Suppose the First Black Woman Crossed the Aisle

If I were the First Black Woman that President Biden nominated to the US Supreme Court I would be insulted.

Because after all, when President Biden says he is going to nominate a black woman -- as in East Asians need not apply -- that's racism, straight up.

I suppose that whoever he nominates -- and I understand that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is the front runner -- she will be a faithful liberal vote, always voting with the other two women liberals on the court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.

Mind you, according to Instapundit:

Judge Jackson grew up in a major metropolitan area, and her father was a lawyer. She would be the fifth sitting justice to fit that profile. She earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard and would be the seventh justice with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and the eighth graduate of Harvard or Yale law school.

So, a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class. 

That's really comical, representing a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class as the First Black Woman. A bit like First Black President Obama who was the son of an East African and a white woman, not a West African, from the people that were enslaved by other West Africans and sold to Brit slavers on the coast.

If I were the First Black Woman on the Court I would trot down to Justice Thomas after a day or two at the Court. And I would start to plot a bit of mayhem.

Because being a black woman I ain't gonna take no sh*t from nobody. Right Grrls?

But I doubt if she will. After all, she's a good little girl and went to Harvard and Harvard Law. You think she is going to break ranks and get combative?

For one thing, if you want to break the liberal ranks and start thinking for yourself you have to have done a bit of reading outside the liberal-lefty canon. You think that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has done that? I doubt it. My nickel says she has deadly boring ruling-class-conventional-wisdom opinions on everything.

Hey, if she had ever broken from the herd she wouldn't be the selection of President Biden to be the First Black Woman on the Supreme Court. Because what liberals want now, what they have to have, is an absolutely reliable vote that will vote as a block with the other two liberal women justices. Until Hell freezes over.

Because that's all that our liberal friends have left.

Today Victor Davis Hanson writes about the ruling-class strategy of nihilism, that all the stuff they are doing is part of a dastardly plan.

But if you mention nihilism then for chappies like me you invoke the shade of Nietzsche, who wrote that nihilism is the second consequence of your God dying, as in:

God is Dead, followed by decadence, followed by nihilism, followed by the eternal recurrence, followed by the revaluation of all values.

Eternal recurrence? Think Groundhog Day.

But, see, I don't think that the current ruling class clamp-down and nihilism is a strategy. I think it is a consequence of our liberal friends's faith, in leftist politics, in government programs, in quotas, in mandates, in feminism, in LGBT.

And that the God of Lefty Politics has failed. And our lefty friends do not know what to do. Except double down on their lefty politics.

There is no politics without an enemy, and so our lefty friends are finding enemies under every tree and on every street. If the Great Society failed and it wrecked the lower-income family, then it can't be the programs that failed. It must be some enemy that sabotaged it. If Charles Murray suggests that the lower average IQ of blacks is a fact and thus we will never get "equality" then he is a saboteur and a wrecker and must be condemned. If the stock market crashed in 2008 it can't be the low-down liar mortgages that Democrats have championed since the 1930s. It must be greedy bankers. If the COVID administrative mandates aren't working it must be the anti-vaxxers that are to blame.

But don't expect the two liberal justices and the new addition, the black woman Harvard educated daughter of a lawyer, to understand any of that. They are clueless, and will remain clueless, until the whole society is collapsing around them. But they still won't get it.

And frankly, even if Judge Jackson has half a brain, she would be afraid to use it. Imagine the storm that would engulf her if she dared to step out of line. I am not talking about columns in The New York Times and insults from race hustlers. I am talking about removal from the Court. You think they wouldn't stoop to that?

I gotta bridge...

Reviewing and Extending Downstreamism

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture." But did you know that SciFi author  John C. Wright has said that "In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion."

But is there something beyond religion? I like to misquote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and talk about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

In other words, if you really believe in the importance of downstreamism, then you will agree that

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And if you don't agree with that obvious truth, there is no hope for you!

Now, I have been reading a book that reviews the whole of philosophy, religion, science, and spirituality in the last 200 years written by a Brit J.J. Clarke, The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview. It is telling us all about the post-materialist, post-mechanical worldview that issues from what I call the "German Turn" that begins with Kant. Clarke is talking about a worldview that he calls "emergentism,"

a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in fields such as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems[.]

In other words, the way the world works is that some nobody -- it could be a nobody plant -- tries something new, and, wonder of wonders, it works. And that successful change changes the world. Not because it was forced on the world, but because it worked, and people copied the new idea. Because it worked.

So the way the world works is creativity, people creating new things, animals creating new things, plants creating new things, from the bottom up, not from the top down.

So, things just evolve.

But Clarke is an academic, so when he gets to religion and spirituality, he thinks that God is dead so let's reinvent spirituality as a creative enterprise. The old religious culture was based on an eternalist presumption, it

locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world as we experience it through our sense.

The new worldview is what Clarke calls a naturalist presumption, it is

a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, its meaning on the natural world of which we humans are an integral part.

This includes both what we experience in the physical and living world and also the "world of inner sense," the mental world, and also culture and history.

But what Clarke tells us is that the old "eternalist presumption" is done, finished, because we educated advanced humans know that the old world of God and Sin and the promise of eternal life in Heaven has been replaced by the new world of emergentism and the naturalist presumption.

That is where I part ways with the noble professor.

Because not everyone lives in the world of the creative educated philosophy professor for whom God has died. And clearly, for Clarke, there is no reason to respect or make a cultural space for the old people that still live with the worldview of the eternalist perspective.

I say that for the ordinary middle class person the old eternalist presumption still works pretty well. You believe in God; you believe that if you live your life by the rules then you will go to Heaven. So, you live a life of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

But for the educated elite this old worldview is a superstition and verges on bigotry.

Actually, I believe, further, that for the lower class, a still earlier worldview applies. For the lower class there is no happy land of Heaven if you do the right thing. In the lower class, power is everything, and what you need to do is get with a powerful person, and shelter in his powerful shadow. The old Nordic and pagan and Greek and Roman gods seem to apply. The newer Christian God of sweetness and light seems to be a fantasy to the lower class person.

Now I say, starting at 3:00 am today, that for all levels of society, the following applies, using the downstream hierarchy.

Politics answers the question: who is my enemy?

Culture answer the question: who are we the people?

Religion answers the question: who is God?

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" answers the question: What's it all about, Alfie? 

Who is my enemy? For the serf it's the cruel master; for the Commoner it's the tribe or nation next door; for the educated creative it's the dumb white middle-class racist-sexist-homophobes whose religion is pure bigotry.

Who are we the people? For the serf it is the people enslaved and oppressed like me; for the Commoner it is the nation; for the educated creative it is the global community of educated and evolved people.

Who is God? For the serf God is the cruel master; for the Commoner it is the God who made Heaven and Earth and declared that it was good; for the educated creative the god is the creative thinker, artist, activist.

What's it all about? For the serf it is just to stay alive; for the Commoner it is to live a virtuous life and get to Heaven; for the educated creative it is to create something that changes the world.

To be continued.

Let's All Blog on "Mass Formation Psychosis"

It should not be remarkable that humans, as social animals, all join together in moments of danger. In normal times social animals cooperate in peaceable pursuits; in abnormal times social animals combine to fight the foe.

So it's not surprising that in the COVID era, sold by the rulers as an existential peril, that all good men and women have come together for the good of humanity.

Some have called this "mass formation psychosis" and I understand why. If you think that the mass formation has coalesced to fight a phony foe, then it is not a healthy thing, but a destructive thing.

In a piece at American Greatness Malcom Pollack regards our current society as especially prone to the call to mass formation.

It helps if there is "free-floating anxiety" of what tomorrow might bring. I must say that I feel that right now, but not about COVID. Instead I worry about the hell we are going to go through wringing inflation out of the economy, and the increasing desperation of our ruling class to hang onto power.

It helps if there is "social isolation" with many people having "no meaningful relationships in their lives." I guess. But I think that is always true.

Finally it helps to have "a crisis of meaning." Deaths of despair and all that.

But I think that the COVID panic has actually been perfectly normal and physical. There came news of a dreaded virus from beyond the seas. Our political leaders rallied us to fight this invisible foe: of course we responded.

And then, of course, narrative control -- censorship when you are on the other side -- steps in. The natural instinct of the ruling class, as it raises its sword to rally the troops, is that we all speak with one voice, and silence all those that distract us from the One True Path to victory.

My special experience in all this is that I experienced a different response from men and from women to COVID.

Men, I think, respond to the call to go out and fight. But in COVID, apart from the brave Essential Workers, there hasn't been much call for brave soldiers to fight the foe.

Women, I think, respond to the call by doing all the right things: masking and cleaning and isolating and doing all the recommended things to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Notice, also, that women don't expect to be asked to risk their lives for the movement. Teachers unions were obviously more concerned about the safety of teachers than the safety of children.

I would say that since the first peak in infections and deaths passed in the summer of 2020 it was time to dial down the panic porn and reduce the social mobilization. Everyone wasn't going to die. We didn't have to hide in bunkers.

But, of course, political leaders love the rush that playing Henry V at Harfleur gives them. And bureaucrats love the opportunity to issue rules and let contracts for testing and even vaccine apps.

And in the general populace -- and especially with women -- there is clearly a mood to enforce compliance with the dictates issued from on high.

And when it's clear that we are not dealing with the End of the World, how do you dial down the Henry V act?

Very reluctantly.

So what is interesting at this stage of the mass formation cycle is:

the COVID Karens that still think we are all in existential danger

the administrative bureaucrats still issuing emergency edicts long after the emergency is over 

the politicians wondering how they can change the direction of march without causing chaos in the army. 

Otherwise, everything is fine. 

Remember "It's the Economy Stupid?"

Back in the day, they say, they had a big sign up in the Clinton 1992 presidential campaign headquarters: "It's the Economy Stupid!"

The idea, I assume, was that while all the people that politicians talk to are grifters and hangers-on, the voters are just thinking about the price of meat at Safeway this week and whether wages are keeping up with prices.

Oh and you'd better not mess with my Social Security and Medicare.

But I say that Obama in 2009 and Biden in 2021 ignored that golden rule. Obama's stimulus package in 2009 was all about throwing money at teachers and setting up Obamacare rather than restarting the economy after the generational Crash of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

The same is true of Biden's early stimulus package and subsequent "infrastructure" and Build Back Better packages. They had nothing to do with getting the economy on track after the disruption of the COVID scare. They were all about servicing elite Democratic constituencies and their demand for loot.

I suppose it is natural for the monarch in any regime to live in the bubble of his court, and not really pay enough attention to the real world outside. In the last few days, for instance, I have been writing about the willful failure of our ruling class to grasp the importance of the work of Charles Murray, that Great Society programs don't work and that the economy is favoring high IQ workers and really hurting ordinary average folks without standout talent.

My point is that, before the rulers hand out the goodies to their supporters, as all regimes have done since the dawn of time, they need to make sure that the Commoners and the peasants are doing OK.

And I would say that the Bidenoids are clearly acting as though the overall health of the economy, as experienced by ordinary Commoners, is not something that lordly courtiers need to concern themselves about.

I was reading Ben Stein at The American Spectator and he was talking about his dad.

Some of you will recall that my father, Herbert Stein, a noted economist from about around 1945 to 1999, was instrumental in helping the U.S. shift from a wartime economy to a wildly prosperous peacetime economy.

He served as a LTJG in the Navy, and then on a series of commissions and committees that planned how to get from huge wartime deficits under FDR — and rightly so, of course — to a sustained balanced budget peacetime economy[.]

Imagine that! The powers that be were thinking about how to transition from war to peace! And the result of their work was this:

I'd say that the reduction of federal debt from 1945 to 1980 was pretty decent. I'd say that the ruling class had its eye on the ball. But obviously, not since then.

I'd say, looking at the chart, that we are in for some unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in the next few years. The job of a ruling class is to make sure that any unpleasantness is confined to court circles and that it should not impacts ordinary Commoners and peasants.

Of course, that is to say nothing about the green agenda -- that I regard as a combination of ruling-class fashion parade and ruling-class moral preening. Greenology was referenced recently over at WattsUpWithThat in respect of how our greenie friends are in the early stages of turning the economy upside down in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable resources. They call it "deep decarbonization." As an engineer that worked for a while in electric generation planning, I am here to say that these chaps have no idea.

More than that, I say that our greenie friends are sending the economy off a cliff and you have no idea what we are going to experience when we hit the rocks at the bottom.

Except that fortunately the Germans are going to hit bottom first. And give us time to deploy our parachutes.

For those of us that have parachutes.

I don't know what the bottom line is for ignoring the "It's the Economy, Stupid!" My guess would start at losing Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. But what do I know?

Yes, But the Republicans Have Nothing

Now that our Democratic friends are staring utter failure in the face, the latest "messaging" is that Republicans don't believe in anything, e.g., WaPo's Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans are embarrassed to tell us what they are for."

Well yes. And part of that is that chapettes like Jennifer Rubin and the whole of the rest of the educated class sneers at the modest goal of ordinary American Commoners to live an ordinary life of going to work, obeying the laws, following the rules, having children and living in a nice house in the suburbs.

People on the right get in on the sneering act too. David Cole at Taki's is always up for a sneer at the utter ineffectiveness of Repubicans.

And frankly, I get it. What in the world is the point of arguing whether John Locke was a Christian or not when our lefty friends are telling us to worship their LGBT gods or else?

And what does the Republican Party have to offer to counter the wall-to-wall spending something-for-everyone spending spree and saving the world from climate change?

Because everyone deserves free stuff and everyone wants to save the world from burning up.

Well. I'd say that the free-stuff and save-the-world is on the way to self-destruction.

Free stuff? I discussed that yesterday in respect of Charles Murray's work. His books show pretty conclusively that the big-government model of the Great Society programs Makes Things Worse for the very people they are intended to help. And the current education and credentials system modified by racist DEI is making life really cool for the educated class, but Making Things Worse of average people and much worse for lower class people.

And I think that ordinary people are going to be reacting big time against the green agenda that means the end of personal transportation and cheap energy.

But then what?

Thank you Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

I used to wonder about what the next regime would be like.

Wait, using the "downstream" notion of Andrew Breitbart, I'd have to say that I know what the next politics will look like, what the next culture will look like, what the next religion will look like, what the next meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will look like.

And I am here to say that I didn't invent any of it. It's all out there; all you have to do is look for it.

First of all, you must understand that there are three kinds of people. I didn't invent that; tons of thinkers have come up with the idea of Three Layers of humanity. Curtis Yarvin's idea is that the top layer is Educated Gentry; the middle layer is ordinary middle-class Commoners; and the bottom layer is Clients -- or serfs or underlings.

The Clients need a boss to tell them what to do; the Commoners need a set of rules to tell them what to do; the Gentry need the chance to invent new rules, be creative.

The next regime needs to help the Clients learn how to live by a set of rules rather than today's order from the boss. It needs to help the Commoners get a bit creative; and it needs to teach the Gentry that ordinary people are not their playthings: their creative projects should be about improving themselves, not improving others.

Second, we need to internalize what has happened in philosophy, and knowledge generally in the last 200 years. I call it the German Turn and it left the lefty dream of Heaven on Earth and the Road to Justice in the dust 50 years ago.

Roughly speaking, the human world of the future will not be a system, a political cultural machine. It will be an emergent lifeworld, a community in the world with other humans with whom we communicate and negotiate and develop moral agreement in an ongoing person-to-person process, per Jürgen Habermas.

Notice how, at present, the way the world works is that the Educated Gentry imposes its moral system on the rest of us rather than engaging and negotiating morals and values with others as respected people that just think differently than they do.

What sort of person would the people in the new Educated Gentry of the human lifeworld be? I've sketched it out in my series "A Good Life Better Than the Left."

I have to say that none of these ideas are mine. They are all ideas and concepts that are out there in the world that I have encountered in my reading. And I don't suggest that anything is the last word. Indeed, the whole point of the notion is that it is emerging, developing, through the interactions of people, and not a fixed eternal system imposed from above or from outside.

Then, of course, it doesn't matter if Republicans Have Nothing. Things will just develop, on their own.

Charles Murray and the Ruling Class

There's a podcast up on Powerline with Steven Hayward interviewing Charles Murray and Steve Sailer on race and Year of George and the Great Awokening.

Charles Murray, of course,  is the author of several books on big government and race and IQ, and Steve Sailer blogs on the Unz Review and always has naughty statistics on race. 

This gives me a chance to pass Murray's major books in review. Here are some excerpts from a review of Murray's work that I wrote in 2014.

First, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980, published in 1984, says that

the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.

Then came The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1996.

[I] thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read [the] warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then. 

Then Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010 in 2012 that I thought the best of his books.

Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that [Murray says] that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Coming Apart starting here.

Since then, Murray has written Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America in 2021. As the blurb says:

American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. 

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Facing Reality starting here.

But this week we had Charles Murray on a podcast, and the big takeaway for me was his comment on the reaction to The Bell Curve published in 1996.

The key section starts at about 10:00. Says Murray:

People didn't read The Bell Curve even when it first came out... Were there responses I respected and of course the politic thing for me to say is, to be very serious, yes, there were... Well, it's really hard for me to think of any that impressed me and there were some were written by very famous scholars that I just thought were pure "horse manure." and others in which I thought they were knowingly lying, that these people were too smart and too well informed not to know that they were lying about what was in the book.

OK. So there's a "tell" here. What is going on? Why don't liberals want to honestly discuss the question of IQ and race? The Bell Curve said that jobs increasingly required high cognitive skills, and that people without high cognitive skills would be at a disadvantage. E.g., especially, blacks.

The answer is The Sixties. In the Sixties liberals set the future by passing Civil Rights laws that made discrimination by race and sex illegal. And they passed the Great Society legislation that mandated a bunch of handouts to the poor. And they started Affirmative Action that deliberately discriminated against whites.

Charles Murray in Losing Ground said that the handouts didn't improve the lives of the poor.

Charles Murray in The Bell Curve said that the future belonged to the cognitive elite, and blacks would be particularly disadvantaged.

Charles Murray in Coming Apart said that, looking at whites only, the cognitive elite were doin' fine, the middle were doing so-so, and in the lower classes the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much. In other words The Bell Curve was right. The policy of the cognitive elite discriminates against all people with a less-than-magnificent IQ -- including whites with low IQs.

Oh, and by the way, since Coming Apart was published we now know about the white working class "dying of despair" from drink and drugs. Golly, that couldn't possibly be about the low IQ whites just not being able to make it in the economy that privileges high IQ could it? Nah! Not a chance.

You expect our liberal friends to say, oh well, looks like we screwed up? So let's all get together and try to fix things?

Well, the record of the last 35 years since Losing Ground in 1984 is pretty clear. Our liberal friends aren't going to admit that they screwed up: not on big government programs and not on race. Instead they say the whole thing is due to white racism. And patriarchal sexism, and vile homophobia. And anything else, including the kitchen sink, that they can throw at ordinary Americans.

And if you disagree with them you are going to be downrated on Google Search because "disinformation," fired from your job, and canceled from social media.

I mean, if the black crime rate is nine times the white crime rate it can't be because the politics and programs of our liberal friends in the cognitive elite actually Make Things Worse. No. It must be the "hate" of far-right white supremacist armed insurrectionists.

And that is where America is today. Unless and until we do something about it.

What I Think, and Why Regarding the Political Moment

All of a sudden, I am reading articles about what conservatism should be. "Common good" conservatism? Just regular old  conservatism without the modifiers? National conservatism? Or what?

I think it's important to know who is doing the asking. In my view the Hobbeses, Lockes, Burkes, that were celebrated in Buckleyite conservatism were a class of the high bourgeois trying to imagine a ruling class of people like them rather than the royalty of old. In other words, if you weren't anointed by God, how do you justify your regime?

I would say that it was a basically honest attempt to form a new politics, for it clearly was interested in the class interest of people like them, but it also thought that the lower orders would benefit too.

This view of ruling has been challenged by an openly educated, intellectual class that has justified its rule on the notion that it rules not in the interest of the upper echelons but in the interest of the lower class. That's what communism, socialism, the welfare state, the managerial state are all about.

I think that the view of the educated, intellectual class has basically been a lie. I would say that the liberals / socialists / progressives have basically ruled in their own self interest, based on a cruel hatred for the middling sorts of people and an agenda that seems to care for the lower class but in fact confirms it in its serf-like, dependent status, and actually Makes Things Worse for everyone except the educated ruling class.

The present mania for "systemic racism," in my view, is a confirmation that today's educated ruling class does not rule for the benefit of the lower class or "minorities." There would be no need to make a big fuss about racism if the progressives were really benefiting minorities and the oppressed; everyone would understand how the traditionally oppressed were making great strides under the benevolent rule of the educated and the evolved.

Thus, in my view, the big publicized racist incidents of the last few even-numbered years, from 2014's Trayvon Martin to 2020's George Floyd, are not an indication that eevil white oppressors are oppressing innocent oppressed people, but that there is a whole generation of minority underclass people who have been utterly trashed by the progressive administrative state and the educated class culture on which it stands.

I would say that the simple fact is that government programs supervised by the educated class cannot be the basis of human society. Human society is not an administrative hierarchy; it is an emergent phenomenon with interconnections and relations that we barely understand. Call it the "lifeworld" -- a term invented by the German Husserl and further developed by the German Habermas -- as, according to La Wik,

the "background" environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon.

This idea obviously has a connection with Burke's "little platoons" and the idea of a whole network of social organizations separate from and independent of government.

I say that the only warrant for government power is "existential peril," in other words an emergency that requires the mobilization of society and its resources to fight something that will destroy "us." Obviously, you would expect, the biggest problem in human society is dealing with would-be leaders that are selling an "existential peril" that is not, in fact, an existential peril. But how do we tell?

I think that the way to understand politics at the present moment is that the ordinary middle class, the Commoners, are starting to organize in an organic fashion, and are trying to coalesce around a politics that will represent their interest, to live responsible lives with marriages, families and children, and to live such lives by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law.

You can see that the old conservatism, based on the culture of the upper middle class, does not serve. And the progressive educated class has clearly shown itself, over the last century, as the enemy of the ordinary middle-class Commoner.

Who should lead the ordinary middle-class Commoners? Politically it is simple.

First it was Richard Nixon, with his vice president that championed the "silent majority." And you will remember that the Deep State dispatched him in his second term with a threatened impeachment in the House.

Then it was Ronald Reagan. I remember attending a Republican presidential caucus in 1980 and being amazed by the clearly Commoner Reagan supporters from down the hill that showed up to win the caucus. The educated class tried to get rid of Reagan with "Iran Contra" but failed.

Then it was Donald Trump. He connected with the Commoner middle class and won the 2016 election. They tried to get rid of him with investigations and Deep State shenanigans and two impeachments in the House, and eventually succeeded in the curious case of the election of 2020.

Looked at that way, you can see that the question of the political rise of the Commoner middle class is not a shocking new thing that started with Donald Trump.

I would say that the resistance to the rise of the Commoner middle class has been getting more and more determined. It seems that though the question will soon come to a head.

We may all hope that it does not include violence and a butcher's bill. But you never know. Sometimes ruling classes go quietly. Sometimes they have to be shown the door. Sometimes they have to be ejected.

Time will tell.