Canadian Truckers and the Great Rebellion

I first crystallized on a narrative about the political suppression of ordinary Commoners back in November 2020. I wrote about how it all started when the Commoner-born Richard Nixon was cheated out of the White House with a stolen election in 1960.

My point is that the Commoners of America have been gradually coming to cultural and political consciousness in the last half century. Call it a Great Rebellion. And the educated ruling class keeps trying to sabotage this movement.

I don't want to suggest that the sabotage is scandalous. It is just natural that our present ruling class -- that practices an over - under political formula -- would find the middle-middle as a threat to its power, and the ruling class would be right. The rising tide of Commonerism is a threat to its power.

To me, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump were all elected by ordinary middle-class Commoners, the great middle-middle of America, to represent them and their ordinary needs as ordinary Americans.

And, I think it fair to say, our Gentry ruling class did its utmost to kick all three out of office, and succeeded with two of them. Hey, two out of three ain't bad.

Now with have the Canadian Truckers and their bouncy castles entering the fray.

Now, I don't want to say who is right and who is wrong in all this.

But I would suggest that the COVID activities of the ruling class have been felt most cruelly by the middle-middle, that is, by people that neither have laptop jobs that can be done by computer at home and with Zoom calls nor are people just getting a check, like retirees and the lower class that doesn't work much.

And, because nobody in the ruling class really knows anyone in the middle-middle, the rulers don't really have a feel for how all the scientific and beneficent COVID restrictions and regulations are hitting the middle-middle.

And thus, when the middle-middle objects, the Gentry ruling class is caught by surprise. Naturally, it experiences the resistance to its beneficent rules as an insult. And so the cry goes out: Does anyone know one of These People?

Of course, it is worse than that, because the over - under political formula of today's ruling class experiences the middle-middle as the enemy. That is the logic of its Allyship notion, that the rulers are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples fighting the White Oppressors.

What I am suggesting is that, because of the ruling-class political formula, any member of the ruling class would already be primed to regard people protesting its wise and thoughtful COVID regulations as the Enemy. 

Because that is how politics works. I notice when I walk in the neighborhood that all the dogs being taken for a walk are very interested in me. Except for one thing: if there is another dog around, the dogs in question are going to be much more interested in each other than in the humans.

But here is something that shocked me this morning. I was walking towards a dog and its owner, but in between us was a squirrel. And the dog paid no attention to the squirrel. Didn't that dog know that squirrels are the Enemy? Hey, maybe the dog was blind, because in my experience dogs have highly sensitive radar that picks up squirrels at one hundred paces.

So it is with politicians. Their radar is tuned to pick up Enemies, the enemies of their political formula.

And so, if you want to understand a politician, keep a sharp eye on him and see who or what pricks up his attention. Chances are that's the Enemy that he has sworn a blood oath to track down and demolish.

I don't know what will happen with the Great Rebellion of Commoners. Up to now our Gentry ruling class has done a pretty effective job of heading it off at the pass. But it does seem to me that its anti-Commoner campaign is getting a little more active of late.

And I wonder what Peter Turchin's "over-production of elites" will mean in the long run. I mean if the over-produced elite scions can't find a nice Stiltstocking job at the Circumlocution Office, maybe they will join the Resistance. 

Or maybe not. Because Darling, have you ever been inside the house of one of those Deplorables?

In Politics You Never Admit You Were Wrong

For years I've used Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution as a way of understanding politics, that when things go wrong, the activists amp it up and start canceling their opponents: Reign of Terror.

But I can see, back when I started writing about reigns of terror, that I didn't have the key insight that drives political activists to destroy the opposition.

The problem with politics is that you can never admit you were wrong. Or made a mistake. Or shoulder the blame.

Obviously, this is crazy. Human life, every human life, is one mistake after the next. Successful people, happy people, are the kind that realize that "Houston we have a problem" and work like mad to solve the problem.

If fixing mistakes is one of the key skills for a happy and successful life, why don't politicians admit their mistakes?

I think it is because politics is always about fighting an enemy. As in: Nazi Carl Schmitt, that the political is the friend - enemy distinction. As in: Curtis Yarvin, that there is no politics without an enemy. 

Think of it.

• If you've been leading the fight to an enemy for years, can you turn around and say: wow, this enemy is not as bad as we thought?
  
  
• Can you admit that your strategy for fighting the enemy was all wrong, and so now it's back to square one?
  
  
• Can you admit as President Roosevelt in December 1941 that you screwed up the intelligence and the Japanese were able to cruise a force half way across the Pacific to bomb Pearl Harbor?

Obviously not. 

If you admit any of these things, then there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign. So the only way to hang onto your political leadership is never to admit being wrong. And the political system accommodates this. After a couple of presidential terms, the voters typically decide it is Time for a Change. What they are really saying is: you promised Heaven on Earth, you failed to deliver, and so you are outta here.

This approach allows us to understand the present moment.

• If you have spent the last two years pushing mandatory masks and mandatory vaccinations and the science starts to show that you were wrong, then you have a bit of a problem.
  
  
• If you have been pushing entitlement programs for the last century and the entitlement programs are broke, then maybe your brilliant plan was not o brilliant.
  
  
• If you have been enacting welfare programs and the result is that lower-class men don't work much and lower-class women don't marry much, and the young men of these families are violent criminals and only aspire to rapping, then maybe you have a problem.
  
  
• If you passed civil rights laws half a century ago, and you elected the First Black President fifteen years ago, and blacks are still poor and criminal and violent, then maybe you have a problem.

Do you see the point? The last thing that any politicians does is admit he screwed up. The last thing that any ruling class does is admit that its programs and policies were and are a disaster. 

Because once you admit your mistake, there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign.

• Would any politician of your acquaintance admit a mistake and resign?
  
  
• Would our educated ruling class ever admit a mistake and resign?

There is a reason for this, and I use Nicholas Wade and his Before the Dawn to illustrate it. Male chimps defend the troop's territory from other male chimps. But when there are no more male chimps left, then the troop ceases to exist and the females are absorbed into another troop. Same thing with human hunter-gatherer bands.

So, for males, politics -- the pursuit of the enemy -- really is a matter of life and death, or at least status vs. oblivion.

But what do humans do when they are oppressed by rulers that are screwing everything up? There seem to be several alternatives.

1. Exhaustion. That's how most reigns of terror and great purges end.
2. Bouncy castles. Truckers get together and set up inflatable castles in the capital city.
3. Scapegoat. We all come together and select a scapegoat and make them responsible for everything. As in "time for a change" elections.
4. Revolution. The ruling class is ejected and replaced by a new one.

I sure would like it if our problems could be solved by something less than bloody revolution.

But here is a new concept: Any problem that is less than life-or-death shouldn't be the responsibility of politicians and politics. Because almost every human activity is likely to go wrong and require people to get together and fix it. It needs people with a "Houston we have a problem" attitude.

And politics is the one human activity where you can never admit you were wrong and then get together and fix it.

Making Sense of George Soros, Klaus Schwab

One of the questions in the back of my mind is about George Soros. What is this billionaire Jewish currency speculator think he is doing with all his support of lefty activism? 

Does it issue from the trauma of being a Jewish kid in Hungary in the last days of Hitler's Reich? Or is is simply the conventional wisdom of an educated post-WWII European that the nation state equals nationalism equals Hitler?

And whatabout Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos every year and pushing the Great Reset and Build Back Better? Michael Rectenwald has a long piece "What is the Great Reset?" in Hillsdale College's Imprimis.

Apparently the Great Reset is "a means of addressing the 'weaknesses of capitalism' that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.

Appararently Klaus Schwab has been pushing the idea of "stakeholder capitalism" since the 1970s. "Stakeholder capitalism" means that

the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.

Schwab and the WEF have promoted this idea ever since.

They can take credit for the stakeholder and public-private partnership rhetoric and policies embraced by governments, corporations, non-governmentals organizations, and international governance bodies worldwide.

Then there is a thing called the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index, a kind of "social credit score" for corporations that has the effect of promoting lefty ideas like "commitments to already-vulnerable communities within their ecosystems."

BlackRock, Inc., the world's largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model. 

And BlackRock is all-in on the climate-change movement.

In recent publications, Schwab and Thierry Malleret have pitted "stakeholder capitalism" against "neoliberalism," which they define as "a corpus of ideas and policies... favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

In other words, today's corporate elite is in bed with the administrative elite which is in bed with the political elite, and a grand time is had by all. 

It does all help make sense of the whole COVID experience. Because the whole elite is using the same hymnal, reading the same music and singing the same words.

So of course the social media giants are all-in on suppressing "misinformation" and "disinformation." 

Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg was nominated to be one of Klaus Sachwab's Young Global Leaders -- along with Google's Sergey Brin and others you may have heard of?

Really, it makes much more sense for corporate leaders to be "in alignment" with political and cultural leaders than opposed to them. It avoids being branded as "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth" and all the other pejoratives that have been hurled at businessmen down the last couple of centuries.

And it gives the corporate elite a stake in the over - under politics of the current era. If you support "stakeholder capitalism" it means you care about the oppressed. It makes you one of the good guys.

But the science™.

See, the science these days says that a benevolent top-down hierarchy is not the recipe for peace and prosperity. The science tells us that top-down politics and economics tends to set the economy and the culture in concrete. And it keeps on going on until the day that it doesn't. On that day, the dam breaks and all hell breaks loose.

See, the modern view is that life, the universe, and everything is "emergent." New ideas, new complexities emerge from the primordial soup, and if they work they take over the world. If they don't work then you never hear of them.

A notion like "stakeholder capitalism" that operates with the conceit that it knows how to organize "all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity" is wrong. We tried that back in the day with unionized manufacturing. All the workers at GM and Ford and General Electric were unionized and well-paid and pensioned. Until they weren't.

But that's OK. Because we now know that the white working class that benefited from the union-worker era were in fact racist-sexist-homophobes  and "bitter clingers" that had it coming.

So let's revisit the hit on "neoliberalism" that it favors "competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

Very good. But who gets to define "solidarity," "government intervention" and "social welfare?" And who gets to use their political and economic power to implement these ideas? And what if their brilliant idea is wrong?

We see what typically happens with this model from the late COVID experience. We are told that our betters are "following the science." But we learn later that they are just winging it. And when the opinion polls turn decisively against their policies of masking and vaccination they change their tune. But the science?

There's no doubt that we humans can help people when the market turns against them and their comfortable lives are threatened by a new technology. But we cannot stop "creative destruction" in its tracks with "government intervention." Because chances are that "government intervention" will make things worse, because ten-to-one government intervention will help the powerful and be completely oblivious about the non-powerful.

For example, the governments in the United States have fallen over themselves to make unionized teachers safe and force children to wear masks in school. But they have been oblivious to the harm done in all kinds of ways to ordinary non-organized workers like truckers.

I suppose then that the way to understand George Soros and Klaus Schwab is to understand that, like most humans, they think that what is best for them is best for the rest of the world. And you better fall in line, peasants.

Oh, and Whoa, listen to Dr. Robert Malone with Tucker Carlson on WEF and Young Leaders starting at 46:30.

Wokeness Has Only Just Begun, Says Blogger

Thanks to the links at Powerline, I got to read this piece about Wokeness, by N.S. Lyons: "No, the Revolution isn't Over." Because:

1. Wokeness is a religion, a set of "metaphysical beliefs.
   
   
2. The "void of meaning hasn't been filled." There's nothing out there that can compete with Wokeness.
   
   
3. "Social atomization hasn't reversed." No communities, civic associations, "little platoons" to fill the gap.
   
   
4. "Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity." And Wokeness is a kind of desperate attempt to recover meaning.
   
   
5. The Information Revolution isn't done yet. Makes it easier to form mobs.
   
   
6. There is no authority that can "establish any kind of common metaphysical framework, common moral narrative, common vision of a properly ordered life, common norms, or even a common reality that most of society will respect, trust, follow, and collectively defend."
   
   
7. Political parties can't help because "All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist,"
   
   
8. Majorities don't matter because, per Taleb, the most intolerant minority rules.
   
   
9. "Personnel is policy" and don't expect the teachers and the HRs to back off their wokey agenda.
   
   
10. Wokies occupy all the institutional high ground.
    
    
11. "Long marches are long" and we haven't even started a counter-march.
    
    
12. "Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell." Well, yeah. Because they have been carefully taught.
    
    
13. "The youth are still coddled and mentally broken"
    
    
14. "Elite overproduction is still in overdrive"
    
    
15. "'Wokeness is still required by law." And that goes all the way back to the Civil Rights Laws.
    
    
16. "Money is still power... This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change)."
    
    
17. "The opposition is still only political." There is no "resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts," not yet.
    
    
18. "Partisanship is still getting worse" and a Trump election in 2024 might unleash an "outbreak of the Second Woke Crusade to extirpate all the Racist Forces of Evil from the nation once and for all."
    
    
19. "None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands." I.e. "The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on."
    
    
20. This is just like Mao's Cultural Revolution. The leaders using the woke young to beat up on their rivals. But, like the Cultural Revolution it may not end well for the rulers.

Yeah. Don't get too optimistic, especially if the GOP wins the midterms.

But Who Will Be the Ruling Class?

In the last week or so I have been blogging on the crisis of our time. And the basic problem is that we are in the Autumn of the Educated Ruling Class, because the program of the educated ruling class has failed. It failed for the working class, it has failed for blacks.

And, of course, it has ended up being unjust to the ordinary Commoner middle class, because its over - under political formula, that was intended originally to feature the fat-cat bourgeoisie as enemy, has ended up with the ordinary Commoner middle class as the enemy, because racist-sexist-homophobe.

I have been noting how we have had a succession of presidents - Nixon, Reagan, Trump -- who have really campaigned and governed as the leader of the Commoner middle class.

I have noted how, despite all this, the Republicans have no clue what they are doing. And it is true, as the Zman writes, that conservatism really doesn't have a clue.

The question is: who would be the ruling class in the Next Regime, assuming that the Next Regime is a regime that features what I call an expanding-middle political formula, that regards the ordinary Commoner middle class as "friends" and anyone that wants to beat up on the ordinary Commoner middle class as the "enemy." But, anyone that wants to ally with the ordinary middle class is welcome as a friend.

And I don't mean here the top-dog part of the ruling class, but the second-tier, that today is the entire educated and credentialed class that benefits from the administrative state: the bureaucrats in the government, the lower-order politicians, the teachers, professors, journalists: everyone that Curtis Yarvin calls The Cathedral. Down to the nice liberal ladies that have #WeBelieve yardsigns out front.

And the answer is: I don't know.

But there is an even bigger problem. It arises from a notion from economist Milton Friedman. He wrote that government is always running against the limits. It always spends as much as it can, and it taxes as much as it can. And, I would say, it borrows as much as it can.

The question is: can modern government be cut back so that it is spending not 35-40 percent of GDP but, say, 15 percent of GDP? I don't know, but I suspect that it can't be done, partly because politics is always about loot and plunder for the supporters, and also because "women expect to be protected."

All I can say is that I am going to think about this. I am sure that someone has already figured this out, and that the answer is obvious. But I haven't figured it out.

Who will be the rank-and-file of the new ruling class that governs in the interest of the ordinary Commoner middle class? I don't know.

After the Canadian Truckers

I imagine that the Canadian government will manage to dislodge and humiliate the Canadian truckers and use their media narrative power to marginalize the ordinary middle-class populists that have arisen to support them.

Pretty well what has happened here with the January 6 mostly peaceful protesters.

The fact is that political change is almost never peaceful. That's because the ruling class has too much going with the present correlation of forces to act sensibly when the rules change.

Prime Minister Trudeau exactly tells us the problem with his tweet:

Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.

As I blogged last week, this tweet (and most of the other tweets from Trudeau) are trumpeting the political formula of today's ruling class, that I have called today the "pejorative ruling class," meaning the ruling class that Makes Things Worse.

I say that we are living in the Autumn of the Pejorative Ruling Class, meaning that the political formula that has worked so well over the last century, of the educated/credentialed/academic ruling class allied with the lower class to beat up on the stuck-up bourgeoisie, is in its last stages.

It is failing for a number of reasons.

1. It does not really help the "oppressed classes," primarily because it does not do anything for the lower classes except feed them with free money.
   
   
2. It has tripled the size of government over the last century. This means that, in the US, at least 40 percent of GDP is seized by the government and handed out as loot and plunder. If you think that this benefits society as a whole, I gotta bridge...
   
   
3. It has created a huge credentialed elite that has been educated for bureaucratic and administrative supervision -- in numbers rather in excess of the actual demand for such workers.

As I wrote last week, the over-under political formula made a kind of ugly political sense a century ago, because the working class was big and the bourgeoisie was small; so the numbers favored the rule of the educated class.

But now the middle class is easily the biggest class, so it doesn't really make political sense to marginalize it as "bitter clingers," "deplorables," and racist-sexist-homophobes.

But, flipping through Prime Minister Trudeau Twitter feed, it is clear that pandering to the oppressed classes, of whatever color and gender, is what he does.

And that is what President Biden does.

On the right, we tend to call all this "far-left" and wokey and the rest of it. But I think that it is more accurate to say that these people are just ordinary educated people doing what they have been taught. They don't know any better.

And if you have been taught a political formula where you, the ruling class, are called by Gaia and Justice to fight the horrid evil white oppressors to stop the endless marginalization of the eternal oppressed peoples, then what Trudeau and Biden do makes complete sense. It creates meaningful lives for the Laptop class and it provides loot and plunder for their lower class supporters.

But it is incredibly annoying to ordinary middle class people that just want to live their lives by the rules, own a nice house in the suburbs and raise a family.

It is also incredibly confusing to the middle class to be regaled endlessly about racism and sexism and privilege. Because ordinary middle class people just get on with life, playing the cards that life has dealt them, and not feeling that they have been particularly privileged or advantaged by their lives or their parents' lives.

And, by the way, the ordinary white middle class is taught every day that any day now, the rules may change and they won't get the promotion or job they wanted because the DEI administrators are going to hire or promote someone not on experience or merit or results, but on race and gender.

I wonder what the ordinary middle class thinks about that. We really don't know because the ordinary middle class knows that the way to get into trouble in a New York minute is to complain about quotas / affirmative action / diversity / equity. So they button their lips. Unless they happen to be on the street in the middle of a Canadian trucker peaceful protest.

OK. Our present ruling class is clueless. At one point the mayor of Ottawa criticized the truckers and their supporters for turning the whole thing into a backyard barbecue.

I mean. Peaceful protest is deadly serious. Because justice. Because centuries of oppression. How Dare the truckers and their supporters have fun!

I think the important thing to know is that our rulers really don't know what to do. They know they are in trouble, but none of the usual Five Point Plans are going to make a blind bit of difference.

And in back of that is that there is really nothing for politics to do any more.

Because politics requires an enemy that we can go and fight and destroy, to make us safe. But really there is no enemy. Not any more. So that means there is nothing for politics to do.

So the ruling class makes it up. Oppressed classes and climate disaster. Unless we act now.

Women's Tears and the Public Square

As you know I believe with sociologist George Simmel that the public square was invented by men for men, and that, with women coming into the public square they are changing it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Now comes Richard Hanania with a piece "Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas." He is saying that when men argue in the public square they can stand there are argue away forever -- although argument tends to end up as fisticuffs.

But if a man is arguing with a woman and she dissolves in tears, then she wins.

A man can’t just yell in another man’s face for 5 or 10 minutes about how he’s hurting his feelings. If a man does behave this way, bystanders are more likely to feel disgusted than join in or play the role of white knight. The man at the receiving end of the abuse is at some point going to have to escalate towards violence, or back down and say something about how this is beneath him. Depending on the situation, observers may assume violence is a distinct possibility, and get between the two sides.

None of these options are available when getting yelled at by a woman. You certainly can’t make an implicit threat of violence. Raising your voice will turn everyone against you, and even walking away can look heartless.

Hanania proposes three available rules for male vs. female argument:

1. Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.
   
   
2. Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.
   
   
3. We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.

But, of course, this means that women have the upper hand, because they can always switch to hyper-emotionalism when they are losing an argument.

Actually, I think that any capitulation to female rules is unworkable: you cannot have an effective public square on that basis.

Moreover, I don't know if you've noticed, but the option to be "exhausted" or to use hyper-emotionalism is only OK for lefty women. If you are a regime-approved activist, go ahead. But don't try that if you are a conservative, or a female supporter of a Canadian trucker. I don't think that Sarah Palin was ever allowed to be "exhausted." And I doubt if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) gets to be all emotional with Chuck Schumer.

Actually women's rules cannot work in the public square, and the reason is obvious from my notion that men have a Culture of Insult -- which is the male one-on-one confrontation minus the actual resort to violence -- and women have a Culture of Complaint.

I have said that the way the women's Culture of Complaint works is for two women to be have coffee together and complaining about a third person.

But I realize that is incomplete. There is another instantiation of the women's Culture of Complaint. A woman may directly complain to her husband or to a man. And she does this because she knows that the man cannot win in that situation. If she gets angry, he cannot resort to violence, as he might with another man. If she gets emotional, he cannot resort to disdain.

The reason that the Culture of Complaint works for woman on woman is that the woman has the option that "she will never talk to that woman again." Whether it's the neighbor across the street or another officer on the US Navy ship. Remember the case of the US Navy destroyer colliding with a container ship back in 2017? The "officer of the deck" (OOD) and the "Tactical Action Officer" in charge of "monitoring the combat radar" were both women.

The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!!

Obviously a Navy cannot function when the women aren't talking to each other. But a neighborhood can.

The way that public institutions work -- have to work -- is that every day the people working there have to suck it in and work with the other people. Even if the other people suck. Especially if they suck.

For men, they have to stop short of violence. For women they have to stop short of "exhaustion" and "never talking to that person again."

Otherwise you don't have a public institution. You have a barroom brawl and you have Navy destroyers crashing into container ships. And that is not good.