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About the War on Populism

When people raise the question of “populism” in politics they are generally accusing the Other Guys of a crude appeal to emotion and bigotry.

The big question on the populist front has been the concern in the best circles about “populist nationalism.” The word “populist” is usually intended to communicate “rude and crude,” “Nationalism,” experts agree, is Literally Hitler.

Ruy Teixeira is discussing this in a post on “No Populism Without Cultural Populism.” Our Democratic friends are a bit upset about the cultural populism directed at them, on the immigration, gender, and DEI front when the real problem is those Billionaires of which you’ve heard tell that aren’t paying their fair share.

Teixeira links to Democratic candidate James Talarico, who’s running for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Texas against the divine Jasmine Crockett:

The culture wars are a smokescreen. They want us looking left and right at our neighbors instead of looking up at them. The biggest divide in our politics is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.

Yep, I get it.

The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. Trans people are 1% of the population. Muslims are 1% of the population. Undocumented people are 1% of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1%.

Yep. According to my Four Wars concept, the best domestic politics is “unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.”

You see the point. Talarico is a Democrat; he can’t unite Democrats against Muslims or migrants or transgenders as the small minority. Because “The Groups.” The Group Industrial Complex will tan his hide if he doesn’t come out 110% for transgenders, migrants and Muslims.

So he goes for the Billionaires. Chaps like Andrew Carnegie who used cheap immigrant labor to make cheap steel, and then annihilated the workers in the infamous 1892 Homestead Strike.

Only, of course, inexpensive steel was real good for building steamships that could transport poor people from Europe to America.

Or monopolist Rockefeller, who saved the whales by developing the oil industry and making it possible for Hollywood Westerns to feature oil lamps in the homes of the Wild West.

Now we have the tech billionaires. And how did they make their money? By making information on the internet almost free. Not to mention invent and manufacture those gigantic wall TVs so sports fans can keep an eye on their favorite teams all weekend.

Yep, I get it. “There is no politics without an enemy.” So every politician has to gin up an enemy, and heroically lead our young men into battle against the Frightful Foe. Only, of course, it’s the young kids that get killed in the politicians’ war. It’s the politicians that stay safely behind the lines and get to parade as national heroes after the glorious victory.

If you are a “populist nationalist” politician you play the cultural populism card against transgenders and migrants and Muslims.

If you are a Democratic politician you play the economic populism card and demand that the Billionaires pay their fair share.

Got it.

| Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:39:41 GMT |

CIA Babes in Politics

Did you know that the Democrats are actively recruiting former CIA people as candidates? David Strom has the receipts.

The ideal candidate was a young-to-middle-aged female intelligence-type—think Elissa Slotkin or Abigail Spanberger—who could run as a moderate and work from the inside to undermine conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular.

And don’t forget NPR CEO sweetie pie Katherine Maher, who was involved in some way with the color revolutions back in the day.

David Strom writes that this is all part of a plan:

The radical left is openly sharing their 2026 playbook:

→ Run as “moderates” with veteran optics and big progressive money

→ Win critical swing races

→ Immediately implement the hard-left agenda once in power

But you know what? I’m not all that exercised about it. Because I have this feeling that the girl CIA spies are just pen pushers: apparatchiks rather than nomenklatura.

What the Democrats desperately need is candidates to lead them out of the Swamp.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. The IC needs pen-pushers just like any bureaucracy. But I don’t see the Mahers and the Spanbergers getting the Dems out of their present mess.

I see the Democrats’ real problem as “The Groups,” the lefty activist groups that set the Dem agends and turn the money spigots. There is no Democrat with the independence and the fundraising pipeline that can push against “The Groups.”

So you have Democratic politicians in all the blue states and in Congress that just have to go with the radical agenda and crank up the spending for the government bureaucrats and the NGO Industrial Complex. “Nice little job you got here…”

And the Democrats in Congress don’t even have the cojones to stand up at President Trump’s suggestion and celebrate American citizens over illegal aliens.

Now, Let Me Be Clear — llike President Obama. I am not saying that the CIA operative babes are armed insurrectionists waiting with sleeper operatives in the Deep State waiting for the signal on their secret decoder rings. I am just saying that I suspect that CIA bureaucrats and the members of the USAID Industrial Complexx are much like most other bureaucrats. They do their jobs, but they really aren’t going to dig the Democrats out of the hole they have dug for themselves.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps the Democrats will win the midterms, impeach President Trump and throw half the Republican Party in jail and let illegal aliens vote by mail forever.

Or not.

| Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:22:13 GMT |

The Feminization of Revolution

Remember back in the day? If the natives got restless it was described as rioting in the streets.

But then the Narrative changed. Experts and political philosophers started to write about “demonstrations.” You can see that the point of the street action is now “a show of force” rather than actual violence in the streets.

I suspect that our lefty friends decided one day in a secret cabal in a fashionable café in Paris that rioting didn’t have quite the desired effect. Possibly because if the revolutionaries practice violence then that licenses the ruling class to practice violence. And we certainly don’t want the far-right armed insurrectionists to think that they have a license to counter-riot.

Also, of course, by The Sixties in the US, the demonstrators were not helpless victims of capitalism but the sons and factotums of the ruling class, and especially the obedient Narrative reciters in the mass media. So actual violence was not needed. Top level politicians could threaten violence if the demands of the demonstrators were not met. But the actors in the street did not have to.

OK, I checked with Google, and Google AI said that “protest” goes back to the 15th century, but:

its modern usage to describe public marches and rallies gained significant traction during the 1960s. Before this era, “demonstration” was the more common term, but the rise of activism—particularly regarding the Vietnam War and Civil Rights—shifted the terminology toward “protest” to emphasize active, and often disruptive, dissent.

You can see that “protest” is trying to communicate “rights” and “justice” while “demonstration” says that, if we want — and we might — we can tear the place down.

But now we don’t have “protests.” No indeed. Now we have “peaceful protests.” Not according to Google, who says that the idea of “nonviolent” or “peaceful” protests also came out of the Civil Rights Era.

But I don’t agree, and I realized what was going on a week ago when I read a piece which featured an accompanying photo full of twentysomething girl protesters.

And I thought: That’s what it’s all about! Revolution is not the good old riot like we get to see in living color in the movie of Les Miserables set in 1832. Revolution is now an upper-class thing, a girl thing.

“Women expect to be protected,” according to philosopher Christopher Chantrill. Therefore, most women — especially from the privileged educated classes — aren’t going to go out for a rumble like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story or the students in Les Mis. No, women don’t have a culture of violence, “Women have a Culture of Complaint,” according to philosopher Christopher Chantrill.

So it makes complete sense that when women march in the street with their artistically hand-created protest signs, they are “complaining” and “protesting” rather than threatening the gang from the other side of town — even if the Other is nothing less that radical-right armed insurrectionists.

So, you might say, we have feminized Revolution, like everything else in our society, according to the prophecy of Georg Simmel who said at the turn of the 20th century that the effect of women coming out into the public square would be that they would transform it to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

And “mostly peaceful protest?” That is a cunning term that helpfully suggests that a violent riot is not really violent. Just mostly peaceful, girls.

See? Now I have explained everything.

| Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:34:22 GMT |

One Thing about the Iran Decapitation Strikes

For some reason I have the idea that, back in the day, the rulers of the world had an informal agreement that war is war, but bombing the emperor’s palace is bad form. Old chap.

Of course, that does not apply to US domestic politics. Any leftie that wants to take a shot at President Trump — or any IC worthy that feels the need to take out President Kennedy — go right ahead. That’s Different.

But I am concerned that now that Trump and Netanyahu have taken out the entire top shelf of Iran’s ruling class, and I fear that the rules have changed.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because the US is the Global Hegemon for the foreseeable future, and the US sets the rules, and anyway, there’s no way to put a missile into the men’s room at the White House. Yet.

But still, think about what the US (and/or Israel) has done. Bomb the palace where the top Iranian leaders were meeting in Tehran. Then bomb the building in Qom where the Assembly of Experts were meeting to select the next national leader.

Think about some future global hegemon bombing the White House when the President’s cabinet is meeting. Or think of bombing the US Capitol when Congress is checking the electors selected for the next presidential election.

I know. It is unthinkable. The White House and the Capitol are Holy Places where we Americans conduct our sacred rituals with much pomp and ceremony. And don’t get me started on the Washington Monument.

Of course, maybe the problem is that Iran has no right to play in the Global Hegemons League, and the US is teaching it a lesson to stay in the Regional Ideologues League where it belongs. Today the Hegemons League would be the US, Russia, and China. Tomorrow? You think maybe India, replacing Russia after its diminishment in the Ukraine War?

Anyway, I suspect that in bombing Iran that Trump & Co. have led the world into a New Era.

And we may look back with regret.

| Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:10:24 GMT |

Critical Theory Update

Back in 2020 I wrote a Brief on Critical Theory. I said that it was a thread that started with Kant and his notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances. Then there was Fichte that wrote that “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” meaning that conscious thought begins in the unconscious.

Hegel wrote about the “nightlike abyss” of the unconscious, and Schopenhauer called this unconscious drive “Will,” and Wagner wrote The Ring of the Nibelung to show that myth is a welling up of the unconscious out of the abyss to tell a story about how the world works and how it’s all about the girls, from the Rhine Maidens and the Valkyries to the heroine Brünnhilde.

Notice how Marx manipulates the unconscious to make a political point. Google Search:

Marx viewed the “unconscious” not as a psychological concept, but as a social and economic phenomenon where capitalist structures (”base”) shape consciousness (”superstructure”).

And, of course, the helpless workers have no idea how the bourgeoisie manipulate their unconscious. But the Marxists would take care of that.

Then came World War I and the workers unaccountably identified with their nations, not their class. So the Frankfurt School arose to construct a new critical theory based not on class but on all forms of repression: sexual and racial. To emancipate the world, the Frankfurt School proposed a

synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.

Frankfurt scholars-in-chief Horkheimer and Adorno felt that they should keep their distance from politics, and Jürgen Habermas in The Theory of Communicative Action proposed that humans should get together, all friendly like, to discuss their differences.

But Herbert Marcuse dove right in and encouraged the Sixties students to protest.

Marcuse saw agents of change that could supplement the quiescent working class and unite with third-world communist revolutionaries.

By the way, the code word for going beyond thinking to fundamental transformation is called “Praxis:”

the transformative union of reflection and action, where theoretical understanding of social injustices (like exploitation or oppression) drives practical, informed action to change the world.

But suppose your “theoretical understanding of social injustices” just does not align with the reality of “dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge”? What then?

Then you get to what we now actually call “Critical Theory.”

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida… were reshaping academic discourse with critiques of knowledge, meaning, power, institutions, and social control with deconstructive approaches that further challenged assumptions about objectivity and truth.

Thus critical theory expands into

critical animal studies, critical criminology, dependency theory and imperialism studies, critical environmental justice, feminist theory and gender studies, critical historiography, intersectionality, critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and critical terrorism studies.

And the critical theorists expand on

Marxism’s emphasis on analyzing how dominant groups and systems shape and control society through exploitation and oppression[.]

For some reason these devoted activists are blind to the fact that they are the agents of exploitation and oppression in today’s world.

In fact, I would argue that the critical theorists turn Kant’s original notion of our fundamental ignorance about things-in-themselves upside down. Instead of humbly wondering how the world works they are all determined that the world is nothing but hegemony and oppression all the way down and that their analysis is the truth that can inform a Praxis that can lead to a just and equal society.

Notice that the whole point of Kant is that we cannot know the truth-in-itself.

My critique of Critical Theory is a Real Simple collection of Four Laws.

Socialism cannot work, because prices. Prices are a social thing — dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge — and cannot be directed by government.

Administrative government cannot work because the “knowledge problem.” Society works through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that government and corporate administrators cannot grasp.

Regulation cannot work, because “regulatory capture.” Actors in the market have dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that cannot be comprehended by government regulation.

Government programs cannot work, because every government program becomes institutional corruption.

Yes, dear lefties, there is injustice and domination and hegemony all over the place. But a single theory — or even a basket load of critical theory — of oppression just cannot comprehend the depth and complexity of human life and society. Because the way the world works is through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge, and not through critical theory and Praxis.

Because how do you know that your critical theory is anything other than intellectual fantasy?

| Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:42:50 GMT |

Let Us Analyze the War Situation

A little under five years ago I developed my Four Wars concept. As with all my ideas it is Real Simple.

International wars:

1. Unite the country against a small country for a quick win.

2. Unite the country against a big country for a world war.

Civil wars:

3. Unite half the country against the other half for a civil war

4. Unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.

And that is all.

Let us analyze the Iran situation and the US domestic situation in the light of the Four Wars concept.

Iran Situation

About 50 years ago the Iranian people rose up against the US-sponsored Shah and kicked him out. They imported a modest mullah, Ayatollah Khomeini, from Paris, but he turned out to be a totalitarian religious thug.

But every regime need an enemy, especially if you are a religious totalitarian regime. So what did the new Iranian regime come up with? It declared war on a small neighboring nation, Israel. But because it didn’t have the power to actually defeat Israel in war it chose the lesser path, of sponsoring and financing terrorists in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, and in Yemen, and making a fortune selling keffiyeh scarves to liberal women all across the West.

It all worked like a champ until the regime violated the famous Mr. Brooke — of Middlemarch — philosophy not to “go too far” and backed Hamas in Gaza to commit the October 7, 2023 atrocities against Israel. The result has been the current Iran War in which Israel, backed by the Global Hegemon Trump is busy reducing the Iranian regime to rubble and also uniting the Sunni Arabs against it.

Notice that Iran is now in the position of a small nation going to war against all the other nations in the region. This is not recommended in my Four Wars concept.

US Domestic Situation

Back in the day, political entities were straight hierarchical, from the feudal king down to the rural peasant, and everyone knew their place.

But when Gutenberg invented the printing press a new educated class arose and began to challenge the feudal hierarchy that had declined to provide them with an honorable place in the hierarchy unless they were priests or monks. The rising educated class pushed the idea of equality. It might be in the terms that the North American rebels developed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

Or it might be couched in the idea of blissful equality developed by Rousseau.

At any rate, by the mid-19th century experts had decided that the educated class ought to be the rulers. But how?

Naturally, they consulted my Four Wars concept and decided that the problem was the small bourgeoisie that was exploiting the vast majority of people in the industrial working class. Let the vast working class unite against the tiny bourgeoisie!

Although good in theory it didn’t work out in practice, maybe because in the immediate aftermath of Marx’s writings in the mid 19th century economic growth in western countries maxxed out. Here’s the US record from my usgovernmentspending.com.

Odd that it should be an S-curve, interrupted by a blip in the 1930s.

After World War I, in which the working class identified with their nations and not their class, the Frankfurt School in the 1920s invented critical theory and decided that the problem was much bigger than the exploitation of the working class.

Thus the educated class would be the champions of not just the working class against a now pretty substantial middle class, but a coalition of all oppressed peoples, from blacks to women to colonized peoples. Do you see how they adjusted the need of successful politics to make war upon a small minority by enlarging the community of oppressed peoples? Great idea, if it turned out to be a good idea that worked.

If you look at the various iterations of critical theory since jusst after World War II, you can see that it is always in search of a new majority of oppressed people that the educated class can lead to glorious victory with its “Praxis” and change the world.

Only, just like with the Iranian mullahs, the educated class has conjured up enemies who don’t like what the educated class is doing to them. That is the meaning of “populist nationalism” that the educated class spends all its spare time attacking as fascism and Literally Hitler. I saw a cool yard sign here in North Seattle:

I assume that the creator of that sign knows that “care for each other” means vast government programs funded by taxes on billionaires.

Back in the 2000s the educated class in the US knew that it was gathering together The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. But now it’s not so sure, because traditionally marginalized groups like the lower middle class and blacks and Hispanics are moving towards the Republican Party. That’s why experts agreed that we should flood the country with “undocumented migrants.”

But this means that, instead of uniting the vast majority of the country against a small privileged minority, the Democrats are uniting half the country against the other half. Not a good strategic idea because you never know who will win in a civil war.

Of course, the real problem is that there is very little that politics can do except execute one of the Four Wars. But the whole point of human society begins after the heroes have won the war and we can all get back to cooperating with each other. As I say, inspired by F.A. Hayek:

Society works through dispersed, subjective, and local knowledge that government and corporate administrators cannot grasp.

But politics is all about concentrating social action into fighting and winning a war — and then distributing the spoils to the supporters.

| Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:49:47 GMT |

Suppose Your Women's Liberation Enslaved You

All the world knows that the liberation of women in the last century or so has transformed women from subordination under the patriarchy to a new liberated age.

But my go-to guy is Georg Simmel, who wrote over a century ago about the transformation of the lives of women occasioned by the modern era. And his take is a bit different.

According to Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Market, Simmel noted that capitalism had opposite effects on middle-class and working-class women. With labor-saving devices and ready-made clothes reducing the need for labor in the household, middle-class women wanted to get out into the world and enter the man’s world of “property, higher education professional equality, and political participation.”

But the experience of working-class women, “driven out of the home and into the factory by economic need” decades before, was different. They wanted to get back into the home and “the possibility of devoting more time to their familial roles as wife and mother.”

Middle-class women wanted to get out of the house, working-class women to get back into it.

Isn’t that still the case, except now we are talking about educated-class women versus ordinary middle-class women?

And isn’t it odd that we don’t really hear in the public square from the women in the lower orders?

A similar narrative was developed by Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010. My analysis of the book is that Murray tells us “that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine… The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don’t marry and the men don’t work.”

Anyone asked the lower class in Fishtown (a poor white neighborhood in Philadelphia that is now gentrifying) what they think? Bueller? Anyone?

It is a characteristic of modern society that only the elite gets to decide.

• If the workers are being exploited then the educated class in government offices gets to decide how to save them.

• If the educated class decides on no-fault divorce, so guys or gals can call it off, when the mood takes them, then that’s the rules.

• If educated-class women want to spend their twenties establishing a career and various sexual relationships and aborting the occasional accident, then that’s the rules.

• If the educated class decides that what we need is mortgage subsidies that encourage people to put their last nickel into a home mortgage and increase prices out of the range of the lower middle-class, then that’s the rules.

• If the educated class decides to solve the racism of centuries with quotas that benefit higher-income minorities, then that’s the rules.

Now I happen to believe in Lord Byron’s poetical notion from Don Juan that:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘
Tis woman’s whole existence.

Maybe it’s a bit over the top, but it is certainly my experience that women take “love” much more seriously than men. It’s not hard to see why. Women need protection, from unwelcome male attention, during pregnancy, while raising children. I believe that “love” in women is largely their instinctive devotion to the one that protects them. It is not hard to see that biology and society combine to provide for the protection of women and children.

So I believe that the cultural and religious norms relating to sex and marriage and children and the status of women are not in fact artifacts of the male patriarchy but something much deeper.

It may be that you, educated-class women, feel confined and imprisoned by traditional cultural tropes around sex and marriage and work and play, but maybe other women, lower in the class ranking than you, find protection from “the guard-rails,” but don’t have the means and the cultural power to articulate their needs.

Needless to say, more research is needed, and maybe it should be research not dominated by educated-class researchers.

Were women more enslaved by society in the days of yore? Or are they enslaved today by all the cross-currents of modern educated-class ideology?

You make the call.

| Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:58:53 GMT |

Experiencing War on X

During the last week or so of Epic Fury and and Roaring Lion the effect of a de-censored X has become apparent to me.

As an ordinary X subscriber I get to receive the Narrative of all kinds of propaganda sources: US, Israeli, liberal influencers, Iran regime and opponents. And I gotta admit, it is pretty confusing. If I weren’t as smart as paint…

It makes me understand why all warring states need to impose censorship. And also why the narrative never ends. We are still hearing how World War II was the noblest and greatest war of all time and that the Nazis were the worst thing since Attila the Hun. Or maybe Genghis Khan.

And I get why the Bidenoids did a full court press on social media during World War COVID. It would never do for people to start questioning lockdowns and vaccinations. Not after our beloved leaders had told us that The Science required it. Because once you admit that, hey, maybe we don’t need to shut down the beaches in California, or maybe the lockdowns weren’t such a good idea, then people may start to doubt other aspects of the regime strategy and tactics.

It has become clear to me, especially in the last week, that a warring state absolutely needs to assure its army and its people that we are the good guys, the Other is evil, and everything is going well, our boys are heroes, and victory is assured. Otherwise…

And if you start to do your own investigation, you start to wonder whether it was a good idea for the Brits and the French to ally against Germany in the Entente Cordiale in 1904 and surround Germany from east and west in the Triple Entente with Russia in 1907. I get it: a united Germany, that had invented modern philosophy and modern chemistry and modern physics after centuries of being a disunited Holy Roman Empire, was a fearsome thing, the scariest thing since the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683. And don’t get me started on the Treaty of Versailles.

But it’s all too easy to second-guess the politicians a century later.

Meanwhile, what really is going on? Are the US and Israel really beheading the Iranian regime? Can the Iranian people really hope to put an end to their subjection without US troops on the ground? Will the IRGC keep popping off missiles forever?

Then there’s the big picture. Can a US president that once was a TV star really hope to end the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Islamist regime in Iran and the Communist regime in Cuba? All in one year? Are you kidding? Where are the experts, the wise ones, the foreign policy analysts on all this?

And now President Trump is announcing a war on drug cartels with his Shield of the Americas. Really? If this is such a great idea, how come the experts didn’t figure it out decades ago?

Meanwhile President Trump had a press conference today where he announced “major strides” in Epic Fury and Datarepublican has a comprehensive data analysis of the state of the conflict so far.

To be continued…

| Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:11:49 GMT |

Guess Who Implemented the Immigration Surge

Last month I wrote about a piece by Alicia Nieves at Compact on the power of “The Groups” in the Democratic Party. She was writing about Shawn Thierry, a liberal black woman state legislator in Texas. Thierry voted against “SB 14, a bill to ban gender transition treatments for minors.” So The Groups had her primaried and voted outta there. As Nieves wrote about the Democrats:

a relatively small but highly organized ecosystem of national advocacy groups, politicized unions, and ideological nonprofits exerts outsized influence over the party’s candidate selection, legislative and policy drafting, and internal discipline.

Now she’s written a piece about “The Moment Mass Migration Started” on March 10, 2014, also at Compact. How it was The Groups — in this case immigration activists — cranked up the illegal immigrant explosion of the last decade.

The activists had come up with a couple of ideas to make it very difficult for the Feds to turn back migrants at the border. Here’s how it worked:

• First, the migrants needed to claim persecution back home;

• Second, the system would allow migrants to stay in the US while their “credible fear” claim was adjudicated.

So, the activists had tutored a group of migrants to just openly go to the border and tell the immigration officials that they had a credible fear that they faced persecution back home.

If an asylum officer determines that a migrant has a credible fear of persecution, the individual can present his or her asylum claim before an immigration judge.

And, the migrants would be allowed to stay, taking advantage of

discretionary enforcement guidelines issued by the Obama administration, which allowed migrants who were not considered a flight risk or public safety threat to be released from detention while their cases continued.

And it worked!

But the Obama administration would push back on this, right? Wrong. The Obama administration was trying to get an immigration reform bill through Congress to shore up its Hispanic base and “provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants with American loved ones.”

Actually, the Obamas wanted to curb the new activist strategy, but

The ACLU and other liberal legal groups used federal litigation to curtail the administration’s nascent deterrence efforts.

And all over the world, migrants got the message. So “credible-fear” cases exploded, and the Obama administration dared not push back as the Bush administration had done in 2005.

Of course, in 2017 the Trump 45 administration began cracking down on immigration. But that forced Biden to crank down immigration enforcement even more. Because The Groups.

During his first year in office, the administration issued nearly 300 immigration-related executive actions, including roughly 90 that reversed or began dismantling Trump-era restrictions.

You’d think that, by now, the Democrats would all have gotten into a huddle, after the Trump 2024 win, to moderate their position on immigration. But “The Groups” have forced them to double down. And thus Democrats are all united in a moral crusade to push back against ICE and make Renee Good and Alex Pretti into martyrs.

It’s interesting to compare the immigration issue with the Voter ID issue. Over 50 percent of voters back deportation of illegal immigrants, and over 80 percent back Voter ID in elections.

But the Democrats are all agreed that immigration restrictions are a violation of human rights. And Trump is having a really hard time getting Republican senators in line to pass his SAVE Act.

See the difference? Democrats are all singing in unison from the Progressive Hymn Book on immigration. Republicans are a total mess on Voter ID.

And the reason is that The Groups of the Activist Industrial Complex have the power to kick out any Democratic officeholder that doesn’t get with every item in the left’s program.

No Republican-adjacent activist group has that kind of power. Not even close.

And I doubt that things will change until the Democrats get beaten 60-40 in a couple of back-to-back presidential elections with a 60-40 GOP Senate and a 295-140 GOP House. You know, like the Democrats had in the mid 1930s in the glory days of the New Deal.

Remember Bill Clinton, the “New Democrat?” That only happened after Republicans won three presidential elections in a row. Of course, the New Democrat thing was all a lie, and Clinton went right ahead with Hillarycare and tax increases. But not after 1994 when the Dems lost 54 seats in the House and Republicans had a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952.

Never mind. Right now, the fact of the all-powerful Groups of “relatively small but highly organized ecosystem of national advocacy groups, politicized unions, and ideological nonprofits” explains everything about the whys and the wherefores of our Democratic friends.

And you know? It really helps me to have read these two pieces by Alicia Nieves and develop a really good understanding of how the Democratic side of the aisle works, and know that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is not quite the monster that he plays on TV.

| Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:28:41 GMT |

Was Lillian Hellman a Scoundrel?

I was loitering in a used book store the other day and stumbled on a copy of Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time. Hey, for $6.00, why not?

Now my take on Lillian Hellman for years has been that of co-writer Mary McCarthy, expressed on the Dick Cavett Show in 1980 that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”

And one time when visiting Berkeley, CA, I got to a performance of her play Watch on the Rhine at the Berkeley Rep. Just the sort of play those lefty Berkeley professors would appreciate.

In Scoundrel Time, published in 1976, Hellman writes that Mary McCarthy is a liar. So there.

Scoundrel Time is about Hellman’s encounter with McCarthyism. She was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and refused to testify. Was she, or had she ever been, a member of the Communist Party? Wiki says she was in the early 1930s.

Whether she was a Commie spy or not, Scoundrel Time does relate how hard it is to be a political target. Hellman’s income went from “earning a hundred and forty thousand a year… to fifty and then twenty and then ten.” Wow! $143,000 in the early 1950s would be $14 million in today’s dollars! Hey doll! Wanna take me out to dinner?

In a way it is funny to read Hellman’s outrage at Sen. McCarthy and his aides Roy Cohn and David Schine. She is pleased that Richard Nixon and his aides Haldeman and Erlichman got their comeuppance in due time.

But she tells us brilliantly how hard it is to keep your head up when “they” are after you. Especially, let me say, if you are a woman.

And you tell me, Lilli: was McCarthyism in its time worse than the Democrats taking after Trump and everyone associated with him in our time? And all the lefty college professors turning the universities into No Conservatives Need Apply? And Hollywood becoming completely wokified, and the media completely performing as a woke, Democratic echo chamber? And so on.

My take on Hellman is that she was a creature of her time. Born in 1905 she became an adult in 1930ish and at that time “everyone who was anyone” knew that capitalism was an unjust and unstable mess and there had to be a better way. Should we go full bore to communism or just let FDR’s Brain Trust take care of things? Experts and intellectuals disagreed.

But I think the most interesting part of the book is the Introduction by Garry Wills. He writes that the anti-Communist line started in 1947 as Truman’s aide Clark Clifford was planning for the 1948 election and deciding what to do about “isolating” Henry Wallace, for “the core of Wallace’s backing is made up of Communists and fellow travelers.” Prominent liberals in the Americans for Democratic Action were to put the skids on Wallace.

Against the ADA was the Progressive Citizens of America, the home of Communists and “radicals like Lillian Hellman… Miss Hellman campaigned for [Wallace] full-time.”

And then, of course came the Berlin Blockade starting in June 1948. So anti-Communism got into high gear during the second term of Harry Truman. Get it? In reality, “McCarthyism” wasn’t a bunch of Republicans trying to demonize honest Hollywood stars and scriptwriters. It was just politics as usual, and it started with Truman’s run for reelection. Only thing is that since liberals and Democrats ran the media unopposed at the time, it was OK to blame Republicans for the Communist witch-hunt.

And the truth is that it is lefty writers and intellectuals that get all wound up about politics and morality and witch-hunts. And they have all been on the left ever since Rousseau. There will never be a right-wing Narrative about the witch-hunts of the Trump years. Mostly because we far-right racist-sexist-homophobes just aren’t that jacked up about the outrage of the government coming after us. On the contrary, we expect it.

| Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:09:29 GMT |

Gotta Pay for those State Gubmint Pensions

When it was announced a while back that the state government worker unions in California were pushing the proposed wealth tax on billionaires, because health care, I thought Hmm.

Then today I read a piece in The American Spectator by Steven Greenhut about the California state pension problem.

[There’s] Assembly Bill 1383 in the California Legislature, which will surely expand the state’s massive and growing pension debt by allowing public-sector unions to negotiate bigger pensions and earlier retirement ages for new hires.

Then he goes on about the rules for pension eligibility. Nothing to do with how much money is in the kitty. It’s just based on X% of your final salary times the number of years worked.

Public safety officials — police employees, firefighters, prison guards — often receive 3 percent at 50.

Gosh! What could go wrong!

It made me wonder about the proposed income tax here in Washington State and its estate tax and its proposed capital gains tax. So I checked Google Search:

Washington state faces a brewing pension crisis driven by legislators targeting a $3-$4 billion surplus in the Law Enforcement Officers and Firefighters (LEOFF 1) plan to cover general budget deficits.

Dear me! Whoever heard of a surplus in a gubmint employees pension fund! It’s good that our fearless leaders are putting a stop to it.

But what we don’t read about is how our fearless politicians are conducting a government-wide analysis of programs and employee head counts in order to solve the budget problem.

Ya think?

There was a time when I would have wondered why the politicians didn’t do the sensible and prudent thing. That was before I read about Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his notion of the political as about friend vs. enemy.

You see, government has nothing to do with delivering services. All that is window dressing gussied up by regime flunkies. Government, per Schmitt, is only in the business of delivering benefits to its supporters — the “friends.” Sometimes the supporters are Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries; sometimes they are Somali pirates; sometimes they are Big Pharma; sometimes they are government employees.

The easy part of politics is passing new benefits to a new class of beneficiaries. The hard part of politics is curbing benefits that have got out of control and are breaking the budget. Forget “hard part.” How about “impossible.”

So when Social Security is breaking the federal budget, the politicians do nothing except run up the deficit.

When California health care for illegal aliens is breaking the budget, the state employees agitate for more taxes.

When government employee pensions are breaking the state budget, the politicians do nothing while state employees agitate for higher taxes.

When billionaires leave the state for lower-tax states the politicians and activists call them greedy.

You know, it’s a funny thing. Everybody knows that our rulers are the most educated and evolved rulers in history. But they don’t have the education and the evolution to tell the beneficiaries sucking at the government tit to go get a job.

Why is that? It’s because, for humans, sucking at the community tit is in the jeans.

| Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:05:52 GMT |

"Liberal Patriot" Almost Faces Reality

Ruy Teixeira runs the Liberal Patriot Substack. Back in the 2000s he and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, but since then he has realized that the Democratic majority they confidently predicted ain’t gonna happen.

He seems to have reached the Houston We Have a Problem moment with these three recent posts:

Are Moderate Democrats Becoming Extinct?

The Democratiic Party base is shifting from “older, working-class, moderate black voters… [to] college-educated white liberals.”

Neither Party Is Interested in “Heterodoxy”

Both parties beat up on public figures that don’t go with the party or the church narrative.

The Democrats’ White Liberal Problem

“{W]hite liberals have changed from being a voice in the choir to the choir director.”

Now I am rereading Jerry Muller’s The Mind and the Market. Muller starts with the fact that, down the ages of human history, politics and religion are really rigid, and both political and religious leaders just don’t get the market — and especially lending and credit. When the market economy started to emerge in the last millennium, all the best people were flummoxed, because the market is all about flexibility and adaptation, a different world to their world.

Aristotle regarded commerce — the “trafficking in goods”… — not only as inimical to political virtue, but as a hazard to the moral well-being of the individual.

Paul the Apostle:

[T]he love of money is the root of all evils[.]

You can see that the political elites and the religious elites were both suspicious of the market and the money economy.

So, when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations he was really pushing against the accumulated understanding of how the world worked. His mission was to persuade the world that, to make a woollen coat you needed the cooperation of “the shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser.” And then there were the merchants and carriers transporting woolen stuff around. His most famous illustration is pin-making, where ten persons working together can make 48,000 pins per day, but only about twenty pins a day working individually.

What he realized was that the market and its prices enabled the coordination needed to make it all work.

How was all that activity to be coordinated? Smith’s job was to explain how the market did it best. Unfortunately, he wasn’t completely successful in his argument, and so social scientists Stalin and Mao were required to demonstrate that the absence of the market led to famine and poverty.

But the fact is that we humans, in our individual lives, live mostly ignorant of the coordination operations of the market and the money economy. And we all really get mad when the market pulls us up short and tells us to stop doing what we are doing, because we got it wrong.

When John Halpin writes that everyone in the public square is always trying to keep people in line and punishing them for “heterodoxy,” he is just reminding us what our political and religious instincts prompt us to do. We naturally suspect those that don’t agree with us of evil intentions.

And we can see that, again and again since The Wealth of Nations published in 1776, people of every walk of life, from the highest to the lowest, have wanted to overrule the market.

Marx wrote that the working class would be “immiserated” under capitalism. Only he was wrong. The working class prospered under capitalism, but starved under communism.

The educated class in 1882 pushed the Pendleton Act to transition the federal government from a “spoils system” to an administrative system run by educated experts. So now instead of a welfare web with a constellation of mutual-aid societies helping people individually and collectively we have a rigid system of government pensions and health care and welfare that is riddled with corruption and is heading the governments to bankruptcy. In place of the old “spoils system” we now have a different spoils system, featuring NGOs and government grants that shower money on the educated class — and with “white liberals” as choir directors.

The point is that our educated class — and I suspect all educated classes down the ages — really lives in the world before the market economy took over. It only knows the rigidities of politics where you are either with us or against us, and the logic-chopping of theologians promulgating the One True Path to salvation and burning the heretics alive. That is what secular intellectuals and religious theologians do and have always done.

And if things are going wrong it is not because the rigidities of politics and religion do not apply to the flexibilities and the adaptations and the creations of people making and trading in the marketplace. No, it is because of the recklessness of the speculators, the greed of the moneylenders and the power of the big corporations.

Reading about the dynasties that have ruled China since the unification under the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, the experts tell us that the average dynasty ruled for about 60 years. I take that to mean that the new dynasty that sweeps out the old corrupt dynasty typically becomes weak and corrupted itself in about two generations. I like to think that our present US dynasty is the educated class that came to power in the 1880s as a new broom that would sweep out the corruption of the “spoils system.” But now it is 150 years old — pretty long in the tooth for your average dynasty.

I take it that political dynasties down the ages have typically been unable to imagine a world that was not ruled by their beneficent Oz. And I take it that our own ruling class is likewise completely flummoxed that a yahoo like Donald Trump could become president and that the ordinary middle class could redirect the regime to look after their interests and ignore the interests of the educated class. And that Something Must Be Done to stop Trump and the yahoos.

Typically, of course, regimes and dynasties do not change without a bit of trouble, with the old regime refusing to go quietly. I can’t imagine why that would be so, but it seems to be the usual procedure for regime change.

| Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:02:16 GMT |

Back in the Day in Brooklyn

Back in the day in Brooklyn, according to Bob Capano in The American Spectator, he, the sole Republican for miles around, got along just fine with the Democrats in charge, like “Borough President Howard Golden and then Marty Markowitz.”

We disagreed over policy, but never questioned each other’s patriotism or basic humanity.

Jews, Italians, Irish: in the end they were all Americans. But now it’s different.

Golden and Markowitz supported more cops on the streets and cracked down on quality-of-life crimes. Today’s party leadership embraced “defund the police” rhetoric after George Floyd.

Immigration:

The pragmatic Democrats I knew supported legal immigration and border security… Today’s party treats any enforcement as xenophobia.

Bob Capano mourns the good old days.

But our mission, if we accept it, is to figure out why today’s Democratic Party is different. What is going on?

My guess is that the hyphenated Americans of the 20th century that formed the base of the Democratic Party are now becoming Republicans. Then there’s this in an X-post from David Marcus.

I am getting an almost uniform sense from my sources in the black community that there are fears that immigrants are taking over the Democratic Party, and not even offering power sharing. Mandani’s commie cabinet is remarkably devoid of black men.

Of course. According to Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class every ruling class has a “political formula,” the made-up moral and legal basis for its power. For our rulers, the educated class, the moral basis of its power is that it fights for the oppressed.

Notice that if you are a student of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt politics is merely about fighting against the enemy. I guess that works for chimpanzees, but it seems that humans need a moral justification for fighting the enemy.

See World War II. Hitler wasn’t just the enemy. He was the most evil enemy and Nazism the most evil ideology since… Yeah, since what? Those white Southern slave owners?

Back in the day the oppressed were the immigrant white ethnics in the great industrial cities, especially the Jews, Italians, and Irish.

Then it was women and blacks. Then gays and lesbians, and LGBTQ in general.

The game starts out as a moral quest against an evil enemy: fighting for the oppressed against the oppressors. But then it devolves into just a question of handing out the loot to the supporters. That’s the stage that Bob Capano experienced in Brooklyn. But that was then.

Here's what I think.

I think that our liberal friends need a moral basis for their power: See Mosca, above. But it’s all a lie. Politics and government is all about and only about fighting for your supporters and handing out loot and plunder. So, what are “good” people to do? It’s simple. Politics can’t just be about fighting the enemy; it has to be about fighting the evil enemy. That’s why there have to be “oppressors” and that’s why the supporters of liberal politicians and activists have to be “oppressed” for our liberal friends to feel good about their use of political power.

Let’s face it. The old white ethnics aren’t helpless any more: fuggedabout it. Liberals have been handing out loot to blacks for fifty years; blacks don’t seem grateful any more: the vibe has gone.

But OMG those helpless migrants, under the cruel cowskin whips of the ICE oppressors! And Muslims! Those helpless Gazans!

I think that the oppressed class has to demonstrate a certain amount of rage and militance for the oppressed-people formula to work for our liberal friends. Think of the German-Americans. They never really had the requisite rage to be loyal foot-soldiers in the liberal army. They didn’t have the criminal gangs — e.g., in Minnesota — that are so helpful in disciplining the rank-and-file of the oppressed group and in funneling campaign cash to the office-holders.

Yep, it looks like Muslims are just the ticket for the next era in liberal governance.

The question is whether there are enough Muslims and undocumented migrants to form a new ruling coalition under the benevolent supervision of our liberal friends. Very likely not. That’s why voter ID is a direct attack on “our democracy.”

| Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:54:53 GMT |

What is the Lesson of Venezuela, Cuba, Iran?

All of a sudden, all at once, the Hemingway quote about bankruptcy applies to the sovereign states of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.

How did you go bankrupt? Gradually, then suddenly.

Of course, former real-estate magnate and bankrupt Donald Trump certainly gave them a shove.

But just as there is a lesson to be learned in the aftermath of every bankruptcy, there is surely a lesson to be learned in the spiral dive of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.

What is the lesson? The lesson is simple:

Don’t mess with the economy, politicians.

There is one reason, and one reason only, to mess with the economy, and that’s when you need to fight a world war. Interestingly, when President Roosevelt decided to go to war he released the “economic royalists” from the fetters he had clamped on them during the New Deal and told them: “you go girl.” And they did.

Fortunately, World War II for the US only lasted 3.5 years. After the war was over we could convert all the tank plants and truck plants into automobile factories so we could build Chevrolets for GIs to see the USA.

It is clear that there is a large group in the educated class that believes in the fairy story of collectivism as a blueprint for something more than an agricultural village. And nobody ever told it better than Zohran Mamdani:

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.

Only the reality is that government control of the economy replaces the organic web of individual economic decisions with the top-down knout of government force.

Let us take the example of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela:

Hugo Chávez’s economic policy, known as “Bolivarian Socialism,” centered on using vast oil revenues to fund extensive social programs (Bolivarian Missions) aimed at reducing poverty and inequality, which fell significantly by 2012. His administration nationalized key industries (oil, agriculture, finance) and implemented price/currency controls, often leading to reduced oil production.

So we could say that taking oil revenues to fund socialism worked, for a while. But then the rigidity of government and nationalization created a frigidity of socialism.

Problem is that government can never admit it made a mistake.

Whatabout Cuba?

Fidel Castro’s economic policy focused on central planning, nationalizing private assets, and establishing a socialist state dependent on Soviet aid until 1991. After the USSR collapsed, causing severe crises, he allowed limited private business and foreign investment, alternating between, opening up to, and restricting market mechanisms to ensure survival and maintain state control.

I wonder what would have happened if Cuba had not been kept going with Soviet aid. Anyway, today the economy is wrecked and the infrastructure is ancient. Because politicians cannot run the economy. But my nickel says that Raul Castro has an emergency generator to power his “heavily secured and not publicly disclosed” residences during the electrical blackouts.

Iran is an obvious case for economic ruin. It’s been running a war on Israel for the last 47 years, spending staggering amounts of money on missiles and nuclear development and proxy armies Hezbollah and Hamas. Let me tell you: no country in the world can thrive when it conducts a permanent war. In the end, as Margaret Thatcher knew, you run out of other peoples’ money.

But, you might ask, how can they be so dumb? A general answer, I think, is to be found by analyzing our own blue states and cities in the good old USA.

California is proposing a tax on billionaire net worth, the idea of its government employee union. Service Employees International Union – United Healthcare Workers West is behind the effort to “fund healthcare and education” with the wealth of billionaires. In other words, to keep the checks coming for healthcare and education workers. Not a word about making healthcare and education better and more effective, which is what private sector operations do all the time. Just keep the checks coming.

I tell you. Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt didn’t know the half of it when he wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. To echo Mao Zedong:

Who are our enemies? Billionaires.

Who are our friends? Healthcare and education workers.

And that is all. If you are in politics, all you are thinking about is how to take the fight to the enemy, whether billionaires or Israel. And all you are thinking about is how to keep your supporters supporting you. And that means to keep the checks coming.

Nobody is talking about how to make the healthcare programs more effective, or to reform education to meet the challenge of AI. Why? Well, do you think that Gavin Newsom and his aides and staffers have the least interest in the details of the healthcare and education systems? No. All they are thinking about is the next election.

So that is why socialist and administrative governments are a total failure. The only thing that people in politics think about is dishing the enemy and gifting their friends.

So they can win the next election.

That is all.

| Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:34:21 GMT |

Habermas: Balancing System with Lifeworld

The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas just died at the age of 96. He is noted for his 1981 book The Theory of Communicative Action. I read him starting the 2000s, and used his notion of balancing system and lifeworld in my book An American Manifesto.

Habermas starts from the critique of modernity in Horkheimer and Adorno’s book The Dialectic of Enlightenment which accuses modern man of domination and hegemony that it encoded in the very idea of the Enlightenment.

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.

Habermas tried to figure out how we get out of this trap, and his Theory of Communicative Action is his way to do it.

Habermas opposes the world of system created by the Enlightenment with the notion of “lifeworld” or Lebenswelt developed by Husserl. The liberal notion of “lived experience” comes from this. The idea is that we humans develop a shared understanding of the world we live in through our communication and living together in a “lifeworld.” As I wrote in “A Critique of Human Mechanics”:

People are not just instrumental reasoners, strategically motivated merely by the logic of power and the drive to get what they want in the world… They also live in a community immersed in a cultural tradition, a lifeworld that “appears as a reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretations” that is “always already” familiar.

Habermas is still enough of a Marxist to think of the market as a dominatory and a system. But I disagree. I believe that the market is very much like the Habermas’s lifeworld in which people communicate to reach agreement. The market is not a system; it is a web of interaction and communication. Only the market and its prices allow people to communicate at a distance.

In an actual marketplace, the buyer and the seller meet face to face and either reach agreement on price and quantity or no sale. But the experience of a buyer at the supermarket is not much different. The buyer sees a product on the shelf and its advertised price. The buyer either determines that the price is OK and buys, or that the price is too high and doesn’t buy. In both cases the buyer is free to buy or not to buy.

To me, the big challenge with Habermas’s notion of humans freely discussing matters in the lifeworld and coming to agreement is: Whatabout the people that didn’t get to be part of the discussion? Is it OK for educated people get together and freely discuss a new government program and then, after reaching agreement, impose that program on the rest of society?

I say that the notion of human communication and free agreement means that agreements should generally only affect the people in the room. And that this is a very good argument for the idea of limited government. It is one thing, in a war, for the generals to get together and decide what to do next and then order their subordinates to march into the hail of bullets. It is another thing when politicians and activists and special interests get together and decide to implement a program that benefits them and Somali fraudsters but nobody else.

And that is how I interpret Jürgen Habermas, although I suspect he would not agree with me.

In general, when people get together in the lifeworld and discuss something and reach agreement, the agreement should just be about matters that affect the people in the room.

To reach agreement on a matter that will affect people outside the room smacks of domination and hegemony, what lefty Horkheimer and Adorno were concerned about in Dialectic of Enlightenment. And yet the whole lefty project is precisely about domination and hegemony. Of people lefty people don’t like in favor of people that lefties do like.

Go figure.

| Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:34:39 GMT |

Of Course Democrats Don't Care about Growth

Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, runs The Liberal Patriot Substack. It seems to be devoted to telling the Democrats to get back in the mainstream.

Today he has a piece titled “Democrats Don’t Have a Growth Program.”

Democrats once understood the importance of economic growth… [to] harness the benefits of growth for the working class[.]

But not any more. Today they are running on “affordability,” meaning “a grab bag of price caps and controls, subsidies and new regulations”. And “a populist denunciation of the rich and big companies”.

Of course they are. That’s because the Democrats are the party of people that “seem to have in mind a socially liberal ecotopia that is highly appealing to educated, upper middle class liberals but much less so to the working class.”

The other side of Democratic economic policy right now is shoveling benefits at migrants, presumably on the assumption that as and when they get to vote they will vote Democrat.

If you want to understand where our Democratic friends are coming from look no further than the writings of Justus Möser of Osnabrück (1720-1794), who has a whole chapter to himself in Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market. Möser was author of a multi-volume History of Osnabrück. His city was the medieval world of the guild, where “vocation and economic status were largely determined by birth”, and Möser was close to the center of power. Möser didn’t like the emerging market economy. No doubt: he could see that it would disrupt the status he and the upper crust of Osnabrück had enjoyed for generations.

That’s the way to understand our liberal friends. Whatever the future brings, it almost certainly will not continue their present elevated social status.

Indeed one of the consequences of economic growth is that it shuffles the status hierarchy in unexpected ways. A couple of days ago I read a piece in Unherd complaining about venture capitalist king Marc Andreessen. You see, Andreessen is not in favor of Freudian introspection.

“Move forward. Go,” he explains.

On X, the other day I read Andreessen saying that he prefers Adler to Freud.

Alfred Adler built one of the most hostile philosophical ecosystems ever devised for the practice of looking inward[.]

Of course all the usual suspects are horrified. But come on: if you are in the VC business you have to put introspection aside. The only thing that matters is whether your start-up is a success or not. If not, then you go back and start over.

And the future is very likely going to be driven by the tech lords and their startup culture and not the tenured lords and their credential culture. That’s why the tech lords were marshaled in battalion strength at Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

But if you are a credentialed expert, a professor in the university, an administrator in an environmental agency, your position is just like Justus Möser back in Osnabrück. Your world works for you: it’s a good world. Why would you want to change it with the uncertainties of economic growth?

So even though I think that our Democratic friends are fools and knaves, I imagine that I understand them. Their world is threatened by “change.” So they are opposed to it.

| Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:39:54 GMT |

Trying to Understand Our Age

While everyone is fixated on whether President Trump is getting bogged down in Iran, or the dupe of the Israelis, I have been ruminating about the future and whether it will be defined by the tech lords like Marc Andreessen.

I have been very partial to Nietzsche, ever since I saw lefty Helen Lewis refer to Nietzsche as “the Nazis favorite intellectual.” There is a tendency in lefty land, don’t you know, to believe that Nietzsche leads directly to Literally Hitler, do not pass go.

There is a tendency in people like me to believe the opposite of whatever is currently fashionable in lefty land.

Reading a very detailed book about Nietzsche titled The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 by Steven E. Aschheim, I can understand why lefties believe that Nietzsche is Literally Hitler. But the book makes clear that just about every second-rate thinker in Germany that you have never heard of was using Nietzsche to push their agenda — left right and in between.

You might just as well say that Marx was the Commies’ favorite intellectual. But somehow it doesn’t have quite the bite as saying that Nietzsche created Hitler. I wonder why.

I think the radical thing about Nietzsche is that he argued that the future — the meaning of life, the universe, everything — was open. It was up to the Übermensch to create it. Typically, almost all religions and ideologies argue for a closed system, as in “we” know the meaning of life, the universe, everything, and all you have to do is get with the program, whether it’s Greek philosophy, Christianity, or the various flavors of modern leftism.

That’s what I’m getting from Jerry Z. Muller’s Mind and the Market. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas both have a program to show us what to do. And almost all philosophers and theologians practice this rigid system: get with the program — my program — and all will be well. And almost all philosophical and religious tracts are very rigid, arguing from logic and reason.

But Nietezsche is different. He doesn’t use too much logic and reason. He likes nothing more than a nicely turned phrase in a maxim or an aphorism. That’s what his famous quote is all about, retailed by Google Search:

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (from The Gay Science, 1882), warns that the Enlightenment and rising secularism rendered the Christian God unbelievable as a foundation for morality, threatening to plunge humanity into nihilism.

He presents Also Sprach Zarathustra as the musings of a prophet. I interpret that to mean that the logic and reason of the Enlightenment and the various secular ideologies aren’t going to bring Heaven on Earth. Only, of course, most prophets tend to be selling their followers on the One True Path.

Nietzsche tells us that the future ain’t gonna be easy. After nihilism comes the eternal return of Groundhog Day stumbling around in the dark. Maybe, but only maybe, you and I will figure it all out and wake up one morning with Andie MacDowell in bed with us. More likely is the notion of the venture capital industry, that the world is full of entrepreneurs with good ideas. The problem is to find the good idea that works.

In a rigid society, defined and controlled by philosophers and theologians, the only way to live is according to the One True Way. If the One True Way leads to famine and disaster, that’s too bad. But the world of the market is a selection process, where everyone is pushing their idea and their invention. The guy that comes up with a new idea that works gets to make a fortune.

And by the way, he does not “accumulate” his fortune. Instead his billions are the present value of his invention or his company to the rest of society.

Of course, it could be that the great idea that works will lead eventually to disaster. That is the narrative of the left at least since Marx. Marx said that capitalism would lead to the “immiseration” of the workers. The Progressives said that monopolists like Rockefeller were cornering the market in oil. The New Deal Brain Trusters believed that the Great Depression was the fault of economic royalists. Now we have the climate change movement that believes that fossil fuels will mean the end of life as we know it.

It’s true. Ice ages come and go. Species flourish and then die out. Asteroids collide with the Earth and cause mass extinctions. Modern humans will one day be sidelined, just like Neanderthals back in the day.

Meanwhile, the tech lords showed up in battalion strength at Trump’s inauguration. MBS had Elon Musk in the frame with him when listening to a speech by President Trump on his 2025 visit to the Middle East. And all across Europe the old guard is desperately trying to keep the populist nationalists out of power.

All is proceeding as Nietzsche prophesied.

| Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:04:52 GMT |

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