Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
World War Always
For some time I have enjoyed making a joke out of the recent existential perils that our liberal friends have terrified us. As in:
World War Climate
World War COVID
and now World War AI
But Victor Davis Hanson has written “AI and the Same Old Politicized Hysteria” to expand the front. He mentions:
Paul Ehrlich and the “population bomb” in 1968.
Carl Sagan and his “nuclear winter”, from nuclear war, in the 1980s.
Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance environmental and climate panic in 1992.
#MeToo beating up men for “sexual harassment”, founded in 2006.
COVID hysteria of 2020.
George Floyd hysteria and “I can’t breathe” in 2020
And now AI
And I am sure that is just the top line of politicized hysteria. There must be more gold in them thar hills.
Now, it is easy to sneer at our liberal friends for their eternal resort to conjuring up enemies and existential perils to bolster their regime. But I now realize that this is just politics-as-usual.
Politics is about the enemy: usually an evil enemy. Thus:
Schmitt: the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Mao: “Who are our enemies?
Reverse Clausewitz: Politics is the mere continuation of war by other means,
Yarvin: “There is no politics without an enemy.”
And this is the fundamental problem at the heart of non-lefty US politics. We really don’t believe in politics, don’t believe in power. But our lefty friends do. Oh how they do.
What is intriguing to me is to analyze lefty politics as war short of actual soldiers in the trenches: activism, street protests; assassinations; canceling. But not actual generals directing army groups on the North European Plain.
Is it appropriate to understand history as endless war? Maybe, maybe not. But let’s have at it, anyway.
Here is my history of the world since 1900 and starting with the Spanish American War:
World War Warmup
World War I
World War Depression
World War II
World War Commie
World War Great Society
World War Population
World War Environment
World War Anti-Nuke
World War Oil
World War Climate
World War Safety (as in #MeToo)
World War COVID
World War Floyd
World War Felon (as in DJT)
World War Mullah
World War AI
Note that the only World War started by a Republican was the Spanish American War, World War Warmup. I don’t think that we can really blame President Trump for World War Mullah. The whole point of the mullah-cratic regime in Iran has been the war against the Great Enemy, the USA, and the Little Enemy, Israel.
What fun our liberal friends have had with their world wars, down the decades.
And every time, they Made Things Worse. Except for World War II. Because after World War II we did not impose a punitive peace on Germany and Japan. Anyone get a Nobel Peace Prize for that?
| Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:13:56 GMT |
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 |
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
When government teachers teach your kids Critical Race Theory, it isn’t Critical Theory; it is just regime propaganda.
There’s never been anything like it. — Donald J. Trump.
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:
