Gays Can Never be "Normal"

One of the lies that liberals tell themselves is that the fundamentalist Christian churches are the very locus of the powerful patriarchy, and therefore must be crushed.

In fact, as liberal James Ault tells in in Spirit and Flesh, a book about a fundamentalist church in New England, the opposite is true. In the church that he studied the men held all the offices but the women had all the power. They operated behind the scenes, and their men did what they were told.

Another thing to keep in mind is that fundamentalists are little people. No elite American would attend a real fundamentalist church; it would be too embarrassing. And as liberals say of African Americans: they can't be racists because they don't have the power.

So when gays decide to humiliate small Christian shopkeepers by siccing the local Human Rights Commission on them, there is only one thing to say: how about a little compassion, a little tolerance? How about putting yourself in the place of the "other?"

How about practicing what you preach?

Also, it might be a good time to revisit Winston Churchill's dictum: in victory, magnanimity. Gays have won the gay marriage battle. How about declaring victory and going home?

Look, I get the impossible position of the gays. Back in the days of Stonewall they were defiantly radical and counter-cultural. But now they want to be "normal" and accepted as normal. Only problem is, as Erick Erickson writes, that gays can never be normal. Gays can't be normal because they can't get married and have normal children that grow up with a mother and a father. And so on and so on.

A generation ago and more liberals indoctrinated young college women to liberate their sexual selves: women could get laid just like men! Unfortunately the young women believed them, and tried to do it. But most women aren't cut out for the multiple partners game. They fall in love and love forever. The sexual revolution created nothing but heartache.

Now liberals are indoctrinating our youth into believing that gay is just a lifestyle choice -- or that you are born gay, or whatever lends itself to the activist battle of the moment. Unfortunately our young people believe believe them. They will live to regret it, but by then it will be too late.

Of course, that's nothing on the liberal war on Christianity. I regard the Axial Age religions as vital agencies that help people graduate from the life of tribal helplessness as People of the Subordinate Self, and become People of the Responsible Self and responsible individuals. The left and the welfare state are foolish attempts that discourage people from making the momentous leap from victimhood and bondage to responsibility and freedom.

Yes, but the Christians are such bigots!

My take on the almost universal religious condemnation of homosexuality down the ages is that it is probably a social evolutionary thing: social Darwinism, if you like. Society needs to channel young energy towards marriage, work, and making babies, because otherwise the race dies out. Kinda like the late Roman empire where it got to be really difficult to get well-born young men to abandon their lives of dissipation and get married. Kinda like Europe today.

So religion isn't just about getting people to behave right through the cunning trick of divine justice. It also must push the idea of "go forth and multiply." Otherwise oblivion.

Our liberal friends like to suggest that getting married and raising children is a second-class sort of life, one that you resort to if don't have it in you to become a creative artist. And, of course, women are wasted as stay-at-home moms.

But the truth is that multiplication is hard. Ask any school-aged kid. Ask any married couple with two or three kids and one of them a surly teenager. And the most important thing that 90 percent of us will ever do is to put children on the ground and get them properly fledged and out of the nest.

Individual Responsibility: What about the Ancient Nomads?

One of my thoughtful emailers sent me a question about my post on SJW Anita Sarkeesian. He notes my three-stage system of People of the Subordinate Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Creative Self, and writes:

You mention that responsible individualism is "the responsibility to find work, the responsibility to make your own choices, the responsibility to find your own mate, all within the demanding environment of the market economy".  Aren't these the responsibilities of all humans, always?  Surely man has dreamed of universal leisure for his fellow man since time immemorial, and only recently has such fantasy become the basis of entire ideologies.  How then do our modern age responsibilities differ than that of an ancient nomad when boiled down to the basics of the quote above?  

The straight answer to that is: yes, of course, and not just of humans but of every living thing. Of course every human has the responsibility to get on their bike and earn a living. But there's a problem with all social animals, the problem of freeloading. The basic deal in social cooperation is that we all get to eat at the communal table; we all make our contribution, and we all get to enjoy the fruits of our cooperation. The reason that social cooperation works is that the division of labor works: when animals specialize, the individuals benefit and the community benefits.

But what about the slacker? There are several ways to deal with this menace. The first is shaming and possible expulsion. Other people in the community judge your behavior and take action. Then there is hierarchy. The boss tells you what to do, and punishes you if you don't do it. Then there is divine justice. God punishes you for your sins. Finally, there is exchange, which the anthropologists tell us is unique to modern humans, although it didn't really go viral until the rise of the bourgeoisie. People find a way to contribute to society and then get rewarded by the exchange system for their contribution.

On my system, the hunter-gatherers are pre-subordinate selves. They cooperate in a face-to-face society and the slacker gets named and shamed into compliance. We see this today in the ubiquitous community of women at work or in a neighborhood that have no power over each other except the judgements of other women's gossip.

When we get to the agricultural age we get a visibly hierarchical society where people must do their part and where agricultural workers are typically subordinated to a landed warrior class. Once you get this subordination you get the freeloader that does the absolute minimum of work that will avoid sanction. We see this survive today in any corporate or government bureaucracy where you can probably enjoy lifetime tenure and a pension if you keep your nose clean and don't antagonize the bosses. The problem is that it is staggeringly inefficient to have everyone sitting around waiting for the boss to tell them what to do.

The boss system works, after a fashion, in the agricultural age because life on the farm is pretty simple. But in the industrial age, where almost nobody grows their own food or builds their own cottage, the boss system has broken down. Today we all live in the exchange system where each one of us must find out how to contribute to society, and we learn what others value through the exchange system and its prices for ideas, for goods and for labor.

In this modern age, where the yoke of work and of finding work falls directly upon the shoulders of the individual worker, it is not surprising, as my emailer suggests, that people dream of "universal leisure for his fellow man" and conjure up whole ideologies to that dream. It is telling, of course, that all attempts to realize dreams of universal leisure have turned into nightmares. They have all regressed to the old boss system and have simply been unable to deliver even a smidgen of leisure. Instead they have required the most cruel compulsion to deliver even the simplest necessities of modern life.

And so today we get Anita Sarkeesian, once a nice middle-class college girl, who gets seduced by the victim ideology of feminism and the all-explaining power of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Sarkeesian and her fellow religionists demand "safe spaces," freedom from "microagressions" and the power to defenestrate anyone that challenges their dogmas.

For decades liberals have been lecturing us about the horror of that delicate flower, the Victorian wife, that had to be protected from the big bad world of sex and sleaze, and was told to "lie back and think of England." The solution to this patriarchal nightmare, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, was the "independent woman," unafraid of sex, unafraid of the public square and men and career.

What is going on here? It's politics. The whole point of politics is power, and the needs of power change from decade to decade. In the mid 20th century the cry was for the independent woman. Now the cry is for "safe spaces." But it's all politics and political power.

Yes, it's true that every individual has the responsibility to provide for himself and his family. But nomads are socialized into cooperation in a different way than modern city folk. The question is: how do you deal with the freeloader? In nomad society the freeloader got a frown from the other women; the agricultural bondman got a frown from his lord (and from the village women). Today it is a frown from the exchange system (and from the boss at work and the neighborhood women).

The way to stay clear of the modern freeloader police is to be a responsible individual. Then you'll have nothing to fear from the gossiping women, nothing to fear from the boss at work, and nothing to fear from the market system.

But you still have to watch out for the diversity police. There is no escape from them!

Robert Kuttner: On Another Planet

Sometimes it really pays to read the guys on the other side and try to understand how they look at the world. Here's Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect wondering “Why the 99 Percent Keeps Losing.”

You and I understand this perfectly. The 99 percent is losing because liberals. But Kuttner, against all the evidence, thinks Republicans are to blame. And he still can't understand it.

The vast majority of Americans keep falling behind economically because of changes in society's ground rules, while the rich get even richer -- yet this situation doesn't translate into a winning politics.

If anything, the right keeps gaining and the wealthy keep pulling away. How can this possibly be?
Well, he's got seven reasons. And the first one is that Republicans are to blame for the gridlock in Washington, and the experts agree.

Actually, I agree with Kuttner and the experts on this one. We Republicans and conservatives are fundamentally opposed to the continued expansion of the welfare state. We think that it is unjust and wicked. So of course we try to stop the Democrats expanding its injustice any way we can. Wouldn't Democrats do the same?

But the Democrats are hardly blameless, writes Kuttner.

Instead of seizing on the collapse of 2008 as a disgrace for laissez-faire economics, deregulation, Wall Street and the Republican Party, Barack Obama tried to make nice with the GOP, refrained from cleaning out the big banks that caused the mess, and drank the Kool-Aid of budget balance.

Actually, my impression is that the Democrats have been blaming the crash on “laissez-faire economics, deregulation, Wall Street,” not to mention greedy bankers. And as for Obama trying to “make nice with the GOP:” come on, pal. Obama doesn't even know how to make nice with Democrats.

Then Kuttner's all upset about the US Supreme Court and Citizens United. The court majority “has become an opportunistic subsidiary of the Republican Party.” If only! And what about Chief Justice Roberts waving through Obamacare, old chum?

Then there's economic inequality. In the years after World War II,

Shared prosperity was built on government activism promoting opportunity, strong unions providing decent wages even for the less educated, enforcement of other labor laws, debt-free public higher education, well-regulated financial institutions, a genuinely progressive income tax, and a trading system that did not promote outsourcing.

This is a standard Democratic talking point. Back in the Fifties America had good jobs at good wages, and then Ronald Reagan ruined it.

Yes but what about the changes to the economy and “how jobs are structured?” What about education and technology? That's “malarkey,” according to Kuttner. With the right politics, we'd whack corporate executives, grow unions, and windfall profits would be shared.

Yet with all this mess, Millennials aren't in the streets protesting. Maybe we could wake them up with “a one-time write off of all past student debt.” And hey, how about a “genuine mass movement?”
You mean like the Tea Party?

It's easy to dismiss all Kuttner's arguments as self-deceiving claptrap. But let us try to understand the point of view of the “other.”

There is an argument that politics could successfully strong-arm a one-time redistribution of income through labor and social insurance legislation half a century ago.  You could argue that it worked back then because the US bestrode the world economy like a colossus. Government could successfully force the economic system to funnel money to Democratic supporters.

Could it be that the decade of the Glorious Fifties was a special situation, never to be repeated?

Could it be that there is a limit to what politics and organizing and movements and taxes and regulation can accomplish in this world?

Could it be that progressives like Robert Kuttner are just plain wrong about what will help the 99 percent start winning?

On the conservative view you'd expect that when the Fed is printing money and keeping interest rates low, you'd have a stock market boom that would benefit the rich. When the government legislates a complex entitlement like Obamacare that puts huge new burdens on individuals and employers, you'd expect the economy to stumble and wages to crumble. When government mandates minimum wages and lays swingeing taxes on labor, you'd expect employers to be stingy with jobs and you'd expect a flourishing underground economy.

And you'd expect the 99 percent to go right on losing.

Liberals like Robert Kuttner like to sneer at fundamentalists that don't believe in evolution.

But what really matters is the science of whether minimum wages hurt the very people they are supposed to help, whether unions end up destroying the businesses they organize, whether government health care can ever be more than a hole to pour money through.

I just wish that the world would start sneering at liberal fundamentalism on economics.

Anita Sarkeesian: The Road from Individual to Victim

Canadian critic and social justice warrior Anita Sarkeesian is the young lady that stirred up #gamergate. So far so good. But I recently got to view remarks she made at All About Women 2015 at the Sydney Opera House (H/T Susan L. M. Goldberg). In her prepared remarks Sarkeesian described her journey from neo-liberal individualist to feminist victim.

This is fascinating to me because of my three-stage theory of social membership. Simply put, my theory imagines three types of people. There are the People of the Subordinate Self: think workers, peasants, serfs, slaves, bondsmen, underclass. Their creed is collectivism; their place is the village. Then there are People of the Responsible Self: think Jews, Christians, careers, bourgeoisie, markets, business. Their creed is responsible individualism; their place is the city. Finally there are the People of the Creative Self: think artists, writers, revolutionaries, activists. Their creed is expressive individualism; their place is the artist's colony.

Now, it is my notion that you need a religion when you move from one selfhood to another. The Axial Age religions, including Judaism and Christianity, are vehicles that help people on the road from the world of the Subordinate Self to the world of the Responsible Self. Romanticism is the vehicle if you want to graduate from the creed of responsible individualism to the belief system of expressive individualism.

What I had never thought about is what religion you need if you want to go in the opposite direction! Suppose that you were born into a family in the middle class but you don't feel like a responsible individual at all? Suppose you find that you are really a victim, a member of the tribe of the exploited and the oppressed? Perfectly simple. For you there is leftism. Here is Anita Sarkeesian describing her journey.

Like most people who grew up immersed in the neoliberal ideology of the West, I saw the world largely as a series of individuals making their own personal individual choices. And here I was, a young woman making my own personal choices about what to wear, what to buy, what to study and what I wanted to do every day. Within that narrow individualist framework feminism seemed like a relic of the distant past.

 But then she had her Road to Damascus experience.

With the help of some amazing mentors and by reading a lot of feminist writing, especially the words of women of color and queer women from around the world, I learned to see through a sociological lens and understand the world as it really exists, as a series of intersecting social systems. Once you have a systemic and institutional framework, you see how oppression manifests in many subtle ways under the systems of what bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

Well, of course! It all dovetails! But there is a problem.

 Unfortunately many contemporary discourses in and around feminism tend to emphasize a form of hyper individualism (informed by the neoliberal worldview). More and more, I hear variations on this idea that anything that any woman personally chooses to do is a feminist act, this attitude is often referred to as “choice feminism”. Choice feminism posits that each individual woman determines what is empowering for herself, which might sound good on the surface but this concept risks obscuring the bigger picture and larger, fundamental goals of the movement by focusing on individual women and a very narrow, individual notion of “empowerment”. It erases the reality that some choices that women make have an enormous negative impact on other women’s lives.

So, you see, unless you go with Sarkeesian's approved feminism you are helping the patriarchy, and you will be shunned. You see, "Even if an individual woman can make patriarchy work for her, it’s still a losing game for the rest of the women on this planet." And that is bad.

And because of how systems of oppression intersect and compound one another, it’s women of color, indigenous women, women living in the global south, women with disabilities, queer women, and transwomen who bare the brunt of those ramifications.

 The bottom line is this:

In order to be a feminist we have a responsibility beyond ourselves, we have a responsibility to each other, and we have a responsibility to work for the collective liberation of all women.

So it's a fantasy to think of yourself as a responsible self and an individualist. Because, really, we aren't individuals at all, but victims, and what we need to do is to "work for the collective liberation of all women."

Now actually I agree with Anita Sarkeesian. We really are victims. Ever since the first families in Mesopotamia got sucked into alluvial agriculture five thousand years ago humans have found themselves "caged" by the new ways. That's the word that Michael Mann uses in The Sources of Social Power. In other words, once you've abandoned the nomadic ways of the hunter-gatherer and joined a fixed settlement that works the land you are trapped in the new way. For one thing, agriculture supports a lot more people per square mile than nomadism. If you break up agriculture, a ton of people are going to die until the population reduces to a level that can survive on nomadism.

Another thing is that people become less war-like in settled agricultural communities. In nomadic groups all the men are enrolled to fight the border wars against the neighboring groups. In the larger agricultural societies only the warrior class does the fighting, and the borders are much further away. So the death by violence comes down from 500 per 100,000 per year to 50 per 100,000 per year, according the Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

In the transition from agricultural to industrial society you get another step in pacification. The nation state is bigger than the feudal barony, and the army of the feudal host is replaced by a professional bureaucratic army. Violent death rate drops from 50 per 100,000 per year to five or even one per 100,000 per year.

Don't mind me, Anita Sarkeesian, but I'd make a wild guess and say that the level of patriarchal oppression comes down with the transition from nomad to agricultural settlement, and again with the transition from agriculture to industry. These days we aren't governed by a landed warrior class, but by an educated elite class -- people like you, Anita Sarkeesian.

If you want to experience vicariously the good old patriarchy in action, read the Iliad. Those Argives and Danaans thought nothing of sacking cities, killing the men, and taking the women as concubines. Raping and pillage where what men did in those days.

But in America, in 1896, a young Norwegian immigrant woman, Helga Estby, walked across the continent to try to win a $10,000 prize. Was she raped and pillaged on the way? Wikipedia doesn't say. But I'd guess that she wasn't.

The truth is that responsible individualism is not liberation; it is a heavy yoke of responsibility: the responsibility to find work, the responsibility to make your own choices, the responsibility to find your own mate, all within the demanding environment of the market economy. It's not surprising that immediately after the rise of capitalism a succession of social and political movements started to yearn for the lost Eden of collectivism, and the liberation from the heavy burdens of life and work under capitalism from which there is no escape.

It is telling that in the university in 2015 women are demanding "safe spaces" from people and ideas that they don't want to face. If you ask me, that's a return to the patriarchy, because people in "safe places" need society to protect them from danger. And who do you think are going to be the protectors?

If life as a responsible individual is tough, the truth is that expressive individualism, the life of the artist and the creator, is even harder. All of us can find a place in the world if we give up our lives to a collective. Most of us can find a place in the world as responsible individuals. But only a few can make it as creators of original work.

So it's not surprising that there are many people like Anita Sarkeesian that long for a simpler, less creative, less responsible life. The trouble is that this liberation in collectivism is not liberating at all. Ask anyone that lived in Soviet Russia or Maoist China.

And Anita Sarkeesian is not really a victim. She is an activist, rough and tough and devilish sly, a leader and an influencer. In fact she is a member of the creative class, having hacked out a place for herself in the sun by developing a significant talent for creative publicity.

What Would an Islam Reformation Mean?

I love Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali Muslim turned western atheist. Her books Nomad and Infidel are breathtaking views into the crisis in Islam. Now she's just out with Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now and proposed to reform Islam, and I'll be out there buying myself a copy. Meanwhile we have the reviewers. Writes Brian Stewart:

The argument in Heretic, Hirsi Ali’s fourth book, is straightforward: Islam is in need of a radical transformation. Islam itself, that is — mainstream Islam, not “radical” Islam. This is a thorny proposition: How to reform a religion whose adherents believe its central text was dictated by Allah Himself? But when the behavior of millions is guided by a religion whose sacred texts frequently justify intolerance and cruelty, something must be done.

But what is to be done?

Hirsi Ali proposes five amendments to Islamic doctrine: dethroning Mohammad as an infallible prophet, and scrapping a literalist reading of the Quran; elevating the rewards of human life over those of eternal life (with the ancillary purpose of delegitimizing martyrdom); replacing the most barbarous parts of Sharia with practical man-made legislation; promoting concerted action to stigmatize those tempted to take religious law into their own hands; and, last, repudiating the theological warrant for jihad.

Yes, but how? Hirsi Ali wants us westerners to ally with so-called "Mecca" Muslims, "pious believers who are not inclined to practice violence but remain at odds with the modern world in crucial ways."

But, of course, what we in the west think and do is rather beside the point. The question is rather, how do Muslims deal with the fact of the modern world? And how do they deal with the fact that their heartlands are racked with war and violence?

The fundamental problem in all "reformations" and "enlightenments" and "revolutions" is that religion and politics are human attempts to stabilize a radically unstable world. They attempt to provide a safe place where humans can live out their lives with some pretense of a "normal life."

But what happens when the objective conditions of life change? What happens is that religious leaders and political leaders push back. The religious leaders mobilize against "heresy" and the political leaders mobilize against "rebels." Very often the heretics are idiots and the rebels are pirates; but not always.

The Reformation in Europe was not merely an argument over religion, it was also an argument over politics and the economy, part of the capitalist and individualist revolution, and it was an internal European thing. The rising bourgeoisie of merchants and manufacturers started creating remarkable amounts of wealth and their wealth and their culture started to influence the old feudal order in Europe, leading to centuries of religious and dynastic wars, astonishing increases in prosperity and transformation of the way of life of everyone from kings to paupers.

As the European transformation proceeded, it expanded out across the world, creating an enormous challenge to the two great populations and cultures of the world in India and China. For India and China, the challenge was not just an argument within the culture as in Europe, but a dreadful attack from without. India ended up under British rule for a couple of centuries, and China experienced dreadful convulsions for the long century between 1850 and 1980. After emerging from under the western knout they thought to set up the new India and the new China by embracing socialism, obviously the latest and greatest from the west, but found to their cost that socialism was, in fact, a dreadful reaction, an attempt to return to an economic and social Eden that never was. So now they are going capitalist.

But what about Islam in its heartlands from North Africa to the Hindu Kush? Let's be honest. If it weren't for oil, nobody would give a damn. But because of oil we in the west keep meddling in the Middle East to keep the oil flowing cheap and regular. And the wealth from oil has allowed the Middle Eastern religious and political authorities to resist the existential challenges that the rise of the west has posed to Islam.

What should be done, and how? I turn for inspiration to Marxism, which reckons that the productive forces are the foundation and that culture and politics are the superstructure. On this view, like it or not, global individualist capitalism is the productive force on which the whole world is based. Whatever your religion, whatever your politics, you must figure how to connect it with the reality of the modern Great Enrichment, in which peoples that practice capitalism have increased their income by nearly two orders of magnitude in 200-300 years.

When we look at Muslims in their heartland, or Muslims in their great diaspora to Europe and North America, that is the issue. How do these peoples, tossed into the 21st century, create a new superstructure for their culture that will make it possible for them to live a "normal life" again?

Ted Cruz, Railsplitter

The biggest applause line for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speech on March 23, 2015 at Liberty University was his actual announcement that he would run for President of the United States. The second biggest applause line was this:

Instead of a president who boycotts Prime Minister Netanyahu, imagine a president who stands unapologetically with the nation of Israel.

Yep, those conservative Christian students at Liberty University stand with Israel.

And the speech also hit the other standard conservative applause lines: to "stand up and defeat radical Islamic terrorism," to repeal "every word of Obamacare," to repeal "every word of Common Core." And the flat tax, and abolish the IRS.

But the speech was really about introducing Ted Cruz as an American everyman, with both parents from humble origins, with a mother the first in her Irish Catholic family to go to college and become a computer programmer in the 1950s, with an alcoholic father that nearly abandoned his family but for Jesus, with Ted going to college and working two jobs when his father's business cratered into bankruptcy during the 1980s oil price crash. And then there's his wife Heidi starting a business "in grade school" baking bread for folks working in the apple orchards. Can you say "not Bush" and "not Clinton?"

The conservative response to Ted Cruz's speech have seemed a little jaded, and the liberals, of course, want to define him already as the Second Coming of Joe McCarthy. But my take was that this was a carefully constructed strategic speech, your basic born-in-a-log-cabin, man-of-the-people, hope-and-change speech. Of course it was.

Cruz openly appealed to conservative Christians.

Today, roughly half of born again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.

And of course he appealed to the rest of the conservative coalition with applause lines on liberty, the Second Amendment, abortion, and a message of hope for middle-class strivers with small businesses growing and prospering and "young people coming out of school with four, five, six job offers."

Obviously the speech was pitched at the conservative base, but Cruz left a wide opening to move to the center.

And one other thing. The left likes to paint Ted Cruz as a mad bomber. Hey, the GOP establishment likes to do the same. But Cruz is cool, medium cool. The problem with advertising him as a mad bomber is that, when voters get to see him on TV, they will experience a disconnect. They will wonder what's so bad about such a mild-mannered candidate.

There was nothing wild or extreme in Ted Cruz's announcement speech. Just standard conservative boilerplate that puts him in the mainstream of conservative politics. The only people likely to be annoyed would be liberals.

One other thing: Ted's elder daughter Caroline. She high-fived some of the audience as the Cruz family moved around the stage after the speech. Can anyone spell P-O-L-I-T-I-C-I-A-N?

Ted Cruz did say a lot of things that liberals think nobody should be allowed to say in America.  But apart from gentry liberals, who would have a problem with that?

If Feminism is all about vicitmization, then who will save the victims?

We all know that the patriarchy is the source of all our problems on the racism, sexism, and homophobia front. But suppose it isn't?

Yes, I know. If there is one thing we all agree on it is the evil of the patriarchy that kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time. But wait a minute! Chaps like Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn and The Faith Instinct suggest that the invention of religion helped free humans from the rule of the alpha male and created the egalitarianism of the hunter-gatherers.

OK, let's just say that the evil of patriarchy kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of capitalism when a ruthless individualism was born out of the comfortable village communism that obtained somehow under the boot of the feudal system. But wait! Chaps like Alan MacFarlane in The Origins of English Individualism say that the birth of individualism in England in the mid 12th century meant that women were owning property as individuals and could sue in the manorial courts. In the much-loved extended family women were always under the control of some patriarchal male.

Well, anyway, everybody knows that women were beside themselves with boredom in the heyday of 1950s suburbia. Or at least Betty Friedan was, in The Feminine Mystique. Except of course that it is women that like nice leafy nests in which to raise their children in suburbia away from the testosterone of the big city. It is men that like standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by.

Here is what I really think. I think that some sort of patriarchal society, where women are expected to value family before career, is essential to the survival of the species. Sorry about that, girls.

Exhibit A is the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference. Robert Stacy McCain writes about it in "Warriors Against Human Nature." He tells us about the emergence of queer feminism, as against the old traditional "binary" feminism.

On McCain's testimony, queer feminism is the invention of Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, now required coursework at hundreds of US colleges. Here's how it works.

Professor Butler declares that the division of humanity into male and female is an artificial illusion, the gender binary produced by the heterosexual matrix. Therefore, those characteristics we think of as naturally male (masculine) and female (feminine) are not natural at all, according to Queer Theory. Instead these categories are imposed on us by the oppressive demands of the male-supremacist system of patriarchy.

Er, which US political party is supposed to be anti-science?

But suppose that all that the feminist cultural Marxist rubbish were true. Then how do you account for this piece on privilege? Here are Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven writing about "Why Won't Liberals talk about the Most Important Kind of 'Privilege' in America?" It's marriage privilege. You see, they write, studies show that the children of married parents do much better in life by any measure you like. Oh, there is one other little matter. Studies show that children of married parents do better if there aren't too many children of single parents in the area.

Yes, liberals and queer feminists. Marriage: It's for the children.

Want more? Here's a young academic that doesn't dare assign any reading or do or say anything that might set off the liberal students in his class.

All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

Or the special snowflake liberal students might get you fired.

It's easy to laugh at all this. After all, medieval scholastics (they say) used to argue about the number of angels that you could fit on a pinhead. Nothing new here.

It would all be great fun if lives weren't being ruined. I am talking about the millions of children of single parents, who are predominantly from the low income 30 percent, because liberals condone single parenthood. I am talking about the millions of women that listen to their liberal instructors and direct their life trajectory away from marriage and children and then wake up at 50 empty and alone, wondering who will take care of them in their old age.

You see liberals: the problem isn't economic inequality. It's "spiritual inequality," as Robert William Fogel says. The problem isn't money; the problem is that the modern administrative welfare state incarcerates the poor in cultural ghettos. What's your four-point program for that?

My take on feminism and abortion and childlessness and twentysomethings in the city is that it is a self-indulgence of the rich and the well-born. The fact is that marriage and children is a life of work and effort, for both sexes. A certain amount of money allows you to choose a life of personal growth and creativity, become an artist or a writer, instead of a wage slave and a parent. Really, who wouldn't choose hanging out in the city with witty, intelligent friends against a life of diapers and bosses and meltdowns?

Who wouldn't? Anyone with half a brain. The fact is that feminism and gentry liberalism are merely the modern instantiation of age-old upper-class self-indulgence. What we call the "patriarchy" is merely the call of the genes. They demand to be reproduced and they demand to flourish. Or else.

The funny thing about queer feminism is that it demands victimization. McCain quotes feminist professor Sandra Bartky:

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization... to see oneself as a victim.

Of course, it's not funny at all. It's an argument for force. If someone is a victim, because of social injustice, then it stands to reason that government must act to end the injustice. That is the common thread that runs down left-wing thought from the French Revolution  down to the present. If there is something wrong in society then it can only be solved by political action, which means force.

If you have a taste for power then you have a taste for politics. And politics executes its program in government. So anyone with a taste for power will naturally find their thoughts turning to some great injustice that can only be resolved by government action. If that person with a taste for power cannot find a real injustice to fight they will find some minor injustice and inflate it into a great political cause.

The genius of Marx was to find in the working class such a victim -- even though the working class in the 19th century was improving its lot beyond anything ever known in history.

The genius of the cultural Marxists was to generalize the victimization-of-the-working-class meme into a general concept of victimization that could be applied in behalf of anyone and everyone against a target oppressor class, the capitalists, the patriarchy, whoever.

But if women can only be safe when protected by powerful feminist activist custodians that means that women just aren't strong enough to live as the "independent woman" of Simone de Beauvoir of The Second Sex. And if women need protection from powerful patrons or matrons, what then is the difference between a patriarchy and a liberal femiarchy? Power is power; all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Anyway, what matriarch could really be free enough of victimization to be able to protect the poor little queer feminist victims?

If women are victims then they cannot be allowed out alone at night. They must be guarded and supervised. And obviously the guarding cannot be done by women, who are victims. Only men can do it. So we are back to the patriarchy.

Michael Barone has a piece out today on Raul Emanuel's campaign for re-election as mayor of Chicago. He writes about the rise of "gentry liberals" as a political force with the election of John Lindsay as mayor of New York City in the 1960s. Typically, gentry liberals have acquired power in coalition with African Americans while antagonizing the old white ethnics that used to supply the Democratic votes in the big cities.

Lindsay constructed a new coalition of gentry liberals and blacks, setting up a police civilian review board and claiming credit for preventing a riot in Harlem. He showed disdain for ethnic and middle-class whites, a “new snobbery” as I called it at the time.

Lindsay’s policies played a major part in a negative national trend, as crime and welfare dependency roughly tripled in the 1965–75 decade, and New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Other cities with fewer strengths went into death spirals, like my native Detroit.

Gentry liberalism has tended to be really bad for big American cities, from New York to Detroit, and particularly bad for the minorities that vote with the gentry liberals.

I'd say that goes for any victim group. By allying themselves with gentry liberals the victims are just setting themselves up for more failure and heartache. Because in the end, the allies of the gentry liberals are just votes, to be discarded when no longer useful for the liberal project of power.

There is, in other words, no substitute for getting out of the victim syndrome, getting away from the mechanical model of political system, and becoming a responsible individual. "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista," as Burke wrote two centuries ago, "you see nothing but the gallows."

And nothing has changed on the left-wing front since then.