All Politics is Identity Politics, Jonah

The subtitle of Jonah Goldberg's latest book, Suicide of the West, is "How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy."

So Jonah waffles into a column about people who have interviewed him on his book. Everyone is opposed to "tribalism" but "each side thinks only their opponents are guilty of it."

On nationalism, I get the most pushback from the right and the least from the left.

But what does he mean?

However on identity politics,

It's hard for many liberals to understand (or at least admit) that there might be something pernicious about dividing everybody up into categories of race, sex, ethnicity, etc. Meanwhile, many on the right struggle to see how their side might be guilty of doing the same thing.

 Of course the answer to this conundrum is that all politics is identity politics. All politics is division, dividing people up into our tribe and their tribe. Only, of course, our tribe/identity and its memes are good, while the other side's tribe/identity and its memes are bad and threaten the body politic.

All politics divides people into our tribe and their tribe, and all religion, including modern secular religion divides people up into the Chosen and the Rest.

Conservatives in general want to keep domestic politics down to a low roar, in accordance with their idea that government should be limited and politics just a disagreement among friends. But as for those Commies and those Islamofascists...

The left is the same only different.  For the left the question of justice is the only thing, and political power is the one best way to bend the arc of history. But as for the inordinate fear of communism and Islam, well, only racists, sexists, and bigots have a problem with that.

It all makes sense. On matters of life and death, or what we take to be matters of life and death, humans  are intensely tribal and deploy identity politics to rally supporters to their banner. On  other matters, we humans ask "what's your problem?"

It was the Founders and the writers that inspired them that proposed to build governmental institutions that would put roadblocks in the way of political and religious enthusiasts. Limited government and three co-equal branches of government were designed to keep the partisans busy reducing the other guy's idiotic plans to dust. And the separation of church and state were designed to prevent religious enthusiasts from invoking the power of the state in their establishment of a heaven on earth.

And, of course, there is the market, that puts its thumb very firmly on the scales of getting along and trusting the stranger.

I'd say that it's a shame that so many people cannot grasp the wisdom of the Founders and the market and instead live for the revolution and the triumph of the Chosen.

But nobody said that life was easy. And nobody is going to stop the other guys and their evil tribalism with the weapon of our sacred identity and vision of the truth.

Of Course Lefty UW Students Hate Conservatives

Imagine this: At the University of Washington in Seattle:

Many left-leaning students at the University of Washington-Seattle harbor feelings that Republicans and conservatives are "evil," "inhuman," or "not even a person," according to a new study led by a team of UW psychology professors.

Well, bust my buttons, who'd a-thunk it?

Well we know why. It's because the young heads full of mush were carefully taught exactly that! By their lefty professors. For college credit.

And by the way, let us not forget that forming a mob to take out some jerk you dislike is the most delicious thing in the world. And by the way, per Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the key tactics of the Bolsheviks was to portray their enemies as animals: insects, vermin.

Remember back in the day?

Back in the day, liberals were all wigged out about innocent Hollywood scriptwriters and directors being blacklisted -- blacklisted! -- because of their Communists sympathies. Back in the day liberal playgoers thrilled to lefty playwright Arthur Miller descanting on the horrors of witch-hunting in 17th century Salem with The Crucible -- not to mention the dead-end life of the salesman. Back in the day liberal musical-goers were nodding wisely at songs in South Pacifice about race and hate:

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

Get it? Nudge, nudge? Back to the Future? Witch-hunting of noble progressives, or Communists or socialists, horrible racism, or whatever the nom-de-jour for fashionable lefties was back then?

Actually, that "carefully taught" thing is more liberal baloney. According to the "minimal group paradigm" getting people to hate and to fear the people in the out-group is the easiest thing in the world. Humans are pre-programmed to hate and to fear! Any fool lefty teacher can make it happen!

And notice how the report on left-wing student bigotry mentions that, while all students became more tolerant during the study as they were mixed together with out-group students:

But when re-surveyed a month later, the students, especially liberals — who reported stronger feelings of manichaeism in the first place — basically went back to hating their political opponents.

Today liberals are engaged in ideological warfare on anyone that steps out of the progressive line. On anything. And you may not express your hate speech on social media. Because hate. And it is perfectly obvious that our liberal friends are absolutely clueless about what they are doing.

But I think that liberals are going to be surprised at what happens down the road.

See, I think that the reason that folks back in the day developed the idea of innocent until proven guilty, and rules of evidence, and limited government and freedom of speech is not because they were good guys but because life in any settlement bigger than a face-to-face village requires it. If you don't have those rules then you can't have a successful, prosperous society.

It's fine to have your vicious little lefty cult at the university but when you get out into the real world of capitalism you have to face the fact that you will deal every day with people who are not in your in-group. Then what? Are you going to put on your AntiFa artistical black gear and spit in their face? The overwhelming fact of capitalism is the idea of amicable transactions with strangers, people who most likely are not like you and do not like people like you. And that goes double with foreign trade. If you do not deal pleasantly and amiably with everyone then you ain't gonna rake in the bucks, and your employer is going to say Sayonara, pal, I can't use you. In capitalism, the pressure is on, every day, to get on with people, all people.

So I think that, despite the predictions of gloom and doom and predictions of secession and the splitting up of the US, pretty soon our lefty friends will find that their ideological reign of terror is going to be costing them big time.

Look at it from the perspective of the ruling class. For the ruling class, law and rules of evidence are really good for keeping the plebs down on the farm feeling that they can get justice at your ruling-class courts of law, and thus not starting to chafe under the injustice of a regime that does not care about people like them.

For the ruling class free speech means that you get to know about the dumb hotheads and potential troublemakers out there without having to spend a lot of money on FBIs and infiltrators.

For the ruling class, it is not such a good idea to have raving witch-hunters running around looking for racists, sexists and homophobes behind every Twitter user. People feel really resentful when their in-group members are being targeted by the well-born thugs of the regime. They might even start to grumble about injustice. Most people want to put the high-school mean girls and jocks behind them once they get out of high school. (Actually, mean girls and jocks are a good reason to abolish high school).

Again, the fact is that liberal in-group members have no clue, no clue, how their shenanigans play to the normals and deplorables. Only one thing will convince them: that their totalitarian tactics -- totalitarian? who me? -- turn off American voters and prevent good progressive folks from getting their hands on the all-important levers of power.

I reckon that the lefty Kavanaugh shenanigans probably cost the Dems a couple of Senate seats, and maybe the chance of retaking the Senate. Was that really worth it?

And, of course, even when they do get their hands on the levers of power it all turns to dust, because in the market age we don't need so much stinkin' political power. You'd think they'd get the point: Bolshevism: disaster and famine and massacre. Maoism: famine and terror and poverty. Fidelism: endless poverty and enslavement. Chávism: 20 percent economic contraction last year and the same this year. Are lefties really that dumb that they don't no nothing about historee?

But the truth is that religious cults are the most amazing high. The leaders and their henchmen and their inquisitors just love it. How do you penetrate their tiny minds and teach them to be sadder and wiser engines?

The Question is: What Us and Them Works for Us?

I've been writing recently about tribalism, and what I call "fake tribalism." I started out with the conventional notion that, in the old days, people were organized in tribes of the kindred, people related to each other by blood. I proposed that everything since then -- empires, nations, class politics, modern identity politics -- is fake tribalism, the transfer of the old idea of belonging from the tribe of the kindred to artificial tribes based on completely new ideas of belonging on a larger scale.

But then, reading C.R. Hallpike's How We Got Here, I realized that tribalism has always been a movable feast. Yes, the hunter-gatherer bands were defined by bands of the kindred, but if you got in a row with your band you could take off and join another one. Ditto with pre-state agricultural villages. Tribes were not cast in concrete, but merely sticky like porridge.

On Hallpike's narrative it was only with the invention of state-based agricultural empires that we get a rigidification of identity, and the mobilization of the various inhabitants of a region into a self-conscious people around whom arbitrary boundaries are set and from whom there is no exit. The boundaries were important, I suspect, because because most of the people in the agricultural era were serfs or slaves, a pretty universal characteristic of agricultural age culture.

Oh dear. That means that full-on tribalism only developed when it had already become fake, the various artificial creations of kings and Nietzsche's pals "the priests" of the great agricultural empires that were inventing fake tribes to match their glorious empires. Back to the drawing board. Now what?

Now what is the "minimal group paradigm" developed by Henri Tajfel. Tajfel discovered that you can set up any kind of artificial group -- say in a research project -- and the people in each group will immediately identify with and favor their in-group. That explains why, e.g., liberals all believe everything they read in the New York Times and NPR and know that everything in conservative land is racist sexist homophobic "hate" and conservative believe what they read on right-wing websites and know that all mainstream media news  is "fake news." Liberals know that people like them are outraged by Trump tear-gassing migrants at the border, and conservatives know that without a defended border you don't have a nation. Both groups define themselves in terms of the unconsciously agreed agenda among people like them.

I found this immensely liberating. For it means that you can create identity with anything. Identity doesn't have to be race or gender or class as we have been carefully taught. Identity can be anything. It is up to the founder of the identity to find people willing to identify with the new identity that he just created out of whole cloth. This happens most obviously with the founders of religious cults, a St. Paul or a Luther or a Calvin or a Joseph Smith. It also happens in politics with Marx inventing the new idea of "the workers."

It also happens with  the idea of "nation." Liah Greenfield proposes that the idea of the English nation began after Henry VII won the battle of Bosworth Field and created a bunch of nobles from the common folk. Used to be, in the "society of orders," that there were the higher orders like kings and nobles who defined the nation, and then there were the "people" in the lower orders. With Henry VII "people" and "nation" were merged. To put in in terms of my "fake tribalism" notion, Henry VII needed a new kind of fake tribalism to symbolize his new regime, and to define the boundaries of the in-group. He defined his fake tribe as the nation of England. Shortly thereafter Henry VIII completed the job of nation-building by disarming the nobles and creating a national army. Ever since, the national army in a nation has symbolized the nation.

In our time the global educated class wants to define identity as anything-but-nation. So they have invented a new "society of orders" with the educated ruling class as the savior activists, the middle class as the deplorable bigots, and the lower orders as helpless victims who the savior activists are called to save from racism, sexism, and homophobia.

If you want to dish the global educated ruling class you have to come up with something better, a political movement to which you can rally enough people to overpower the global educated ruling class. It is pretty obvious that this is going to be "nation." The only question is whether some damn politician can rally the middle-class deplorables beyond its base of the white male deplorables known for their racism, sexism, and homophobia by hiving off enough women and minorities into a larger identity of nation.

You can see that Donald Trump is trying to appeal to voters on  the basis of an identity politics of American nationalism while his opponents want to claim that his American identity politics is really the evil and divisive racist sexist bigotry of which you've heard tell.

The point that I get from the nationalism analysis of Liah Greenfield and the minimal group paradigm of Henri Tajfel is that you can create identity out of anything. Just get a bunch of people together and bind them together with a set of group identifiers. There is nothing that establishes for all time that kindred, or race, or sex, or nation is the natural form of identity. Humans are groupish and it is up to would-be group leaders to define the parameters of the group and create and grow that group.

Simply stated, all politics is tribal, and all politics is about "us" and "them." Humans are designed so that a leader can organize any group of them into a group of "us" and lead  them to war against the evil  "them." The only question is what works.

There are Two Kinds of Liberal Programs

Way back in the dim and distant past Irving Kristol, the father of the one we know, wrote that if you want to help the poor with government programs, you have to deal in the middle class. Unfortunately, that piece of wisdom doesn't appear on Google Search, so everyone has forgotten about it. Except me.

The idea is that if you want to help the poor in old age with a pension program then you'd better make the pension program include the middle class, as Social Security did. Otherwise no-go.

The corollary of this theorem is that it is impossible to reform entitlement programs because doing so will negatively impact the middle class.

Armed with this vital knowledge I remember in 1993-94 thinking that HillaryCare would never fly because the middle class already had health insurance. In other words, there was no way that the Dems could deal in the middle class with their program to beef up health care delivery to the poor, because the middle class had already got what they wanted. I remember the day I heard on NPR the liberal women reporters marveling that ordinary Americans didn't like HillaryCare, because they didn't see how it would benefit them. In fact I remember exactly where my car was at that moment: it was on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge in North Seattle.

Thus, in 2009-10, President Obama had to lie his head off about Obamacare promising that the average person would benefit and that they could keep their doctor. And Nancy Pelosi had to frog-march the moderate Dems through the lobbies to get them to vote for it. And the Dems had to do some shenanigans in the Senate to get it through. And then the Republicans won back the House  in  2010 with the biggest "wave" in decades and nearly all those moderate Dems lost their seats.

Now to the present time. Do you notice that almost all the stuff liberals are pushing is stuff that benefits some liberal identity group but that does not deal in the middle class?

There is illegal immigration and open borders. Almost no average American citizen, white, black, or Hispanic supports this. Really, only lefty activists and their billionaire supporters favor Open Borders.

There is Muslims. Ask any non-Muslim in America, and I bet they'd tell you that Muslims should get with the program. But all the liberals are running around expostulating about Islamophobia.

There is LGBTQ. Really, nobody outside the educated class has a clue what all the fuss is about. As I say, LGBTQ is about getting creative about sex (because we are all creative, right?) and the only people into that are the People of the Creative Self of my reductive Three Peoples theory. And now, according to Ben Shapiro, a transgender has insisting on joining a gym -- would that be Curves? -- that caters for women that prefer not to have men floating around. Of course the trans man-to-woman wants to change in the women's changing room. Of course. Ask any woman in America what she thinks of that!

There is climate change. This is yet another elite plan to kick the middle class out of their cars and force them into buses and trains. Who benefits?  All the scientists and regulators in the educated class that get grants and lifetime employment out of the scam, and also crony capitalists that know how to play the subsidy game for electric cars, wind and solar. But ordinary Americans get screwed.

See, I think that our liberal friends think that they got their pensions and health care and education programs enacted because of their glorious virtue, because justice and the arc of history. But really their programs were just bribes paid to the middle class. So our liberal friends don't really get that today's lefty agenda has a fatal flaw: it doesn't benefit the middle class.

Notice the left's response to their quandary: to deplatform anyone that disagrees with them and banish them from the public square as a racist, sexist homophobe. This strategy shows that instinctively, liberals understand that their agenda is unpopular and that the only way to advance it is by totalitarian oppression of the opposition. It may work for a while, but I predict that in the end it will create a huge movement of rejection, boiling with a sense of injustice, that overwhelms the left in a vast realignment of politics.

Yeah. There are two kinds of liberal programs: the ones that deal in the middle class and the ones that don't. And I think that a clever politician ought to be able to figure out how to take that all the way to the White House and a fundamental realignment of the electorate.

Understanding World History Through the Lens of Nationalism

Just as the foolish and superficial Emmanuel Macron of France declares nationalism bad, patriotism good, Liah Greenfield writes "The World That Nationalism Made" in American Affairs. "Nationalism is the cultural framework of modernity," she writes.

She also wrote a book about it: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992) and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001). Maybe I should take a look.

How did nationalism start, Greenfield asks? With Henry VII in England after the Wars of the Roses.

The [Wars of the Roses] was protracted, but it is enough to mention that, by the time it ended in 1485, both branches lost all their males, and the English feudal aristocracy was physically destroyed. A very distant relation of the Lancaster branch took the throne as the Tudor king Henry VII. In need of an upper class, he soon recruited a new aristocracy from the common people.

So, the old ideology of the "society of orders," of blue-blooded aristocrats versus the "lower orders," got ditched. Here were all those newly minted aristocrats, who just yesterday were just commoners. What did it all mean? The world demanded an answer.

Nationalism was the answer to this demand. It resulted from a linguistic-semantic innovation: the equation of two terms that had previously belonged to two unconnected semantic fields: people and nation. The specific meaning of the word “people,” as discussed above, was “commoners,” the lower classes. The word “nation,” meanwhile, meant an elite, representatives of cultural and political authority.

So in Britland "people" and "nation" became the same thing, because the people, the commoners, had become part of the elite, "representatives of cultural and political authority."

Jolly good fun for the Brits, but in due course other peoples got to feel resentful, because they were not organized as nations and they felt depraved on account of they were deprived: French, Germans, Russians, and now, of course, Arabs.

Want to understand the problems of the world for the last 200 years? It is about folks wanting to be nations and hating the world that don't give them no respect.

But what about China? China, writes Greenfield, is finally defining itself as a nation.

In the last three decades, nationalism has finally taken root within China’s giant population, animating this previously inert, enormous mass of humanity with competitive, nationalist motivation. For the first time in its long history, China demands from the world the dignity due to it, and insists on being recognized by all as the Middle Kingdom.

But China is not filled with Nietzschean ressentiment.

China, however, is different from most other participants in this competition: it belongs to another civilization. Unlike Russia, unlike Arab countries, it has never seen the West as a model. It does not envy the West, and so, ultimately, could never consider itself inferior to it. Its identity is self-sufficient, and its internal dignity does not depend on the respect accorded by the West. For this reason, it can borrow from the West piecemeal, customizing its imports in the process.

Well. That's encouraging. And what about India? My experience of Indians is that they are untroubled by comparison with the West. They seemed to shuck off British rule with remarkable sang-froid, inventing their own Indian National Movement that successfully threw off the British Raj with astonishingly little violence.

The problem is the western elite, which does not understand the national idea -- and the resentments felt by those playing catch-up -- and imagines itself high above such mean and pitiful things.

The spark that ignites the mixture of inferiority, envy, and desire for recognition, which feeds ethnic nationalism, is being lit by the delusional thinking of Western elites. These elites, ignorant of and unwilling to learn from history, refuse to understand nationalism, disregard the psychological dynamics behind it, and continue to rationalize their existence via a belief in a History with a grand purpose. 

So our western elite doesn't have a clue. But we knew that.

The Liberal Ladies Can't Believe What Trump Said About Obama Judges

You may be surprised to learn that the liberal Jewish ladies at Thanksgiving dinner were outraged at President Trump's comment about "Obama judges."

Hey, I told 'em. I told them that the reason Donald Trump is president today is precisely because he talks back to the liberal Zeitgeist. They were not impressed.

And of course my riposte was nothing compared to the brilliant social-media comments, like the one countering Chief Justice Roberts. If there are no Obama judges, no Trump judges, no Bush judges, let all the judges appointed by President Obama resign to be replaced by judges appointed by President Trump.

Exactly.

But it illustrated for me my universal Law of the Incoming Rounds. Liberals are outraged, outraged, by President Trump's dirty mouth, but the liberal non-white lady writers at The New York Times prattle away endlessly about racism and white privilege, with not a care in the world about how this "feels" when you are on the receiving end.

What it "feels" like, liberals, is that someone just lobbed a mortar round into your fire base and half your buddies are now dead or dying.

After all, liberals go about their lives every day, without a care in the world, accusing other people of being racist, sexist homophobes, perfectly oblivious to the fact that a mere accusation can result in loss of job or career. Hello Brendan Eich. Of course they don't have a care in the world about accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia. Because you are not allowed to do that to liberals.

That is why liberal ladies get to be shocked, shocked, when President Trump lobs a mortar round into the liberal fire base. Why, you have no idea how hard Judge Woke von Liberal worked to become an accomplished ACLU lawyer and eventually get nominated to a federal district court judgeship. They can't believe Trump would say that about a guy with a #WeBelieve sign in front of his house.

Anyway, this all got me to thinking.

Everybody is talking about the day when whites become a minority in the good old USA. And how that will change the domination of the white race forever.

But what people are assuming is that the fake tribalism of 2018 will be the same in 2048. And you know what? I doubt it.

My reason is this. All tribalism is fake tribalism, ginned up by ambitious political activists. It has always been fake, always ginned up by the powerful. Because humans are groupish. They clump together into  groups, and the groups can be founded on any notion of membership or affinity. Anything.

In the hunter-gatherer era, tribalism was between individual bands of hunter-gatherers. In the pre-state agricultural era, between villages. OK. Maybe that is true tribalism, but I no longer think so. I think that all tribalism is made up to fit the groupishness of the time.

I am now beginning to think that real pedal-to-the-metal tribalism didn't get in the saddle until the dawn of the agricultural state, when tribalism was amplified and massaged by the kings and the priests. You can see why. In the pre-state era, people attached themselves to small groupings of humans that were mostly related by blood, and they naturally fought for their tribe in the border raids and massacres of the era. But the leaders of agricultural states needed to build identity on the larger and less closely related states that they built by conquest and domination. So they invented fake tribalism, with fake state-based tribes and fake state enemies. Because that is how you do politics, then and now. And it worked. Rulers have never lacked soldiers to go and fight their fake tribal wars.

In the pre-nation-state era in Europe identity was managed by the feudal monarch, and his enemies were your enemies. Sorta. On the ground the "feudal retainers" -- to use Marx's words -- actually owed loyalty to their immediate feudal lords, not to the king. Hello Wars of the Roses. So really, if you were a feudal retainer, a serf or whatnot, your "tribe" was you and the other feudal retainers of the duke or earl that ruled the countryside in which you lived. You were the duke's men, not the king's men.

When the nation state arose, in part due to the suppression of the nobility by the absolute monarchs, the basic tribe was the nation state: the Brits against the French, the French against the Germans. And the bribed apologists of the monarchs would write about the British "race." I propose that our modern notion of "race" didn't really start to develop until European navigators started exploring the world, and a new tribalism of us and them was needed to support the power narrative of global empires like Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, and the Brits. That's when the bribed apologists of the European states really started writing and talking about the "white" race, the Negro race, the "red" Indians of North America, and the "yellow" races of East Asia.

And so here we are, and every good little girl is writing articles for The New York Times that takes for granted the race tribalism that developed in the last half-millennium and maybe peaked with the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights revolution. And they have taken like ducks to water as they broadcast the identity-politics tribalism launched by the Frankfurt School a century ago.

Let me emphasize. I think that all talk about racism, of nationalism, communism vs. free world: all political division is fake tribalism ginned up by ruling classes and would-be ruling classes in their pursuit of political power.

Now when you are a political entrepreneur bidding for power through the electoral process the obvious thing to do is to alter the configuration of tribal loyalties, to redivide the population in new ways, to get people to think of themselves in new ways that will get them to think again about their natural tribal home.

Used to be, for instance, that blacks voted Republican, because it was Republicans that freed the slaves. But starting with FDR, blacks became Democrats, because Democrats offered them loot -- even though the Democrats were also the party of Jim Crow!

Used to be that working people voted for Democrats, starting with the Irish in the mid-19th century that voted for Democrats because most British-born Americans voted Republican. So it was with the white working class until Ronald Reagan picked up the Reagan Democrats in 1980. Why was that? Because Democrats no longer cared about the white working class and no longer offered white workers any loot, preferring to bid for the votes of single women and blacks.

Today, we are all taught to believe that the Democrats will inherit the earth because whites will become a minority, and non-whites plus educated whites will be a majority. But that assumes that current loyalties are maintained.

What the conventional wisdom does not grasp is that political tribal membership changes, and usually because some political entrepreneur manages to assemble a political coalition based on some novel tribal grouping. Sure as eggs is eggs, this new tribal grouping will be based on some new sense of grievance and injustice experienced by some strategic sub-set of voters.

How about this? At some point a movement arises that is seething with resentment against the educated class for its ruthless and corrupt spoils system, that shovels billions and billions to the educated class for universities, for research, for grants, for climate change, for electric cars, for light rail, for bike lanes, etc. While "we," the new oppressed, get nothing.

If I were an average middle-class man or woman in a not-very-upscale suburb in America, I would be asking "when do I get my share of this loot?" But your average liberal lady doesn't have a clue about this. Because she is perfectly satisfied with things as they are, and feeling comfortably virtuous about all the wonderful things that liberal activists are doing for the traditionally marginalized.

I don't know how the political future will work out; I only know that it will go on being the same until it changes. And about half an hour after it changes, and the political world is organized by a new fake tribalism, everyone will realize that it was inevitable, and how could the liberal educated class possibly have been so blind -- and bigoted -- as not to see it.

No, Critical Theorists, Creativity is Not The Only Thing

In a Thanksgiving Day piece, Michael Walsh accuses the Critical Theory chaps of "nihilism." If, by nihilism he means: "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless," then I don't think so. The Critical Theorists do believe in something. They believe in the world-historical destiny of the creative individual -- the artist, the writer, the intellectual, the activist -- to change the world.

And crucially, as the Brit academics say, the Critical Theorists believe that the only way for a creative age to dawn is by destroying the bourgeois Christian European capitalist civilization of which we've heard tell.

Now I believe that this notion is worse than a blunder, worse than a crime, worse than a tragedy, worse than a disaster. It is, I would say, cosmically wrong; it leads to cultural extinction. This is because the creative individual stands on the shoulders of his former self, the middle-class responsible bourgeois. That is why, almost to a man, lefty Critical Theory intellectuals are children of the middle class. You have to be born middle-class to aspire to creative apotheosis.

So if your program is that to usher in a world of creative freedom you need to first destroy the responsible culture of the middle class I am here to tell you that you will destroy everything, because the creative culture is founded upon the rock of the middle-class culture.

I don't know when this creative cult got started. Was it with Descartes, and "I think, therefore I am?" Or Kant, who proposed that our minds are busy processing sense impressions into mental impressions and theories about the thing-in-itself? Or Hegel with his dialectic? Certainly by the time we get to Nietzsche we are definitely trying to understand who or what the creative individual is and how he should live. And Freud's Ego, das Ich, is clearly a creative ego trying to elbow its way past the unconscious Id and the cramping moral instincts of the Superego. In Jung we are trying to balance personal unconscious, collective unconscious with self-consciousness, and combining all the memes of cultural history into a meta-theory of existence, featuring a sacrificial hero exploring the boundary between order and chaos.

Now, it is my belief, drawing on my study of developmental psychology, that a good way to understand the world we humans live in today is with my reductive Three Peoples theory. Of course, the world isn't really that simple; but all theories of the world are simplifications of some kind or another. The question is: does the theory help me understand the world?

My Three Peoples theory begins with the idea that all peoples across the world are dealing with the challenge of living in the city, after millennia of "rural idiocy" as slaves or serfs in the agricultural age. When people arrive in the city as migrants from the countryside -- one of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman, another was a maltster -- we are People of the Subordinate Self, subordinate to some rural lord or squire. We are defined by our caste or rural role, and we are conservative in that we observe the traditional rules of farming, knowing that not to plant at the right time, not to rotate crops, not to preserve food with the traditional methods is to invite starvation and famine. But once we come to the city we have to learn personal responsibility and submission not to a lord but to the prices of the market, including the labor market. Then, after a struggle, we enter the world of the People of the Responsible Self; we become middle-class bourgeois, citizens rather than country folk.

The necessity of this journey, for every migrant to the city, is what the Marxist left denies, and they are wrong, cosmically wrong, and they have visited extinction upon the urban working class. That is why the white working class in the US is reportedly "dying of despair." Because the left led them into a cultural, economic, and political ditch.

But remember, for your average lefty sporting a #WeBelieve sign in the front yard, the question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is no longer the question of adapting to the wrenching cultural challenge of making it in the city. Been there, done that, in your parents' or grandparents' generation. The challenge now is to find something creative, something original to do with your life.

Hey, I know! Champion the rights of women! The rights of minorities! Advocate for migrants! Fight the hate of xenophobes and Islamophobes! That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theorists: they adapted Marxism from advocating for the working class to advocating for every other victim class arriving at the gates of the city.

But the problem is that, as with the working class, the left is teaching these new migrants to the city culture and its public square not to adapt to bourgeois and middle-class norms but to maintain a separation; not to become Americans, but Feminist-Americans, African-Americans, Arab-Americans. And I believe that just as the left drove the white working class into the ditch of cultural despair, the left will do the same for its current clients.

In fact, I believe that the current female-driven movement of special snowflakes that object to microaggressions and insist on safe spaces and seeing sexual harassment everywhere are a harvest of the left's war on the bourgeoisie and the culture of the People of the Responsible Self. These women are saying that they do not want to become responsible individuals armed with the culture of the middle-class; they just want to be protected from scary things and scary people.

Right now I am reading Nietzsche, and what he is trying to do is to imagine what it means to be a creative individual and what it takes to become one. How do you make yourself into a person with the courage and the fortitude to do scary, original things? It is notable that Nietzsche was not very good at that. He had what we would now call "mental health issues." He could write about being a creative Übermensch -- just barely -- but lost his mind actually trying to be that sort of person. The truth is that being a true creative individual is a very hard thing to do, day to day, and most of us don't have the intestinal fortitude to do it, to live it day to day.

Really, when you think of it, this dreadful error of the left is nothing remarkable. You think that we humans would sally forth into the Creative Age without so much as a single glitch? I gotta bridge to sell you, for that is not the way of the world, which advances through the debris of disaster and failure.

The truth of the creative life is the truth demonstrated to us by Nietzsche, who said that the creative person needs to he hard, and Jung's hero whose personality only develops through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice. It is only after the creative hero descends into the underworld of his unconscious and confronts his personal demons and learns some wisdom from the encounter that he can return to the world of society and contribute to its welfare.

That is just to say that you don't get to be a creative hero and bend the arc of history towards justice and get your ticket to the People of the Creative Self until you have learned discipline and responsibility among the People of the Responsible Self.