The Evil Spirits Will Always Be With Us

Even though David Hume disentangled factual truth and moral truth, says Zman, people still conflate them. And then a day later he notes how important simple belief is to humans.

Mysterious forces like privilege and institutional racism drive the public debate. These are not things that can be seen or even described. They just exist. Lives are being changed and public policy is being written on the assumption that these things exist. 

You mean the #WeBelieve signs?

I think it is important to understand that we humans are everything we ever were. We are the interactions at the molecular level, at the DNA level, at the distributed body level where cells are built and destroyed, nutrients are transported across the body, babies grow into adults, adults reproduce, and then grow old and die. We are an unknown complication of instincts, of semi-conscious emotions, of unconscious drives, of rational thought and of creative innovations.

Zman tells us about the importance of writing things down.

People who think the natural phenomena of the world are controlled by spirits are going to live different lives than people who work from a fixed set of religious doctrines. The spirit gods are fickle and unpredictable, while the book of rules is less so. The unpredictability of the holy book is due to the people holding it, not the book itself. It creates a standard of truth that everyone can understand and, more important, uphold collectively.

But, I would say, a wise book religion keeps a continuity with the spirit gods. That is why Catholicism had saints and miracles. And that is why the Reformation and Puritanism, with their iconoclasm and focus on the book to the exclusion of everything else, are a problem. Because here we are, 500 years later, and nice liberal ladies say: We Believe in Black Lives Matter and Love is Love -- not because of a book, but because.

I say that leftism is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is slavery, and the welfare state is feudalism, and reparations is revenge. In part, I think this is a reaction against too much book religion and book ideology.

But I claim to understand why this is so. People cannot live by bourgeois rationalism and a dichotomy between factual truth and moral truth alone. In fact, tons of people just don't get the religion of the book and fixed rational rules. Because the only thing they know is the fickle world of the evil spirit that doesn't like them.

Our glorious elite, that lives on its faith in creativity -- not just in making better scientific theories but that humans can "fundamentally transform" society -- likes to regard the simple bourgeois culture of responsibility as backward and shameful. It regards the middle class that lives by the truth of people following the rules, getting a job, and obeying the laws as cramped and oppressive. Whatabout the people that can't get a job? Because disability or racism? Whatabout them, deplorables?

That is why my theory of the Good Life recognizes all three levels of human experience, and is the wisest and the deepest and the truest thing out there. It recognizes that there are millions of people that still live in a world beset by evil spirits. And by the way, what do you call Hitler/Stalin/Mao? If those guys weren't animated by Evil Spirits my name isn't Chris Chantrill.

My theory of the Good Life believes that the great broad middle class lives by rules and responsibility. But that the middle class often can't understand the folks that believe the world is driven by the Evil Corporations, or whatever evil spirits best fit their sufferings and setbacks.

My theory of the Good Life believes that educated people live in the faith of creativity, that we have the power to discover new knowledge and that the highest and best life is to discover something new, whether a scientific theory, a new technology, a new social program, a way to transform the world towards heaven on earth.

What is missing in this world is perfect people that recognize that there are people in the world that don't think like them, people that believe that other people have a right to live in their own way, and a right not to be bullied and harassed and canceled into the right ways -- which mysteriously happen to be just what the perfect people believe.

I say that the German Turn that begins with Kant's dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, is the way out of the box, because it says that we humans cannot know the minds of the evil spirits, cannot know for sure that our science really describes the world as it is, cannot know for sure that our creative achievements are real rather than imaginary.

In other words, all of us, whether a certified genius, an ordinary schmuck, or a delta-minus moron, are stumbling in the dark. We live our lives in the faith that what we believe, what we are doing, what we dream of doing, is the right thing.

But what if we are wrong?

I would say that to ask that question is the beginning of wisdom. And never mind about the answer.

The Gender Gap in Free Speech

A piece in Psychology Today has recently reported that men are more pro-free-speech than women (from Steve Sailer).

In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.

But young men have the same attitude as adult women. And a study of online speech found that "women are more censorious than men."

Which all fits in with my "women in the public square" notion that women do not like the open-outcry culture of the public square, because open outcry is a guy thing. The culture of the community of women is one that creates an organic, subconscious pressure towards outward conformity and being outwardly "nice." It is appropriate for domestic society and neighborhoods, where the needs are for people to get on with each other, help each other, and keep the kids alive.

There is, in my view, a need in domestic society to avoid innovation and conflict, because the whole point is to have babies and keep the kids alive.

Or, to argue from the opposite position, in the marketplace the majority of innovations and creative endeavors end in failure. Which is fine in the marketplace as we have seen over the past 200 years of the Great Enrichment.

But, of course, innovation in making babies and raising children is personal. It is no good for me to make innovative changes in raising my children or growing my food, knowing that in the aggregate the innovations will result in a better, more prosperous society. Because if innovation hurts my kid, then that is final.

So that explains why women are more risk-averse than men, why women are more likely to be censorious cancelers in corporate world, why women are less likely to be involved in corporate startups.

It explains why women are more pro-mask in the current COVID dispensation, and more likely to follow the advice of experts. Women are coded for these things.

Whereas men are coded to take stupid risks, because "men are expendable."

My prediction is still that women are going to retreat from the public square and occupy positions and occupations with less risk and that reward conformity. That probably means that they will occupy most of the positions in government and corporate bureaucracy, because those positions are coded for following the established procedure and not deviating from approved norms.

But young men have a problem. If, as the "experts agree," young men are low on free speech approval, it means that they are ill-equipped for male adult life. For one thing, women are better coded for "go along to get along" lives and occupations, so if men choose low-risk occupations they are likely to find themselves outperformed and out-judged by the women around them.

It is interesting to note from another piece, that East Germany was perhaps the most censorious society in history.

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. 

The trouble is that this sort of top-down ideological control, while benefiting the ruling class in the short term, does enormous damage to the body politic -- including the ruling class -- in the long term. 

If there is one thing we should have learned from the history of the West in the last several hundred years it is that today's rebel is tomorrow's CEO, and that a healthy society permits a vigorous circulation among the elite -- the political elite, the cultural elite, the economic elite.

But that is exactly what women have seldom done, and the current political and cultural elite are trying to prevent. Because they are the good guys, the virtuous guys, and people that don't agree with them are evil and ought to be suppressed.

There is no doubt it will all end in tears, because life, the universe, and everything is a constant renewal that is achieved by the death of the old. The truth of the women's culture of conformity is that you need to keep things on hold to get the kids out of the nest. The truth of the men's culture of competition is that you need to innovate so the next generation will have a world to live in.

How do you balance the two? I have no idea, except to honor women's need for a quiet place and men's need to shake things up.

Missing the Point of Jane Austen

Apparently there's a whole industry out there criticizing Jane Austen for not being woke enough. Or praising her as the world's first feminist. Or taking her to task for not turning her novels into tirades against slavery. That's what I get from a fairly sensible article about "Interrogating Jane" by Lona Manning.

Oh dear. What fools these mortals be.

I want the novels of an era to be drenched in the conventional wisdom of the time. That's because I don't trust history, don't trust politicians, don't trust historians to tell me the truth about the Good Old Days.

Instead, I want to be able to winkle out of the text and the story what was really going down back then. The value to me in Jane Austen is precisely that. That servants don't exist as people. That when Fanny Price asks a question about the slave trade there is a dead silence. That Anne Elliot is good dutiful girl that rejects the marriage proposal of the young Captain Wentworth without a fortune on the advice of elders, and then grows up to marry him anyway. When he is as rich as Croesus.

I want to be able to feel the grinding harshness of life in the English countryside that is described by Thomas Hardy. I want to be able to experience the social crosscurrents in George Eliot's Adam Bede, from the rising young carpenter, to the woman preacher, to the twerpy orphan girl to the twerpy son of the manor. And I want to read about the pride of long-term farm tenants and their tradition of honor and respectability. I want all this without so much as a single fashionable word from today's moral framework.

I want to experience the emergence of the servant as almost a person in North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, in the person of Dixon, the servant of the Hales.

I want to read what Anthony Trollope writes about blacks and creoles and whites and what have you when he travels to the West Indies in the 1850s in The West Indies and the Spanish Main. And I don't want to hear any wokey flim-flammery about his whiteness and his upper-class Victorian sensibility and his apology for European colonialism.

And I don't want to hear a single word about how the slavery in the United States was uniquely evil and has condemned the United States to bottomless perdition forever.

What is interesting is that slavery, ubiquitous since forever, became a scandal during the 18th century. What is interesting is that after the abolition of African slavery in the 19th century in Europe and the Americas the world saw the founding to two slave states held up to the world as the very incarnation of truth and justice. What is interesting is that after the 19th century saw the elimination of whole forests of subordination the 20th century saw the replanting of a sort of neo-feudalism in the welfare state.

What is interesting is that after the righteous elimination of eevil absolute monarchies and their subjugation of the people and commerce for their dynastic adventures, the 20th century has seen the growth of monster state loot and plunder, where the ruling class extracts 40 to 50 percent of the income of ordinary people in order to reward their political supporters -- who are often, but not always, the very people that cough up the revenue.

What will be the fate of today's authors when knowing commentators from the virtuous future bemoan today's moral obtuseness and cowardice. And conclusively prove how today's writers deliberately and hypocritically avoided facing up to the monstrous injustices of our age.

Dems in Cloud Cuckoo Land

I'm at the airport this morning, and let me tell you, America is back. Albeit that all the men have black masks and all the women have pretty masks. Well, almost.

But I have to tell you -- if you will believe me -- that there is no sign of the systemic racism and white supremacy that President Biden warned us about last night. Why, I just saw a black woman and a white woman walking past the gate and they didn't seem in the least angry or frightened of each other.

The question all we racist-sexist-homophobes are asking is whether this is the last Big Push in a century of big government of the educated class, by the educated class, for the educated class, before the whole thing collapses. Or whether the educated class will succeed in sewing the place up into a totalitarian monostate where you'd better behave or you'll be sent to Critical Race Theory Reeducation Camp.

I tell you what. Nobody knows. The Dems are pressing all the buttons that worked for them in the past, from trillions for public works to trillions for women and children to race-card accusations. 

And if they don't work? The record of the past is that you can't expect the old warriors that knew how to fight the old way to suddenly reinvent themselves. So when they realize that the old levers and buttons don't work it will be too late. Of course, if they hammer on the old buttons hard enough, you never know.

After reading the reports on the Biden speech last night I'd say that the strategy of bashing all the buttons at once may not work too well. After all, the political art of loot and plunder requires that you tell you supporters that they are going to get their share. But you really don't want to rile up the opposition with too much taxation and sequestration and outright insult. I suspect that if President Biden were a little more on the ball his agenda would be a little less pedal-to-the-metal on every left-liberal wish list.

I'd say that one problem with the liberal interest-group / activist organization culture is that with every organization superbly organized to trumpet its issue to the reverberate hills there is a real problem getting any of them to cool their jets for the larger liberal interest. I always remember Nancy Pelosi confidently talking about AstroTurf during the first few months of the Tea Party. Of course she did, because every single liberal organization is a fake pretense at Representing the People, and instead is a special-interest scam.

But my belief is that the populist rebellion of the last ten years is organic, from the grass roots and not the AstroTurf plastic.

And that is the problem that is going to change the world. That the ordinary American can't take it any more and the average clueless rulers just don't have a clue.

A Panorama of Slavery: The Privateersman

Captain Marryat, he of The Children of the New Forest, was a naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane. His last naval adventure novel was The Privateersman, which turns out to be a reflection on slavery, for our hero, a disinherited gentleman from the north of England gets tricked into the slave trade, is then enslaved and then... Well you shall read the story.

The story opens in media res with a series of naval encounters in the Caribbean while our hero is a crewman on the privateer Revenge commanded by Captain Weatherall. First the Revenge captures a Frenchman, then is overwhelmed by a French and a Spanish ship acting together, then our hero is freed by the Hero and sent to hospital in Port Royal, Jamaica to recover. Then it's back to Liverpool, England and he meets the owner, Mr. Trevannion, of the privateer on which he had served in the Caribbean.

Now he sails as mate on a ship trading to Senegal, but is wrecked and captured by "natives" and carried off into the desert and sold as a slave to a fierce Negro desert king. But one of the king's women, Whyna, takes pity on him, and he becomes her personal slave. But then he and his companions are ransomed, return to the coast and sail back to Liverpool.

His time with the Negro queen excited interest in the gentry of Liverpool but soon it was time to ship out as first mate on another trip to Senegal. He uncovers a plot to capture the ship, foils the conspirators and sails back to Liverpool.

After a trip to London our hero gets command of his own ship for a bit of privateering. But first he takes some escaped Jacobites to Bordeaux, France and makes the acquaintance of the French that he fought in the Caribbean. Of course the Frenchie wants another fight, but our hero beats him and takes his ship as a prize back to Liverpool. But then he is arrested for helping the Jacobites escape. After being condemned to death and a short stay in the Tower of London as a traitor condemned to death he is pardoned and returns to Liverpool.

But his imprisonment in the Tower of London has persuaded our hero Elrington that privateering is not for him, and so he tells his employer -- in the hearing of the employer's daughter, the fair Miss Amy Trevannion, who is much impressed. He agrees to one more privateering cruise in which he captures three ships. But first he rescues a drowning man from a sinking ship that turns out to be his younger brother, Philip.

His employer is so pleased with him that he proposes to take him into business after a year's trial, but at the end of the trial Elrington refuses partnership because his employer's business is privateering. Miss Trevannion is cold towards him, and yet our hero observes her, later, weeping.

After numerous trials and excursions Elrington -- did you know his real name was Musgrave? -- heads to London to enroll his pal Captain Levee's ship to sail for the Royal Navy as a naval rather than a private ship. Then he captains a ship to Senegal for his employer, to take advantage of a special deal in elephant tusks and gold dust. 

But then Elrington gets the fever and when he wakes up his crew has exchanged the tusks and gold for slaves and they are on their way to Brazil and he is a prisoner of the mate Olvirez who hatched the slave plan. And when the ship arrives Rio de Janeiro in Brazil Elrington is sent off to a government diamond mine, for life, as an effective slave. But of course, he gets released by an extraordinary coincidence, and soon gets on a ship to return to England.

Only the ship gets wrecked on an island off North America. Elrington and the captain repair the ship enough to float it and get off the reef but they and the crew are captured by pirates and stripped of everything from clothes to money. The pirate soon anchors off the coast of America and cut the captives adrift in a rowboat.

By the way, did I mention that Elrington -- or Musgrave -- had scored a diamond from the diamond slave mine that he hangs around his neck in a leather pouch?

The former captives land and separate, and Elrington and a companion find a canoe and paddle up the coast, but then get captured by Indians, escape, and then recaptured. His companion is killed but he is forced to marry an Indian woman: slavery? One day while out hunting with the Indians he encounters a white man and would have joined his ship, except its crew were called the "Jolly Rovers:" pirates. He walks on and comes to a house on a hill. It is a plantation run by a woman who employs two convicts as slaves, and now also our hero, who finds himself once more a prisoner, a slave. But pretty soon he find out he is to be her sex slave as well: marriage or your life. Impossible: because Miss Trevannion! He tries to escape, but is captured and put in irons.

Pretty soon the plantation is attacked by Indians and set afire. He and his mistress run off in the smoke, and then he runs away from her and into the Jolly Rovers and joins their ship. But he refuses to join their crew or become their pirate captain. Even so, it's back down to the Caribbean and Jamaica. On the way they run into the pirate ship that had despoiled Elrington before and capture it. While engaged with the other pirate ship a British corvette shows up and blasts the pirates to smithereens.

Guess who the captain of the corvette is? Elrington's brother Philip.

So Elrington, first name Alexander, real surname Musgrave, makes a swift passage to England, sells his diamond for £38,000, finds out that his baronet father and his two elder brothers are dead, so he is now Sir Alexander Musgrave, and he can go to Liverpool and make his beloved Amy Trevannion into Lady Musgrave.

What a life: enslaved three times, imprisoned twice, captured any number of times. But things are much better now.

The Fourth Turning: Trying Not to Frighten the Rulers

About five years ago (I think) my daughter recommended I read The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and last week I finally read it.

The book makes the unexceptional argument that history goes in cycles, with typically a crisis once a century. Obviously, you might say, any ruling class gets weak and flabby after a century and either gets its back stiffened by an in-group replacement, or the less amiable war and revolution.

But Strauss and Howe butter up this notion with some Jungian archetypes, that the century long cycle is driven by a generations of Prophets succeeded by Nomads succeeded by Heroes succeeded by Artists.

Which, in my opinion, gets a bit confusing and turgid, and allows them to predict anything about anyone.

The key to their argument is the "fourth turning" when the accumulated detritus from a three generations of rule in any political entity creates a mess that provokes unrest and rebellion and/or war. The result is a reset that refreshes the society and begins a new cycle. When the book was published in 1997 the authors were predicting a Crisis era beginning in about 2005 or maybe as late a 2020.

Because a book like this is targeted at an educated audience, the "cognitive elite" that is basically the ruling class, it has to step rather daintily. After all, the reason we are in a mess right now is that we have had about a century of rule by the educated class that has ramped up government spending from about 10 percent of GDP to 40 percent of GDP and we are soon going to run out of money. Plus, as Charles Murray relates in Coming Apart, the last 50 years has been good for people with good cognitive skills, but not so good for the less cognitively able. So life is good for the cognitive, but not so good for the rest.

So I think that all the talk about Jungian archetypes is a smokescreen to hide the unpleasant truth that the Crisis is going to be all about the injustice dished out by the educated elite and experienced by ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives struggling through the brambles that have been sown in their gardens by their educated and cognitive betters.

And, the book is all about the changing fashions and enthusiasms in the ruling elite. I suppose that is inevitable because rebellions never succeed and wars never start without the ruling class -- or a resentful cabal in the second rank -- stepping up to lead. Slave rebellions and peasant revolts never succeed. Even the Spartacus rebellion in 73 BC of 70 slave gladiators that swelled into a host of over 100,000 was put down by the Roman legions. So, the question is what cabal in the ruling class is likely to form a head of rebellion.

We could say that the Fourth Turning in the US started with the Tea Party and the 64-seat GOP gains in 2010 that flipped the House and ended in Donald Trump getting elected president in 2016. The question is whether the rulers can put down the revolt. I suppose that the answer is: they probably can unless a significant splinter of the ruling class decides to go for broke and side with the rebels. Right now they have beaten back the rebels, but only just, with a questionable presidential election and a 50-50 Congress.

But can the Biden people clinch the deal? Can they intimidate Big Business into suppressing the yokels? Can they keep the economy on track and still satisfy their supporters? Can they, er, manage the elections? Can they keep the blacks riled up? Can the ruling class get its act together?

I suppose that is really the question. It's not whether the Deplorables have an argument or that the Commoners of Middle America are getting screwed. The question is can the ruling class stay unified, or will some sector of the ruling class decide to put itself at the head of a movement to "take back America."

And then, of course, the question is how far the rebels are willing to go to make their point, and how ruthless the rulers are willing to be in stopping them.

A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokeism

Over the weekend I wrote up a 4-part review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Because, even though I bought and read Coming Apart back in 2012 when it was published, I wanted to be sure I knew all the ins and outs of his book.

As you may know, Murray wrote the book after being anathematized as a racist for The Bell Curve published in 1994 which first advanced the idea that modern society was becoming one in which you needed good cognitive skills to succeed and that certain groups -- blacks in particular -- that exhibit lower IQ than the norm were going to be on the short end of the cognitive age. OK, he said: I'm a racist. Let's analyze the cognitive age for whites only.

I tend to summarize his book thusly: "the top 20 percent is doin' fine, with great careers and merger marriages, the middle 50 percent just so-so, and in the bottom 30 percent the men don't work much and the women don't marry much."

My new summary goes something like this: The US economy over the last 50 years has transformed life and work, and in particular benefited a "cognitive elite" of people with extraordinary cognitive skills. This cognitive elite is now the "new upper class" in America. But people lacking in high cognitive skills have not done so well, and in particular the bottom 30 percent has been hard hit. There aren't many good jobs for people without at least a high-school education, and so we also have a "new lower class" in America, where people don't work much, and don't marry much, and don't feel at all happy.

Perhaps the strongest point in Coming Apart is Murray's analysis of the new upper class of the cognitive elite that has segregated itself off from the rest of America into a cultural "bubble" and doesn't know much about the rest of America. Back in the day, when nearly everyone went to church and belonged to fraternal organizations they necessarily mixed -- and had to get along with -- people very different from themselves. No longer. And the growth of the welfare state means that people no longer have to get together to achieve social and community goals. They leave it up to politicians, government and its bureaucrats.

Murray proposes that to live a happy and meaningful live you have to score on the four ancient virtues: industry, honesty, marriage, religion. The new upper class scores well on all four virtues: they live worthy lives with, as I say, "great careers and merger marriages."

Writes Murray, "the new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them." It is a "hollow elite." For, while the new lower class has suffered and declined over the last half century, the new upper class has no idea that there is a problem; has no credible analysis of the problem; and demonizes anyone that tries to develop an analysis and a solution to the problem.

Things can't go on like this, Murray reckons: something has to give. And he comes up with a four-part prophecy, that involves the collapse of the European model of the welfare state and its intellectual underpinnings, the development of an alternative to the welfare state, and Americans asserting their allegiance to basic Americanism.

That's when I understood what the new ruling-class woke-ism is all about.

If a ruling class is challenged it has two basic options. It can grant the validity of the challenge and start to reform its corrupt institutions. Or it can double down and declare war on the insurgents. And that is how to understand the culture war, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and Wokeism.

I dare say that in 2009 with the inauguration of the First Black President and a Democratic Congress with a 57-41 Democratic Senate and a 257-178 House our new upper class imagined that politics as we know it was all over and social justice -- fundamental transformation -- would rule for a thousand years. Instead they got a series of jolts. First of all was the Tea Party in 2009-10 and the flipping of the House with a 64 seat GOP gain leading to a 242-193 alignment. Then President Obama won reelection with less of a majority than his first election. Then the Senate flipped in 2014 to 54-44 Republican. Then the impossible happened in 2016 and a crude populist nationalist won the presidency.

Do you see the point? You can interpret these events in two ways. You can either say, that "we" have a problem. Or you can react with incredulity: "Inconceivable" as Wallace Shawn (son of New Yorker editor William Shawn) said in The Princess Bride. And that's when people start looking under rocks, or start chanting "Russia, Russia."

This is what you call a failure of prophecy. And governing elites tend not to say: wow, our whole world view is contradicted. Instead they tend to double down and to opt for a Reign of Terror and Virtue. Or Great Purge. Or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And society ends up with a mammoth butcher's bill.

Now my guess is that the current wokeism and cancel culture and war on "systemic racism" is making things worse for the new lower class, and not better.

This is not rocket science. Ask yourself: how do "we" help people with less than stellar cognitive skills live a meaningful life in a congitive age? Give 'em welfare? I doubt it. I would say that we need, just to start, a reform of education and credentialing that creates pathways for people without high cognitive skills. And it would help create a adult culture for such people to help them get married, have children, own a home of their own, and live a meaningful life with modest security. In the larger sense, this means encouraging the lower orders to develop a sense of "agency" and permit them to create a world in which they can live lives of meaning.

Ask yourself: do I have a clue how a person of low cognitive ability would go about building a life with meaning in a cognitive age? I sure don't. 

But since our new upper class lives in a bubble and uses its cultural and political and economic power to dominate the rest of society with no backtalk allowed we have done nothing to help the "cognitively challenged."

You can see this bubble mentality in the #WeBelieve yardsigns that I like to believe are the work of the women of the new upper class. All of its assertions, from Black Lives Matter to Science is Real to Love is Love are trite expressions of new-upper-class conceit. They mean nothing to the new lower class, except for Black Lives Matter which will lead blacks to utter ruin.

I like to say that politics is division and government is force. The point of politics is for a warrior to rally the young men to his banner to fight the foreign foe on the border. The point of government is to reward the supporters of the rulers after they have won the great victory.

The problem is, of course, that the need to rally the nation to war happens only once in a generation, or less. So what do the politicians do the rest of the time? And there are other people, besides the supporters of the regime, who, you might say, also have a right to live a prosperous and meaningful life. Whatabout them?

The current administration's agenda has been simply stated: climate change and systemic racism. Do you see that there is nothing for the ordinary American in this agenda? Climate change is a ruling-class fantasy that empowers the rulers to spend vast quantities of money and order people around in a rerun of World War II. Systemic racism is a play to rile up the lower "people of color" and teach them that "they are owed," tempt them with government handouts and their problems are the fault of "white oppressors" who are...

Yes, the oppressors are not the new upper class that has an almost complete control of culture, politics, and the economy but, presumably, the white Commoners of the middle class. Who have absolutely no input into the national political and economic agenda, except when they vote for Trump to "Make America Great Again."

There is nothing in the Biden administration agenda to address the agenda of ordinary American Commoners, and there is nothing to address the problems of the new lower class that goes beyond handing out goodies.

Look, every upper class screws up. It must do so, because it looks out on the world and instinctively tries to adapt it to suit people like them and to dangle baubles that it imagines will attract the support of others. And there are millions of people who are not like them, who will eventually get angry about the blindness and the injustice of the rulers.

But when the people have clearly said that, hey, things are not working out for people like us, then the ruling class has two options. It can admit "we screwed up" and try to achieve a "redress of grievances." Or it can double down.

It is pretty obvious what our "hollow elite" has decided. And it is telling that its decision demonstrates an astonishing hubris, to ignore the possibility that there might be problems out there among the peasants about which we bright shining stars in the political firmament know nothing.