Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Trying to Dial Down Politics and Religion
What is it about politics and religion that they seem to go together like bacon and eggs?
I think it’s because politics is a boy thing — fighting the enemy — and morality is a girl thing — “I’m never speaking to her again.” So if you combine them it’s almost like a nuclear plant going critical.
If you are into politics or religion, you need to maximize your power. To energize the men, you need to persuade them that it’s a crime that things are the way they are, and we need to fight until we change things. To energize women you need to persuade them that people are suffering because of the way the things are the way they are, and we all need to complain until they change things.
If you want to legislate a program for universal child care, you need to persuade everyne that it’s a good thing to help mothers and to get billionaires to pay, and a bad thing that it’s so hard and expensive for moms to find childcare and so bad that billionaires don’t pay their share.
If you want to conquer the world, like Mohammed the Prophet, you go to war against the evil infidels. If you are the Crusaders you sail for the Holy Land to free it from the Muslim hordes.
There were the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots in the second half of the 16th Century (Rumor has it that the Chantrills of old were French Huguenots). There was the German Thirty Years War in the early to mid 17th Century that started as a Protestant rebellion against the Catholic Hapsburgs and escalated into a full-scale European war with the French, Swedish, and Spanish monarchs joining in the fun.
If you were the Protestant Dutch in 1688 you invaded England so you could make it fight against Catholic France.
And let’s just stop there.
One thing that really gets people riled up is martyrs: people that died for the Cause. Here’s an example just down the street in woke fancy-pants North Seattle.
If you are a woke liberal, and especially a woke woman liberal, Trump is a dictator and ICE agents are Nazis. If you are Vice President Vance then Alex Pretti is an “assassin.” I wonder who will win the messaging war.
Of course, after January 6, conservatives tried to make the unarmed Ashli Babbit into a martyr, without much success because liberals wanted to brand all J6 rioters as “armed insurrectionists.”
Look, I get it. Men have been defending their territory since the chimpanzees, and women have been expecting to be protected since human babies got big heads and needed to be birthed way before a baby could look after itself.
But I think we can do better. But how? Clearly, political leaders and religious leaders know how to push the right buttons, and the rule of the lowest common denominator means that leaders push the easiest buttons to get the reaction they want and the power they crave.
One of the things that has impressed me in my life is how men have dialed down the warrior ethic from actual fights and duels to the competition of sports and the competition of the market economy and its special modern variant, the tech startup culture.
But whatabout women? It is my belief that we have made a really big mistake in imagining that women can perform like men in politics and in the adminstrations of corporations and government: women don’t do hierarchy, not instinctively. My faith is that somewhere out there are women that just can’t take it any more, and that those women will walk us away from the government welfare-state and school system and create new “communities of care” that look after people in the world in the way that women have instintively done down the ages. For instance, in a neighborhood near me during the late COVID unpleasantness the women set up micro-schools for their children when the bureaucratic and administrative system closed down the government “child custodial facilities” that we foolishly call “schools.”
I wonder if, with the imminent collapse of the woke frenzy, a new age will dawn in which women just start reorganizing the care part of human life according to notions that engage the natural and human-developed instincts of women. It would be fascinating to see something like this develop before I go and join my ancestors.
| perm | 02/05/26 11:27 pm ET | comments |
The Fatal Combination of Politics and Morality
How are we to understand the current nightmare in Iran? Here’s an Iranian, Roohola Ramezani, on Quillette, discussing “Progressive Moral Reasoning and Iran’s Revolt.”
It is a rejection of a state that defines itself as the custodian of metaphysical truth rather than as a provider of ordinary governance.
Our beloved liberal friends here in the good old USA know that they are “custodian[s] of metaphysical truth.” In Iran it’s the mullahs. And this is not just a problem in the US or Iran but all the world over. Ramezani returns to this again and again in his piece.
A politics that cannot recognise a mass demand for ordinary governance forfeits its ability to understand some of the most consequential struggles of our time.
Remember “normalcy” and President Harding?
To recognise Iran’s revolt for what it is requires a modest but difficult adjustment: taking political normalcy seriously as a political aim.
In other words:
In the real world, politics ought to aim for security and prosperity rather than some grand, transcendent ideals.
Not quite. Politics knows nothing about prosperity, except prosperity for its supporters and poverty for its enemies.
Here’s the big problem, and it’s not just in Iran, but throughout the world of the educated progressive:
Contemporary progressive reasoning tends to derive legitimacy from moral alignment—with universal norms, transnational standards, or approved ethical vocabularies. What it struggles to acknowledge is legitimacy as a political achievement: something produced by enduring institutions, binding rules, and legitimate authority.
Notice what is going on here: the combination of politics and morality. There’s a book on this: The Totalitarian Temptation by Jean-François Revel.
Revel argued that totalitarianism exerts a powerful psychological and ideological pull—even (or especially) on people who start with noble intentions like pursuing social justice, equality, or anti-capitalist ideals.
And this:
This temptation arises from two main sources:
The genuine struggle for economic justice and better living conditions.
The desire among elites (and sometimes masses) for unchallenged power under the guise of moral certainty.
You know, I have been writing about this forever. Here is a blog post from 2010 where I propose that politics is about taking and morality is about giving.
And here is my discussion in 2024 of Henry Kissinger arguing in his book Diplomacy that foreign policy should be about Realpolitik and not the moral project of “making the world safe for democracy.”
Clearly, the temptation to use morality to further your political power goes back to the Stone Age. But, experts agree, God decided to use the 20th century and set up the bleachers to show how this works out in practice. Nation after nation sold its people on going to war because the Other Guys were Evil. The whole point about Literally Hitler is that he wasn’t just your average dictator doing a spot of border adjustment in eastern Europe but the most evil man since God hurled Satan headlong flaming from the ethereal sky to bottomless perdition, etc.
I say that the beginning of wisdom is to understand that politics has nothing to do with morality, and that politics should be minimized and morality maximized (but not so far as to burn the eevil witches).
It is touching to read Ramezani’s piece and realize how the Iranian regime really is par for the course in the modern era. The Iranian regime uses Islam to justify its moral crusade. Our lefty progressives moralize notions of injustice and human rights to justify their political power.
Our mission, if we accept it, is to shrink politics to activities where only force will do the job. Wherever agreement or persuasion or moral shaming will work — not to mention the give and take of buying and selling — there is no need for politics.
| perm | 02/05/26 12:27 am ET | comments |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
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
Wrong Turn: the Left began with errors like Marxist economics; it continued with conceits like the administrative welfare state and climate change; it committed great crimes like the government-created famines in Ukraine and China; it compounded its errors with lies like systemic racism.
The press is downstream from activism is downstream from the Cathedral is downstream from the political formula.
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.
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: Analysis of Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation
