud's famous remark (which I had thought was made by Oscar Wilde)

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

I say, Siggie, that you are asking the wrong question, you silly boy. It is not what women want, it is what women expect. And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

So, you LGBTs and liberals and wokies and judges and nice liberal ladies and all the ships at sea. With this bathroom thingy you are heading right into Trouble, with a capital T, right here in River City. Because biological women really don't like biological men in the women's bathroom. I mean that women really don't like men in the girls' bathroom!

You will notice that the LGBT activists chose a biological woman acting as a man in order to demand the right of transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice. Of course they did. Because when you want access to the other guys' bathroom you certainly don't want to go to the court system on behalf of a biological male wanting to use the girls bathroom. Whatever the civil-rights laws may say about discrimination, you wouldn't want to be persuading judges to permit biological males in the women's bathroom. Not yet. Not this week.

On this subject I am a true Leninist: The worse the better.

The fun thing about this is that, back in the day, liberals were bellowing from the rooftops about "legislating morality" and protecting women from the male gaze, and liberating women. Today, everything that liberals do amounts to legislating their morality and forcing it upon the rest of the world.

And also parading a battalion of fake victims before the world.

And this issue also attaches to my concept on women in the public square. The public square, according to German sociologist Georg Simmel, was created by men for men. So women coming into the public square a century ago could be expected to transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

What women in the public square do not like -- do not like -- is the idea of men coming into the women's bathroom. Because "women expect to be protected."

Just sayin'.

The End of Over/Under Politics

Back in the day, we didn't have over/under politics. Back in 12th century England, politics was all about squabbling nobles. In Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir there isn't a word about the middle class or the oppressed peoples. Politics is all about King Henry II of England and his Angevin Empire -- which included England and a good half of France. When he wasn't putting down rebellions among his feudatories he was playing political games with the King of France and quarreling with his sons.

And if he got really annoyed with one of his feudal retainers he would lay siege to his castle and destroy it and probably set fire to the town around it.

I guess if you were a poor person you just hung on and hoped that your lord would prosper -- and not tax you too heavily to finance his wars.

But then there was the Black Death and in its aftermath wages went up and the lower orders became a bit uppity what with Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1381 against the poll tax needed to finance the Hundred Years War.

And then came the nationalization of the armed forces and the development of agricultural "improvement" and the surplus peasants were sent packing.

Thus the first Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1497. And the first Poor Law in 1536, although the first big poor law was in 1597. Clearly, in this world, the poor have emerged into political consciousness: as a problem, rather than an opportunity.

So how do we get from the taken-for-granted hierarchy of the Middle Ages to the over-under political philosophy that is clearly in full bloom with rich kids Marx and Engels by 1850?

Well, more research is needed. But, to start with, in the 18th century, we have Rousseau. In The Discourse on Inequality he argues that mankind in the "state of nature" is driven by pity and self-preservation. Says SparkNotes:

Man in the state of nature has few needs, no idea of good and evil, and little contact with other humans. Nevertheless, he is happy.

But he has "perfectibility." And this drives him to respond to his environment, and live in groups, and develop reason and society. But this is not good, because

As men start to live in groups, pity and self-preservation are replaced by amour propre, which drives men to compare themselves to others, and to need to dominate others in order to be happy.

This leads to a dangerous instability between rich and poor, leading to war, that is solved by a trick where the rich entice the poor into a political society that merely "fixes the relations of dominance." And, of course, private property is the cornerstone of this dominance.

In The Social Contract "agreed upon by all citizens for their mutual preservation" Rousseau defines the "sovereign" as "the collective grouping of all citizens" that "expresses the general will that aims for the common good." It is in conflict with the actual "government to exercise executive power." And the "sovereign" and "government" are typically in conflict.

Then we have Babeuf, in the French Revolution. His "newspaper Le tribun du peuple (The Tribune of the People) was best known for its advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy and the abolition of private property."

But both Rousseau and Babeuf were commoners -- Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker; Babeuf the son of an officer who was working as a domestic servant at the beginning of the Revolution. 

Next we get Saint Simon, born an aristocrat, and another socialist theorist. But he recommended the rule of an "industrial class... [that] included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society such as businesspeople, managers, scientists and bankers, along with manual labourers, amongst others."

Honestly, I don't see how all this muddle gets to Marx and the brilliant idea that rich educated kids like him will lead the helpless workers to glorious revolution and heaven on Earth.

But, clearly, the logic of politics as war by other means leads Marx to invent a struggle of the poor helpless workers against the monstrous and evil capitalists and bourgeoisie, not because the capitalists and bourgeoisie are necessarily evil but because the logic of his over/under political system requires an enemy.

In fact, of course, the two centuries since the French Revolution and the century and a half since The Communist Manifesto have seen a Great Enrichment, an increase of 30 times in real per capita income in the western world. And we have had scientific experiments on whole populations that have conclusively demonstrated that the market economy delivers prosperity to ordinary people and poor people, and that the ideas of Marx lead to slavery and death camps and famine.

So I say that the current spasm of over/under politics, in the antiracism of Allyism, with allies advocating for "oppressed peoples" against "white oppressors" is more nonsense driven by the logic of over/under politics that requires the middling sort of people to be the enemy. That's because the logic of politics requires an enemy, and the logic of over/under politics requires that the enemy be the middle. Who else could it be?

I say there is a reason why over/under politics switched from Marx's over/under politics of class to the current over/under politics of race. The reason is that by, say 1970, the numbers weren't working, because the Great Enrichment had lifted too many helpless workers into the responsible middle class. So a new concept was required, of racial oppression and white guilt. "Anti Whiteness," if you will.

But what do we do about it?

I don't think that the answer is a conscious whiteness race movement. And my reason arises out of my reductive Three Peoples theory. In the Three Peoples theory it is easy to understand the logic of the left's over/under politics. The "over" class of rulers is the educated elite, the Cathedral of Curtis Yarvin's notion, and it wants to be important, wants to rule. But the ordinary responsible Commoners of the middle class don't want too much government rule, thank you very much, so the obvious thing for the overclass to do is to champion the "under" class, the Subordinate Clients, and hopefully get to direct traffic. This situation is obviously a class situation.

And I don't think that the middle middle people experience themselves as "white." That's because the logic of being middle class and doing middle-class things is that you work to serve the consumer and you associate with people that you can trust because they exhibit a record of trustworthy behavior; you obey the law, you go to work, and you follow the rules, and you don't really think about it. Notice how this middling trust culture differs from the overclass where you trust people with the right ideas and credentials and from the underclass where you associate with people of your race, or class, or language, or kindred.

And that is why I think that the future for the middle middle is a class identification of being middle class commoners rather than white people.

So I believe that the Great Rebellion of Commoners will not be defined by race but by class.

Yes, but whatabout the non-white members of the middle class? Won't they identify with their ethnic and religious origins rather than with whiteness?

No, I don't think they will, and the reason is war. In my view all groups and tribes and nations are defined by the war in which various disparate elements are drawn together and forged into a political (or military) army. This experience creates a new cultural community, a new identity, a new "band of brothers." If the "army" wins its war then it defines a new community, a new identity. In our time, the "band of brothers" creates a new nation. If it loses, of course, it disappears into the mists of time.

So my prophecy is that the facts of the situation today in which the ordinary middle class finds itself attacked by the Cathedral is radicalizing the middle class, and the experience of defending the middle-class identity, and the instinctive political strategy of the politicians representing the middle-class identity, is creating a new political identity and a new unity. And the disparate people that are coming together into this new identity will increasingly experience themselves as united into a nation of commoners rather than the previous identity they may have experienced.

I give you President Trump. Our lefty friends insisted that he was a racist sexist homophobe, because Charlottesville. But I'd say that President Trump has and does define himself as a leader of Americans, ordinary, patriotic, middle-class Americans. In other words, he defines himself exactly as you would expect a leader of ordinary middle-class American commoners rebelling against the rule of the educated overclass.

And I think the current instinctive panic of our Democratic friends, where they are trying to ram through their entire woke agenda in six months, demonstrates that, even if our Democratic friends don't consciously understand the rise of the Commoners, they just feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and the foundations of their world are shaking. So there is no time to be lost.

And they are right to be concerned. Because I prophesy that the Age of Domination of Over/Under Politics is coming to an end.

My Three Theses: Racism Does Not Pay

I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here. Now let us discuss Thesis Two, that racism Does Not Pay.

Really there should be no need to go beyond the fact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States after the end of Reconstruction -- i.e., the military occupation of the South -- after the Civil War.

Why did the South need Jim Crow? Because otherwise people would not discriminate against blacks. At least, not enough.

Yes. Political folk have a real problem with businessmen and employers and corporations. They really don't want to discriminate. It's costly to have racially segregated railroad trains. It is crazy not to hire marginalized minority workers at a lower wage than privileged majority workers -- if it is more profitable. It is annoying to have to send blacks to the back of the bus. It means unhappy customers.

And clearly, the racism in employment since the Civil Rights era, half hidden by a score of euphemisms such as Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion, Equity, and so on, costs money. Because all the HR and race-counting and Human Rights Commission busy work that a modern corporation is obliged to perform is a pure cost. Oh boy, what it would save not to have all those busybody women in HR collecting race and gender data so that the government can use it against the corporation!

But let us not just blame the racists for screwing the economy. Basically all wage and hour laws are put there to stop eevil corporate chieftains from using employees to get the maximum profit out of them, just like Marx said. 

Only, of course, nobody knows what makes the most money. Is it treating the employee as a widget? Is it treating an employee like a human? Is it reducing everyone to contractors with no benefits and no tenure? Encouraging and subsidizing employees that improve their skills? Firing everyone over thirty? Providing extensive benefits from pensions to health insurance? Paying premium wages? Paying low wages supplemented by profit-sharing in the good years?

Basically, I believe, the culture of capitalism is that you are the slave of the consumer. Whatever the consumer wants, and whatever price the consumer is willing to pay, that is final. And then there is trust. The point of trust is not that it is a good thing, although it is. The value of trust is that it reduces costs. That is why diamond merchants are often Hasidic Jews: they have a closed community and trust and reputation is everything, so they can exchange valuable diamonds and have faith that none of their fellow merchants will cheat them.

There is a Science to explain this. It is called the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. It does not pay to cheat unless you will never see the other party to a transaction again.

This capitulation to the market is hard, very hard, for humans to do because we are all social animals and instinctively look for protection from our kindred and from the people that we know. Capitalism is an utter revolution in social relations that says that you trust those people that are trustworthy. It says that your life and prosperity depends on you serving your fellows, doing things that they are willing to pay for. And the customer is always right.

Racism is the old way, the way of the hunter-gatherer band, the way of the village, the clan, the ethnic ghetto in the big city. And it Does Not Pay.

Next up: We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay

I had a brainwave a week ago, about slavery and race, and I announced my brainwave in a piece at The American Thinker. I call it My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

Oooh look. I already mapped the idea out in "Stop Moralizing about Race, Slavery, Empire" back in January 2020.

What on earth is this idea of Three Theses all about?

Obviously it issues from the first principle of my life, that all my ideas must cut across the grain of liberal ideas, creating confusion. Hopefully, strategic confusion in liberal-land.

But we are bigger than that. We really want to know. Why should we, in the current epoch, have decided to abolish one of the most ubiquitous human institutions, probably dating back to the beginning of agriculture.

Yes, what do the scientists say? Nils Petter Lagerlöf of York University:

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies.

Oh oh. There's a clue. We just emerged from the agricultural age. So maybe there is something about agriculture...

We know all about the Romans and their slaves. They had Triumphs, parades in downtown Rome, to exhibit the slaves and plunder from their successful military -- shall we call them colonial imperialist? -- campaigns.

Don't forget the Vikings, bless their Scandinavian hearts. Sarah Pruitt:

Historical accounts make it clear that when they raided coastal towns from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, the Vikings took thousands of men, women and children captive, and held or sold them as slaves—or thralls, as they were called in Old Norse. According to one estimate, slaves might have comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of Viking-era Scandinavia.

Dublin, Ireland, was the principal slave market in Northwest Europe.

Then there were peasants that actually requested to become slaves. You can read about that in The Year 1000 by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East. As I understand the Venetian and the Genoese merchants were very much into that business.

But, writes Max Weber in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, slavery is problematical. Yes, the slave-owner enjoys "a more complete power of disposal over the worker than is the case with employment for wages.:" But there are costs (p.276):

1. Capital to invest in slaves is usually more expensive than "employment of free labor," including the "capital risk" of slave ownership.
2. Fluctuations in the price of slaves, and problems with recruitment of slaves.
3. If slaves can marry, then cost of women and children is borne by the slave-owner.
4. Difficulty in using slaves to operate "tools and apparatus" because of need for "high level of responsibility and... the operator's self-interest."
5. Impossibility of selection, hiring and firing.

Thus, writes Weber, slavery only works where slaves are cheap, with a well-supplied slave market, and put to work in slave plantations or "very simple industrial processes."

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the greatest slave experiments in all history, the slave state of the Soviet Union, 1917-89, and the slave state of Maoist China, 1949-79. And why did Maoist China take the capitalist road under Deng Xiaoping in 1979? Because slave socialism Did Not Pay. And why did the Soviet Union start "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev and collapse in 1989. I wonder why the noble Commies, devoted students of Marx and Engels, decided to end their experiment in slavery? I will tell you, it is because communism -- i.e., slavery -- Does Not Pay.

This is not to completely marginalize the noble activism of people like William Wilberforce, son of a wealthy British merchant in the Baltic trade, or the importance of the abolitionist movement that helped end the slave trade and thus make slaves a lot less cheap.

And it is not to hide the guilt of Venetian merchants that invented slave plantations on Cyprus to grow sugar cane. Or the Brits that made money growing slave sugar in the West Indies, or the Virginians that grew slave tobacco, or the Southerners that grew cotton with slave labor.

But if slavery Does Not Pay, then maybe we didn't need to have a civil war over it.

Yes, imagine what would have happened if the abolitionist activists and their mostly peaceful protests had cooled their jets? Suppose US had not decided to turn the question of slavery over to a civil war? Suppose our fearless leaders had just ended slavery by buying off the slave owners with 10 cents on the dollar for their slave investments as they did in Brazil and elsewhere. The Brits paid out £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the Slave Compensation Act of 1833 when Brit GDP was about £500 million. That's about 4 percent of GDP. So, in today's money that would cost the Brit taxpayer about £80 billion., Here in the US 4 percent of GDP is about $800 billion. I think that, in today's terms, with $2 trillion infrastructure programs it would be chump change. I bet it would have been cheaper than the Civil War.

Of course, in our day we have reintroduced the voluntary slavery of the Year 1000 where people can "surrender themselves into bondage." We call it "welfare."

Next up: We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.

So You Want a Revolution

On his Gray Mirror Substack, Curtis Yarvin is proposing that the only way forward is the singularity of a democratically elected president who, for the time being, acts as an absolute monarch.

And the Z-man is talking about the fantasy of a two-party political system.

In reality, America is a one party system. It has been since Gettysburg. The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes. The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.

But why? Why didn't Ronald Reagan cut spending? Why didn't the Supreme Court vote down the unconstitutional Obamacare, and why didn't the Republican Congress of 2017-18 repeal Obamacare?

The answer, of course, is Chantrill's Law, that you cannot repeal a government program. Why? Because every program is some grant of loot and plunder to somebody's political supporters.

Reform Social Security? Even though you might lay out how it will benefit everyone, present beneficiaries are going to suspect that there's a catch, and whatabout their checks.

Reform education? There are millions of folks working in the current system and any change threatens their paychecks. And they have unions breathing down the necks of the politicians.

And so on. This means there is no prospect of "change" until everything is so screwed up that people are ready to give up their share of the loot in return for the promise of a strong leader to lead them to safety.

The story of Hitler demonstrates this. In the years from 1871-1914 Germans were eager to become the equal -- or better -- of the nations of Europe, full of plans to expand the boundaries and create an empire. The disaster of 1918 was a bolt from the blue, utterly unthinkable. And then it got worse, with hyperinflation as the German government failed to balance its books. Then, of course, came the crash of 1929 and things got worse again. What do you expect the Germans, or any people, to do when disaster strikes like that? What any people does in this situation is: it elects a strong leader. It forgets all the privileges and carve-outs and benefits, because they are all Gone with the Wind already. They just want to be saved from disaster.

Will that disaster happen here? Really, my guess is that it won't. Again, Germany's experience is telling. The US has not lost a world war, and been utterly humiliated by the victors. We still have the world's default currency, and that won't change for a decade or two. The Democrats' vote-bank is likely to suffer in the years ahead as Hispanics seem to be moving into the middle class and voting like it.

But in the long run, I'd say, the current system, whether the dysfunctional Uniparty of the Zman's analysis or the dysfunctional oligarchy of Yarvin's analysis, cannot say No. It cannot say to the beneficiaries of the government's 36 percent share of GDP, sorry, but you are going to have to take a cut. It dare not. And so the system will collapse, and people will demand a strong leader.

In the short term we could well see a replay of the 1970s where the ineffectual "stagflation" of the Carter years led to the election of the "amiable dunce" Ronald Reagan. One thing about Ronald Reagan: he may not have reduced spending but he stopped it increasing. I suspect that the spending plans of the Biden administration, that are simply distribution of loot and plunder to lefty interest groups, will inspire a reaction similar to the Reagan revolution.

In the long run, I think we humans have an existential challenge. The story of all previous human government has been dividing and/or conquering and divvying up the loot among the supporters. I suggest that this age-old human culture has reached an end. In the old days "to the victor the spoils" actually worked for the victor -- even though it meant death and destruction to the loser.

But I think that in the industrial and post-industrial era, the victor of a military struggle or a political struggle hurts himself if he resorts to loot and plunder. That's because the real source of wealth today is not gold or oil or broad rich acres but the "intangible capital" inside peoples' heads. The victors get richer by putting the losers back to profitable work rather than plundering them of everything they own.

But I expect it will take a thousand years for humans to change society to reflect this truth.

The "Four Americas" and My Three Peoples

As usual, during the night, I awoke to realize something. Thanks, unconscious, you're a real pal!

I thought to myself: how does the Four Americas of The Atlantic's George Packer and his "How America Fractured into Four Parts" match up with my reductive Three Peoples theory? 

I first noticed, yesterday, that Packer's view of America was a "View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club," another world, separate from the corridors of power trod by our rulers. But now it's time to Be Like Ike, and make the problem bigger.

Let's lay out the Four Americas, as described by George Packer:

Free America. That's the old Buckley conservatism, the anti-Communists, and the libertarians.

Smart America. That's the high-cognitive-skill folks with advanced degrees that work as salaried employees in tech, the professions, journalism and the arts.

Real America. These folk believe that the real heart of America is the "common people that work with their hands," a "country of white people."

Just America. Young "people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world... They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists."

Before I bring the hammer down, let's just rehearse my Three Peoples.

People of the Creative Self "These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary."

People of the Responsible Self "Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, 'deplorables,' these are people... that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law."

People of the Subordinate Self "Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, these are people that do not experience 'agency.'" They are somebody's subordinate.

Let us re-describe the Four Americas in their relationship to the ruling class and the ruling class's political formula of fighting systemic racism. And let's figure out how they fit in my reductive Three Peoples system.

Free America. These are the defeated foes of the ruling class that once hoped at least to sit at the table with the educated ruling class. Don't worry about they, they're done. They are, to me, People of the Creative Self.

Smart America. These are people that have thrived under the bureaucratic rule of the educated ruling class. They are good at education and taking exams and converting their skills into salaried positions approved by the rulers. They eagerly display BLM signs in front of their houses and deplatform people that peddle in "disinformation." They are, of course, People of the Creative Self.

Real America. These are people that don't have the intellectual chops, the cognitive skills to make it in Smart America. They are commoners that do the ordinary work of society: technicians rather than techies. Racist-sexist-homophobes, every one. The are, obviously, People of the Responsible Self, often in danger of falling into the world of the Subordinate Self.

Just America. These are people that have been screwed by the political and educational system set up by their liberal educated-class parents. They are almost all white, but don't talk about that. They are would-be People of the Creative Self only they'll never make it. So they think of themselves as helpless victims, "fake" People of the Subordinate Self.

Golly Geewillikins. Godfrey Daniels. Mother of Pearl.

First, this Fractured America is mostly an tableau of upper-class America, the People of the Creative Self. In other words it is the actual ruling class viewing the next class down as representing the whole of America. Almost everyone in the Four Americas -- except the dastardly "deplorables" -- is a member or would-be member of the creative class.

Second, there is no real mention for the underclass, the Clients of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, the People of the Subordinate Self in my Three Peoples, except as a back-handed insults about "vodka in plastic cups" and "missing teeth from crystal meth." They sorta exist in Real America, in the lower section of Real America, in the 21st century collapse that "happened in the shadow of historic failures" like the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They get a fake entry as the wokey social-justice activists -- the "trained Marxists" of BLM -- but they don't really exist in George Packer's world. 

Third, you can see why Big Tech is down for the ruling class's program of beating up white deplorables. They are the fortunate sons of our educated ruling class, that happen to have the intellectual chops to thrive in the world that the educated class created over the last century. Why rock the boat?

Fourth, you can understand the lefty wokies and their rage. It's fiendish really. These young people, that have fake degrees in activism, that don't have the chops for the high-status salaried professions, are being drafted into the educated-class's activist army that is beating up ordinary Commoners because they are all systemic "white oppressors."

Here's what I think. 

The one vital need in every ruling class is to have a real understanding of the people that they rule. Otherwise that ruling class is not long for this world. If the rest of the ruling class thinks like George Packer, then they got a problem.

But really, it's not surprising that George Packer is dealing in fantasy and only thinking about people on the next step lower in the political and cultural hierarchy. For one thing, it is only those people that count, that are likely to mount a cultural or political challenge to our ruling class. Yep, no mention of the rising Hispanics, who are starting to vote Republican. No mention of the "oppressed peoples" of the underclass, the folks that have really taken it on the chin from the ruling class's race politics of the last half-century and the inflexible top-down culture of the administrative state. No mention of Asians, who are beginning to feel the whip of race-conscious government.

Could the omission of ordinary middle-class Hispanics and Asians from the Four Americas be a mistake? Or would it just complicate the agenda of the ruling class in the Biden years, so better not think about it?

Let's just say that if the clueless clots of Just America that "literally know nothing" -- in the words of Ben Rhodes -- ever got a clue, they might not continue as the useful idiots of the ruling class.

Might not, of course. I don't have much confidence in that. But you never know.

The View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club

Over at The Atlantic they know that something is wrong. Goldwater, Reagan, Bush, Trump. Really, darling, how can anyone stand it? 

So George Pasker has written about "How America Fractured into Four Parts:" Free America, Smart America, Real America, Just America.

Over at Free America we have the coalition of traditionalists, anti-Communists, and libertarians. Although traditionalism and anti-Communism have died out, libertarianism is still strong: people still read Ayn Rand. By the way, did you know that Barry Goldwater was a segregationist?

Then there is Smart America, the folks in the knowledge economy,

salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. 

They are smart and know how to play the credentials game, for themselves and their children.

Then there is Real America, whose members believe in the "idea that the authentic heart of democracy beats hardest in common people who work with their hands." Sarah Palin is the archetype, and Trump is the modern pied-piper. From time to time, Real America has been interracial, but that always dissolves because "white supremacy."

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way, it renders the Black working class invisible.

By the way, here is Packer's view of Trump.

Throughout his adult life, Trump has been hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. 

Really? I had no idea.  

Finally there is Just America. It sees through the lies of Free America and Smart America. It sees "the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled."

It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.

So, it stands to reason that the ruling class should back the truth-seekers of Just America and teach the rest of America a lesson. On with The Project!

What is clear to me is the "tell." There is no discussion of the ruling class as actors in this play. They are the Brit colonialists up at Shimla drinking their gin-and-tonics at the club, and worrying that "the natives are restless." The only time that "Progressives" are mentioned is when Packer states that

Progressives, shocked by the readiness of half the country to support this hateful man [Trump], seized on racism as the single cause and set out to disprove every alternative.

Oh really! I had no idea! That our ruling class used "racism" as a club to beat back the monstrous challenge to their divine right to rule.

But this was too simplistic, says Packer. "Racism is such an irreducible evil" that it allowed Progressives to ignore the "grievances of their compatriots down in the lowlands" etc.

See what is going on here? A little ideological leak from Mt. Olympus, giving us peasants a brief look at what our rulers are really thinking. Hey, what's a ruler to do when the peasants start grumbling?

Now I interpret Packer's Four Americas as four reactions to a century of Progressive rule by the educated ruling class.

I'd say that Free America is a principled objection to the top-down administrative state with its programs-for-all and its regulatory ethos, both from a traditional humans-as-social-animals perspective and from a markets perspective.

I'd say that Smart America is people doing what they are told: get an education, get a credential, and take your place in the ordered hierarchy that the rulers have designed for you. It works pretty well for the cognitive elite.

I'd say that Real America is people that have fallen out of the system, the grand plan of the Olympian progressive gods, and they look to an older America for inspiration.

I'd say that Just America is people that know that something is wrong, but being creatures of the system, have no ideological tools to critique the society that progressives have created and grown except the lefty rubbish that they have been carefully taught. They want more of the same, the sweeties, because that's all they know.

This is the point at which I like to bring up my chart of government spending since 1900.

I just suggest to all the world that when you look at government spending growing from 7 percent of GDP to the present 35ish percent (leaving out the various peaks responding to wars and crises) on all kinds of top-down programs you are bound to say to yourself: Hmm, I'll bet that at least half of that growth is a bad idea that doesn't make America a juster or more prosperous society, but just Makes Things Worse.

It doesn't take genius or conspiracy theory to come to this notion. Anyone that has lived in the world knows that there are lots of good ideas abroad in the world, but not so many good ideas that actually work.

God only knows what it is going to take to fix America, especially when we see the ruling class spinning such fanciful tales to itself.