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More End-of-an-Age Musings
If you check X every day right now you see some people saying that President Trump is resetting the world, making the US undisputed Lord of the Americas and fossil fuels. And others saying that he is losing it — and always did.
And then there’s the SPLC indictments, about how the Southern Poverty Law Center has been creating fake far-right activists for years, including the Charlottesville tiki-torch marchers.
And then there is Charles Murray on X discussing the problem the left has with Human Bio-diversity, or HBD. If humans are diverse in their capabilities — rather than a Blank Slate — then the left’s war on inequality is simply power politics with no basis in science. You know, like lefty economics from Marx to Keynes to Krugman has no basis in science.
And there are all kinds of stories about how the Intelligence Community has been getting its oar into national politics, and backing the liberal side all the way. I have a conspiracy theory that the IC and its alums have been far more involved in our national politics than we like to think or admit. And that’s because all the alums are versed in “color revolution” tactics. Which is short for fomenting revolution. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is one such. She worked for the CIA from 2006 to 2014. I’m not saying she actually fomented revolution. But she probably learned all about it.
My point is that our liberal friends are really good at playing power politics, and they really think that people like them should be in power. The problem is that almost everything they believe, culturally and politically and economically, Makes Things Worse.
It really isn’t a good idea to inflame resentment. It really isn’t a good idea to have the care of the poor assigned to government. It really isn’t a good idea to develop a huge establishment of economic regulation. It really isn’t a good idea to make us all dependent on the state. But liberals are in favor of all that because they believe. It never occurs to them that big government gives them power, political power.
And things won’t change until liberals have made such a mess of things that all ordinary people come to rebel against the notion that government can do anything except make thing worse.
I wish it wouldn’t come to that, because it would mean desperate hardship and misery for ordinary people.
I guess it comes down to this. All the signs are signaling that we are coming to the end of an age, because our rulers are fools and know nothing except how to stay in power, for the time being.
Change is coming. The only question is how much the current rulers will resist and how violent the new regime will be. Has there ever been a regime change in history that did not involve a civil war?
It comes down to the question of the butcher’s bill, and who has to pay it.
| Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:06:59 GMT |
Here's More Research on the Left
I finished up my piece on “Understanding the Left” with the eternal comment: “more research is needed.”
And no sooner had I done that than I ran into tons of stuff on “ressentiment.”
Nietzsche, of course, is the go-to guy on this, as Google AI is forced to admit:
Nietzsche’s ressentiment is a profound, reactive psychological state born of weakness, where suppressed envy and hatred for the strong are transformed into a new moral system.
And clearly, a major strand in modern democracy, after the vote was extended into the shopkeeper class and the working class, is resentment. Resentment against the Jews; resentment against the rich. Obviously the Allyship narrative is pure resentment: the resentful oppressed peoples against the dastardly white oppressors.
And the point is that politicians immediately picked up on this. In Austria it was Georg von Schönerer (who was not an aristocrat) and Karl Lueger, before 1900. You could get votes, lots of votes, by playing the resentment card. That’s what all the blue states are doing with their billionaire taxes and their pied à terre taxes. That’s what FDR was doing with his “economic royalists.”
The other big thing that lefty politicians do is tell women that they deserve to have their wifely and motherly needs taken care of: free education, free health care, free child care, and all the things that women down the ages have needed from a good husband.
Notice that both ressentiment and free stuff fit into the mold of politics proposed by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his reduction of politics to friend and enemy: free stuff for our friends, death and taxes for our enemy.
I say that the politics of the next regime needs to delegitimize both these themes.
Isn’t that what libertarianism is trying to do? Not exactly. The problem with libertarianism, I suggest, is that it tries to imagine a world without resentment and without women expecting to be taken care of.
I say that the politics of the next regime has to deal with the fact of resentment. It must not ignore it and it must get beyond Nietzsche’s sneering about “slave morality.” How do you do that? I don’t really know.
And how do we deal with the fact of women expecting government to meet all their needs with free stuff? How do you redirect them from expecting government to expecting husbands to do all that?
The answer, of course, is in Andrew Breitbart’s notion of politics being downstream from culture, and my extension that culture is downstream from religion.
In fact, of course, Nietzsche was trying to do this. His notion of the Übermensch is about trying to celebrate people that push upwards with courage and with creativity. In The Mind and the Market Jerry Z. Muller writes about Simmel and Schumpeter echoing this. And if you listen to tech lords like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel you see that they are trying to do something about this: they are not just greedy Robber Barons, but men seriously thinking about the values that help society cohere rather than split apart.
But the fact is that as soon as we got “democracy,” defined as extending the vote to the lower classes, politicians discovered that resentment was the royal road to power.
Maybe things are different now. Maybe the politics of populist nationalism is about a majority of voters resenting the privileges of the NGO class, of Nick Shirleys exposing NGO-class fraud. And maybe the young Gen-Z men returning to religion are trying to rise above resentment and weakness to responsibility and strength.
We shall see.
| Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:11:08 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
What’s the difference between an activist and a revolutionary? The activist is building his resume; the revolutionary is burning it.
The more politics, the more enemies.
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: An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer Theory
