After our educated lords and rulers rose to power through the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries the great question was: how should they rule?

The answer, that crystallized in the century between 1850 and 1950, was that our rulers would fight for the victims. And what a parade of victims: workers, women, Blacks, LGBT. And also the Palestinians.

The fate of the Palestinians is instructive. After the defeat of the Arab attack on the Jews in Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel by the victorious Jews in 1948, the Arab Palestinians went on welfare, supported as helpless victims by the UN, the U.S., and other interested parties. And there they have lingered ever since.

My question is: what good has all the tender care by our victim-adjacent rulers done for the Palestinians? I would say that our beloved rulers have Made Things Worse. Meanwhile the Palestinians have chosen leaders that promised to fight the Israelis and return them to the lands that they know belong to them.

There is a sophisticated word for this kind of politics: Irredentism. I first encountered the word decades ago from reading the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He told me that Eastern Europe was a morass of irredentism, with the people of every province or country fervently believing that some borderland presently ruled by the other guys really belonged to them. I only got to learn the details in The Other Europe by E. Garrison Walters. Transylvania, Moldova, Silesia, Moravia, Wallachia, Galicia: the list goes on and on. The Jewish Mises himself came from Lemberg in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is now Lvov in Ukraine. He ended up in the United States, via Austria and Switzerland.

Irredentism is great for sauntering politicians: it keeps the people riled up, bellowing for revenge, and it keeps the politicians in power. But whatabout the ordinary people? What do they get out of it? Not so much.

Here at home in the USA, victim politics works great for our ruling class, but not so much for the victims, as you may have noticed. Life is good for the educated class, but not so great for the rest of us.

Our ruling class promises to fight. It promised to fight for the workers against the employers. It promised to fight for the women against the patriarchy. It promised to fight for blacks against the racists. It promised to fight for the gays against the homophobes.

But let's think this through. Does it really help the workers to fight the employers? Or is it true to say that workers and employers need each other and would benefit from working together rather than fighting? Does it really help to fight the patriarchy? Or is it true to say that men and women need each other, because children need a mother and a father: their mother and their father? Does it really help to point out racists behind every tree? Or would it help for the cops to subdue the gangbangers and the shoplifters and for the activists to get a job and let ordinary Blacks build lives for themselves in safety?

More and more, I am convinced, politics does nothing except conjure up enemies where none exist, and loot the economy to pay off the supporters.

These days the rulers are fighting for the transgenders against women. Because? Because transgenders are victims! Yes, I know: somewhere on Earth, the evil patriarchs are cheering.

Right now, I am reading Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's Political Theology. If I understand any of it, I understand that the way that academics construct political doctrines in our time is more or less identical to the process by which theologians constructed systems of religious belief in the olden time. In the olden time theologians convinced us that the king was God's anointed. Today, we are told, political activists are next to godliness because they fight for justice for the oppressed. And just as God wrought miracles in the olden time, our political activists are all just about to demonstrate the miracle of social justice in our time.

The problem with politics is that it cannot get beyond its obsession with the enemy, whether kings attacking the king next door or activists fighting the White oppressors. And, of course, every ruling class demands a princely ransom for its fight against the enemy, a ransom that comes out of the lives and earnings of ordinary citizens. That is why the West has seen populist uprisings against the educated ruling class in recent decades. While the ruling class pays professors and DEI administrators to come up with new ways to advertise its compassion for the victims, ordinary people worry abo how to pay for the next fill-up at the gas pump.

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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