Activism and a Meaningful LIfe

It's about five years since I started writing about "Activism Culture." One of the first posts was "If Every Young Liberal Longs to be an Activist, What About Conservatives?" That post started with a conversation I had with a woman friend who had quit her job and gone back to school. She was upgrading her skills because she had always wanted to get into "activism."

So here's another monument to "activism." It's an MSNBC producer, Ariana N. Pekary, who quit her job last month at MSNBC. She couldn't take it any more, because media has now become purely a race for ratings, and every moment of every program is evaluated according to how it "rates." Says she:

Through this pandemic and the surreal, alienating lockdown, I’ve witnessed many people question their lives and what they’re doing with their time on this planet.  I reckon I’m one of those people, looking for greater meaning and truth.

That, I am sure, is what my friend was looking for in "activism." And indeed, young people are all carefully taught in our schools and universities, that activism in behalf of traditionally marginalized people is the answer to the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

You can see the notion in the woke left's Three Layers understanding of society, courtesy of Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Allies, you wonder? Listen to this Portland stay-at-home mom, who objected to PTA money funding expensive African drumming classes for minority students at her kids' middle school.

This escalated to the point where they offered white ally trainings so that white parents could understand and learn their white privilege.

This view of society exactly matches the Activism Culture. Activists, on this understanding, are the "ällies" of "members of oppressed groups," And the meaning of life, or in Arian Pekary's words, "greater meaning and truth" issues from acts of allying with members of oppressed groups in political action.

Notice the essential ingredient in this Three Layer theory. It is the "white oppressors." Without the white oppressors the "allies" wouldn't have a reason to fight for the members of oppressed groups. So the whole thing depends upon there really being a category of "white oppressors."

In other words, for a woman who has always wanted to get into "activism" it doesn't make sense unless there truly is a darkling cloud of "white oppressors" out there on the horizon. That is why, of course, our liberal friends are always on about white supremacists and white nationalists and racist-sexist-homophobes and the radical right. Because there must be a Satan behind the clear and obvious oppression of traditionally marginalized groups.

Now, I think that "activism" of Activism Culture means two different things, depending on whether you are a man or a woman, and this issues out of the basic instincts of men as defenders and women as nurturers.

Thus, AntiFa is clearly a male effort, of black-clad street soldiers fighting for justice against the eevil right-wing fascists.

Thus my friend's efforts to help poor southern women register to vote is clearly an effort to be helpful and nurturing.

But what if the "members of oppressed groups" are not really very oppressed? What if the "white oppressors" are just ordinary white middle-class Commoners with no particular economic, cultural, or political power? What if the "allies" are conceited members of the educated Gentry "looking for greater meaning and truth" in the wrong places?

It's a good question. How would you know the answer?

I guess that this suggests the importance of the Jungian notion of the Sacrificial Hero archetype. If your "activism" leads to you being a national hero beloved by all MSNBC producers and executives because your activism builds TV ratings, I'd say that you are probably doing the wrong thing.

But if your "activism" merely illuminated the border between Order and Chaos and shines a little light on a darkling world and your activism doesn't lead to any publicity and the glare of the klieg lights. Well then, probably it is leading to "greater meaning and truth."

For never forget my two maxims about government and politics:

Government is force. 

Politics is division.

It means that whenever you do anything in politics and government, chances are you are making things worse. Because humans as social animals thrive from the reduction of force and the smoothing over of divisions.

Or, more simply, anyone getting into "activism" is playing with fire when it comes to a meaningful life. 

Don't say I didn't warn you!

The Three Peoples and Gubmint Programs

An emailer friend recently sent me a rant on the current riotous political situation, that the problem is "an unlimited food supply for indigent rats."

The cure is to cut off the food supply.  Cut off welfare. Cut all non essential employment. End social security. End AFDC. End EBT.  Debase the dollar value until minimum wage equals the value of labor. Defund all social services. Defund public schools.  Defund police. Defund hospital emergency.  When the supply of labor settles to equal the legitimate demand for labor then calm will be restored.

But actually, the people rioting are not the indigent rats, but the educated youth wing of the Democratic Party. The rats are doing fine, if you assume that, like the bottom 35 percent of white Americans, their men don't work much and their women don't marry much.

The problem with the indigent rats is the problem with George Floyd, with Rayshard Brooks, with Michael Brown, with Trayvon Martin, that they are young black men that have never twigged to the city market economy. They are not employed, not married, medicating themselves with drugs, etc. And, as with George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, they are terrified of being arrested and sent back into jail.

Anyway, it go me to thinking. What do people want? Or, more importantly, what do each of my reductive Three Peoples want out of government?

Let us start with the People of the Responsible Self, the Commoners. Our defining characteristic is that we don't want power, and we don't want to be under someone else's power. Or, as Sarah Hoyt writes in "Vive La Bourgeoisie," 

You neither want to be ruled nor to rule.  You want to rule yourself.

Or, to reframe what my friend wrote, We Commoners want the responsibility and dignity of saving for our own Social Security and old age. We want to supervise and pay for the education of our own children. We want to do our own health care and not have to dodge through all the crumbling monuments of "free" health care. As for the poor? We are willing to step up and help. But first, we think they should get a job, and that starts with an end to the minimum wage and all the gubmint programs that discourage the poor from getting with the program and learning how to become good middle-class wage-earners and accept the rules of the market economy.

Whatabout the People of the Subordinate Self, the Clients, the victims, the "oppressed peoples?" The defining principle of their lives is the belief that the world is a brutal place and the only way to survive is to find a powerful leader and serve that leader in return for the safety of his protection. You do what you have to do to earn his protection. In our society that means voting for the lefty party that offers free stuff, from  welfare to to EBT to social services to Social Security and Medicare. It's a cold cruel world out there, and you have to find a warm hearth to keep warm.

Whatabout the People of the Creative Self, the educated Gentry? The defining principle of the Gentry life is to elevate yourself above the herd. Mere responsible behavior is not enough. You must "make your mark" in your chosen field. One of those fields is "activism" bending the arc of history towards justice for the traditionally marginalized, or the "oppressed peoples" of the world. And the way to do that, as has developed over the last century or so, is to create government programs that assign the responsibility for human welfare to wise, educated bureaucrats, politicians and activists. Thus the whole array of gubmint programs.

Now I say that the reason for Trump and Brexit and the populist nationalists in Europe is that the current welfare state is great for the educated Gentry, who have awarded themselves lots of remunerative and satisfying creative gigs. (Case in point:  when I went to an engineering conference in Switzerland in 1990, all the European academics there seemed to have some EU grant or gig. They were all as happy as clams). The welfare state is great, at least on the surface, for the Clients and the Victims, because it puts off the evil day when they knuckle down to the fact of the market economy and start down the Road to the Middle Class.

But the current setup is not so great for the People of the Responsible Self, the Commoners. For one thing, the educated Gentry likes to imagine us all as racist-sexist-homophobes. For another, the politics of the Gentry is all about nice gigs for themselves and free money for the Victims. But they never think about how their policy "plays in Peoria."

For instance, if Commoners weren't putting payroll taxes into Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance, they could be saving their own money for retirement and then using it on the way to start a business or buy a house or educate the kids. If we didn't have the gubmint housing programs with 80 percent down 30 year loans then we would be back to the pre-WWII rules where you probably put 50 percent down with a ten-year mortgage. If that were the case, then housing prices would be a lot lower and ordinary people could afford to buy houses. Especially the ordinary people that saved a little money for a big down payment.

I want to dwell on this housing thing. "Everybody" thinks that we need the government and Fannie/Freddie to make housing affordable for ordinary people, especially minorities. But all the subsidies and 80 percent loans and 30-year stuff means that more people can afford to spend more on housing, and that bids the price up. Is that good or bad? Is it affordable? You tell me.

To wrap up, if you want to understand the present political situation, it helps to see that the educated Gentry is getting what they want and the Clients and victims get their "benefits." But, I would say, ordinary Commoners are told to step to the back of the line, and like it. Because pejoratives.

Or, as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

At the present moment, our educated Gentry has No Idea about this. Because they are wonderful and Commoners are white supremacists and systemic racists.

When you think about it, it shows that the educated Gentry is clueless. Because if they were half as wise as they pretend, they would be on to the fact that the ordinary Commoner has been getting shafted, by them, for years.

The job of any good colonialist is to know when "the natives are restless" and why.

When the White Woke Mob Comes to the Home of a Black Woman Police Chief

As my friend says, "you couldn't make it up." On Saturday August 1, at about 6:30pm a line of BLM vehicles harassed the home of Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in Seattle's middle-class suburb Lynnwood.

If you are a liberal Seattle resident sporting a Black Lives Matter yard-sign, Lynnwood is, well, precisely the place you would not want to live. But if you are the Seattle Police Chief and you don't get the bennies of working for high-tech, Lynnwood is probably the place where you could just about afford to buy a home.

But guess what. The neighbors of Best assembled to push back against a

crowd of about 200 persons, mostly white men and women in their twenties, were dressed in black with masks and black hoods and carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter.”...

Neighbors aware of Best’s physical home location, established a perimeter to protect her home from possible mischief.  Best was not home at the time of the incident.

After it was all over, the neighbors thanked the county police:

All of the neighbors interviewed by the Lynnwood Times were thankful to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office for providing an around the clock law enforcement presence.

Then Best thanked the neighbors:

Chief Best personally thanked each of her neighbors for their support and apologized to them for the incident. However, neighbors responded with sympathy to Best for the ordeal she and her staff are going through.

Then the neighbors had a message for Carmen Best.

“She [Best] thanked us all for banding together,” one neighbor told the Lynnwood Times. “It made us feel awesome.  She felt she had to apologize to all of us, that this was happening to us and we said no. We apologized to her that this is happening to her.” 

 Do you feel what I feel, that this is America at its best? Completely different from the hate and the Sturm und Drang of the wokey set? I mean, aren't these white Commoner Americans all supposed to be "white oppressors" and "systemic racists?" And here they are exchanging compliments with a Black woman? What gives?

What gives is that Commoners are all Americans; their tribe is the nation, and their culture is that everyone gets along and everyone lends a hand when things get a little sticky. Anyone can apply and get accepted into this club. The only qualification is the need to get a bit misty-eyed when you see the American flag and hear the national anthem. It's not mandatory, but it helps. Also, it helps to treat other Americans as Americans and not as "white oppressors" or "oppressed peoples."

It's a funny thing, really. Equality. Not equality of result, of course, because that requires force. But equality of address. The idea that we are all in this together, and we are all equal in the sight of God or of Gaia, and nobody outranks anyone else, even if one guy is a white retiree and another is the black woman police chief of Woke Seattle.

More and more I am convinced of my analysis of "activism" as LARPing, or play-acting at revolution. You see this in Les Mis, when it rehearses the Paris riots of 1830. The kids on the barricades are young Educated Youth. But when one of them gets wounded, it takes the former convict Jean Valjean to come into the riot-zone and get him out. Valjean is doing it for his adopted daughter, the saintly Cosette, who was actually born to a single mother.

And as I've said before, LARPing is the motive force in the traditional medieval romance, with its knights on their palfreys and the damsels in distress. This was a time when really the upper crust of the day were courtiers in the courts of the absolute monarchs, and not the rough, tough heroes of yore.

But all this AntiFa noise reminds us that our young people today need a meaning of life more meaningful than play-acting at 18th century revolution when the problem today is that the wokesters' masters are the problem. We need a revolution, not against nobody Commoners, but against The Swamp, the Deep State, the one-party education establishment, the proud and conceited educated elite Gentry: really anyone mindlessly posting a #WeBelieve or Black Lives Matter yardsign.

Yes. Imagine that America's problem is not "systemic racism" or "white supremacy" but "liberal racism" and "liberal supremacy." Not to mention the Reign of Terror aspects of the woke Cancel Culture.

It's easy to get downhearted listening to the drumbeat of woke cancel culture, and even give in to the temptation of despair for America.

But then you read about white neighbors defending the house of a black woman chief of police, and the neighbors and the chief exchange compliments. And, if you are like me, you get a little misty-eyed.

And then you are reminded of my maxims, that

The American People are the best people in the world. 

The USA is the best country in the world. 

And you decide that, maybe, things are not so bad after all. 

My Two Cents on President Trump

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt has a good piece in the Washington Post(!) enumerating the successes of President Trump. Just in case the Post readers "literally knew nothing."

You know the story: the China menace, judges, tax cuts, deregulation, beefing up the military, ditching the Iran deal, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, USMCA, the wall, and so on.

But at the end, Hewitt gives a inch:

Trump’s brawling, slugging, tempestuous approach to everything in every hour has worn down many, but his road is marked by these accomplishments. 

Not to me, pal. My attitude towards Trump is the same as President Lincoln towards Gen. Grant: "I can't spare this man -- he fights!"

And maybe it is Trump's aggressiveness has encouraged the wokie left to go full cancel culture, which I suspect -- I hope -- will prove to be a strategic mistake.

But one thing worries me. It is that Trump has not advocated the details of his policies. Many policy changes have been implemented as executive orders as a kind of fait accompli, without fighting a battle of winning the idea war.

I get why this is so. It is that, in today's America, nobody has access to the public square except liberals and lefties. Any conservative or libertarian or traditional religious idea gets canceled immediately as racism-sexism-homophobia-systemic-racism, etc.

So there is absolutely no opportunity to have a frank and fair discussion of the issues. And indeed there is a whole culture of left-wing activist NGOs that are tirelessly working on things like climate, urbanizing, diversity and inclusion, as part of the left's activism culture, for which there is no counter argument, because the rest of America is not into activism as a way of life.

Thus, in America right now, there is no public ventilation and development of ideas outside the Overton window of left-speak.

This is wrong, because the educated leftist gentry is a small part of the nation, and the economic interest and the culture and the religion of most Americans is very different from those of the educated elite.

It is also foolish. The whole point of the public square and elections and democratic government is to force the rulers to take into account the views and the interests of a broad spectrum of citizens, not just their own selfish power and cultural interests, and the interests of their supporters. The whole point of all the checks and balances is to stop the government getting too far out of whack, and to rebalance towards the center before the malcontents decide to form a head of rebellion. 

Regarding a head of rebellion I am not talking about the mostly peaceful protesters that are right now rioting in the streets of the wokiest cities. These rioters are regime supporters -- regime street thugs of the Democratic Party -- trying to embarrass the "not to be endured" presidency of Donald Trump.

Indeed the mostly peaceful protesters make a mockery of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" because the wokies already have the ear of the government and the rulers. It is the 62 percent of Americans who are afraid to state their opinions in public that need the right of protest.

But I understand the aggressiveness of the liberal and woke sector. Because they live in the "Blue Bubble" they really have no idea how the other half thinks. Their ideas are the right ones, and everyone else is a white supremacist.

At some point, these liberal castles in the air will all come crashing down. The only question is how much of the rest of America comes crashing down before the liberals cry "uncle."

"Movements" are So Over

In my series on Activism Culture I have been developing the idea that the left's faith in "activism" is a replay of the medieval romance -- King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; Lancelot, Guinevere, Parsifal, rescuing damsels in distress and all.

The point is that, in the days when the medieval romance flourished there were no more knights searching in the undergrowth for damsels in distress. The knights and barons had all become courtiers in the courts of the absolute monarchs. The monarchs liked it that way; it kept the powerful feudal lords under their watchful eye.

Now comes Adam Ellwanger with "On the Decline of American 'Movements.'" He notes that today's "movements" are unlike the great movements of yesteryear.

America has a rich history of movements. No one in 2020 seriously disputes the moral clarity of the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, or the civil rights movement (in its mid-century articulation). But somehow, today’s “movements” seem less weighty—less substantive—than their forebears. Why?

Well, he says, take Black Lives Matter.

The organization claims to be addressing “systemic racism” and injustice. As many commentators have observed, “systemic racism” is a nebulous concept—it can manifest itself anywhere, in virtually any way. 

In all the current "movements" there is no clear articulation of what the problem is and what to do about it. You can see that the abolitionist movement was clearly about the abolition of slavery; the women's suffrage movement was clearly about votes for women. The civil rights movement was clearly about the prohibition of racial discrimination by the government and individuals.

And the point is that you could do all that by writing a law. Bliss was it to be in that day a political activist! To strike down with one blow, Siegfried, the evil dragon of the ages!

But what exactly does "systemic racism" mean? And what exactly would we do to end it?

What exactly does sexual harassment mean? And what would it mean to #BelieveAllWomen? In courts of law?

It seems clear that BLM activists and #MeToo activists are more nearly Live Action Role Playing, imagining themselves the glorious activists of yore, mounted on their palfreys, rescuing damsels in distress, and reveling in the heady experience of a mass movement and its mostly peaceful protests. Yeah! We are fighting against The Man!

So what has happened?

Suppose we say that the great injustices that we perceive in the age of the market economy have all been addressed?

It is relatively easy to suggest that everything will change, If Only we stop the government and evil corporations from discriminating against traditionally marginalized people.

But what do we do about police brutality against African American males, given that African American males in America commit about 50 percent of the murders? Defund the police? You mean in the face, already, of sharply increased urban violence and urban murders this year? Increase spending on social workers? But didn't we do that half a century ago with unclear results?

My point is that politics and government are very blunt instruments with which to do social surgery. Unless you are dealing with a pretty open-and-shut case, and a pretty clear goal of what to do, then politics and government are not the solution.

And, of course, very often politics and government fail to achieve beneficial goals even when the injustice is pretty clear and the proposed solution pretty simple.

So I say that the Age of Politics, of simple solutions to easily dramatized problems, is over. And the people that think that politics and "movements" and "activism" can solve our modern problems are reactionaries, nostalgically yearning for a simpler time when the problems seemed clear and simple.

Actually, I would argue, the problems were not simple, back in the day, nor did the political solutions do much to solve those problems. End slavery? Yeah! But in the century since, we have had gigantic wars into which elite politicians drafted -- enslaved -- young men as soldiers using the power of government and sent the enslaved young men to their deaths in the millions. But no slavery, no sir!

The answer, of course, is that we must look beyond the temptation of government and force, and look to the solution of religion and persuasion.

In a way, we are doing that. The Cancel Culture is recognizing that force is not the answer; naming and shaming and shunning is the way. But why not have a bunch of Cancel Cultures? Why should it just be a left-wing one? Hey, I know! Let's confine moral lecturing to within the culture of an actual religion that people join voluntarily?

In other words, for the really heinous stuff -- slavery, votes for women, racial discrimination -- we have laws and criminal penalties. But for merely moral questions we have religion: join the religious community of your choice. And, as we know, humans in a community tend to go along to get along. Maybe we encourage people to join the moral community of their choice by channeling various social benefits through them. Kinda like the mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations back in the day.

Yes, Did you know that back in the 19th century, "everyone" belonged to a mutual-aid society or a fraternal organization? These organizations offered death benefits, life insurance, and "lodge doctors." Imagine.

For at the bottom of it all, we humans are social animals. All that means is that we have a ton of behaviors that avoid the resort to the dangerous and expensive solution of violence.

You can call the ton of behaviors:  religion, tradition, culture, archetypes, community, whatever. But government and force? Not so much, because we are better than that.

Our Rulers: Are They Playing Us for Idiots, or are They Idiots?

When you are the poor helpless victims it is hard to decide if the rulers that are bearing down on you are cunning and ruthless or whether they are mindless thugs.

The Zman takes the latter position in a rather dense piece on "The Parable of the Lizard People." He says that a group using political "violence on behalf of their cause is assuming there is no other option." But then he says that the folks being targeted, the shop owners, by BLM and Antifa are supported by corporate sponsors to the point that there are practically mega-corporation commercials supporting the rioters -- who are, of course, sponsored by the ruling class regime. Thus the folks targeted by the rioting,

the people under attack in our world lack self-awareness. They think they are in charge and that the corporations and politicians will respond to market pressure. You can be sure most of them think they will have their revenge in November. They think “get woke, go broke” is a reflection of reality. A big part of the war being waged on them is a psyop to reinforce this false consciousness.

Well, it could be. But that assumes that the "powers that be" are competent and know what they are doing. And I don't think so. I think that powers that know what they are doing are very rare. They are people like Bismarck and Lord Salisbury that kept Europe in the late 19th century under control. They they died and the idiots, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Brit and French politicians, burned the whole place down through stupidity.

I just can't help feeling that our ruling class today is shot through with idiots. It now appears that the whole Trump Russia thing was an incompetent sh*t show from the start, with the fabled Steele dossier put together by a "sub-source" Russian drunkard that had worked at the Brookings Institution. Just so the Clinton campaign could spy on the Trump campaign. And then the whole post-election stuff, including Special Prosecutor Mueller and the inpeachment effort: come on Dems, you can do better than that.

Or take the AntiFa riots. It would have been cool to have some huge peaceful demonstrations after the death of George Floyd, to rally the black vote to the Democrats one last time. But the present riots by young white gentry: Please. And we clearly have all the Dem mayors frozen in place like deer in the headlights, because their political education is in the fraud of "activism" and "peaceful protest." Which have been, for 50 years since the end of the Civil Right Era, fake play-acting by the ruling class's kidz. If the rioters had been eevil "far-right" white supremacists the mayors would have known exactly what to do and they would have done it if AntiFa didn't do their work for them.

See, I think it was staggering stupidity by Hillary Clinton not to concede the election in 2016 and send everyone home.

See, I think it is staggering incompetence by Nancy Pelosi and the other House leaders to allow the radical left to set the agenda.

I think it is staggering incompetence by the Dem mayors not to snuff out the lefty riots.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the Soros-supported prosecutors to do things like harass the St. Louis couple that defended their historic home with firearms. That's the sort of thing that transmits in a second through every gun-nut in the nation.

I think it is staggering stupidity for the tech-lords to have allowed their woke censors to be censoring center-right content and for Google to practically disappear Breitbart from its search results. Actually I think it is stupid to be censoring far-right content as well.

I think it is staggering stupidity for Judge Sullivan and the Court of Appeals to be still harassing LTG Flynn. I mean really fellahs. The definition of injustice is a powerful government hounding a private citizen using the full extent of the law and its staggering expense.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy that read a few books and thinks he knows something.

Here's what I'm thinking about. I wonder how we get through all the trillion dollar deficits and Federal Reserve money printing without a nasty inflationary bubble and a worse nasty recession a couple years down the road.

Now that, to me, is a real problem.

Liberal Woman Journalist Doesn't Get Conservative Women

One of the corollaries of my reductive Three Peoples theory is that people in one layer can't understand, and don't respect people in other layers. Example:

In Vanity Fair TV critic Sonia Saraiya asks "Is Hollywood too soft on conservative women?" Yes, she says, using "Mrs. America" on Phyllis Schlafly, "Bombshell" on Megyn Kelly, and "The Iron Lady" on Margaret Thatcher as examples. That's because Saraiya reckons "that they belonged to a group of “white nationalist racist gender traitors.”

In other words they had the wrong ideas, and weren't down-for-the-movement feminists. So launch the lefty pejoratives.

Did you know that "pejorative" means making things worse?

This attitude so common among educated women is, according to my theory, because People of the Creative Self, or educated Gentry, all have a culture in which women are supposed to believe in careers for women, and therefore abortion, and the notion that the "patriarchy" has oppressed women since the dawn of time.

And these people cannot understand or give the time of day to anyone outside the Overton window of their liberal world view.

But if you are a Woman of the Responsible Self, or a Commoner, you do not see yourself breaking the glass ceiling; you do not see the point. You see yourself as a wife, a mother, the caretaker of the family. So, you don't see the point of a career, not if it interferes with taking care of your family, you don't like the idea of abortion, because it implies that babies are expendable. And you don't see your husband as an oppressor, but rather as a provider that maybe doesn't always live up to the standards you have set for him. Yes, Commoner women tend to be a little patronizing towards their husbands.

Now, the women examined by Saraiya are/were not in fact ordinary Commoner women although they were born Commoners. Shlafly's father was a machinist and salesmen hammered by the Great Depression; Thatcher's father was a corner grocer in Grantham in England. But they got educated, starting with a Catholic girl's school for Schlafly and a British grammar school for Thatcher. 

Schlafly and Thatcher were both Amazon warriors, who learned how to operate in the men's public square utterly without fear -- or at least not showing any fear, which is what matters. They were extraordinary women, by any standard. Schlafly more or less singlehandedly ditched the Equal Rights Amendment; she argued that the ERA would be a disaster for women. Thatcher learned how to be a politician in Britain long before the parties prepared special women-only shortlists. It took Thatcher ten years of work before she got herself selected as a candidate for Parliament and elected to the House of Commons. And to see any of the videos of her as Prime Minister in the House of Commons shows her in complete mastery of the House of Commons culture, which is a male Culture of Insult. Only, because of House Rules, the insults must be indirect, which makes them much more fun.

The point of my Three Peoples theory -- and the reason I also use Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients -- is because it proposes a world in which there are people Who Are Not Like You. And it thereby allows you to live with The Horror! that these other people are not going to agree with you.

"Because I am so wise" -- that's Fritzi's line, not mine -- I understand and empathize with the fact that the world is full of people that do not see it the way that I do. I realize that all the liberal Gentry women up the street with their #WeBelieve signs naturally believe all the liberal shibboleths like Love is Love and Women's Rights are Human Rights. But I also understand that they are sitting in their liberal bubbles talking to their liberal friends and just have no clue -- because their liberal world view does not admit such a clue -- of how the other half -- or rather two thirds -- lives and experiences the world. So, of course it makes sense for them to think of Other People as superstitious bigots or, in today's argot, “white nationalist racist gender traitors.”

You see, I believe in a world in which it is OK for a woman to be a furious feminist, breaking glass ceilings and non-cis-gendering to her heart's content. But I also believe in a world where it is considered worthy and honorable and respectable to be a wife and mother. And I also understand that there exists a world of Subordinate women, living in a pre-city culture in which women... Well I know not exactly how such a world operates. I assume it operates something like the community of women of the hunter-gather band or the village women of the agricultural era, or the working-class mothers of the industrial slum. But more research is needed.

Yes. What do lower-class women want? Or expect? Has anyone inquired, ever? Anyone thought twice about imposing their own world view upon these women?

Didn't think so.