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Trying to Imagine a Politics with Less Enemy
One of the takeaways, for me, from Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise is the culture that created the British Victorian world of mostly non-state institutions:
self-help and mutual-aid societies… charity schools, ragged schools (for destitute children and orphans), Sunday schools, societies to promote piety and virtue, others for the relief of aged widows, penitent prostitutes, the dear, dumb, blind, and otherwise incapacitated, mothers meetings, soup kitchens, maternity charities, crèches… working men’s associations, slate clubs, medical clubs, lending libraries, natural history societies… holiday funds, penny banks, saving banks, visiting societies, temperance societies, pension societies, and more.
To me. that’s how the world should work.
But that culture was opposed, from the 19th century down to the present day, by what Merker calls the “partisans of overthrow.” He means the political faith, on the left, that we — radicals, activists — must overthrow the current corrupt and unjust political regime and create a new and perfect world of equality.
Actually, I get the “overthrow” concept. It is most obvious in the peasant rebellions after the Black Death and the worker uprisings in the wake of the various financial crises and subsequent depressions of the modern era. When your whole world has been destroyed, you may as well go for broke.
The characteristic of the modern era, though, is that the rebellions are led by educated rich kids that never had a job. And the rebellions are justified by the unjust sufferings of the victims, whether workers, blacks, women, gays, transgenders or Gazans.
What I see lacking is a political culture that defends the organic society of everyday middle-class life, as exemplified by the Victorian ethos described above.
Correction: I believe that we have seen successive attempts to do just that. In my view, “nationalism” is the natural political home of the ordinary middle class. And that is because the modern “nation” is a feature of the post-industrial revolution world. Used to be feudal lords and their estates. Then absolute monarchs and their “kingdoms.” Now it is nations. The middle class is comfortable with nations, but the educated class is not. The political home of the educated class — in particular educated rich kids without real jobs, from Marx down to Katie Wilson — is global humanity, by, for, and about the dreams and power of the educated class.
In the United States we have seen successive attempts to make the US about the ordinary middle class, from Nixon’s Silent Majority to Reagan’s Reagan Democrats to the Tea Party to Trump’s MAGA.
Particularly with Trump’s MAGA, this organic movement provokes outrage in the educated class, and no wonder. It threatens the power and the influence of the educated class. It’s not that the ordinary middle class is organized to destroy the educated class. But, even in its mild successes of the middle class, the educated class can see that the whole thing is wrong and bigoted and narrow-minded. And threatens its power.
In my view, however, the various middle-class movements are just inchoate reactions, pushbacks, against the pride and successive failures of the educated class.
The failures of the educated class regime don’t even get seriously discussed. For instance:
Social Security. It’s running out of money. Imagine if it had been a national savings program, universal IRAs.
Medicare. It’s gigantically expensive and naturally run by Big Pharma and Big Hospital. At least it’s not as bad as Britain’s NHS and Canada’s own Medicare.
Welfare. It’s demolished the low-income family.
Education. It’s failing on all fronts.
The fact is that all these activities should be done outside government, because Science:
Government can’t run the economy because you need market prices to make things work.
Government can’t run anything because bureaucrats just can’t know enough about the fine-grain details, let alone the big picture.
Government can’t regulate the economy because “regulatory capture.”
All government programs become a Fraud Industrial Complex, per Nick Shirley.
See my “Four Laws in Brief.”
But how would we construct a politics that said: “hey, dial down all these programs, they don’t do any good and they never will?”
The point of politics was defined for all time by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. The political is about whacking the enemy and gifting your friends. For our liberal friends, it’s easy. The enemy is: robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, economic royalists, racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, right-wing extremists. And the friends are anyone that receives government handouts, from welfare to government employment to NGO grants, and votes the right way.
Then there is the existential peril. I have prefixed all the perils with “World War” as in
World War Nazi
World War Commie
World War Civil Rights
World War Environment
World War Climate
World War COVID
and now World War AI
Do you see the problem? All politics reduces to a war on the enemy or a war on an existential peril. So if we create a nationalist politics of the middle class, the question then arises, per Mao, “Who are our enemies?”
Obviously, the enemy is the educated class and its power, its ambitions, its World Wars, and its fantasies. But I don’t regard the educated class as enemies, but just fools and knaves, as in: “if you think you can solve the world’s problems with politics, then I have a bridge to sell you.”
Is it enough for the Next Politics to merely be a defense of all the non-state institutions listed at the top of this piece? Would it work for the enemy to be the activists pushing the next existential panic?
Björn Merker writes about morality as basically the unconscious ritual culture handed down as “the way we do things.” But clearly in the last few millennia, this ritual culture has been formalized and brought into consciousness with religions and priests and temples. That is probably because human life and culture has been changing so fast — from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to market economy — that unconscious adjustments in ritual just haven’t been fast enough to work.
I like to understand the Enlightenment as the rise of the educated class and the replacement of the old order of kings and popes.
But if we are seeing the rise of the ordinary middle class that wants a replacement of the old order of professors and bureaucrats and educated rich kids, what in the world would the new order look like? Trumps and Farages and Le Pens and Melonis as far as the eye can see?
I have no idea.
| Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:03:07 GMT |
Nietzsche Misses the Point
Reading Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise over the last week or so and blogging on it, I’ve immersed myself in a lot of talk about morality. Merker writes about various moralities, most notably the “other-regard” morality of Christianity and socialism.
In my analysis of Merker’s book I write about “Merker: The Three Western Moralities”. And I come out with my own theory of moralities, based on Merker’s ideas:
Altruistic Morality This is the Christian morality of benevolence, doing good to others, that Merker calls “other-regard”. We see it in the morality of socialism, the welfare state, and the “effective altruism” of the tech lords. It was satirized by Dickens in Bleak House with Mrs. Jellyby.
Prudential Morality This is Aristotle’s morality that came into Christian western Europe with St. Thomas Aquinas. Prudential ethics is “self-regarding” rather than “other-regarding.” But it warns against “violating the self-interest of others”. Self-interest is a good thing as long as it does not violate the self-interest of others.
Trust Morality This was developed by Adam Smith, as the “ethic of reciprocity” that we experience in the market economy. Buyer and seller both receive and they both give, they both exchange one value for another, they each bind themselves to a mutual obligation to respect the change of ownership, and by fulfilling it they each realize a bit of their self-interest.
It is telling, of course, that our lefty friends regard the Trust Morality of the market as the worst thing in the world, because, per Marx, it is exploitation straight-up.
Now I think that the Trust Morality of the market place is perhaps the most staggering invention in human history. All it’s done is increase real per-capita income by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years.
Then I picked up The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H.L. Mencken and read Mencken’s take on Nietzsche’s adaptation of Schopenhauer’s idea of Will into his two moralities: Master Morality and Slave Morality. Here ís Grok:
Master Morality:
“Good” means noble, powerful, proud, healthy, courageous, creative, and life-affirming. The masters simply are good; they do not first consult a rule or calculate utility.
“Bad” is a secondary, almost casual judgment. It means common, weak, low, or unsuccessful—more a description of inferiority than a moral condemnation.
Slave Morality:
“Good” is redefined as whatever the weak already are or must be: humility, meekness, patience, pity, self-denial, and equality.
“Evil” is the former “good” of the masters—pride, strength, aggression, and happiness—now recast as wicked and damnable.
Now, I think all this misses the point, beginning with Schopenhauer’s Will. The point is that humans are social animals. We can’t pursue and achieve our Will except in cooperation with other humans.
You can be “noble, powerful, proud, healthy, courageous, creative, and life-affirming” and good for you. But unless people sign up and rally to your banner, all that Master Morality is nothing.
You can live the principles of “humility, meekness, patience, pity, self-denial, and equality” but unless you cooperate with others, your Slave Morality and your life is nothing.
Also, I believe, following Merker, that morality is mostly subconscious, part of our “ritual culture” analyzed by me in “Merker: The Secret of Human Culture”. So, I believe, making morality wholly part of our “conscious” life is missing the point.
Let’s get to Nietzsche’s Big Idea and the Übermensch. You can be the superest Superman in the world, but it doesn’t mean a thing unless you work with other people.
Right now, the über-est Übermensch in the world is Elon Musk. But he doesn’t do his stuff alone. He does it because he has people working for him and with him that are utterly inspired to get his Starship up and running and make humans interplanetary. And when you see his workers cheering their heads off when things go right during a Starship flight, you get the idea that there is something out of the ordinary — even other-worldly — in the Musk phenomenon.
That’s not to say that Altrustic Morality isn’t a glorious thing. Right now I’m reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Miss Matty has lost all her money in a bank failure. First thing is that her servant, Martha, says she’ll marry her “follower” Jem and Miss Matty can come live with them as a boarder. And then the other ladies in the village get together to figure out how much money they could each afford to pay Miss Matty and keep her in her current life.
Incidentally, when Nietzsche went mad, his friends rallied to help him and his sister looked after him for the rest of his life.
It’s interesting. I’ve read all about Nietzsche and the Übermensch before and felt that the lefties that think that the Übermensch leads directly to Literally Hitler, do not pass go, have missed the point. But reading Merker and his Three Moralities primed me for a completely different take on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
What a lucky guy I am!
| Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:56:46 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The left says there are oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors. I say there are Deceivers, ordinary Americans, and Deceived groups.
The left says there are oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors. I say there are Deceivers, ordinary Americans, and Deceived groups.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Plato
