Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Let's Fix All our Modern Religions
I just read a review of JD Vance’s new book Communion, about how he abandoned the “religion of status,” the “arrogant desire to rise above others,” and became a Catholic.
Back in the day when he was being raised by Mamaw, he believed in her “mainstream evangelical Protestantism.” But then he lost his faith in the military and adopted the religion of credentials, for as a child he had “envied people who had wealth, power, status, influence, prestige, and celebrity.”
But then he noticed, in the age of wokeness, that status depended enormously on having “right-think” rather than “wrong-think.” And his wife Usha wanted him “to be a good person, a good husband, and a good father (eventually).”
Yeah, I know. It’s all very well for people at the top of the status ranking to sneer at status, but…
I suppose we could say that, in our age as in all others, people want to live a meaningful life.
Now I am reading a thorough analysis of German Philosophy from Kant to Adorno. And the key thing that I am noticing is the question of God. From Kant to Schopenhauer the philosophers tried to weave God — usually rather clumsily — into their philosophical meaning of life.
But then comes Feuerbach and The Essence of Christianity — first translated into English by My Girl George Eliot. He’s the first guy to say that God is a mere projection of human values like “reason, will, love, and other perfections.” He opened the way for Nietzsche to go the whole hog and declare that “God is Dead and we have killed him.”
To me, this is all about the consequence of modern science developing a universe that just doesn’t fit the Christian idea of God and a seven-day Creation. We humans are not in Kansas anymore.
I think that, for the last nearly 200 years, the Death of God has freed humans to invent whole new secular religions and politics to imagine the meaning of life and the structure of society — in absolutely crazy ways from Marxism to fascism to the administrative state to wokism.
Which just shows that every human has some sort of a belief in a godlike concept, the way things oughta be, or will be, or can be, despite everything. I’d say that the reason the last century or so has been so chaotic is that, with “God is Dead” and the extinction of belief in a traditional God and the associated belief systems, the arena was opened to every crazy possibility — especially for people that believe in the religion of status and its corollary, the religion of equality.
Dare I say that a couple of centuries later we wise ones are beginning to think that the old traditional beliefs help to direct a life away from the craziness towards sanity, and that the secular cults have not exactly freed humans from the shackles of injustice and age-old bigotry by killing God and loosing upon the world the glories of secularism.
In the bad old days we had religious wars over whose God was true. Now we have secular religious wars over whose ideology is true. Nothing has changed.
Meanwhile we get, every generation or so, a technological revolution that blows up the conventional experience of reality.
What is to be done?
My line is the request of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion / My Fair Lady for Professor Higgins to treat her “more friendly like.”
Hey, why not base our culture and society on the notion of “more friendly like?” We could do worse.
| Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:20:56 GMT |
The Careening Corrupt Government of Bureaucrats
All the blue states are busy pushing tax increases. They don't seem to be proposing expensive new programs. So what gives?
OK. So we all know about the fraud. Look no further than California and Minnesota. Fortunately all the other blue states are fraud free. Wink wink…
But I just read a piece by Quillette’s boss Claire Lehmann titled “The Party of the Worker is Now the Party of the Bureaucrat.” She writes about her time working in Canberra for the Department of Health and Aging. Until she couldn't take it anymore.
But first, as a teenager and a college student, she worked in restaurants. So she knows what work means.
When Lehman worked for the department it hac 4-5000 employees. Now it has 7000. Here’s how it went.
On my first rotation, I was reprimanded for writing a ministerial letter too quickly. Two hours was sufficient time to write a letter I thought—one that mostly consisted of copy and pasting boilerplate from other letters—but according to the director of the team, I needed to take a day.
Why? Because they had nothing else for me to do. There were no meetings, no policies being drafted, and no conference papers for us to work on. So we had morning tea instead. And afternoon tea. We took long lunches. We did crossword puzzles to keep our brains active, and daily “quizzes” to alleviate the boredom. The Director of the section once sent a ministerial letter back to me asking me to delete a comma. I was excited. Because deleting a comma meant that I had something to do.
Do you get the point? Government agencies just go from year to year, increasing the wages, increasing the work-force, increasing the pensions. And deleting commas.
And they need more money. And the.politicians depend on the bureaucrats’ union to get out the vote. And so they need more taxes.
Now you understand why California has a billionaire’s unrealized assets tax on the ballot. And why Washington State is pushing an income tax and an estate tax.
And, by the way, as Sir Keir Starmer steps down an UK Prime Minister, he is said to have complained that he would pull the lever and nothing would happen. In Yes, Minister the joke was that the bureaucrats were a lot smarter than the politicians. Maybe not. But maybe they are powerful enough that they can ignore orders from the politicians, and get away with it.
And that's not even dealing with the fact, as I read the other day, that about 25 percent of the labor force in the US works for the government and about 15 percent more in government adjacent jobs.
Now I read a review of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field.
Furious Minds opens with an epigraph intended to liken her subjects to Nazis, and the tone hardly lightens thereafter…
[Field] is especially animated whenever shades of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt—who defined the political sphere as grounded in the distinction between friends and enemies—appear in a conservative author.
Writer Gregory Conti asks whether invoking the shade of “Nazi jurit Carl Schmitt” isn’t making Schmitt’s point. That “there is no politics without an enemy,” as Curtis Yarvin interprets him.
Field is a political theorist by training, so interpreting primary texts would be, one suspects, her forte. Where one might expect to find detailed exegesis, one often encounters either a testimonial from another commentator decrying the person in question as racist or misogynist, or an allegation of guilt by association along the lines that such-and-such figure quoted Carl Schmitt, or knew some unsavory white nationalist years prior.
Cue Sun Tzu about not knowing your enemy. Because our liberal friends do not get the point of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. That’s because they have merged the political and the moral and think, with Barack Obama, that they are bending the arc of history towards justice rather than merely beating on their enemies and gifting their friends.
I think that right now we hard-rightists are developing a pretty good ammunition depot with boxes and boxes of explosives about corruption, fraud, and the whole back-scratching NGO world. And the dysfunctional bureaucracy that orders the politicians to increase taxes.
It’s pretty obvious what is coming. Some intellectuals are going to get together a good narrative on the injustice of the current high tax low performance government. The next Trump, or next Trump but one, will match the ideas with his political genius.
And the world will change.
But it probably has to get worse before it gets better. My gut feeling is that we will need women to decide that the current regime does not protect them. Because “women expect to be protected.” And indeed that politics has never protected women. The only thing that really protects a woman is a husband.
Hey, I could be wrong!
| Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:30:01 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
Three Facts of Politics: the political is the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt); there is no politics without an enemy (Yarvin); there is no politics without handouts (Chantrill).
There is nothing more annoying to a politician than the lack of a crisis.
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
