The Border Between Criminal and Immoral

What is the difference between a criminal act and an immoral act?

In other words, where do we draw the line between applying government violence and applying moral censure?

On the question of discrimination on the grounds of race?

I raise this because an acquaintance recently brought up the study of hiring managers discriminating on the basis of racial clues in the resumés of job applicants. Here's one such study on the Harvard Business School website: "Minorities Who 'Whiten' Job Resumes Get More Interviews."

I think that "all good people" agree that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of race in this manner, even if it is unconscious. And that such people should be frowned upon, and even named, shamed, and shunned.

But should they be sued by the local human rights commission? And pay a fine?

I would say that, e.g., universities that have racial quotas and that deliberately set up selection criteria to disadvantage east Asians that would otherwise completely dominate the student body should be criminally prosecuted for racial discrimination and their Heads of Diversity and Heads of Enrollment and University President should be jailed in Washington DC in conditions approximating the conditions of the notorious armed insurrectionists of January 6.

But I would say that hiring managers that inadvertently prefer "whitened" resumes are should not be imprisoned in durance vile like the J6 rioters. But no doubt they should have scarlet letters on their chests.

The problem here is that our lefty friends have tended, over the last century or so, have tended to view the struggle for justice as a purely political matter. This was illuminated for me today reading "The Turn" by Liel Leibowitz at The Tablet. She used to be an ordinary lefty.

I felt secure in my politics. Truth and justice, I believed, leaned leftward. If you were some version of a decent human being, you cared about those less fortunate than you, which meant that you supported a whole host of measures designed to even the playing field a little.

OK, there was Joseph Stalin, but what a glorious feeling: socialist youth, marches with Palestinians, PhD, parties on the Upper West Side with the literati.

But then maybe you are concerned about free speech, about lockdowns and "the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society." Oh and Israel. And your friends might disown you if you disagreed with them.

I still remember how confusing and painful it felt to know that my beliefs—beliefs, mind you, that, until very recently, were so obvious and banal and widely held on the left that they were hardly considered beliefs at all—now labeled me an outcast.

Notice that Leibowitz's entire piece is written in the language of feelings and morality: "you supported a whole hosts of measures designed to even the playing field a little."

As the guy up the street up the hill on swank Palatine Av. says on his yard-sign: "equality never hurt anyone."

There is, in the minds of such people, no comprehension of my banal maxims:

Government is force.

There is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

There is no politics without an enemy.

Hey kids. How about we get together and think up a way to fight poverty without force, i.e., without government?

How do yo get through to nice Jewish girl PhDs that when you use government for any reason you are using force. And that is not good.

And I would say that, before we use force, we should exhausts all other possibilities.

There is another problem, I think. And that is that women, in the community of women, do not use force. They use a form of moral persuasion based on the fact that women need to be seen by other women as "nice." They do not have direct confrontations with women that disagree with them. It is all done indirectly.

Thus it is easy for women to miss the fact that, when things are decided in government, it is not the same as the ladies in the neighborhood deciding to do something. Because when government decides to do something its word is law, and it obtains the funds for its program by force.

It's only when you find yourself on the wrong side of "the whole host of measures" that you get your "come to Jesus moment."

And that's when it starts to dawn on you that you are being forced to pay for government programs that Make Things Worse. Even though nice Jewish girl PhDs only just realized this yesterday.

So, what do we do? Well, for a start we can think about Michael Novak and his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism where he proposes what I call a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. When you combine them together you get totalitarianism.

Using Nazi Carl Schmitt's analysis, we could say that

The moral/cultural is the good and evil distinction; its method is judgement.

The economic is the profit and loss distinction; its method is competition.

The political is the friend and enemy distinction; its method is conflict and war.

Now I would say that we should reduce the political as much as possible but no further, because in the political anyone that disagrees with you is an enemy.

And if you don't get that then I think you have a problem.

For the great questions of politics and morality come down to the border: what do we do by force, and what do we do by persuasion?

The Usual Ruling Class Lies

Back in the day I read Winston Churchill's The Second World War from cover to cover. He didn't actually say that "history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." But, certainly, by writing the most well-known history of WWII he didn't do himself any harm.

And, for people like myself that have read his history, his narrative necessarily colors what we understand about the world's biggest and deadliest war.

But over the years I have come to distrust more and more the ruling-class narratives of the past. That's because I have also come to believe that the actions of nearly all governments are a story of fumbling incompetence and bad faith. Thus I tend to disbelieve all histories that present the past as a glorious victory against evil forces.

I do not say this in a spirit of spite, but from my understanding of the nature of government, and the impossible situation of most governments most of the time.

The only warrant for government action is existential peril, such as an invasion across the border, or an armed insurrection of a disaffected sector of the population. Unfortunately for would-be national heroes the incidence of such perils is very small, so most would-be national heroes have to make it up. Otherwise they are just footnotes to history.

And when a national hero does get to rescue his nation it is never a simple and glorious tale of the march to victory but a catalog of errors. That is how all human action works. You think you have a fantastic idea that will make your fortune. But usually the idea is seriously flawed, and it is only by overcoming a succession of mistakes and errors that you win through to fame and riches and the love of beautiful women.

So I regard World War I as a complete bungle. What in the world was the point of Germany and France going to war, except the memories of the Franco-Prussian War of the previous generation and the Napoleonic War of a hundred years before?

What in the world did President Wilson mean by getting the US involved in WWI? How about letting the Brits and the Krauts and the Frogs battle each other to exhaustion?

What in the world did President Wilson think he was doing by imposing a humiliating peace on defeated Germany?

What on earth did the progressives in the US and the Fabian socialists in Britain think they were doing in building a gigantic entitlement state in which their peoples were enserfed to a huge government that gave millions of jobs to the educated class and subordinate benefits to the lower orders?

What did liberals think they were doing when they implemented reverse racism on the American people after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s? Wouldn't that be switching from the anti-black racism of the Jim Crow era to an anti-white racism that continues to this day?

What was going on when the Global Cooling narrative of the 1970s switched to Global Warming in the 1980s?

And don't get me started on the War on Terror.

My conceit is to assume incompetents at work, stitching together some threadbare justification for a new government initiative and increased government power. And then writing deceitful narratives about it all when the glorious future doesn't quite live up to the hype.

Today I have been reading Ron Unz's review of Robert F. Kennedy's The Real Anthony Fauci that accuses Fauci of pushing a false narrative that the HIV virus was the cause of AIDS deaths, and then pushing the AZT vaccine as a cure to HIV-caused AIDS when in fact AZT was a real killer. On Kennedy's narrative Dr. Fauci silenced voices that opposed his narrative and policy and denied them research funding and killed their careers. And this is the guy in charge of the fight against COVID.

My point is that I would expect this. We have a guy of moderate accomplishments but with a knack for using government power against people resisting the narrative. So did he screw up the AIDS fight? Good question. Is he screwing up the COVID fight? Who knows? More research is needed.

But be sure that there will be an official narrative about how the political principals were heroes fighting to save us from existential perils, and that any objection is nothing more than conspiracy theory.

Unless the current regime is replaced by a new regime and the history dictated by the new regime naturally represents the old regime as losers and fools and knaves and the new regime as glorious heroes that have saved America from a fate worse than death.

The Rich Paid at the Office

On American Greatness and elsewhere, Salena Zito wonders why The Rich (or C-suite as she calls it) are not as community minded as in olden times. Such as when Mark Twain lived in Hannibal, Missouri.

Zito tells the story of John Garth, playmate and school friend of Samuel Clemens, how he went to New York City.

Garth and his wife Helen, also a childhood friend [of Clemens], had briefly moved to New York City, where he prospered in the banking, brokerage, and manufacturing industries[.]

Then they returned to Hannibal, built a fancy house, and devoted themselves to good works.

They provided jobs, donated to worthy causes such as the Home for the Friendless, and attended church shoulder to shoulder with the people in the community. And when Garth died, his wife donated $25,000 for a stand-alone library to be built in the center of town.

But today's rich don't do that. Imagine Jeff Bezos doing that. According to Steve McMahon, "Washington-based public affairs professional and co-founder of Purple Strategies",

those who run the corporations that employ millions and dominate the culture have shed their connection with both their employees and their customers. 

And who among us, who live in America's super ZIPs, knows or cares about the ordinary middle class?

Back in the day, Zito wants us to think, the rich and successful did not look down upon the ordinary.

That cannot be said about today’s cultural curators in our C-suites of legacy media, corporations, education, bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, who have decided that those who live outside of their super ZIP codes deserve nothing less than a daily onslaught of vigorous attacks on their values and way of life. 

So what has changed?

I'd say it is the over / under culture of our present ruling class.

Our present ruling class experiences itself not as the top of a natural cultural and political hierarchy, but as noble activists fighting for the rights of the oppressed against the oppressors.

Yes, you may ask, what "oppressed" and which "oppressors?" Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked me that.

The difference is clear in the whole Black Lives Matter frenzy of 2020.

Back in the day, the kid that made it big in the big city came back to the town of his birth, built a fancy house, and did what was expected of him. He built libraries, helped the poor, and was ready to lend a hand.

Today, the well-educated resident of a gentrified neighborhood puts up a BLM sign and the billionaires put up millions to support left-wing activism.

And in Washington DC our ruling class erects museums celebrating their support of helpless victims, as I write today in The American Thinker in "Let's Build a National White Trash Museum. Not." 

What is the point of the National Museum of African American Culture and History? It's obvious. It is to celebrate how advanced and anti-racist our current ruling class is, and how its support for the oppressed former slaves is just about the most wonderful thing in history. The same with the Holocaust Museum. There was no Jewish Holocaust in the United States. But the US ruling class wants you to know that it attacked Nazi Germany and ground it into dust for the mass murder of Jews. And the same with the National Museum of the American Indian. The museum does nothing for the conquered and decimated tribes of North America. But it certainly puts our modern ruling class in a good light.

Do you see the point? The modern elite is all about virtue-signaling its magnificence, and nothing about actually helping people in their communities.

Put it this way. Back in the day, the ruling class built magnificent palaces to demonstrate its magnificence. Today's ruling class builds virtue-signaling museums to demonstrate its magnificence.

And having paid for the museums, and made contributions to left-wing activist causes, and paid its taxes, and contributed to politicians, our modern overclass figures it has made its contribution to society. That it already paid at the office, thank you.

Hey, who can blame them?

But I dream of a better America. 

But we won't get it while the Department of Good Works is a government department spending north of 35 percent of GDP per year.

Facing Down the Religion of Leftism

One of the standard conservative narratives is that conservatives are influenced by reality and objective truth whereas lefties are simply religious believers that will say and do anything to advance their sacred cause.

Actually, I think that the ZMan puts out a straw-man when he writes that "bourgeois objectivism" is the problem,

the assumption that all social problems have a correct set of answers and the point of politics is to discover those solutions.

I think that is more the assumption of our educated ruling class, who themselves are bullied about by the lefty crazies.

So I would analyze our situation as this:

There are lefty crazies, who want to transform the world with politics elevated to a kind of religion.

There are Inner Party educated-class liberals, who believe themselves to be the only qualified people to direct the political affairs of the nation.

There are Outer Party conservatives that believe in ruling with a light touch, but truckle to the Inner Party Pooh Bahs.

All the above sectors belong to the ruling class of educated people, the Educated Gentry. There are two other sectors:

There are ordinary middle-class Americans that just want to live their lives, do their jobs, and live a decent life. I call these people Responsibles.

There are lower-class Americans that attach to lefties and or the educated ruling class because they are Subordinate people that need a lord to protect them.

Since the Outer Party conservatives do not have a religious priesthood directing their morality, they are rather less energized than the Inner Party and its lefty priesthood. It is this that demoralizes and annoys folks like the ZMan.

The only thing that can stop the coalition between lefties and their educated-class allies is a Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class. No doubt the Outer Party will adapt itself to become its leaders.

But I do not think that the Great Rebellion has a chance without the lefties and the Inner Party having first ruined the country and the lives of the ordinary middle class.

Yes, I know. You would think that the Biden administration has been chosen by God to do just that.

See, I think that it is natural and physical that stupid scions of the educated class would believe stupid things like the idea that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

And, unfortunately, over the past 200 years, the stupid scions of the educated class have been able to persuade the lower class that loot and plunder delivered by the government was the answer to their problems. It is only in the past 50 years that the social center of gravity has tended towards the middle, where the biggest sector of society has become the ordinary middle class, rather than the lower-class peasants or lower-class industrial workers.

I think the sign that the current lefty plus Inner Party sector is in trouble is precisely the culture war of the past couple of decades. A confident ascendant ruling and cultural class does not need to amp things up.

Indeed, a witch-hunt / reign of terror / great purge / cancel culture is a sign that things are going wrong for the believers, that the prophecy of the lefty prophets has failed, and that the progressive, or lefty, or liberal era has Made Things Worse. When the prophecy of your priests has failed, you do stupid stuff, like:

Defunding the police and letting criminal defendants go free.

Creating a crazy cult that the planet is going to burn, unless we go back to sun power and windmills.

Making a sacred cult out of abortion.

Enlarging an already over-large government entitlement state.

In fact, I believe we need a radically reduced state. Why? Because the modern economy rewards people that are trustworthy and punishes people who are untrustworthy. Thus, most people are "nudged" by the need to present themselves as trustworthy, and act in a trustworthy fashion. They don't need much supervision and ordering about.

We need police forces to repress those that refuse to be trustworthy, and we need navies to deal with pirates that might take a shine to a 200,000 ton container ship. That is all.

But what comes next? 

I don't know, but I suspect that the current system will need to collapse in hyperinflation and misery before we can get a majority of people to stand up against the lefty activists and the educated-class grifters.

Here's how I look at the history of the world so far.

First there was the Age of War. It made sense because land was the only thing that mattered. It paid to defend your land and you could increase your wealth by conquering your neighbor's land.

Then there was the Age of Politics. It made the Age of War look like a walk in the park, with monster wars about -- what exactly? And monster governments that oppressed and killed their own people -- for what exactly?

Now comes the Age of Trust. Trustworthy people will wive and thrive; untrustworthy people will struggle, unless and until they mend their ways.

Of course, we could give Elon Musk a gubmint contract to take all the untrustworthy people to Mars and let them figure it out there. Just as the Brits gave Sir Walter Raleigh a gubmint contract to take the "waste population" to the Americas. See "My 1584 Project."

But human life will always be a muddle. Sorry, make that "emergent phenomenon."

The World After Roe v. Wade

The problem with abortion politics is that it's not really politics: it's religion. 

If you are an educated-class woman abortion is a kind of talisman that empowers you to fulfill yourself in a career, to confirm that the age-old rule of the patriarchy is well and truly over. If you are a commoner woman then abortion-on-demand is a demonic insult to families and to the sacred trust that women hold to bear and raise the next generation in the miracle of life. 

Only in the lower class is abortion less than religious, for if you are a subordinate woman then abortion is a necessary and practical tool to survive and carve out a life in the disorganized and storm-tossed seas of underclass life.

I was in Washington DC earlier this week during the Supreme Court peaceful protests, and I heard various women in the hotel breakfast room holding forth on abortion: some of them were agreeing with each other on their Christian religious views.  One group of three was actually debating, trading Bible verses against "my spirits;" they agreed to disagree: imagine that.

Of course, the problem with Roe v. Wade is that its original proponents really did not understand what they were doing. Law is not really a thing that divine educated gods impose from on high. In the Anglo-American common law tradition the judge-made law moves from one sticky problem to another, and in the legal decisions tries to disentangle the knots that dumb humans get into in their stumbling walk through life.

It is, of course, the staggering folly of our lefty friends to imagine that they can craft political doctrines from on high that will magically bend the arc of history towards justice, for all humanity, and especially for their particular charge, the helpless victims of which you've heard tell.

As if it is their vision of justice that will make the world anew and make injustice vanish from our midst.

Only, as I say: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." And when you legislate your vision of justice on the world you are visiting injustice on the people at the receiving end of your glorious justice. Sorry about that.

That is the problem with Roe v. Wade. It was decided on Mount Olympus by the liberal gods, imagining that the divine ones could decide the question of abortion once for all. Because they knew. 

Deciding the future of the world from Mount Olympus is all very well when you are deciding the tos and fros at Troy in the all-important Trojan War. But reality is more complicated.

Reality, as we know from our day-to-day life, is one damned thing after another. And abortion is no different.

Back in the day, I'd imagine, aborting a baby almost always meant the death of the mother. Just guessing. So it would make sense that humans would develop the idea that abortion was evil and inhuman and anything else horrible and demonic.

But today, abortion is "safe." Hey, you can even abort a baby at full term and today's health-care professionals are real proficients in the procedure of collapsing the baby's head so it comes out of the birth canal real easy.

But then there is the moral dimension. My morality says that all abortion is shameful, going back to having sex with a woman whose baby you are not already committed to raise. My morality says that terminating a pregnancy at any point is the taking of a human life.

But morality is not everything. There is the criminal dimension. At what point in the progress of a pregnancy does society regard the aborter of a zygote / foetus / unborn baby as a criminal and an enemy of society, and subject to criminal rather than moral penalty?

In France, they tell me, you can abort a baby up to 12 weeks (or 14 weeks after the last period). But after that fuggedaboudit. That baby is going to term or the gendarmes will want to know about it.

But in our country we have the pro-life moral community preaching that life begins at conception, and the pro-lifers are right. And we have the pro-choice community preaching that a woman owns her own body, and the pro-choicers are right.

So, shall we decide the issue by one side annihilating the other in a complete victory and imposing its religion and its values on the rest of America?

I have to admit that I would rather enjoy seeing our liberal friends humiliated and routed from the field, and I sympathize with the commoner women for whom childbearing is a sacred trust. To me, careers for women is something of an educated-class conceit, an activity that insulates well-born women from the seamy side of life. And I think that almost all women should be engaged in their communities, helping each other, raising their children, engaging together to educate their children and the children of their kin and of neighbors and friends, and doing all the myriad of community work that lubricates and elevates human society.

But I accept that for liberal women, the shape of a fulfilling, and creative, and advocating-for-justice life is different. And I am happy that they should pursue their own visions of the good life.

So I think that the women on both sides need to compromise on abortion.

And yes, I believe that the decision on the abortion question is the responsibility of the women of America.

Since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 our liberal women friends have had the whip hand, partly because they are the educated class and the educated class gets to set the moral and cultural agenda, and partly because of the power of the Supreme Court to issue dicta from its judicial Mount Olympus.

But, I would say, it is the duty of the ruling class, the noble elves, to have compassion and understanding for the ordinary lives of the hobbits, and allow them space to live their cramped and limited lives according to their lights, provided of course that the the hobbits do not interfere with the glorious destiny of the noble elves of the educated and ruling class.

For, if the educated and ruling class does not allow the subordinate commoners a certain amount of space to live their lives according to their lights, then, eventually, the commoners will rebel.

Really, the answer is not that hard. Almost all the other countries in the world have abortion laws that allow abortion up to about 12 weeks, and disallow it after that. Right now, the insistence by our liberal lady friends on abortion up to -- and even, in some cases, after -- birth is, in my opinion, a foolish and proud conceit that issues at least in part from the natural tendency in any ruling class that "we make the rules around here, peasants."

Alas, I fear that our liberal friends are too proud and too foolish and too invested in their moral superiority to do the sensible thing.

But, I tell you, dear liberals, if you don't do the sensible thing you will regret it. Or your children will regret it. And sooner than you think.

The Cult of the Sacred Negro

When you spend a few days in Washington DC, as I just did, your cultural antennae really get attuned to the great religious observances of our liberal friends in the practice of The Cult of the Sacred Negro. It seems that hardly a minute goes by without the smoke from some cult altar ascending into the heavens. And this is, of course and addition to and apart from the all-important National Museum of African American History. For instance, the section at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Insitution next to the portraits of American presidents is "The Struggle for Justice."

We are talking about the Civil Rights Era here.

But really: Struggle? Our liberal friends were having the time of their lives during the Civil Rights Era. Struggle? They got up every day with joy in their hearts and set forth with a spring in their step. The problem with life today is that liberals desperately long for the joy, the exaltation, the excitement of "The Struggle for Justice" in the years gone by.

If you look at the various topics on the home page of the National Portrait Gallery, it is almost all about the worship of the Sacred Negro.

Of course, if we bring in René Girard and his victimage mechanism and the whole question of the scapegoat, we get to understand this as the collective worship of the whole community in the cult ritual to drive out the demon of racism.

And our liberal friends are the priests of this cult, ritually slaughtering white supremacists whenever they can get their hands on them in order to purify the American community, and purge its guilt for centuries of slavery and oppression.

As for me, I'm more interested in another sacred narrative, the centuries-long Expulsion of the Serfs from the lands of the feudal magnates into vagrancy and beggardom, starting no later than the Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1494 in England. But I am not ready to elevate it into a Sacred Narrative of the Cult of the White Trash. Not yet. Because I am still working on the details and designing the forms of service and the rituals of sacrifice.

Meanwhile, our masters are fascinated with the question of the Sacred Negro, and want to talk about it, and exhibit it, and virtue signal about it, and sacrifice a few white supremacists before breakfast to appease the racial gods.

And I think that it would be fine if our liberal masters found victims willing to be sacrificed on the Altars of Slave Propitiation. But the problem is that our priestly masters -- and priests, said Naughty Nietzsche, are the chaps that want us to hate ourselves -- don't want to sacrifice their supporters on the altar. They want to sacrifice polluted white males instead of innocent people of color.

All I can say is: can't we put the whole Cult of the Sacred Negro to bed and start worshipping another god and sacrificing something else in our cult rituals?

Two American Heroes Facing Off on the Washington Mall

I've been in Washington DC for the last couple of days, visiting a retired federal bureaucrat and childhood friend of Lady Marjorie, and visiting the Mellon art gallery.

Yes, after FDR's attack dogs had finished prosecuting former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon for tax evasion, FDR called Mellon into the White House and proposed that Mellon donate his art collection to the nation. The National Gallery of Art is the result.

But the big takeaway for me is the two national heroes facing off on the Mall.

At one end of the Mall is the Washington Monument. George Washington is the astonishing man that walked away from political power not once, but twice.

First, the victorious general of the revolutionary army walked away from power at the end of the war. He could have been president or monarch for life. But he went home to his estate at Mount Vernon.

Second, after being elected president twice he went home to Mount Vernon and left the presidency vacant. His vice president John Adams won election in his own right. And then Thomas Jefferson, Adams' rival, won the presidency in 1800.

Do you realize how stunning that is? Of course Cincinnatus, the Roman, went home. Once. Anybody else? Bueller? Anyone?

Now, at the other end of the Mall, right in front of the Capitol and facing Washington, is the Grant Memorial. 

First, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was the Union's commanding general in the Civil War. After the war, as commanding general he feuded with President Andrew Johnson, and this feuding eventually led to Grant's resignation as Secretary of the Army and Johnson's impeachment and acquittal in the Senate.

Second, Grant ran and served as president for two terms, and then went home. Then, of course Grant was broke and dying of throat cancer from those see-gars. So he wrote his memoirs to provide his wife with an income, and died six days after completing the book.

Do you realize how absolutely incredible this is, that our greatest national heroes should refrain from exploiting their national hero status and did not make themselves president-for-life?

And that these two national heroes are facing each other from one end of the National Mall to the other?

Hey. Don't forget Ike. He was the commanding general of the victorious US forces in Europe. Ran for president, served two terms, and then went home.

I'd say it's one of the reasons why the United States is the greatest country in the world and the American people are the greatest people in the world.

But then, I'm biased.