Ruy Teixeira, he of The Emerging Democratic Majority duo, now has a Liberal Patriot Substack. And he wonders if we are experiencing the “Last Hurrah for the Brahmin Left.”
He means that the Left parties in the US, France, and Britain are less and less working class parties and more and more the parties of the educated class.
But I want to comment on the manifesto of the French New Popular Front (NPF) that Ruy quotes from Wikipedia.
overturning Macron's pension, unemployment, education, immigration, police, guaranteed minimum income, and universal national service reforms… lowering the retirement age to 60 in the longer-term; implementing price freezes on essential food, energy, and gas… increasing financial transaction taxes; banning bank financing for fossil fuels… re-instituting a solidarity tax on wealth "with a climate component"… establishing the right to menstrual leave; prohibiting new major highway projects; outlawing intensive animal farming… continuing to supply weapons to defend Ukraine; recognising the state of Palestine along with Israel
Etcetera.
I have a serious conceit that I don’t just oppose our lefty friends. I try to understand them, and try to understand why they are doing what they are doing.
For instance, I would say that all the economic interventions that the NPF is proposing, while well-intentioned, just Will Not Work. Because when you interfere with the economy in a million different ways you end up wrecking it.
Let’s just look at shifting back the retirement age to 60. Sounds like a great idea. Wouldn’t we all like to stop work at 60 and do all the things we’ve longed to do. In a free economy, people would save for retirement and they would retire when their savings would yield an income that would support them for the rest of their life. At what age could they do that? Depends on how much they save in their working years. But if the government does it with an income transfer plan like Social Security, the government is making a big bet on the future with other peoples’ money. In our case, Social Security is going broke, and I’m sure it’s the same in France.
By the way, imagine if every worker had a tax-free MAGA Savings Account that he could use for everything from retirement savings to unemployment insurance to down payment on his dream house. Or is that too radical?
But if you are a member of the educated class or the Brahmin Left, it is all too easy to draft up a manifesto with a glorious vision of the future, which, if you were putting together a profit and loss statement for a corporation, would put you in jail for fraud.
In other words, our educated class tends to indulge in moral posturing, demanding this or that as a matter of justice, without taking responsibility for outcomes. But is retirement savings a matter of justice, or about 80 percent prudence?
I’ve been writing about this for years. In my American Manifesto I used Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Says Wikipedia:
He analyzes it as a differentiation of society into three distinct yet interdependent power centers: a political sector, an economic sector, and a moral-cultural sector.
When you combine the political and the moral-cultural and the economic sector what you get is totalitarian Stalinism.
I wrote that we needed a Greater Separation of Powers between the political, the economic, and the moral-cultural sectors. Otherwise, as Novak writes, you tend to get two sectors ganging up on the other one. And that’s not good.
So when I came to read Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his division of the world into the political, with its distinction between friend and enemy; the moral with its distinction between good and evil; and the economic, with its distinction between useful and harmful I could see it as the same as Novak only different. You can see that Novak is suggesting that when the political gets tied up with the moral then it starts enforcing morality and calling the immoral an enemy. And then it gets into the economy it starts branding economic actors it doesn’t like as the enemy — such as “malefactors of great wealth.” There is no politics without an enemy.
So when I look at the educated class and the Brahmin Left, I experience people making moral judgements about, say, retirement age, and then wanting to back their judgement up with political force. And that’s not good.
And the curious thing is that the Brahmin Left wants to ease up on thieves and violent criminals and incarcerate people that use the wrong pronouns. This actually makes sense, from the left point of view. Criminals are the victims of social injustice, whereas pronoun criminals are white male oppressors: they are evil and they are the enemy.
That’s why I like Carl Schmitt. His definition of the political, the moral, the economic, are a guide to action.
What do we do with a businessman that produces “harmful” products? You fine him and you tell him to find something “useful” to do.
What do we do with a bigot that deadnames a helpless transgender? You tell the world that he is “evil” and a meany jellybeany.
What do we do with a thug that punches out a little old lady on the street and steals her purse? You call him an “enemy” of society and you put him in jail.
Do you see the point? Corporate polluters are “harmful” but not as bad as people cheating on their wives. Adulterers are “evil” but not bad enough to put in jail. Wife-beaters and murderers and child molesters and concentration camp commandants are worse than evil, they are enemies of society.
I just think that our liberal friends on the Brahmin Left need to go to Carl Schmitt reeducation camp and learn the difference between the political, the moral, and the economic. I know, let’s pass a law…
By the way, Carl Schmitt says that the aesthetic is the distinction between beautiful and ugly. But that is another story.