No, this is not a post about lesbians. I’m talking about Liberals. Well, that’s the term the Wall Street Journal still uses for the people of the New Religion. According to this post on their site, Liberals are enjoying a renaissance of late.

There are signs that liberals are making a comeback — and not just because a socialist is running for president, gay marriage is spreading like wildfire and pot legalization is gaining acceptance.

A new analysis of Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll data finds a marked  increase in the share of registered voters identifying themselves as liberals, and an even bigger drop in the share saying they are conservatives.

In three national polls conducted so far in 2015, the analysis found that 26% of registered voters identified themselves as liberals — up from 23% in 2014. At the same time, the share of voters identifying as conservatives dropped to 33% from 37% in 2014.

The defect in this sort of thing is that no one bothers to define the terms. To the people of the WSJ editorial board, conservative means global capitalism, open borders and permanent war on the periphery of the empire. To old guys who were once regarded as typical conservatives in America, none of this makes the least bit of sense. Today’s conservatism looks a lot like what was called liberalism 35 years ago when Reagan ran for president.

That would, in part, explain why more people are inclined to say they are liberal. If the people calling themselves conservative are embracing most of the liberal causes, the only way to remain on the trendy left is to race further into the extremes. On the other hand, people like me no longer describe ourselves as conservative because we are at odds with everything the modern conservative supports.

That’s what never gets picked up on these sorts of surveys. Using a two-dimensional scale for describing ideological inclination is fine, but ours was defined for the purpose of reinforcing Progressive identity. At one of their spectrum is Hitler and at the other is Stalin. The former is a typical person outside the hive, while the latter is a well intentioned, but horribly maligned member of the one true faith.

The result of this bizarre left-right axis is that the folks at Reason Magazine are on the same side as Hitler, a socialist and nationalist. It places Mussolini and FDR at extreme opposites ends, when both men greatly admired one another until you know who came along. The fact that modern Progressives fully embrace the corporatism of European fascists is another paradox of this way of thinking.

I suspect there’s something else going on now. This Great Progressive Awakening has not followed others. There’s no sense that we are about to see a return to normalcy and a snap back toward traditional American patterns. Christianity has collapsed in America and is no longer an anchor of the culture. In 1968 Nixon could count on the silent majority. In the 70’s the Evangelical movement joined politics, leading to the Moral Majority that helped elect Reagan.

Today, nothing like that exists. Evangelicals are spent as a political force. The Catholic Church is in tatters with most of its members either worshiping the NFL on Sunday or ready for the grave. The mainline Protestant faiths are dead, for all practical purposes. The culture has been turned over to homosexuals and blacks, whose extreme intolerance of normalcy makes even the cartoon villains of the Civil Rights Movement look tame.

If you pay any attention, no one could blame you for thinking that it is all over. The lunatics have won and it is now an uninterrupted slide into the abyss. Young people could not be blamed for joining the winning team and making the best of it. They have lives to live. This is, after all, how Christianity spread in Europe.

One of my gags is to point out that if the people flooding over the Rio Grande had law degrees, the American Bar Association would make Pat Buchanan look like an open borders fanatic. The penalties for hiring illegal lawyers would be draconian, involving torture and slow death. The border would make the DMZ look like Golden Gate Park.

In America following WW2, it was a great time to be working and middle class. If you had anything on the ball and a modest amount of self-control, you could create a fine life for yourself and your family. The twenty year period following the war was the heyday of middle-class America.

Just as the 1950’s were not a great time for the talented ten percent of blacks, it was not a great time for the cognitive elite of white America. No great fortunes were amassed in the 50’s and 60’s, like we saw in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th. Men got rich, but not over-class rich. There was simply no way to transfer large chunks of middle-class wealth to the ruling class.

Things changed in the 70’s and by the 1980’s, the technological revolution was setting the stage for a new robber baron class to emerge. First we allowed the financial class to auction off the manufacturing base to the third world. Then all sorts of new value transference schemes were created allowing Silicon Valley to boom. Of course, government metastasized.

This great concentration of wealth over the last three decades has been spurred on by the reckless enthusiasm of the managerial class. Educated people who should have known better cheered on the financialization of the economy by Wall Street and the assault on the culture through mass immigration. After all, the “new money” was bankrolling the universities and think tanks.

This is nowhere more obvious than in our university system. Even the most pedestrian of colleges are staffed with tenured radicals and overgrown hippies preaching nonsense. Middle class children are saddled with tens of thousands in debt for an education that used to be free in pubic school. The basic training for a work life is loaded down with agit-prop of no value in a human society.

The crushing reality of mathematics, however, may finally be reaching these tenured radicals on the college campus.

Lawmakers in Wisconsin advanced a daring proposal made by Gov. Scott Walker that would eliminate state laws guaranteeing faculty tenure at state universities, a dramatic potential shift that has faculty and administrators up in arms.

The Wisconsin legislature’s Joint Finance Committee voted 12-4 Friday to approve a proposal that would eliminate tenure from state law and allow tenured faculty to be laid off even if a school isn’t in a declared financial emergency. The proposal would also weaken faculty influence in setting policy and would cut the University of Wisconsin (UW)’s budget by $250 million over the next two years, down from a $300 million cut that was proposed by Walker.

The elimination of tenure protections was first suggested by Walker back in February, but was considered a longshot proposal. The Joint Finance Committee, however, is tremendously influential, and its decision to send the rollback to the floor of the legislature is seen as making passage much more likely.

By itself, the measure wouldn’t end tenure, but it would remove the current protections it has under state law and allow universities to set their own policies on the matter. In response, current UW system president Ray Cross said the school’s board of regents will act to enshrine tenure as university policy in a meeting later this week. No statement of the university’s intent can match the power of state law, though.

All movements become a business and then a racket. Tenure was seen as a way to increase discourse on campus in an era when the dominant religion was Christianity. It allowed the educated to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. As Christianity died off, the New Religion turned tenure into a jobs racket for members of the faith. If you are not an adherent, you will never get tenure at an American university.

The result is our centers of training and learning have been transformed into monasteries of lunacy, divorced from financial reality and the market economy. If you want to have a nice life, you must pay these gatekeepers for the credential and join, to some degree, their cult. What was intended to be an asset to a thriving people has become another anchor on a sinking culture.

The math of the managerial state means the top must consume the middle in the name of the bottom. The trouble is the middle is finite, meaning the erosion of the lower middle, becomes an erosion of the middle. Then it is onto the upper middle-classes. The rot is now reaching those with advanced degrees. Maybe those alarm bells going off in the universities will wake some of these people up. Maybe it is too late.

Steve Sailer has a post up highlighting the general lunacy of the Bruce Jenner story. The thing no one says in all of this is we are required to pretend, along with Jenner, that he is a woman and it is perfectly normal for him to have done what he has done to himself. No amount of pretending, however, can change the fact we all know it is not real. Jenner is not a woman.

In fact, Jenner is a person with a serious mental illness. If he were convinced, let’s say, that he could fly, society would take custody of him in order to prevent him from jumping off a building. He would be deemed a danger to himself and others. Similarly, if he started slashing his wrists or stabbing himself, he would be remanded to a psychiatric facility and appropriately restrained so he could not mutilate himself.

Biology tells us that humans come in one of two sexes. Not genders. Sexes. We know that some small portion of men and women are sexually abnormal, being attracted to the same sex. Similarly, some humans appear to have no sex drive, while others have an all-consuming sex drive. Like any other abnormality, these are exceptions to the standard.

Where there is no exception is in the presence of a Y-chromosome. If you have that, you are biologically male. About 1-in-1000 have two or more X-chromosomes and a Y-chromosome. These people are not a third sex as there are no documented cases in which both types of gonadal tissue function. In other words, they express as male or female, not both or some third option.

This is basic biology. If someone claimed that their head was on backwards or that they had eight legs, this conflict with observable biological reality would be proof of mental defect. The question, therefore, is why this other type of mental illness is being treated as a triumph, rather than insanity. The Sailer post argues, in its own way, that this has some utility to the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

Most normal people seem to think it is a part of the war on white men or the general attack on traditional western sensibilities. I think that’s the Sailer line. His subsequent post from Theodore Dalrymple adds in the need to crush and humiliate the people. I think that was certainly true in the authoritarian societies Dalrymple was observing. Corrupt the man and you break the man.

There’s more here though, in this denial of biology. Blank slate types used to claim that maleness and femaleness were 100% cultural. That’s largely been forgotten, but I’m old enough to recall when it was an article of faith amongst Progressives. It’s what was behind the push to put girls into sports in the 1970’s. That way, girls could learn to be competitive, just like the boys!

That turned out to be a bust. Women’s professional sports are mostly for lesbians. A typical crowd at a WNBA game is wearing flannel and comfortable shoes. Normal females will play sports until they discover boys and then their interests change. They may keep playing, but it is a part of their competition for eligible males. In other words, girl’s sports remained girl’s sports.

I wonder if what we’re seeing here is a renewed effort to claim that sex is a cultural artifact. After all, if Bruce Jenner can change sexes, then there’s no such thing as sex. That is the unsaid truth of egalitarianism. If everyone is the same, then no one really exists as a unique individual. Egalitarianism is a nullification of humanity and what better way to prove that than to change someone’s sex?

Of course, it could simply be wholesale what has long been observed retail. The person who is willing to break one social convention is likely to break others. Serial killers are often spurred on by the exhilaration from the previous act. Potheads are more likely to try coke and then meth than is the teetotaler. Similarly, a society that has broken from its traditional constraints is always on the prowl for some new high, some new adventure in cultural nullification.

Maybe that’s all there is to this. For as long as I have been alive, the worst thing you could say about someone is that they are average or normal. Everyone invests a maximum amount of time proving they are a special little snowflake, God’s special angel. That usually means being a nuisance or social irritant. Having run out of ways to be weird, we’re now onto mutilating the mentally ill.