Enough of Enemies; Enough of Loot and Plunder!

The fact is that one of the instinctive roles of male humans is to defend the territory. Because the territory has food on it. Defending the territory and its food is a matter of life and death.

But, since the Industrial Revolution food is something humans buy with money. Therefore, access to or control of food-bearing territory is not a matter of life and death.

If we apply Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, we can see that it used to make complete sense. Friend is someone that shares the food-bearing territory and fights to defend it; enemy is someone threatening to take away our food-bearing territory.

So when, e.g., Frederick the Great of Brandenburg invaded Silesia in 1740 it was not about defending Brandenburg's food-growing territory but it was about increasing the area of food-growing territory over which Fred could rule and tax. It worked out well for Our Fred, and he was a decent flute player that liked to play music of an evening. Of course, it could be that he sent the wrong message to the future rulers of Germany.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

Then came Stalin. He starved the peasants of the Ukraine so he could buy industrial equipment from the West. Way to go, Joe.

Then came Adolf Hitler. He believed that Germany needed Lebensraum to grow food for its people. In the East. But Germany was an industrial nation that could buy its food as long as it wasn't in a world war.

Not a good idea, Adolf.

Now, of course, ever since World War II, our global elite has decided that nations and national leaders are literally Hitler, and it is their sacred duty to stop Literally Hitlers anywhere they rear their mustachioed heads.

But, our global leaders are still acting like male humans defending their territory. All across the world leaders during the late COVID emergency have been acting like male humans defending territory, issuing orders to the troops -- er, ordinary citizens -- to keep in line, to wear their uniform masks, get their vaccinations. Or else go to the brig. Just like the GIs in World War II.

And after the War on COVID our leaders are proposing to bravely lead us to Build Back Better with a whole raft of programs to dish benefits out to the people. And mobilize for the Next World War, the Green New Deal that will decarbonize the world before it's too late.

Needless to say, those that get on board with the new World War Green will be handsomely rewarded. Others will pay for their armed insurrection.

The thing that keeps bothering me is that, whether we are talking about hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon rain forest or the cult followers of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, proprietor, we are talking about the same thing.

First there is the enemy to be defeated before it's too late. And then there are the glorious perks to all the faithful friends and followers.

In other words, whenever politics is involved it is always about the enemy, and then always about rewarding the followers. Just like in the Amazon rain forest. Just like with feudal lords and their retainers. Just like the Soviet leaders and their nomenklatura. Just like western leaders and their loyal deep state.

But, you only need to mobilize against the enemy when your life depends on the continued possession of food-growing territory. If you are growing food to sell, if you are making stuff to sell, if you are doing anything in the modern economy, you don't need to defend your food-growing territory. What is more, it doesn't make any sense to invade a country and plunder its resources and sell its inhabitants into slavery. They will benefit you much more doing what they are already doing and selling it to you. That's because 80 percent of wealth in the modern economy is "intangible capital" which is a fancy way of saying the knowledge and skills of humans.

Do you understand what I am saying? I am saying that the modern state with its compulsions, its endless partisan squabbling, its gigantic loot and plunder operation -- that in the developed world means something from one third to one half of gross domestic product -- is an echo from the past, the past of primitive humans that lived and died on food-growing territory that they defended with their lives. That's why I call it the Great Reaction.

Loot and plunder? The last major loot and plunder operation that I know of was the looting and plundering of eastern Germany by the Soviet Union after World War II. How did that work out, Joe Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev?

See my point? If you are in the enemy plus loot and plunder game you ain't doing yourself a favor. Although of course, you do get to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentation of their women. If that's how you get your jollies.

The next Big Thing for humans is to get beyond the primitive culture of enemies and loot and plunder for the friends.

But I don't know how we get there.

ABC of Politics in Brief

Enemy

The political was defined once for all by Nazi Carl Schmitt: 

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

And the point about an enemy is that conflict is possible, and conflict can lead to killing.

Schmitt's notion has been simplified by Curtis Yarvin, who has written: "there is no politics without an enemy."

Tribes

Ancient humans weren't really tribal; they lived in a world of kindred: every person known to them was related to them by blood.

But when humans began to live in communities large enough that they didn't know everyone they have become tribal. They invented a bond between them that replaced the old bonds of blood relationship.

Thus, I maintain, all tribes are "fake tribes." They constitute an imagined relationship, a kinship of being the same kind of people, rather than the people of one blood.

Tribes are typically formed by the brothers-in-arms who have fought a successful war. Their leader is the new lord, and the brothers-in-arms are the members of the new tribe. The ubiquitous tribe of our time is the nation state. The nation is the tribe of the middle class.

Layers

Every human society is hierarchical, and we know why. It is because hierarchy is nature's way of minimizing conflict. Over the years, humans have come to think of society as a Three Layered hierarchy. Viking society was composed of Earls, Peasants and Thralls (slaves). Roman society? Patricians, Plebeians, and Slaves. Today's society, according to Curtis Yarvin, is composed of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. The alternative is just to think of "us" and "them." But that means conflict.

Honor

Among men, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, honor is the reputation for courage. Among women, honor is the reputation for chastity. Obviously, in politics, the reputation for courage is paramount, for the political leader is nothing if he is not leading his friends against the enemy.

Female honor, chastity, or always doing the right thing, is problematic in politics, and that is probably why women are problematic in politics. Women expect to be protected, but the point of the political leader is to lead his tribe into danger.

Activism

Every young educated person wants to be an "activist," fighting for the oppressed against the oppressors. But this is a fantasy, similar to the medieval romance of the late medieval age, that celebrated knights riding their chargers to rescue damsels in distress and search for the Holy Grail. Knightly orders were invented during the Crusades to go to the Holy Land and protect the pilgrims from maurauders. In our day the "activist" is acting the rule of revolutionary of the good old days of the Enlightenement when educated intellectuals were inveighing against the monstrosities of the absolute monarchs.

Blame

No politician ever takes the blame. He cannot, for he is the brave leader of his people leading them to victory against the enemy. And to fail in that is to be defeated in a humiliating battle against the enemy and condemning his people to oblivion.

ABC of Politics: Enemy

What do we mean by politics and the political? What do activists mean when they determine to Struggle for Justice? Or revolutionaries when they plot an armed insurrection to overturn the old regime? Or Black Lives Matter when they declare that equality never hurt anyone? Or Trumpists when they resolve to Make America Great Again?

A few months ago I read Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. I was hesitant, at first, because Carl Schmitt is famous as a "prominent member of the Nazi Party" and there is a reluctance in polite and educated circles to risk any pollution with Nazi associations. 

But the day came when I overcame my inhibitions and ordered Nazi Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. I have to say that the book changed my life, because it changed forever my understanding of politics and government. 

After starting The Concept of the Political noting that nobody seems to have seriously defined the political before him, Schmitt comes out and says, in Chapter II:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

The point about an enemy as compared to other humans, Schmitt points out, is that "conflict" is possible with an enemy. And not just conflict, as he writes in Chapter III:

The terms friend, enemy, and conflict… refer specifically to the real possibility of physical killing.

The guy that pointed me towards Schmitt is Curtis Yarvin, who states that 

[P]olitics is human collective action—against humans. There is no politics without an enemy.

This puts the notion of "limited government" in a new light. For it suggests that politics and government should be limited to questions where the friend and enemy distinction is inescapable. It suggests that government should only be involved in issues where the "other" really is an enemy, a existential threat to our way of life, where we accept that conflict, killing, or a fight to the death, is likely to be needed. 

Schmitt's definition of the political raises an awkward question, that the problem with any politics is that it is liable to descend from a frank and open discussion of the issues into a partisan food-fight where the parties come to experience each other as enemies. Perhaps we need a "no first use" approach to politics similar to the enlightened approach to nuclear warfare: politics is only appropriate if "we" have been attacked by an enemy.

Or, to put it another way, in connection with an "issue" involving politics or government over which the members of a society are divided, is it possible to avoid coming to consider people who vote against our program or vote against our candidate as enemies, and treat them as such?

When do we ever consider, in respect of some political issue or government program, whether we really want to treat opponents of our magnificent ideas as enemies?

For instance, if the education of children is decided by politics, then immediately the question arises about what to do with people that resist the government's policy on education. Recently we have seen, in the United States, exactly what happens. Government leaders in the federal government have decided that parents opposed to its policy may be subject to police surveillance and accused of "violent extremism." 

In other words, the leaders of the United States federal government experience parents opposed to their policy as enemies. This is not remarkable, for it is a short step for anyone in politics to go from considering political opponents as mere nuisances and to experiencing them as enemies.

That's because once a topic becomes political, it enters the friend vs. enemy distinction and starts down the road to conflict and the "real possibility of physical killing."

So what does the political, and the distinction between friend and enemy, come from?

Absent any better ideas it starts, I would argue, with the territorial culture of the chimpanzee. According to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the main job of chimpanzee males is to patrol the border to defend the food-yielding territory in which the females bear and raise young chimps. More territory equals more food equals more baby chimps; less territory equals less food equals less baby chimps. Every male chimp beyond the border is an enemy.

The same is clearly true with humans in the hunter-gatherer and agricultural eras. Anyone that threatens our land is a threat to our life, and an enemy.

But that has all changed with the industrial era. Food is not something you grow any more, it is something you buy. It does not matter where the food is grown or who grows it. Who is the enemy now? Is there really an enemy any more?

Let us rehearse the history of the enemy. In the hunter-gatherer era all men were warriors and defended their territory from the enemy. But in the agricultural era most men became farmers, and only a few men defended the border from the enemy; we call them "marcher lords." Marcher lords had a grand old time fighting each other down to the Hundred Years War and finally in the Wars of the Roses so that Shakespeare could make them into colorful characters to strut and fret upon the Elizabethan stage: other marcher lords as enemies.

In the 17th century began the age of religious wars: Roundheads versus Cavaliers, The Thirty Years War. And the Protestant Dutch invaded England in 1688 to create a counter-force against Catholic France. Rival religions as enemies.

In the 18th century we had class wars with the rising bourgeoisie feeling its oats in the American and French Revolutions. The enemy is not a rival lord but the class of lords in general.

In the 20th century humans graduated to world wars, which were about what? Defending food-growing territory? Teaching emperors with gold-braid uniforms and knightly stars a lesson? Creating Lebensraum? Teaching Nazi racists a lesson? Teaching communists a lesson? Enemies have become ideological, people with a different idea of the good and the just.

I would argue that, ever since the dawn of agriculture, the enemy-at-the-border concept has been less and less relevant. It was certainly irrelevant when Rousseau wrote in A Discourse on Inequality that

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Do you see all the "tells" in this sentence? First of all, it uses the code-word "enclosed," as in enclosures of common land that was a political issue right up until agricultural land ownership didn't matter any more. Then, Rousseau assumes that the people in society can resolve questions of ownership without resort to conflict. So, we are way beyond chimps and hunter-gatherers. The idea of property and property issues settled by legal procedure is already in place and taken for granted. This "first man" is not a founder at all, he already lives in a "civil society." The other people are not "simple enough to believe him," but already live in a society where ownership is a matter of common sense and routine. What's your problem with ownership, Jean-Jacques, a bourgeois born and raised in the city of Geneva?

But politics demands an enemy. Do we need an enemy?

Let us follow the enemy experience down the ages.

Let us propose that the chimp or hunter-gatherer band threatening our food-yielding land is a genuine enemy.

Let us concede that Danes longshipping up the rivers of Saxon England and raping and pillaging English villages are genuine enemies.

Let us say that all feudal feuding up until the dawn of the industrial era is understandable; the other noble and his feudal host is an enemy.

But are rival religions really enemies?

And was the German industrial state a genuine enemy of the French industrial state in 1914? What exactly would be the point?

But there is no politics without an enemy.

What about internal politics?

Is the capitalist the enemy of the worker he employed in the two centuries that real per-capita income has increased by 30 times?

Is the male patriarch really the enemy of all women?

Is the white oppressor really the enemy of the oppressed peoples migrating across the world to partake of white oppressor culture and jobs?

And is the white supremacist really the enemy of the black aspiring rapper?

But there is no politics without an enemy.

I think we humans need to face up to the fact that politics, the cult of the enemy, is vieux jeu, because in the world-wide market economy there are no enemies, because we are no longer chimpanzees competing for food, or marcher lords competing for fiefs, or religions and ideologies competing for state power, and land is not life any more. Life today is not growing and defending the food supply; it is doing and making things that other people will buy.

But there is no politics without an enemy.

ABC of Politics: Tribes

We moderns like to think that we have grown out of tribalism, the way of primitive society. But according to CR Hallpike tribalism is new, dating from the time when humans started to live in towns where they no longer knew everyone.

And the idea that anyone has "grown out of" tribalism is absurd.

Back in the day, humans identified with their kindred, the people they knew that were related to them by blood. But as society has grown in scale humans have started to fake it; we imagine that we are related and are kin to the people around us, by virtue of our common membership in a clan or tribe or nation.

I say that all such identities are fake, an imagined kindred of "people like me." I call this "fake tribalism," an imagined community of kindred that is practiced in all societies larger than one of actual kinship where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows one's blood relationship to everyone.

But why do people create these imagined tribes? I say that every tribe is the expression of the eternal brotherhood of the men who fought to create the tribe and won.

This is most blazingly obvious in the dominant fake tribe of our time, the "nation," which is the tribe of the middle class.

Almost every nation in our time is the product of a victorious war that melded the men of the victorious army into a new fake tribe of a nation.

What made the United States into a nation was its revolutionary war against Britain. What made Britain into a nation was its Second Hundred Years War against France that ended on the battlefield of Waterloo. What made Germany into a nation was Bismarck's three cunning wars, against Denmark, Austria, and France, that conned the various independent states of the Holy Roman Empire into sending soldiers to fight for Bismarck, and thus for the subsequent united German nation.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent the young men of the Great Depression to fight Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. After the glorious victory, the United States was united for a generation, until the youngsters born to the wives of the returning heroes grew up and rebelled against their fathers.

And what of the tribe of progressives the world over that are soldiers of activism, devoted to bending the arc of history towards justice?

The problem with the current crop of multinational organizations is that they are not brotherhoods of warriors bonding with each other in a fight to defend the homeland from aggressors. They are just privileged earls and barons watching their sons set lances against each other in knightly tournaments of activism. The only way to create a global tribe would be to fight an Earthly war of survival against an alien invasion from outer space, in which the surviving space warriors would form a new fake tribe of the heroes that saved the world.

ABC of Politics: Layers

We should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler, as Albert Einstein didn't quite say. But what about human society? Can this unimaginably complex emergent phenomenon be simplified?

Maybe, maybe not. But we humans do it anyway; it is our way of trying to understand and deal with the world of other people.

The simplest thing is to divide the world into "us" and "them," friends and enemies, and this is what politics does. But if we want to get beyond simple binaries and the war of all against all, or at least the binary of my people against your people, or the Hunger Games binary of Capitol against the Districts, we must make the world a little less simple.

Most students of human society have divided it, like Gaul, into three parts. For George Orwell it was Inner Party, Outer Party, and Proles. For Marx it was Communists, Bourgeoisie, and Proletarians. For Tolkien it was Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarves. For the Vikings it was Earls, Peasants, and Thralls  (or slaves). For Curtis Yarvin it is Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

I have joined this three-layer parade with my reductive Three Peoples theory. I submit it as an honest attempt to simplify human society as much as possible, but no further.

I propose that there are three kinds of people in the world:

People of the Subordinate Self Call them slaves, serfs, workers, clients, marginalized, oppressed: these are people that do not experience "agency." They are go-along-to-get-along people, villagers under the thumb of the big man, the serfs of the feudal lord, the factory workers of the corporate behemoth, the ward heelers of the precinct captain, aspiring rappers dealing drugs for the urban gang.  They attach themselves to a powerful patron in return for scraps from the lordly table.

People of the Responsible Self Call them commoners, citizens, middling sorts, "deplorables," these are people that believe they can understand the world according to already established rules and have a responsibility to do something about it. These are people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

People of the Creative Self These are people that want to live a creative life, maybe as a writer, an artist, a videographer, an activist, a revolutionary. They don't want to follow the rules, they want to discover new rules. They don't want just to go to work, they want to reinvent work. They don't just obey the laws; they want to make new ones. 

I got the idea of the Responsible Self from Robert Bellah in his "Evolution of Religion." I got the idea of the Creative Self from Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class.

In medieval times, England's King Alfred divided the world into "those who pray, those who fight, those who work." This is similar to the three French Estates, with the First Estate the clergy, the Second Estate the nobles, and the Third Estate the peasants and burghers. There is, in addition, the three-layer theory of Allyship currently popular among our lefty friends. In this world the evolved and activist Allies are fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. It is clearly an update of Marx's three layers of Communists, Bourgeoisie, and Proletarians. But notice that both the Allyship narrative and Marx collapse the three layers into two.Allies and Oppressed Peoples are united as one against the White Oppressors. Communists and Proletarians are united as one against the Bourgeoisie. I maintain that this collapse is reactionary, a step back to the primitive.

But things don't have to be that serious. I have proposed a three layer system of Snobs, Schmucks, and Scum. A less insulting version is to think of society as composed of Somebodies, Anybodies, and Nobodies. You may think of today's America as composed of Anti-Americans, Americans, and Emerging Americans; I couldn't possibly comment.

Let us not insult Richard Wagner by omitting his three-layer theory. He divided the world of The Ring into gods, humans, and Nibelungs.

Of course, the world is much more complicated than a mere three layers. Yet most of the time most people have difficulty imagining anyone different from themselves as anything but an enemy, in a crude "us" and "them" approach to life, religion, and politics. So a Three Peoples theory is one step up from crudity, from the war of "us" against "them." And there is another thing, suggested by Ken Wilber in his analysis of developmental psychology as applied to human consciousness. He proposes that anyone in a particular "level" will regard people in a lower "level" as delta-minus morons, and people in a higher "level" as madmen.

The most obvious use of this Three Layer concept is as a way to understand our modern politics, which always seems to be based upon an over/under coalition between the highest Layer and the lowest Layer against the Middle Layer. In the current Allyship narrative, the Allies of the ruling class fight for the Oppressed Peoples of the lower class against the White Oppressors of the middle class. Or, using Yarvin's three layers, the educated-class Gentry combine with their underclass Clients against the middle-class Commoners.

I have come to believe that the modern over/under politics is a recipe for conflict. The three-layer world of noble, commoner, and serf of the olden time sets up a world of established hierarchy, and hierarchy, according to Jordan B. Peterson and his lobster notion, is Nature's way of reducing violence. Thus it is not surprising that the leftist politics inspired by Marx -- to replace peaceful hierarchy with a fight for equality by collapsing the Three Layers of educated, middling, and underling into an us-against-them binary of allies and oppressed against white oppressors -- is a recipe for killing fields.

The Three Layers notion also allows us to understand the emerging populist nationalisms in the United States and in Europe. The populist movements are all associations of ordinary middle-class people fighting back against the over/under coalition that dominated politics during the last century when the working class had the votes to empower the educated class to use the political system to reward the workers with programs and benefits and reward itself with power, with sinecures, and with pensions. The ordinary middle class is emerging as a political force because it is now the largest sector of society, if it chooses to use its numbers in the political arena.

The populist nationalisms of the present day are thus an inner-outer politics, of "us," the middle class against the enemy, the "them," of uppers and downers. Because "there is no politics without an enemy."

Maybe after it is all over we can return to a peaceful hierarchy, like the lobsters.

ABC of Politics: Honor

When Alexander Hamilton agreed to a duel with Aaron Burr, his reason was that, as a General in the US armed forces, he had to have a reputation for courage.

Among men, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, honor is the reputation for courage. Among women, honor is the reputation for chastity. I believe that male courage is to be understood not just as physical courage, but the moral courage to do the hard thing. I believe that female courage is to be understood not primarily as sexual chastity, but in being "practically perfect in every way."

Now, I believe that the male concept of honor spawns two cultures: the first is the Culture of Courage; the second is a reflection of the Culture of Courage, the Culture of Insult. A man can demonstrate his courage by his fearless actions, that "boldly did outdare / The dangers of the time." Or he can engage in friendly insult with his fellow men, preferably during a friendly mutual consumption of adult beverages.

For women the female culture of honor spawns two cultures: the first is the Culture of Kindness; the second is the Culture of Complaint. A woman can demonstrate to the world her pure femininity by a constant life of kindness. Or she can advertise the lack of kindness in others by constant complaining. George Eliot in Adam Bede suggests that the Culture of Complaint is in fact a desire to be "soothed."

You can see the application of this in the world of politics. The male politician always needs to advertise his courage, his determination to fight for his nation, or for some particular group of voters: "Fighting for Seniors." He can choose either the high road of the Culture of Courage, just demonstrating to the world his courageous nobility, or he can get down and dirty with the Culture of Insult and deploy pejoratives like racist, sexist, or homophobe.

But for women politicians things are more complicated. She must seem to be courageous, yet not aggressively so, and she must combine kindness as a Lady Bountiful with the tough feminist carapace of complaint against the monstrosity of male privilege. And there is always her secret weapon, that a woman's tears always win against a man.

ABC of Politics: Activism

Back in the day, I had never really thought much about "activism." I knew about it, disliked it, but had never tried to understand it. It was a political "ism" that belonged to the left-wing world -- as are many isms. It was a foreign country and was no concern of mine. But one day a friend told me that she was quitting her corporate job in order to go back to school and become an activist. She had always wanted to "get into activism."

One can ignore the madness of strangers, but a friend one has to try to understand.

Why would a educated woman in mid-life want to get into activism? It was not because she wanted to rebel, I decided, but because she wanted to conform; she wanted to be the best person she could be, and that, she believed, meant activism. I suspect that her yearning was a consequence of the fact that today's youngsters are taught, from kindergarten through graduate school, to believe that political activism is the highest and noblest form of life.

After years of investigation I have come to believe that today's Activism Culture is very similar to the Medieval Romance culture of the olden time. That is to say that I believe it to be a ruling-class conceit, a form of high-class virtue-signaling.

Why do we teach our children to become political activists? It is a long story.

Politics, according to Nazi Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, is the distinction between friend and enemy. Simply put, according to neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy." Or, I would say, the more politics the more enemies.

Now back in the good old days every human community was surrounded by enemies, and it was the job of the men to put a stop to any dawn raids that might be visited upon the community. So, back in the day, political activists were border warriors defending the community against the enemy. 

Later on, in England, King Alfred was sorely tried by various Danes that liked to come a-viking to loot the Wessex villages of grain and silver and sell the women and children as slaves. Looters and slavers as enemies.

Later on, wars developed into high-toned arguments about dynastic succession: the Wars of the Roses. Rival lords as enemies.

Then there came a change: the age of religious wars: Puritans against Cavaliers. The Thirty Years War of 1618-48. And the Protestant Dutch invaded England in 1688 to create a counter-force against Catholic France. Rival religions as enemies.

But then there was Frederick the Great. He may have been an Enlightenment intellectual, but his conquest of Silesia was reactionary: back to simple loot and plunder. Silesia was much richer than the sandy Brandenburg lands around Berlin that he had inherited from his father. Think of the revenues!

Next we get to the French Revolution. It ended up in a Reign of Terror, but it began with an Assembly of Notables -- princes of the blood, archbishops, dukes, marquises and counts -- proposing fairly sensible revisions of the tax system. Then came the men that made the French Revolution a revolution, the Mirabeaus, the Marats, the Robespierres, ideological activists punishing moderates for their moderation with a bit of regicide on the side. And there was no war at all until the peasant revolt against the revolution in the Vendée. The French Revolution was an ideological war, with the old regime, the moderates, or anyone, as enemy.

There is no politics without an enemy. So, as society has changed and politics has changed, the enemy has changed. In our day, we are no longer surrounded by enemy Vikings and looters, but we are still surrounded by enemies. The US Pentagon just announced that climate change and China are both "security threats." The Biden administration early on advertised its determination to tackle the two existential threats of climate change and systemic racism. There is no politics without an enemy.

China? Climate change? Systemic racism? Of course. Each one is an existential threat, an enemy to our way of life, experts agree. If those enemies didn't exist there wouldn't be a need for a government to protect us from anything. No enemy? No need for a government? Fuggedaboutit.

If the foregoing has not persuaded you about the change in political enemies since the good old days of the dawn raid, there is another "tell" that might convince you to believe that the enemies problem has changed in recent times. The "tell" is that our modern ruling class in the developed countries is not a warrior class but an educated class. A warrior class is the ruling class you want when you need to fight military wars to protect the homeland from Vikings, Goths and Vandals. But what is the point of an educated ruling class? What wars would it be needed to fight?

Test Question: What is the difference between a warrior ruling class and an educated ruling class? Explain.

The answer is obvious. Our modern ruling class fights ideological wars, as Robespierre and his ilk did in the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In World War I we were fighting against the horror of old-school Teutonic emperors with stupid mustaches and with knightly stars on their chests; in World War II against the monstrosity of fascism and another mustache; in the Cold War against the horror of Communism and Stalin's mustache. And in the War on Terror? Mullahs with beards.

Of course, we moderns like to sneer at the dynastic wars of the old kings and princes and the religious wars of the 17th century. But is there anything more contemptible than the ideological world wars of the 20th century and the ideological civil wars of the 21st century? And don't get me started on our current Wars of the Wokies that began in the USA and is spreading throughout the mind-world of the West.

I repeat: politics always needs an enemy, and it is the particular talent of an educated class to be able to call up an ideological enemy from the vasty deep on demand. Yes, but what enemy?

Perfectly simple. The ideological enemy of today's ruling class is the ordinary middle class, people that we might call yeomen or commoners. This is a necessary consequence of the over/under political formula that has inspired today's ruling class ever since Rousseau invented it in his Discourse on Inequality and Marx supercharged it in The Communist Manifesto. Our rulers experience themselves as the noble protectors of the lower class against the dawn raid of the bourgeoisie. In the Ally narrative, the rulers are the allies of the "oppressed peoples" and fight the "white oppressors."

There is a difference between olden times and today. The old nobility was a nobility of blood; the new nobility is a nobility of education, of selective college, and credential. In the high Middle Ages the king and his nobles were warriors. In high modernity the leaders of the intellectual class were revolutionaries. But you can see that nothing has changed: the key to any ruling class is its self-perceived specialness.

Every ruling class needs a self-congratulating narrative, especially when it is in decline.

In the Autumn of the Middle Ages the ruling class fell deeply in love with the medieval romance -- stirring tales of knightly virtue, damsels in distress and Holy Grails -- to enjoy before the blazing fire of an evening in the castle keep. Of course, these late feudal nobles were not saintly knights shepherding pilgrims to the Holy Land; they were just powerful men looking after No. 1. But it was their conceit to think of themselves as soldiers of Christ searching for the lost Holy Grail from the Last Supper. They needed something that would make them feel special.

Why should things be any different in the Autumn of the Administrative State? Today's stirring tales of activism are merely the modern version of the medieval romance, putting lipstick on the pig of ideological warfare, elevating the sordid loot and plunder of the modern state into a sacred reparation to peoples oppressed since the dawn of time. Activists are the noble knights -- or at least aspiring squires -- of the ruling class, ideologically setting forth from their NGO castles every morning sans peur et sans reproche to rescue victims in distress from the bigotry and violent extremism of the middle class.

More than that, the activism concept answers a real social need for our well-born youth. In any society it is a real challenge for the child of a wealthy or high-status parent to find a métier that accords with her noble status. In our age the problem is bigger than in the Middle Ages, because children don't automatically inherit the status of their parents. For instance, Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door asked: how does a millionaire mom raise her children? Not to go into business, because of the risk of failure. Instead she raises her children to the high-status and well-paid professions of medicine and law. That was then; this is now, and the most prestigious of today's professions is surely activism. Our universities teach activism as they once taught theology to well-born youngsters fated to become priests in the state established church, and our billionaires fund activism. Activism is a way of acquiring high moral status in a society ruled by an educated elite.

One question that still troubles me: what on Earth did Richard Wagner think he was doing in the middle of the 19th century with all his medieval-romance operas about swan knights and Grails and Teutonic myths?

Ruling classes like to flatter themselves, because the reality of political power is not very pleasant -- since politics is about the enemy. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages were the original robber barons, not noble knights. Today's activists are the bribed apologists of today's ruling class, not dedicated monks of truth and justice. We can tell that as we look back on the riots of the US 2020 election season. Our rulers seemed to be quite untroubled by the riots staged by the activists of Black Lives Matter and AntiFa. But they were deeply offended by teenager Kyle Rittenhouse battling the Kenosha rioters in August 2020 and the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021. The lesson is obvious. Left-wing activists are tolerated by the regime; their riots are judged to be "mostly peaceful protests." Right-wing activists are not even rioters; they are "armed insurrectionists."

For us, the medieval romances and Wagner's operas are delightful entertainment. And there is nothing more delightful than watching Shakespeare's Harry Percy and Prince Hal duke it out at the battle of Shrewsbury.

But the melodrama of modern activism is not so funny. For it is based on a lie, that modern society does not care about the travails of the oppressed, and that the only way for the voice of the oppressed to be heard is through the intercession of well-born activists. Not at all. Our era is remarkably sensitive to the cry of the oppressed, beginning not later than the Duke of Wellington persuading the British House of Lords to pass the great Reform Bill of 1832 that broadened the franchise to include small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers.

Indeed, the concurrence between the medieval romance and the modern activist romance is telling. It is telling us that the present age, in which all good people are devoted to digging out oppression wherever it can be found, is in its autumn. Just as aristocrats down the ages sported the stars and crosses of various orders of chivalry on their chests, so do our modern aristocrats sport their NGO exploits on their college applications and resumes.

Politics needs an enemy. But a ruling class also needs to believe it is doing good.