Back in 2018 I started writing that the left was best understood as a reaction against the modern Double Revolution in science and the modern economy. I coined the idea that the left was a Great Reaction back to the past.

At the time I thought I was being a bit naughty, telling our educated progressive friends that they weren’t progressive at all, but the real reactionaries of the modern world.

I made up a maxim:

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... helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

I had no idea that in 2020 the helpless transgender victim Vicky -- formerly Willie -- would be unctiously interviewed on NPR advocating In Defense of Looting.

And what is the three months of mostly peaceful protest in Portland, Oregon, but a return to the woke tribe’s defense of the streets of “their” Portland against the evil foreign tribe of the racist-sexist-homophobes.

On Saturday night the mostly peaceful protesters in Portland shot a man wearing a “Patriot Prayer” hat. Well, of course. How dare, how dare a Trump supporter show his ugly face in progressive Portland! Portland is woke territory and don’t you forget it, bigot.

The argument I make in my Great Reaction concept is that, given the recent transformation in humanity caused by the revolution in physics and the revolution that we call “capitalism,” of course there is a movement of nostalgia, aching to return to the days of innocence, back to the Garden of Eden.

Only, of course, the whole point of the Garden of Eden myth is that once you have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge you can’t go back to the Garden of Eden.

You and I know this; evidently our lefty friends do not. That is why chaps like Benjamin Franklin said “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.”

We also read our Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

Do you get the feeling that our Democratic friends really know nothing about us? And do you think that we know a lot more about the left than the left knows about the right?

Compare the presidential tickets for 2020: Biden is an old New Deal era carthorse; a Budweiser Clydesdale that ought to be spending his last years sniffing the grass in a nice clovered paddock. Harris is a total fake: the privileged daughter of two Berkeley academics masquerading as an oppressed First Woman of Color. Are the Democrats dumb or something?

President Trump is a force of nature, that turned millions into billions when he took his dad’s modest outer-borough apartment business downtown. Then he learned, with his reality-show gig, how to relate to ordinary Commoners. Vice President Pence is the epitome of a decent Christian man.

On top of that the Democratic National Convention was a celebration of youthful activists and helpless victims while the Republican Convention was a celebration of middle-class Strivers and Commoners. And especially Black Strivers. I wonder why?

You know what I think? I think that you can almost see the hand of God in this.

But I feel for our lefty friends. What fun, What Fun it would have been back in the day to be a revolutionary and save the world from the cruel oppressors! Only here we are two centuries after the bourgeois revolutions and real per-capita income is up by 30 times. The Age of Revolution is over, chums. But you can always go to Les Mis and sing along with “Do You Hear the People Sing?”

What fun it would have been to be a civil rights activist registering Southern blacks to vote, a suffragist marching for women’s right to vote.

Only all that stuff is Gone with the Wind, to coin a phrase.

And the past is only fun in the rear-view mirror. At the time it was nasty, brutish, and short.

The problem for our educated class, the creatives, is to discover a new Meaning of Life, living as they do in the age after the Age of Revolution and, I believe, after the Age of Politics. It would be a life that is higher and nobler than teaching “oppressed peoples” to thirst for vengeance and beating up the white working class just for the thrill of it.

You see, wokies, if you’d ever read a book you’d know that defunding the police and reparations for slavery is reactionary, abandoning justice and the rule of law to return to the primitive culture of blood feuds, vengeance and the lex talionis.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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