Humans Are Evil, But Mostly Just Stupid

What do you think of riots in South Africa, a total mess in Haiti, mostly peaceful protests in Cuba, and anti-vax-passport demonstrations in France?

Frankly, I don't think much, nor do I worry much about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as Suzannah Lipscomb does at UnHerd.com.

What I do worry about is the stupidity of government officials, and their ham-handed actions high and low.

I worry that the shutdown of the economy during COVID will have all kinds of unpleasant effects on the US, stemming in part from disruptions to the lives of marginal people that will never get their lives back together again. I don't say the shutdowns and maskings and quarantines were evil. I just think that they were mostly stupid and will have "unanticipated consequences" that nobody ever thought about.

I worry about the "go for broke" culture in the US ruling class right now, from gigantic spending to excessive unemployment benefits to wholesale voting-law reforms. I don't say that they are evil; I just think they are spooked, and have reacted by doing stupid things.

The Four Horsemen represented Disease, Famine, War, and Judgement. And Lipscomb wants us to realize that those ancient harbingers of disaster are not so ancient or so distant as we like to think in our modern prosperous bubble.

Still, it is sobering to learn of Disease that

It was also bubonic plague that continued to reappear on average every 16 years, with a lethality rate of between 60% and 80%. It killed quickly and horribly.

And of Famine that

Much famine, then as now, was man-made, like the eight-month siege of Sancerre in 1573 during the French Wars of Religion. The inhabitants first turned to eating their horses and donkeys, then cats, rats, and finally dogs.

So a lot of famine was the consequence of War

Warfare is less obvious today. Troops do not get billeted to our homes, nor loot and pillage our food supplies. 

Although, after a century with two world wars and the US meddling all over the world, I wonder.

But whatabout the Day of Judgement? Oh yes, Climate Change,

the news that Canada registered a record, Sahara-desert like high of 49.6°C last month[.]

Hey, I know! Whatabout the absolute disaster of all socialist and national-socialist regimes from Bolshevik Russia to today's Winner, post-Castro Cuba. There's the Judgement of God, if you like.

But I still think that worse than all the evils of the world are the stupidities. You know, like the Great Reset, from the World Economic Forum.

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Oh yeah. That should work.What could go wrong?

Biden, Democrats, Race and Going for Broke

We really are experiencing a weird season right now, as Texas State House Democrats fly the state to go to Washington DC to advocate for the Democrats' plan to federalize election laws, as employers can't find employees, as Democrats are pushing gigantic spending bills. And as President Biden warns us that Jim Crow is only a vote away. Said he:

This year alone, 17 states have enacted -- not just proposed, but enacted -- 28 new laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, not to mention -- and catch this -- nearly 400 additional bills Republican members of the state legislatures are trying to pass.

The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It's unrelenting, and we're going to challenge it vigorously.

All of which makes me wonder what Democrats know that I don't know. I mean, if this is a return to Jim Crow then what has been the point of 50 years of positive discrimination in favor of blacks in the United States?

The good old American term "going for broke" seems to apply.

Why would Democrats try to federalize voting laws when the two houses of Congress are about evenly divided, 50-50? Because this is the best it's gonna be for Democrats from here on out? You tell me.

Why would Democrats be trying to pass gigantic spending bills when the Congress is about evenly divided? Because this is the only chance they will get to hand out loot and plunder to their supporters for a while? You tell me.

Why would Democrats keep the unemployment bonuses going when employers are reporting a shortage of employees? Don't they get how the labor market works? How inflation works? You tell me.

Why is President Biden proposing new subsidies to help low-income homebuyers what with home prices soaring out of sight? Don't Democrats understand that it is past subsidies that have caused the sky-high home prices that have priced young people and low-income buyers out of homeownership -- and maybe marriage? You tell me.

Humans don't "go for broke" unless they are about to lose everything. 

Oh, and when the unemployment bonuses stop and the eviction ban ends, and the mortgage forbearance ends, and when gas prices bounce above $5 per gallon and...

What Democrats don't seem to understand -- and why would they as they live in a New York Times NPR bubble -- is that in order to flatter themselves with their noble anti-racism and noble assistance for the poor they have visited a whole basketful of injustice upon ordinary white middle class Americans.

Because I say that almost every government program Makes Things Worse. You can hand out loot all you like, but at some point the gravy train ends. And when the checks stop coming people get really angry.

And I don't think that Democrats have a clue about the mayhem that is coming.

Our lefty friends have taken a fun ride on the Critical Theory train, insisting among other things that everything is a ruling-class narrative, that race is a social construction. And so on.

As Shakespeare might have said: All the world's a narrative, everything from Creation myths to modern physics and everything in between. The critical thing to understand is that some narratives work -- like modern physics -- and some narratives don't, like Marxist economics.

If you are not worried that your narrative may not be the last word in human knowledge then I think you have a problem.

I keep thinking about Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his advice back in the day that when you pass a big piece of legislation in Congress, you need a 70-30 vote in the Senate. He meant, of course, that you need near unanimity when you pass big things. Because if you don't then you just enrage the people on the losing side, and they will be looking for the opportunity to punch back.

Back in the day it seemed like Democrats would rule for a thousand years, what with the FDR coalition and then the 1964 election when Democrats beat Goldwater 60-40. Ever since, I suspect, there has seemed to be a glitch in the Matrix for Democrats: how could Nixon win? How could the B-movie actor Reagan win? Trump? Eeuw! And it is natural for humans to assume that when things go wrong it is the result of malevolence, on the part of the Other or on the part of God.

That is the position of Democrats as they Go for Broke. They cannot believe that their problems issue from their foolish ideas and narratives that Make Things Worse. It must be the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes -- and Jim Crow, Put Together!

It's all such a shame, especially since it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The End, or the Beginning?

I had an email from an acquaintance who'd written a book about the experience of being overrun like the Native Americans. Is that what we are experiencing, we middle-class white Commoners? A few years ago he'd written a book, For All The Marbles, about America being invaded by jihadi terrorists.

In the first part of the book, I tried to write about what the Native Americans might have been witnessing as the "white wave" of settlers swept across the middle of what was to be the United States.  And, I tried to have my protagonist compare that wave, with the coming wave of terrorists in present day America.

It all depends, of course, on whether we are experiencing the conquest by a superior culture or the last desperate flailings of a failing ruling class.

I rather lean towards the failed ruling class narrative.

I think about my forefathers in the early 20th century who were Commoner Brits with small businesses in places like Russia and Japan. They did what they did because they had business skills that the native population didn't have. An ordinary Commoner could make a decent life out of a routine business "out in the colonies" that he couldn't if he were back home in Britland having to compete with all the entrenched interests. 

Yet. One friend of my grandfather in Japan retired early and sold his business because, he said, the Japanese were learning the business culture so fast that he'd be out of business in a few years.

So I believe that what we see is the rest of the world catching up. But what about what comes next?

I don't think that the next thing has appeared yet. So I don't think that we are in the process of being inundated by a superior civilization. Unless, of course, you look at the fact that the top income groups in the US are various flavors of South and East Asians.

Here are the income league tables for 2019 from La Wik:

Race is a Social Construction	Median Household Income	Percent of Black
Indian Americans	$116,793	266%
Chinese Americans	$81,510	185%
Finipino Americans	$79,936	182%
Vietnamese Americans	$68,979	157%
White Americans	$65,777	150%
Latino Americans	$51,404	117%
Black Americans	$43,862	100%

Now I don't know what you think, but I know that the reason that Indian Americans are at the top is straight up "systemic caste-ism." And the reason that Chinese Americans score so high is "systemic Mandarin examination-ism."

Mind you, I don't blame the Chinese. Hey, back in the 19th century there was this kid that flunked his state examinations, decided he was the brother of Jesus Christ and by the time the Taiping rebellion was over, the butcher's bill was 30 million. Give or take a million or two.

Hey, here's the Wall Street Journal writing about "A PTA Purge of Asians." Really? The Parent Teacher Association "is in cahoots with watering down entrance standards" at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology -- "ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News and World Report." And "The percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year."

Now I'm reading all kinds of stuff, from Curtis Yarvin, who thinks that the oligarchy will win, to the whites-only right, and I think this.

It was all very well when the Democrats were allies of the working class, when the working class was probably a majority of the population. Hey, that was a political formula made in Heaven.

So I get where the Democrats think that by playing the race card and reckoning that in a couple of decades America will be majority non-white, and so their over/under political formula will still be a winner.

But I suspect that there is a great big opportunity for populist nationalists to play the class card, to unite the majority Commoner middle class of every "race is a social construction" and mobilize them against the educated class and its AstroTurf BLM and AntiFa thugs.

See I think the middle class doesn't want too much government. It just wants to obey the laws, go to work, follow the rules and wive and thrive and take personal responsibility.

Whereas the educated class gets off on directing traffic.

Hey, everyone likes a traffic cop, except if there's a traffic pile-up. Then people might start to say: why do we need these Keystone Kraffic Kops? All they do is run around and screw things up.

And there is this. Suppose that What Comes Next is a religious and cultural movement that says: "we don't need so much stinkin' politics, thanks very much."

Because that is what I think is the world's Big Problem. The only thing that politics knows is division. The division of the electorate into Us and Them and the division of loot and plunder among the political supporters. Oh, and the construction of monuments: how's that pyramid coming along, Pharaoh?

What has political division and gubmint loot and plunder done for you lately?

Are we about to be overrun? Or will America arise once again, shake itself off, and resume its destiny as the city on a hill, the last best hope of mankind on Earth?

Tribalism: China will Divide, because Politics is Division

One of my maxims is that the only way you create a nation or a tribe or a race is by fighting a war. It is not true that people "of one race" -- whatever that "social construction" means -- are naturally united whereas a multiracial society is naturally divisive.

"Nowt o' the sort!" as they say in The Secret Garden. 

Now here is the Zman on Taki's saying that the Chinese are naturally united, because they are 90 percent Han.

The great chain of causality begins with biology, then culture, with institutions being culture-specific. Asian societies are biologically homogeneous. China proper is almost entirely Han. Their culture of conformity is mostly the result of being a unified people.

OK. So how come China keeps having its Time of Troubles in between dynasties? How come the Chinese willfully engaged in a civil war from 1921, when the Holy Roman Communist Party was founded, and 1949 when the son of a rich peasant, Mao Zedong, took power in Beijing.

And incidentally culturally appropriated the backdrop of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen, its Gate of Heavenly Peace. There are five gates, by the way, and only the emperor gets to go through the center one, peasant.

So the Chinese are all Han and therefore united. So why did Mao decide to do his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? If the Chinese were all united and stuff? Why bother, old chap?

So here is my philosophy, again.

You create a people -- whether a tribe, a nation, a class, a labor union, by  fighting and winning a war, because the experience of a war unites all the men that served and fought in the war. It's instinctive in men.

Women, on the other hand, do not unite in that way. But they do unite, as they did during COVID, by all being Good Little Girls and wearing masks and keeping social distance and crossing to the other side of the street when someone is walking their dog in the opposite direction. Let's say that women unite for a season in order to be safe.

But once the war is ended then normal politics resumes, and division appears again. Doesn't matter if it is feudal politics where the various barons and counts and dukes all conspire against each other and occasionally besiege each other's castles, or court politics as in the days of the absolute monarchs, or democratic politics where politicians divide the electorate with promises of more spending for the educated class and the underclass and lower taxes for the middle class, or neighborhood politics where the women all complain about each other with "I can't believe she said that."

Once the war is over, then the tribe begins to divide up again. Period.

So the reason why China is united and we can all talk about them being 90 percent Han is that normal politics has not resumed, what with the current single-party rule under President-for-life Xi Dingping.

But it will. I seem to recall that the southerners in China call the northerners wheat-eaters and the northerners call the southerners rice-eaters. I think that these are supposed to be insults, but not being Chinese, I wouldn't know. But, don't forget, there are plenty of dialects in China, from Mandarin to Cantonese. And I seem to recall from the delightful Crazy Rich Asians that the Chinese are as tribal as anyone. And snobbish? You betcha. But look at the Map of Chinese dialects: "China is a large and diverse country." Who knew?

No. No go. All tribes are fake tribes, gussied up to take men to war. And as I say, the tribe of the lower class is the ethnic group, the tribe of the middle class is the nation, the tribe of the educated class in the global educated class.

Notice that the preferred political division of our current ruling class, called "antiracism," posits a division of America between the "oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors."

Notice how there are three lies in the Allyism manifesto.

Lie 1: The so-called "oppressed peoples" are in fact the lower class that is particularly privileged by the rulers with diversity and inclusion and welfare-state loot and plunder.

Lie 2: The so-called "allies" are in fact the ruling class -- oppressors by any other name -- that uses the notion of "oppressed peoples" as a political formula to justify its power.

Lie 3: The so-called "white oppressors" are just ordinary middle-class whites that don't have any particular political power with which to oppress people. They are people that the rulers can cancel in a New York minute as "racist" if they step out of line.

I think that my concept that all tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up in war, is a profound and liberating concept.

Because, you see, in my vision of the good life, if people naturally accept that different classes have different tribes, then the educated Gentry happily lives in its global community of high-minded educated priests all over the world. But the educated class benevolently allows the Commoners to live and wive and thrive in their nations, because in its wisdom it understands that the natural tribe of the middle class is the nation, and the poor dears will never grow out of it. The middle class benevolently allows the Subordinates to live in their ethnic enclaves, but encourages the Subordinates to come out of their ghettos and join the middle-class world of responsibility and trust whenever they are ready.

What a world that would be.

For now, we should start erecting the bleachers so we can watch the Chinese people quarrel among themselves once the Emperor Xi no longer rules a one-party state.

My Three Theses: Wokism Does Not Pay

 I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here, and Thesis Two, on racism here. Now let's discuss Thesis Three, that wokism Does Not Pay.

The first question, of course, is to decide what Wokism is, and why our current ruling class believes in it. I discuss this at length in "A Hollow Elite: The Roots of Wokism." I use my analysis of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 to show how life is good for the "cognitive elite" in America and elsewhere in the world with "great careers and merger marriages" -- for the cognitive elite. But life is not so good for the ordinary middle class, what I call Commoners or Responsibles. And not good at all for the lower class. Murray shows that in the white lower class the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. And things are worse in the black lower class.

Murray's point is that the world of Coming Apart is the world made by the cognitive elite, and it's not working for everybody else. I would add, as a Jungian, that while the cognitive elite denies that anything is wrong, it understands, instinctively, that something is wrong. And, I say, that when religious or political believers face this situation they typically do not give up. Instead they double down. And when the believers form the ruling class they have the power to harass, or imprison, or cancel their critics. And they do.

So I say that Wokism Does Not Pay. 

Obviously, Wokism does not pay for blacks. Murray says that to live a happy and meaningful live you have to score on the four ancient virtues: industry, honesty, marriage, religion. Where are the ruling class worthies that are encouraging the virtues in the black underclass? Not a bit of it. Instead they are encouraging a culture of victimism and "we are owed." The supposed anti-racists are encouraging blacks in the racism and ethnic solidarity that is ubiquitous in lower classes. But Black Lives Matter is not an organic black movement. It is an AstroTurf movement of educated-class activists prodding the black lower class into a tribalist racism that prevents blacks from climbing into the middle class.

Obviously, Wokism does not pay for the ordinary middle class, the Commoners. What Commoners need is a fairly free and flexible economy, with inexpensive paths to getting a good job; affordable housing in safe suburbs, good schools, low crime, and good roads. What our cognitive elite has delivered is expensive education, rampant credentialism, expensive housing, war on suburbs, declining schools, rising crime, and light rail and bike lanes instead of new highways.

But whatabout the educated class, the cognitive elite? What do you mean, Does Not Pay? Things are pretty good if you are a credentialed educated person. Very true. But the continued prosperity and glory of the cognitive elite depends on its continued occupation of the commanding heights of the economy and the culture as the ruling class. If there were to be an "insurrection" -- God forbid -- things might not end up very well for the cognitive elite. That is how to make sense of the absurd overreaction to the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol.

In The Ruling Class Gaetano Mosca makes it clear that one of the vital functions of any ruling class is to make sure that its rule benefits the non-ruling class. Otherwise, he thinks, the ruling class might find itself replaced. He has various proposals to make sure that the rulers stay in touch with the needs of the lower orders.

Right now I am in the early chapters of Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. I have a couple of takeaways thus far that seem to be relevant to our current situation.

First, the French were unable to sort out their government finances. The Brits had accumulated just as much debt -- what with all the wars -- but they had a central bank and managed to avoid financial trouble. The French collected taxes through a farm system and the tax farmers were a very strong special interest. Andz they couldn't get it together to create a central bank.

Second, the French knew they had a problem. They had the great intellectuals, from Voltaire to Diderot to Rousseau who were arguing for reform. Then they had government officials like Turgot and Necker that were trying to reform the system from the inside. Schama mentions a mid-level official, an aristocrat, Malesherbes, who tipped off the publishers of the Encyclopédie when the royal council decided to suppress it, and tried in various ways to get Louis XVI to reform.

See the relevance to our own time? We have a problem in government finance, but the current Biden administration is doing nothing to solve it. We need intellectual critics of the current regime, but there are no publicized figures like Voltaire and Diderot around these days. There are no genuine critics that get a hearing in The New York Times. The whole ruling class today seems to be united around the idea that the problem is the racists and white oppressors in the middle class. They instinctively combine to suppress dissent rather than secretly enable it.

Now, with the Frenchies, it didn't do any good to have the Rousseaus and the Diderots calling for reform and the Neckers and the Turgots and the Malesherbes trying to do something about it. They still ended up with the disaster of the Revolution and the dead-end of Napoleon. But our ruling class doesn't even seem to have the suggestion of an intellectual reform movement or officials trying to right the ship from inside.

I don't know what you think, but I'd say that our position is worse. Especially when you consider the educated class's reaction to Donald Trump, who represents, if ever such a thing were possible, an organic revolt in the Commoner class. Our rulers seem to have no idea that they have a problem, and that their rule is fundamentally unjust and harmful to everyone not in the cognitive elite.

I mean, seriously. Donald Trump was a clear a wake-up call to our present ruling class as any ruling class has ever had in world history. And what did they do? They shut their eyes; they turned away; they decided they didn't like his attitude. They gussied up a conspiracy theory that Trump was conspiring with the Russians! Hey! Remember McCarthyism? That's when liberals said it was the worst thing in the world to accuse them of conspiring with the Russians. Shades of the French courtiers that sneered at the shabbily-dressed Malesherbes.

So yeah, ruling-class Wokism does not pay. It does not pay for the lower class that the rulers keep in dependency and prevents from rising into the middle class. It does not pay for the middle class whose interests get pushed aside in favor of ruling-class conceits like climate change, urbanism, and the racist policies of affirmative action and diversity and inclusion.

And ruling-class Wokism does not pay for the rulers either, because sooner or later the plebs will rebel. And that will be the end of the glorious reign of the educated class, the cognitive elite. Just because they were too snooty to let the plebs live in their own way in a couple of things without being closely supervised by their betters.

Our Rulers Don't Have a Clue What to Do

Today, Victor Davis Hanson tells us that our rulers are lashing out at "Scapegoats, Boogeymen, and Hobgoblins" because they really don't have a clue why things have gone wrong. And therefore don't have a clue what to do about it.

Actually it's worse than that, because the Biden administration's American Families Plan is still throwing money at the problem. As though that worked. So the Bidenoids are Making Things Worse.

That's what rulers do when they are completely befuddled. They just keep on keeping on, punching the same old buttons and expecting things to work.

And the fact that we have a completely be-fuddled old gent as President of the United States right now in July 2021 is a "tell." It is God telling us that our rulers are completely be-fuddled and be-clowned. God is saying: Get a Clue, Kids!

Yesterday, in another proof of God's existence, I read a harrowing story on Quillette about the horrors of teaching in today's academia. Written by pseudonymous Gregory Hanson, "How All My Politically Correct Bones Were Broken" it tells the story a college English instructor that started in the trade 50 years ago .

In my first 10 years of college teaching, from the mid-60s to mid-70s, I modeled myself on my best teachers—men and women who questioned my ideas vigorously. They let me know that I mattered to them, they praised when praise was due, and they pushed me hard. Often I balked, and they continued to push. Indeed, the teachers who sternly, even at times angrily, called me out on my intellectual arrogance and sloppiness became mentors and, in several cases, lifelong friends. 

But, over his 50 year career, things changed.

But inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push—let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push—depending on whether or not a student’s identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. 

Because, you see, if you insist on high standards in English class with your average angry black male who has skated through K-12 without really learning to write, he would get angry, even threatening. And, of course, the administration would be no help at all. But that means that blacks -- who, remember, have lower average IQs -- don't get the special impetus they need to achieve competence in everything from English to Physics. But diversity!

You can see why our education system got ruined. All the right people assumed that the problem with blacks was discrimination. Slay the dragon of discrimination and racism and the world would be set to rights.

And if that didn't work, then slay the dragon of racism again. And then slay the dragon of white supremacy. And then the dragon of systemic racism. And so on.

Only it doesn't work. It will never work, and the reason is simple: discrimination and racism is only part of the problem, and maybe a very small part of the problem. The problem is that The Road to the Middle Class from rural peasantry to middle-class competence in the city is long and arduous. In fact, I would bet my nickel that the transition is harder than the previous transition, from hunter-gatherer bands to village horticulture and thence to agricultural peasantry.

Why? Well, I'll bet that the transition from hunter-gatherer-ology to agricultural peasant took thousands of years. But the industrial revolution is roughly 200 years old. It is proceeding ten times faster.

Put it this way. One of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman; another was a "maltster," a guy that makes sugar from grain. My grandfathers were both small businessmen; my father was an engineer; I was a computer guy. Both my daughters have master's degrees, and one is about to get her PhD.

And now we know exactly what the industrial transition is like, from Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. We are talking about rural girls in South China leaving the farm for the big city sweat shop and being chucked head-first into a total individualist hell, where they have no-one to fall back on, except themselves. So, at the level of an individual life, the transition is immediate! One day you are living in your village; the next day you are on the bus and the day after that you are working in a factory and living in a dorm.

Hey There Rulers and Sycophants! The problem is not racism and white supremacy! The problem is that if a black kid from the inner city wants to get on in the middle-class world of jobs and marriage and home-ownership they have to utterly walk away from the culture of the inner city where they were born and raised. And that is the hardest thing in the world to do!

Gubmint entitlement programs ain't gonna help! Quotas and diversity ain't gonna help! Reparations ain't gonna help! Blacks in every ad and commercial and movie ain't gonna help! Critical Race Theory ain't gonna help! In fact all those things are Making Things Worse!

The only thing that is going to get blacks into the mainstream of American life is for each black youngster to walk away from the inner-city culture and the victim culture -- and, dare I say, the Democratic Party -- and submit, without complaint, to the rigorous cultural transformation that every person undergoes when they join the middle class. And It Is Hard!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Dueling Narratives: Who's the Fascist?

Over at Salon Dean Obeidallah has a podcast with Ben Rhodes, author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made. He says that he "was kinda knocked on my back after the 2016 election." We are now like Hungary.

Hungary has gone from being a democracy to a single-party autocracy in a decade. And I said, "Hey, how did this happen? How did Viktor Orbán, your prime minister, do this in 10 years?" And he said, "Well, it's simple. He got elected on a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis. He redrew the parliamentary districts to entrench his party in power. He changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote. He packed the court with far-right judges. He enriched some cronies who then bought up the media and turned it into a right wing propaganda machine. And he wrapped it up in a national us vs. them message. Us, the real Hungarians, against them — Muslims, immigrants, liberal leaders, George Soros."

So, he concludes, "I can understand not just why democracy is threatened globally, but why it's threatened in the United States[.]"

On the other hand, at UnHerd.com, Joel Kotkin says the Dems are all fascists, and he is writing about

the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

So everyone reckons that they are the real democrats and the other guys are the eevil fascists. Living on different planets, you might say. Or maybe different sides of the same planet. Or maybe right next door on the same planet but interpreting the world in radically different ways.

Actually, let's get real here. If Democrats like Ben Rhodes -- who is supposed to be one of the smart ones in the room -- got blindsided by Trump, then how come he's in the executive suite with Obama?

Or is Ben Rhodes just shoveling ruling-class narrative at the progressive rubes at Salon? That's one of the interesting things in politics. Do the partisans really believe their partisan talking points? I guess it doesn't matter. The narrative is everything. But let's just analyze this paragraph from Deah Abeidallah:

Rhodes also detailed how other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and China, mandate teaching students not the accurate history of their nation but a mythology that helps them remain in power. This should sound familiar, since Republicans have recently been enacting laws to ban "critical race theory," but what they're truly doing is copying the Chinese Communist Party tactic of only allowing the teaching of "history" that helps them politically.

"Accurate history of their nation?" But it is lefties that say that everything is narrative, a ruling-class narrative, that marginalizes the poor and the oppressed. Wow. You think maybe that the recent Democratic embrace of the "1619 Project" is accurate history? Or do you think it, and "critical race theory," is all about "teaching of 'history' that helps [Democrats] politically?"

I know. How about we agree that the "1776 Project," that America is a "city on a hill," and the "1619 Project," that America was founded on slavery, are both mythologies advanced by different factions of the ruling class. That is what critical theory is all about. That there is no such thing as "absolute truth" or "accurate history." It is all narrative. The point of critical race theory is to debunk the Whiteness narrative that the United States is the "last best hope of earth" -- said by President Lincoln in a message to Congress on December 1, 1862 -- and to substitute another narrative, that the United States is and was all about white supremacy and slavery and exploitation and imperialism. The point of conservatism is to debunk the leftist narrative that FDR was a light unto the nations and the century of the welfare state is the most progressive and just and equitable political movement ever. Yeah, it's a narrative.

Just a thought here. If Trump represents an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, then how come his administration was confronted by an 18 month special prosecutor investigation, by non-stop media attacks from top media like The New York Times and The Washington Post and popular cable news like CNN and MSNBC. And how come he was impeached twice in the House of Representatives? How is it possible that an authoritarian president would put up with such attacks? Wouldn't a real authoritarian just put his opponents in jail?

As you know, my analysis of politics says any movement that says: "OMG the orcs are taking over the world" is in fact a failing movement that is facing a "failure of prophecy." And typically, when religious cults or political movements sense that something is wrong -- because the world is not turning out as they confidently predicted with their narrative -- they lash out, detecting conspiracies and reds under the bed.

But I get our lefty friends and their push to force their "critical race theory" into the schools. Heck, if I had political power I would be inclined to force my "critical woke theory" on the kiddies. How everything that lefties have ever said and done, since Marx, is a lie, including "and" and "the." And how pretty much everything that lefties have advocated and implemented "makes things worse."