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The Hives of Power
Wouldn’t you know. Today I read two articles about how the Other Guys are taking over the world with their money and power and their hive network marching through the institutions.
At American Greatness there is a three part series by Stu Cvrk, on “The Democrat Party and Its Supporters Are a Hive”, Part I, Part II, and Part III. Here are the major headlines covered in the three articles:
Ideological Production
Political Coordination
Policy Execution
Enforcement and Intimidation
Activist Infrastructure
Targeting and Suppression
Financial Architecture
Narrative Control
The Judicial-Legal Complex
The Tech-Silicon Valley Complex
The Labor Union-Public Sector Nexus
The Medical-Public Health Establishment
The ESG/Corporate Capture Complex
The International/Transnational Dimension
Boyohboyohboyohboy, as Uncle Billy would say.
But over at The Free Press Erick Erickson is all waxed out at a former shampoo business owner, Charles Haywood, who is spending millions — millions I say — on “a Radical Right Plan to Infiltrate American Conservatism.”
I wonder about the comparative influence of the Left’s Hive and Haywood’s Radical Right Plan? What do you think? A hundred to one? A thousand to one? A million to one? All those Eisenhower-inspired “complexes” against one former shampoo guy?
But guess what about the Radical Right, according to Erick Erickson:
Nearly all of their thinking traces back to one man: Carl Schmitt[.]
Oh no!
Earth to Erick: If you do not understand Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s dictum that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy then you haven’t really begun to to understand politics. And war. And political corruption. And I know not what. If you don’t get the importance of Schmitt’s thinking then, for me, you are not a serious person.
But here’s an interesting point. Over at Compact John B. Judis, he of The Emerging Democratic Majority with Ruy Teixeira, is predicting the “Death of the Professional-Managerial Class.” As an ex-radical activist he’s investigating the class consciousness of the professional-managerial class or PMC. All in all, he reckons that the PMC is just as exploited and miserable as the working class of the olden time. And they are not going to take it any more.
Really? After two centuries of the Dictatorship of the Educated Class, their young-uns aren’t going to take it any more?
Mind you, I reckon that, with AI, we ain’t seen nothing yet on the question of the immiseration of the PMC.
What about politics. And power. And living in this world of power.
I’ve been dithering along in my mind for the last few days dealing with the distinction between the British Victorian ethos of voluntary community and the “partisans of overthrow,” and realizing that there cannot be a culture of cooperation without the force to defend it.
And then I thought, of course, that is what Tolkien’s Middle Earth and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are all about. It’s all about the eternal battle between good and evil, the war against power, where Narnia and the Shire are repeatedly threatened by dark forces. Nobody can expect to be tucked away in their comfortable Shire away from the world of Power. You may not be interested in Power, but Power is interested in you. And so, Bilbo and Frodo are called to resist the eternal thrust of Power.
Narnia and Middle Earth are fairy tales — and I mean that as a compliment.
Is there a possible fairy tale in which the hobbits of the world just say No to the partisans of politics, and in standing up to them and matching their power with power dispatch them to a fate worse than Sauron’s?
Obviously, not in our lifetimes.
| Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:29:46 GMT |
Thinking about a Better World
I got to read a piece by a former Brit peaceful protester harking back to the Good Old Days of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and similar activism in Britland.
Defying inertia. That, in essence, is what protest means. And 15 years ago — as a wave of student protest morphed into opposition to austerity — I really was certain we were on the cusp of a political revolution.
And then he waffles on into Turchin’s “elite overproduction” and its frequent resort to revolution.
Of course, it is my belief that the rise of populist nationalism is sending a message: enough of revolution, already.
Hey, here’s a thought. Maybe AI will cut the cord on the educated class, because who needs an educated class to explain the world to you when AI can do it for free?
Let’s say that the peaceful protesters had a point back in the days after the Crash of 2008. And I suppose they thought that they could effect a political revolution like FDR effected in the 1930s.
Only, you see, in my view the Great Depression was a c*ck-up caused by the failure of the Federal Reserve System to act as Walter Bagehot’s “lender of last resort” in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. As a result of administrative incompetence, thousands of banks failed in the US between 1929 and 1933.
The same thing almost happened in 2008 when Federal Reserve Chairman “Little Ben” Bernanke dithered about whether he had the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers. But Ben muddled through somehow, and so we only had a Great Recession instead of a Great Depression.
Let’s get real here. It is the conceit of every educated-class activist that politics — his political movement — can transform the world.
But my belief is that it is culture that transforms the world, a change in the “way we do things.”
Today, all over the world, the “way we do things” is with big government, and the educated class and the politicians and the experts and the administrators decide how to do it.
But my belief is that the way the world works is with the final words of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She writes that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts” by people just living their ordinary lives. In Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise he is confronting the complex culture of late-Victorian Britain and its vast web of cultural and beneficial and cooperative and mutual-aid institutions outside the frame of government and the “partisans of overthrow” that believe in changing the world with politics rather than with a vast web of cooperation.
I like to use the books of Charles Murray to illustrate our modern problem. In Losing Ground he wrote that the Great Society programs of the 1960s had made things worse. In The Bell Curve he wrote that, since the job market of the future would require increased cognitive skills, groups with lower IQs, like blacks, would be hurt by the change, and that was a problem. In Coming Apart he wrote that in today’s America the white educated class was doing fine; the ordinary white middle class not so fine; and in the white lower class the men didn’t work much and the women didn’t marry much.
The reason that Murray wrote Coming Apart was because the great and the good had accused him of racism in The Bell Curve.
But his point all along is that the welfare state and its programs — in which government spends about 40 percent of GDP — have done serious damage to lower-class people, to their lives and their culture, and therefore Houston We Have a Problem.
Mind you, with “elite overproduction” we are starting to say that even the educated class is hurting.
But you can see that the Brit peaceful protester has no clue about this. He is dreaming of a world where people like him transform the world by the magic of protest. Just as people in politics believe that they can transform the world with a new government program.
How do we move to a society that backs off of big government? That regards politics as the last thing that can improve life on this Earth?
It begins, I suppose with the recognition that politics is downstream from culture, as Andrew Breitbart said. But what is culture? As Merker says, it is partly ritual culture: things we do because “we have always done it this way”, and partly instrumental culture, stuff we have learned to do because it works.
It means a world in which the “political” of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, a world of friend and enemy, is dialed down to threats from real enemies and the abolition of government as a way of gifting your friends. It means a world of people freely and cooperatively interacting, making, buying, selling, helping in a vast social web.
It means, I suspect, that the whole culture of sexual liberation — and sexual license — gets dialed down to a world in which women are not pushed to “put out” like Blanche DuBois, and men understand that when they win the love of a woman it is not just a fling, but a lifelong commitment.
But I have no idea how we even get started. Except that I believe that culture is downstream of religion. I wonder what that means.
| Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:49:52 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
Government is force. Politics is violence. Government is injustice. System is domination. Politics is civil war by other means. Government never learns — Christopher Chantrill
Great Reaction: Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old 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: Communism: An Analysis
