Find all blog entries at A Commoner Manifesto Substack.
Analyzing DSA Through a Schmittian Lens
If you read the issues page of DSA grad student Darializa Avila Chevalier’s campaign for Congress in New York’s District 13 you see it is all about the fight.
We’re fighting to stay here and live full, dignified lives in the city we call home.
She has a Day One Agenda:
Darializa will sign onto these bills to secure housing as a human right, universal healthcare, union protections, a $15 minimum wage and more.
I say that this understanding of politics and human life profoundly misunderstands the nature of human life and human society. Let us use the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach to illustrate the point. Feuerbach experienced religion with: “God is a projection of idealized human qualities.” I am using a Grok inquiry “summary of feuerbach’s philosophy.”
Feuerbach grounds philosophy in sensuous, material human existence—the real, embodied individual in community with others.
Day to day, hour after hour, moment by moment.
But Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, didn’t like the passivity of “community with others.”
[He argued] that Feuerbach’s materialism was too contemplative and passive. Marx extended it into historical materialism, focusing on social practice, class struggle, and changing the world rather than just interpreting it.
What Marx and Chevalier and all people with a political agenda believe is that the answer to our problems is government force. That’s what “We’re fighting” means.
If “housing is a human right” enforced by government, it means that politicians and administrators will spend other people’s money to create housing for poor people. What happens down the road, as politicians set up contracts for their contributors and the bureaucrats mismanage the whole business?
We already know that “universal healthcare” doesn’t work. The Brits tried it; the Canadians are doing it. It ends up as an expensive rationing system with poor service that eats the government’s budget. And the rich set up a parallel system, even if it means traveling to another country to get surgery.
We already know that “union protections” don’t work. They didn’t work for US auto workers that priced US auto manufacturers out of the market, and they don’t work for government employees that demand tax increases to pay for their pensions. The best way to protect workers is to help them know the market rate for their skills and make it hard for powerful special interests to game the system.
We already know that “minimum wage” doesn’t work. The City of Seattle has a $21/hr minimum wage and its Uber rates are the highest in the country. Thomas Sowell said: “The real minimum wage is zero.” The point is that if you offer a wage under the legal minimum and someone is willing to work for that wage, then the minimum wage is just a political fraud.
I get it. With politics, from Marx onward, we are going to go about “changing the world.” But that means with force. We already had a century of experiments in “changing the world” with politics. It always changes the world for the worse.
If I ruled the world I would force all the little kiddies at Freshman Orientation to recite the Schmittian Creed:
I believe there is no politics without an enemy.
I believe morality is the distinction between good and evil.
I believe the economic is the distinction between useful and harmful.
And I would add to that:
I believe that culture is the distinction between our way and not our way.
The point of reciting these distinctions is to drum sense into the bear of very little brain and raise the question: when you say this or that is a human right and society must provide it with government, you are saying that it can be provided by force.
Clausewitz: “war is the mere continuation of politics by other means.”
When you decide to do something with a government program you are declaring that the only solution is war — or more politely, like Candidate Chevalier, a fight.
Get it? Politics, rights, fight, war. All the same game. But only appropriate for demolishing an enemy. And most of life is lived in the moral world of good and evil, in the cultural world of doing things our way instead of their way, and the economic world of doing things that are useful and profitable rather than wasteful or harmful.
It’s really not that hard. But why do so many people insist on doing things by force?
| Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:11:58 GMT |
Political Resets Since 1970
Now that our Democratic friends are shifting hard left, Because Trump, let’s review similar moments in recent history. To help us understand.
Nixon’s Silent Majority
After the Great Society and the Vietnam War and Hippie-dippie-dom, the American People elected 1940s Commie Hunter Richard Nixon to be president in 1968. In November 1969 Nixon gave his Silent Majority speech. He meant “middle-class, often blue-collar or suburban/rural Americans” who weren’t hippie-dippie antiwar lefty protesters.
But then he went off the gold standard, stoked inflation, and got dumped by the Deep State, because Woodward and Bernstein and Deep Throat. Jimmy Carter got to be president.
Reagan’s Reagan Democrats
Jimmy Carter got skunked by Iran and “stagflation.” So the “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan got elected, in part by “Reagan Democrats” that switched parties to vote for common sense. Reagan lowered marginal tax rates — called “trickle-down economics” by the Democrats — and got the economy roaring again.
Clinton the “New Democrat”
Reagan was succeeded by his vice president, George H.W. Bush, who got into a war in the Middle East. The Democrats decided to cut the hippie-dippie-dom and shift to the center as “New Democrats.”
Gingrich’s “Contract With America”
As soon as Bill Clinton got into office he announced tax increases and loosed his wife on the nation to construct HillaryCare. It didn’t go down well, so in 1994 GOP Minority Leader Gingrich announced a Contract with America. It resulted in the first Republican Congress in 40 years.
So everyone was a moderate, including G.W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”
Obama the Non-Moderate Creates Tea Party
President Obama was elected as the First Black President and to bring us Hope and Change. What he delivered was a hard left Affordable Care Act and hard left culture war. You might say it was the end of the moderate New Democrats of Bill Clinton. Obama provoked the organic grassroots Tea Party that helped Republicans win back the House of Representatives in 2010.
Trump the Impaler
Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 without ever having run for political office, and secured a Republican Congress. His election represented a successful revolt of the ordinary middle class that had had it with progressive lefty big government and woke lefty culture war. However, the Democrats successfully won the 2020 election with non-functional Joe Biden, by fair means or foul, and attempted to neuter Trump with wall-to-wall lawfare.
DSA Breakout
The Democratic Socialists of America is a hard-left movement led by the nation’s intellectual elite that is trying to move the Democratic Party hard left. Some experts say that the movement is a consequence of “elite overproduction” meaning anger in the educated elite because of lack of opportunities for educated, credentialed would-be elitists. The movement elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018 and nearly nominated far-left Sen. Bernie Sanders for President in 2020. Only the powers-that-be stopped Sanders and nominated place-holder Joe Biden in his stead. Since the DSA has elected hard-left Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City and looks to add a bunch more DSA candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026.
Two Movements, Two Parties
So, in 2026 the US is experiencing the emergence of two political movements.
The movement in the Republican Party is a repeated rebellion of the ordinary middle class against an educated elite that has spent the last century subordinating the middle class to the programs and cultural hegemony of the educated class.
The movement in the Democratic Party is a movement of the educated class to make itself relevant again by re-politicizing the party and empowering the government under its domination and hegemony to radically change society, because justice.
And ne’er the twain shall meet.
| Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:21:39 GMT |
Switch to Substack for more blog posts
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
If you bend the arc of history, you do not get justice, but injustice.
When the left ran out of real victims to patronize it started inventing “fake” victims.
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: A Critical Theory of Leftist Activism Culture
