Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
There's a Fresh Face in Britland
All the established political parties in the West are hurting. If it’s the US, we have the old-line Democrats being pummeled by the DSA far left and the moderate Republicans being pummeled by the populist hard center.
In Britland the two parties that have dominated politics since just after World War I, Conservative and Labour, are both being eclipsed, by Reform on the right and by the Green Party on the left.
Yesterday in Britain a potential replacement for Labour Party Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham, was elected to Parliament in a by-election in the constituency of Makersfield.
But will anything change? Obviously not, because the fundamental fact about modern government, especially in Britain, is that it spends up to 50% GDP on handouts. And the one thing that will cause a political party to implode is cutting the handouts. No fresh face leading an existing political party will make a blind bit of difference.
The universal rule in modern politics is to rile up your supporters against an enemy, and offer them handouts. President Roosevelt railed against the economic royalists and gave handouts to the working class, including jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration and then Social Security. But President Johnson declared a War on Poverty — “poverty, disease, and ignorance” — and proposed to cure it with Great Society handout programs from Medicare to Medicaid. Subsequently Democrats declared racists the enemy and “affirmative action” the solution. And then bigots in general as the enemy and DEI as the solution. President Reagan declared economic stagnation the enemy and proposed a handout of tax rate cuts — but no spending cuts.
Today, Sen. Warren (D-MA) says that with her “ultra-millionaire wealth tax we could pay for child care for all three and four year olds in America.”
It’s really not that hard. Politics always reduces to an enemy and a handout. Politicians nimbly skip from yesterday’s enemy to tomorrow’s villain. But the handout stays, because all humans demand that the handouts they enjoy are their’s by right and any reduction would be a vile injustice.
It is interesting to me that both here in the US and in Europe the ruling class has augmented its supporters with ramped-up immigration that sidesteps normal bureaucratic procedures with the notion of “asylum seekers.” The immigrants require decades of government handouts before finding their feet in the new society, and they know which party is pushing the handouts.
And the ruling class has funneled handouts to its elite supporters, as it should, with grants and NGOs and extensive administrative supervision of its handout programs for the lower class.
Now, in my view we should transform pension and healthcare programs into mandatory IRA savings accounts and health insurance programs that keep healthcare recipients in touch with prices. But how to do with without a rebellion from today’s recipients?
Maybe education would be a better place to start, by nuking the public schools and universities from orbit — since all education professionals are Democrats — and funding parents for child education and getting employers to pay for credentials.
Put it this way: how could we transform politics so that the enemy is the Director of Handouts and the recipient of government handouts is shamed as a moral leper?
I have no idea.
But one thing is for sure. The educated elite and a century of social programs have made things worse.
| Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:18:08 GMT |
The Horror of Personal Transportation
There is no question that all good people agree that buses and trains and subways are good, and private cars are bad. Just look at Europe, where everyone goes everywhere on public transportation and loves it.
But here in the US, don’t try to get to a World Cup game by public transportation. Fuhgeddaboudit:
the US is utterly dependent on cars and trucks to function.
At Unherd, B. Duncan Moench, “a writer and scholar of American political culture” writes that:
When a society is built around highways, oil dependence, and endless suburban sprawl, it begins… to look… like the logical extension of an atomistic infrastructure that operates with no concern for the public.
Did you know that the auto companies, with malice aforethought, ripped out the electric streetcars in the 1930s after the electric companies were forced to divest themselves of their glorious urban transportation networks, because monopoly? Oh well.
So now everyone goes everywhere in automobiles and we have “a sedentary population unable to tolerate walking even short distances.” Oh well.
And we need forever wars to keep the supply of gasoline going.
Cheap gasoline becomes a constant strategic necessity. Foreign oil fields become matters of American national security.
On the contrary, I think that cheap, reliable personal transportation is the best thing since sliced bread. It only really got going after World War II when Americans hearkened unto Dinah Shore and decided to “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” and bought suburban homes with picket fences not in Pottersvilles but in Levittowns.
I understand that the best sort has always rather sneered at suburbs and freeways and strip malls, although the Euros visiting the USA to see the World Cup are presently marveling at Buc-ee’s. But then the best sort has always traveled private. In Jane Austen the best people have their own coach or barouche, and if you can’t afford your own coach you have to wait for the rich Mrs. Jennings to invite you along. In Dickens it is clear that only the rough crowd travels on the stage coaches. There was a troubling period when, e.g,, Lady Mary Crawley took the train from Yorkshire up to London to see her doctor. But now the rich all fly private. So that’s all right.
Yes. Today we all fly by air for anything more than a three-hour drive. But really, darling, the crowds at the airports are not to be endured.
Although the liberal narrative on transportation is that cars are a patriarchal imposition on society, I believe that cars and suburbs and picket fences are actually most appealing to women. Women like to raise families away from the hurly burly of the city. And if you’ve ever watched a woman puttering about her SUV in the driveway, loading and unloading it with this and that, you will understand that the smart set will only be able take women’s SUVs out of their cold dead hands.
I wonder if, one fine day, we will all get to fly private on Uber Air. Of course we will, and the best people will organize to stop it, just as they have organized and protested for the last 50 years to stop cars and freeways and suburbs, because the Planet.
| Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:49:14 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
It isn’t a lie if nobody calls you on it.
The only thing that politics knows is hate and loot and plunder.
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: A Manifesto About the Meaning of Life
