The Four Stages of Women in Modernity

So. Whither women now? Mary Harrington at UnHerd proposes a four-chapter story of women in the last couple of centuries, because now "The sexual revolution has killed feminism."

Chapter One is women on the farm at the beginning of the 19th century.

The typical American matron was a disciplined, skilled, devout individual who worked alongside her husband in a productive household... The patriarchal legal system of ‘coverture’, which subsumed her legal personhood and property into that of her husband, rendered her technically a subordinate class of citizen. It also served to shield her from market pressures.

Chapter Two is women in the industrial city. 

In the new private household, the bourgeois woman was more economically dependent than her agrarian grandmother. Her main activities were the education of children, the management of servants and the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. She may have been more materially comfortable. But this woman had in many respects less agency than her foremothers.

But was this new situation a shelter from the competitive frenzy in the industrial city or a monstrous and patriarchal injustice? Enter the first stage of feminism demanding equal property rights and right to vote.

Chapter Three is post World War II.

Labour-saving devices and booming consumerism have shifted society once again... And for bourgeois twentieth-century housewives, labour-saving devices combined with an increasingly atomised, individualistic social world to trigger a renewed search for agency, this time within the workplace.

Chapter Four is the Sexual Revolution, that imposed "a liberal male-centric understanding of what a person is: a radically separate individual... [and imposed] the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies."

For women to be human on this model, we must have total ownership over all these aspects of our bodies that differ from those of males. Even a conflict between total autonomy and an unborn human life must be resolved for autonomy.

But, she says, "It’s a worldview that believes human freedom necessitates radical unmooring from the givens of our bodies."

So now what? Back to the Future.

What we need to face this challenge is not more freedom. It’s more and better obligations...

To respond, first and foremost we must stop treating the question of family as a women’s issue. It’s a human one. And we need to accept that men and women are equal in dignity and personhood but different in physiology. 

Well, yes. And also different in psychology. In that men are fighters and women are nurturers; that men must go out and provide while women are dealing with the disability of childbearing and the dependent years of children. And the need for children to grow up with a mother and a father, their mother and their father.

And so on.

Which means that all the conceits and the fantasies of the last century or so are heading for the wood-chipper. Item One would be that there is no such thing as "The Independent Woman" of Simone de Beauvoir. Or, for that matter the free-ranging male taking his pleasures where he may.

Because underneath all the sound and fury of patriarchs and freedom from unwanted pregnancy and oppressive sexual mores there is the simple fact of human existence. Like all living things, the only really important thing is to have children and grow them to maturity.

Everything else is just fantasy.

And, by the way, there are also the tens of millions of women who are not in the educated gentry class and whose lives have been wrecked by the fashions and the fads of gentry women and gentry men.

But that is another story.

The Spendapaloosa and the Fools Promoting It

Because my very own congresscritter Pramila Jayapal is Chair-something-or-other of the House Progressive Caucus I feel I have some responsibility for the utter folly of the current spendapalooza that the Democrats are trying to pass in Congress.

By the way, do you think that, having failed to pass the House this week, the spendapalooza will pass next week after the results of the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey?

Here is helpless oppressed peoples Jayapal talking about caste back in the day:

And so I remember hearing about caste through that, and the Nayars were always considered, they were the advisors to the king on financial affairs and business affairs. And so we weren't in the top two...

OK, so she isn't a priestly Brahmin; she isn't a warrior Kshatriya, but hey, we're Number Three: valuable advisors to kings and potentates! Enjoying the benefits of systemic caste-ism for a couple thousand years! And we certainly aren't those eeeuw Dalits. Actually, I get it. Back in the day, we now know, you high-caste chapettes had a good reason to want to avoid pollution from the shit-carriers. Because germs!

Listen, I'm just a low-caste nobody; my grandfathers were low-caste small businessmen, not the noble Stiltstockings advising kings and potentates in the Circumlocution Office. I have to admit it: my ancestors were not quite out of the top drawer, old chap. One great-grandfather was a dairyman, and another was a "maltster," a guy making sugar from grain. 

So I don't know nuttin'. But I don't get what genius decided that with a 50-50 Senate and a 222-213 House that he/she/xir had a mandate to crank the welfare state into the stratosphere.

I mean I guess why I understand why the girls think that, Jayapal, AOC, Omar, Tlaib. And hey, there's about 100 of these folks in the Progressive Caucus. And I suppose if they spend their whole days talking to each other they might not, as Susan Sowerby says in The Secret Garden, have figured out that they don't get the whole orange.

But whatabout the adults in the room? Nancy! I'm talking to you, girl!

Look, I don't suppose we can expect our noble elected officials to remember what went down in the 70s, how the glorious promise of Keynesian economics, that you should spend your way out of anything, didn't quite work out. But just about everyone was around in 2009 in the aftermath of the 2008 Housing Credit Crisis, and rather notably it was obvious that the money spent on Democratic supporters by the Obama administration didn't really pan out.

I'd say the lesson of the Obama years is that it set us up for Trump. So what's the lesson from that, dear progressives? Maybe to cool your jets and slow down a bit? Else maybe the American people will put you chaps out of power for a generation?

But, of course, The Girls don't understand that. The Girls -- Jayapal, AOC, Omar, Tlaib and Co. -- only know they have a moral imperative to bend the arc of history towards justice, because that's what they have been carefully taught in schools and the whole secular religious activism culture ever since they were little babies.

OK. I'll stop ranting.

Fact is, I believe, we are soon going to enter a new age in which the best and brightest will understand that using government, the agent of blunt force and violence, is not really the right tool to use in the exquisite work of negotiating the social issues of humans living in society.

Or, let's put it more crudely. How do we humans help the helpless in our society without using force? Force is one thing when you are dealing with Nazis or robbers or frauds. But educating children? By force? Caring for the elderly? By force? Helping economic dropouts? With government handouts?

There's got to be a better way for humans to look after the people that need looking after than by appointing the guys that used to be the brave warriors defending against Vikings and Huns and Mongols to do the job.

Thank you for asking. Because I do know what we need to do. We need to engage the women's Culture of Kindness and its doppelganger, the women's Culture of Complaint, in this task. That's what women are good at. And they should be doing that, using their natural instincts to care and nurture -- and also name and shame -- instead of wrecking corporate HR and imagining in the Progressive Caucus that the answer to all our problems is free college and more money for day-care workers -- by force. Just so mothers can go out to work and have careers.

How's that women-going-out-and-having-careers-just-like-men working out, cupcake?

Liberals Learn the Three Step Polka

Yes, our liberal friends are in the middle of a course at Arthur Murray dance studio, and they are learning the Three Step Political Polka. Only they have No Idea what they are getting themselves into, bless their hearts.

You know what the first step was. Right Foot Forward, with Donald Trump.

But Trump! How could this be? How could a right-wing racist-sexist-homophobe be elected President of the United States that had elected a First Black President?

The point is that our liberal friends have No Idea what their politics has done to ordinary white middle-class Americans over the last 50 years. You can see the No Idea in the #WeBelieve yard-signs that nice liberal ladies started putting in their front yards in the wake of the Trump victory. The yard-signs generally feature the entire universe of self-congratulating liberal conceits:

Black Lives Matter / Women's Rights are Human Rights / No Human is Illegal
Science is Real / Love is Love / Kindness is Everything

The funny thing is that the nice liberal ladies in question have No Idea that the self-congratulating conceit in all these slogans is exactly why Trump won in 2016. Because on the receiving end of the politics behind the slogans ordinary white middle-class Americans get screwed.

But not nice liberal ladies, of course. They will do fine.

The second step was Full Left Lunge, with the far-left agenda of President Biden.

Look, I get it. When the Democratic power brokers decided to stop Bernie in the 2020 primary season there was obviously a deal to be made. The Biden folks had to promise Bernie to push his Commie agenda. They had to offer Peter Buttigieg a cabinet post. And every liberal interest group had to have its agenda item in the multi-trillion dollar loot and plunder package. And they had to go full climate change and full systemic racism. Because that was the deal.

But just about every one of the ideas on the left are ideas that are going to hammer the economy. And it ain't gonna be pretty. Actually, just about every idea the left ever had hammers the economy and hurts the lives of ordinary people. 

But we will see, over the next year:

as the vaccination narrative falls apart with the ineffectiveness of the vaccines and the cruelty of vaccine mandates

as the green agenda falls apart with skyrocketing energy prices and electric power blackouts

as the CRT agenda falls apart with angry parents blowing up the government school racket

as the war on policing yields increased violence in liberal cities

as the homeless crisis metastasizes into a return of the diseases of the pre-sanitation age like cholera and typhoid...

We will see our liberal friends having to deal with the fact that their Democratic Party has led them into the wilderness. They won't desert the party. Not yet. They will just be collapsing in confusion and reaching for the old reliable scapegoats of race and the rich and the corporations. And guns, and God, and whatever else can distract them from facing the truth.

What about the third step? That will be the Two Way Splits, with all our liberal friends sitting on the floor in blank stupor, when even nice liberal ladies with their #WeBelieve signs realize that "Houston We Have a Problem."

No doubt it will be in the wake of a Republican win in 2024 with a president and both Houses of Congress with a mandate for, as liberals like to say, Real Change.

Honestly, I don't know how our liberal friends will react to that. After all, when you are of a certain age, you really don't want to try crazy stuff like doing the splits on the dance floor. And the point is that if you have been getting your news and politics from the usual suspects in the mainstream media you have been carefully taught that everything is fine, our guys are the good guys, and anyone who disagrees is a racist-sexist-homophobe. So when the world stops tracking with the world view of the mainstream media, and there is that famous glitch in the Matrix, most of our liberal friends are going to be paralyzed with fear and loathing.

And when that happens there is no telling what they will do next.

"Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste"

We all remember our pal Rahm Emanuel and his famous line in 2008:

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

Guess what: Rahm wasn't the first guy to come up with that line. Winston Churchill said "Never let a good crisis go to waste" towards the end of World War II.

And we are seeing the same thing with the COVID crisis. Pile on every imaginable new spending program you can think of, AOC and Bernie. There'll never be a better time than right now.

But really, it was ever thus. Humans don't like to get radical unless there's a serious crisis. Indeed, we know from hurricanes and the Cajun Navy that humans, in a way, love to drop everything and work together when the world is falling apart.

So, you Friends of Brandon, how about thinking about what to do to take advantage of the metastasizing crisis in the glorious sunshine of the Biden administration?

Although I hate and fear what is coming down the pike, in terms of inflation, the Fed having to step on the brakes -- if it does! -- unemployment, peoples' lives disrupted, let us not forget that the glorious Reagan years were impossible without the abject failure of the Carter years.

Hey, remember? For a few years our Democratic friends would say stuff like: "Liberal? Who me? No, no. Nobody here but us New Democrats and moderates."

Incidentally, that's why liberals changed back from liberals to progressives. For the same reason they switched in the 1920s from progressives to liberals. In the 1920s, after the glorious Wilson years, the progressives decided a name change was in order. And so, after the Sixties and Seventies, liberals decided n their turn that a name change was needed.

But what should we be doing "that you could not do before?" and ram down the throats of the wokey fools and knaves of our present crisis? Of course, I have my dream list, such as phasing Social Security into a genuine retirement savings program featuring Fidelity and Vanguard.

My Social Security reform would allow people to have the option of earmarking some of their FICA taxes for their own savings program. The amount would rise over time so that, in a generation, people could earmark up to 50 percent of FICA taxes to their own retirement program.

Medicare reform? You know, I don't think the ladies would let us. Healthcare is all-in-all to the fair sex.

Education? You know, I think this is the big opportunity this time around. The absurd Loudon Country shenanigans and the ridiculous Biden initiative that siccs the FBI on eevil violent extremist parents may really have upset the suburban moms of the world. We could have a window of opportunity where we can increase school choice: partly because of the transgender frou-fra, and partly from the COVID experience when the teachers decided, like Bartleby, that they would rather not, and moms all over experimented with home-school, micro-schools, and learning pods. Oh, and did you know that black moms are also pro-school choice?

Also, I think, coming up, there is a good chance that with gas prices going through the roof we will get a chance to lance the boil of green energy, at least for a while.

And whatabout putting the shiv into universities? I think it should be something to do with the size of the bureaucracy and the size of the endowment with a complicated factor that says that any university with a big administration and/or endowment would be forced to offer scholarships and bursaries to victims of cancel culture.

Then there is social media. I don't have a clue what we can do, but I'm sure the experts can come up with something.

Then, I think it is time we started to tax activist groups. They should be regarded as profit-making businesses and treated as such. There should be something to penalize non-profits that just spend all their money on activism instead of actually giving money to widows and orphans.

But the main thing is: Wouldn't it be Fun!

Imagine the screams and the cries of racism! Imagine the rage of George Soros and the Tides Foundation. Imagine the stupidities that Brian Stelter and his Reliable Sources would blather on about. Imagine the fancy dresses that AOC would wear to show how hip she is, still.

I think that the important prequel to all this will be in the 2023-24 time frame, assuming that the midterm results in a GOP, er, let's call it a Brandon Congress.

Yes. If I were the Speaker in 2023 I'd start and end every media availability with a "Let's Go Brandon." And I think that when President Biden is announced for the State of the Union speech by the House Sergeant-at-Arms he should say: "Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States." And then the Speaker should say: "Let's Go Brandon."

Hey, if Nancy Pelosi has the time to sit in a SOTU and shred the president's speech, I'd say that the next Speaker of the House of Representatives should wear a Let's Go Brandon face mask.

Or, in response to the women members that all dress in white for the SOTU, maybe all the Republicans should wear Let's Go Brandon suit jackets.

OK. That s enough for now. We don't want things to get out of hand.

No! The State Can't Manage Anything

My guy Curtis Yarvin has a curious piece on the economics of John Ruskin, the Victorian writer. He was, like George Bernard Shaw and Vladimir Lenin, a socialist. So he thinks that it's the job of the government to make sure that everyone has a job and doesn't starve. In other words, the government has an interest in making sure that we all wive and thrive.

Hey, let's face it, says Yarvin,

Since the people are the property of the regime, the people are the assets of the regime. The regime’s incentive is therefore to maintain and improve this human capital.

But is this really how governments act in real life? I don't think so. I think that governments treat their people not as an asset to be carefully managed and tended but as an army to be used in the rulers' glorious fight to win the future. The fight may be a war against the country next door, or it may be to fight climate change. But a ruling class never thinks of itself as merely a night watchman, keeping the streets safe at night. On the contrary, the last thing it wants is for everyone to be nicely tucked up in bed at night. What would be the point?

Yarvin, in his notion of monarchy as the preferred mode of governance, has a point. A monarchy is more likely to treat its people as an asset to be nurtured than as subject people to be looted to reward his supporters.

But even a monarch is not to be trusted with the peoples' welfare. Because his No.1 priority is Number One: himself, the monarch, and his power project. And in his power project the people are just an asset to be exploited for the greater glory of the monarchy, not an asset to be husbanded and improved.

Whether you are talking about a medieval noble arguing with the neighboring nobles about who really inherits some vital dukedom, or nationalist leaders trying to get their nation a place in the sun or American presidents winning glorious world wars, or the present world leaders beating back the horror of climate change, the government is not interested in the wealth and the happiness of the people. It is thinking of the arc of history, whether it bends to national glory or global justice.

Look at the current situation in the United States. The last thing that the present government is thinking about is to "maintain and improve [its] human capital." Instead it is passionately engaged upon expanding the welfare state so that practically every need of its people is the responsibility of some government bureaucracy: so it is going to succeed where a century of bureaucratic administration has failed?

Then the government is passionately engaged upon a total transformation of the energy economy, because climate change. Does anyone really think that this will lead to anything but embarrassment and disaster?

The fact is that, other than making war, governments are absolutely clueless. They know nothing about how to manage the present, let alone prepare for the future.

And if there is one thing we know about the future is that we know nothing about the future. So, any government that makes commitments about the future, whether in workers' wages or workers' rights or workers' skills, it is going to mess it all up. The government cannot make guarantees about incomes or pensions or the future. Because the only thing we know about the future is that it will be a lot different from what we figured.

Yarvin quotes a long paragraph from Ruskin on the situation of domestic servants in a Victorian household, where he argues that the best work is done out of affection -- for the master, presumably.

And so it is, maybe. Until things go south. Guess what happens when things go south for the Victorian gentleman? He closes his house in "town" and sends his domestic servants on their way, with a "reference" attesting to their competence and good will. And when things go south in today's economy and the company can't afford to pay its wages? The company tries to lower wages and the workers probably go on strike. Like that's going to help!

I know. Let's analyze things for the point of view of my reductive Three Peoples theory: Subordinates, Responsibles, and Creatives.

If you are a Subordinate, then you just sit there in your wage-labor job, trusting that you will have that job in the future -- for the next forty years? Really? Remind me what happened to the unionized US auto workers.

If you are a Responsible then you work the best you can, but you know that nothing is forever, so you prepare for a change in the economic weather, figuring to keep your skills up to date, and switching jobs if it looks like the management at your employer is just coasting. But you know that, sooner or later, things will go south and you will have to make the best of it.

If you are a Creative, you will know that the future belongs to those that are creative and have a strategic mind, but even then chances are that most of your brilliant ideas won't work out. So you are always half-prepared to change direction and try something new.

The future belongs to those who...

Yes, what exactly? To those who believe? To those who show up? To those who prepare?

Or just to those who get lucky? Or a combination of the above?

I would say that the key is the spirit of 2 Corinthians, about "things seen" and "things unseen." Government and politics are things seen. But life and instinct and the social nature of humans and the human Lebenswelt are the unseen things that we usually don't "notice."

In my view the whole of the modern miracle of prosperity and science and the market economy are emergent phenomena about which we know a lot less than we imagine.

The only thing I am certain about is that government and politics are probably the best way to smash it all up.

Which Enemy is Best?

Government and politics are all about enemies and war. Oh, and the necessary loot and plunder to reward the victorious soldiers and/or voters.

But which enemy? That, it seems to me, is the critical question. Here are a few of my maxims to clear the underbrush.

Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external or internal enemy — in the present emergency.

There is no politics without an enemy. — Curtis Yarvin

Four political strategies: Unite the country against a small country for a quick win; unite the country against a big country for a world war; unite half the country against the other half for a civil war; unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.

Of course, Yarvin's maxim comes straight from our pal Nazi Carl Schmitt. I have thoughtfully summarized his book The Concept of the Political for your convenience. Schmitt says that the "specific political distinction... is the distinction between friend and enemy."

On my "four political strategies" above you can see that the wise and thoughtful political leader will choose war against a small country, or uniting the country against a small minority, in his war for political supremacy.

That, it hardly needs be said, is what Literally Hitler did in Germany in 1920-33. The National Socialist German Workers Party was clearly attempting to cover as many bases as possible in the "friends" department. And the "enemy?" It was the small minority, the Jews.

Earth to aspiring politicians: Do Not Mess with the Jews. Just sayin'.

But obviously, the rule still applies. The best way to unite a political entity is to unite it against a small minority. But if it can't be the Jews, then who?

Back in Marx's time it made sense to unite the workers against the capitalists. The workers were many and the capitalists were few. Even the "bourgeoisie" was relatively small, compared to the masses coming off the farm and into the factories. Read this German Commie writing of his years of street fighting in Germany in the 1920s. He is a Richard Krebs, quoted in The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans.

I was proud to be a worker and I despised the bourgeois... Policemen were enemies. God was a lie... Every employer was a hyena in human form[.] (p.239)

Hmm. Maybe now we understand why our lefty friends have taken out after the police in recent years. When you think about it, it makes sense. It is better to get young blacks riled up against the police than against the whole of white society. Because the police are a small minority.

Of course, George Wallace in the 1960s had a line about "pointy-headed intellectuals" and Spiro Agnew in the 1970s had a line about "nattering nabobs of negativism." And Donald Trump had a line about the "swamp." These political practitioners are all taking out after a small minority.

Now our liberal friends have succeeded in making it toxic to stigmatize many of our small minorities in the United States, from LBGT to Muslims. They prefer to stigmatize the small minority of "far-right" conspiracists. 

But then, of course, their Ally narrative stigmatizes "white oppressors." I suppose the idea is that these "white oppressors" are some small minority way up there in the Bohemian Grove or some such. But in practice it means stigmatizing all whites as beneficiaries of "white supremacy." I wonder if this is a good idea, strategically. Personally, I think that the anti-white ideology of white liberals and lefties will one day bite them back.

Note my maxim about "unite half the country against the other half for a civil war." It is the Ally narrative that sets up the "white oppressors" -- half the country -- as the enemy. And that is why we have people talking about a "cold civil war."

I still don't know what the cunning politician should do to rally the whole American nation against a small minority enemy. But then I'm not a politician: what do I know.

Why Did Americans Compromise on Slavery in 1787?

At American Greatness Sean Ross Callaghan notes that in 1787 northern abolitionists managed to compromise with southern slaveholders to write and ratify the US Constitution. But here we are in 2021 and it seems we can't compromise on anything.

How many would-be abortions is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) willing to stop in exchange for shored-up Medicare and Social Security or an expanded child-care subsidy? For how long is Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) willing to postpone pushing for a federal ban on abortion in exchange for better-controlled immigration and narrower labor offshoring? 

Yes, why don't we compromise today when the Americans of old were able to do so? Well here's one reason: Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. La Wik.

A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794. 

Now you see what Bismarck meant by his statement that "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." Good old God. He made sure that we had the Constitution under lock and key before He let Eli Whitney invent the cotton gin and all of a sudden make plantation slavery a lot more profitable. And my nickel says that a cotton gin in 1784 would have made Southrons a lot less inclined to compromise in 1787.

Plus, I am sure that back in 1787 that all Americans were joined in a common fear of the Brits who might decide to try again to teach the rebels a lesson. Which they did in the war of 1812.

Today, we don't really fear foreign invaders. And we haven't had much of a worry since the good old days of the Cold War and nuclear bombers ready to take off at a moment's notice. Oh, for sure, we were scared for a couple of minutes after 9/11 and our leaders got into a jolly old war in the Middle East to show the rag-heads who was boss.

Plus our noble liberal leaders are much more concerned about the United States stepping on some helpless victim nation than worrying about, say, the terrible threat of Russia or China.

Oh, sorry, our fearless leaders were all worked up about Russia, Russia for a few months when it was helpful to discredit Donald Trump. My bad.

But Hoo Boy, were they mad when President Trump started talking about the Chinese Flu!

No, the absence of foreign threats means that for people that believe in politics, the enemy must be at home.

Remember Nazi Carl Schmitt and his dictum that politics is based on the friend/enemy distinction? If you are going to have politics you are going to have friends and enemies. If there are no foreign enemies then there must be domestic enemies. And, of course, the more passionate you are about your politics the more you are going to need those enemies.

Now, of course the whole point of elections is to encourage political diehards to get all worked up in the fight of the campaign and then cool their jets once the election is over. There is a certain calming effect, also, when you lose 60-40. But closely fought election and elections with disputed results tend to bring out the enemy hunter in all of us. Liberals were mad as hell when Bush won narrowly in 2000, and the liberal media was all over the rigged election of 2016.

So I don't think the current Wokeness era and its doppelganger the populist-nationalist era is going to be resolved any time soon.

Maybe President Xi will frighten us all to death and get us all to unite. But I'm not sure that I'd like that kind of a unity too much. I really don't want a repeat of President Wilson sending the doughboys off to France or FDR sending the GIs off all over the world. World wars were really cool for the ruling class, but I'm not sure I want a repeat. (And no, WWII was not all about saving the Jews. Not until after the war).

So, I'm afraid that we are caught in the present horrible divisions for a while. My hope is that our liberal friends will overreach themselves so much that the vast majority of good Americans recoil in distaste. But you never know.