L to R: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity
My viewing of the Fox News Channel (FNC) has cratered. Why, if you’re even interested? They seem to be speaking to an increasingly narrow fringe of the right. A conservative cannot be limited to Trump-worship, neo-protectionism, neo-isolationism, and pandering to the unhinged on the far, far right. Extolling those in Republicans ranks who mirror the antics of the Democrats’ “Squad” isn’t a winning formula for me. It’s off-putting.
The news division is different from the commentariat side. Those reporting the news at FNC do yeoman work in carrying stories that should be leads in our now fully woke legacy media, but aren’t. However, the big money and attention in FNC goes to the primetime lineup of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. The school is still out on Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. Carlson is a repulsive booster of neo-isolationism, an odd critic of support for the victims of brutal aggression (Ukraine), a knee-jerk carper against the “big” in big business, and a half-witted reviler of free markets, among other things. Hannity can’t seem to go beyond Trump-worship. It’s disgusting. Like Tucker, Laura rails against a nebulous “establishment” that eerily and rhetorically performs the same function as CRT’s hazy “white supremacy” and Marx’s “working class”. She and Carlson conduct a regular tag-team hatchet job on Zelensky, and she follows Carlson into the swamp of isolationism. I could go on but won’t bore you with an ever-lengthening laundry list.
I found myself yelling at the tv at age 70 as when I was 30 years younger screaming at Dan Rather. I’d rather ingest my news through reading. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, Townhall.com, National Review, etc., staying away from the kookier sites, with supplements from some of the dinosaurs, are my current choices. At least in that way, I can better filter out the balderdash, and keep my sanity.
FNC was a necessary counterpoint to the monotonous leftism most everywhere else. It’s too bad that they regularly soil themselves in the 6 to 9 pm (MST) time slot. Au revoir Fox News Channel.
Matt Gaetz (r, Fla.) and Lauren Boebert (R, Co.), two of the twenty Republicans opposing McCarthy as Speaker
Still no Speaker for the new Republican-majority Congress.
What happens when you cross a lunkhead with P.T. Barnum? The blending of DNA gives you the Republican rump opposing Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and Republican efforts to put the brakes on the Democrats’ scheme to gut America. Some of the gaggle take after the lunkhead side of the gene pool, others the carnival barker. For others exhibiting the wild gene in the family tree, nothing but the perfect will do. The result is a “fecal” (rhymes with chit) show.
If you were looking forward to Republican governance in the House, well, expect to be aghast. If you weren’t, sit back and watch the drama-queen cast of the Keystone Cops at work. It should be a great show. 20 Republicans are making a laughingstock of the other 202. If the rump gets a scalp, such as McCarthy’s, expect scalp-taking to be routine. Meaning, who’d want the leadership job among this cast of narcissistic dolts?
Donald Trump provided the modern template for the drama queen that lies at the heart of many a politician’s soul, but even he finds Gaetz’s stunt “Sad!” What’s more striking is that many of these deadenders don’t really mind if the Democrats regain the Speaker’s gavel. Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reports that Gaetz, Boebert (R, Co.), and Perry (R, Pa.) told McCarthy in a private meeting that “they don’t mind if the speaker vote goes to plurality and [Dem leader] Hakeem Jeffries is elected [because] they’ll fight him.” If true, it speaks volumes for the mindset of these clowns. They want to fight and not govern. They’re into political theater and not responsible decision-making.
No wonder the Republicans are losing the ‘burbs and the degreed middle class. The Republicans are presenting a choice between the sweaty histrionics of Republican William Jennings Bryans and the socialist glibness of California Bay Area Democrats. Many mortgage payers might prefer the glibness to the blustery pandemonium.
To hell with ‘em. Don’t give them a scalp. If anything, hand them theirs. The only choice is McCarthy, period. A disorganized House is clearly their fault. They will be guilty of any return of the crippling Democrats to the seats of power and control of the House’s agenda and committees. Primary them! If they can’t cooperate with fellow Republicans, they can’t cooperate with anybody. Start planning the campaigns now: money, campaign staffs, and candidates.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Jake Sherman’s scoop of the private meeting with McCarthy at https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1610275667756679169
Climate activists, and so-called “stakeholders”, 2019
Stakeholder: noun; a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business. (Google)
***********
Cut to the chase, a “stakeholder” is someone with no direct invested risk (land, labor, capital) in an enterprise who wants the power to impose their political opinions on those that do. Stakeholder is a euphemism for those who want to screw up your investment for their benefit, however defined. “Stakeholder” is a buzzword, for instance, that strives to create the stampede to end the internal combustion engine (ICE) and push everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).
I can’t, and we oughtn’t, leave this phenomenon of the ev alone.
As a 30-year veteran of the public schools, I’m well aware of “stakeholders”. Instead of the simple equation of producers (teachers, principals) and consumers (students, parents), we’ve got “stakeholders” to give us diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI), the principal tenets of critical race theory (CRT), “restorative justice” for classroom disruptors, gender-identity grooming, and the rest of the neo-socialistic chaos of the modern classroom. Student performance in the academic core craters but all of that is brushed aside by the education industry’s “stakeholders”. And you and your kids are the guinea pigs, not the principal “stakeholders” of the whole enterprise. For most of the “stakeholders” and their kids, elite prep schools await.
Now the jive is overtaking the relationship between car buyer and car producer. It works like this: create a mania (the role of “stakeholders”), politicize the mania (the role of “stakeholders”), the subsequent politicization transmutes into government mandates (jobs for “stakeholders”), and the rest of us get to live a life imposed by those far removed by from our needs and wants. This isn’t a free economy at work; it’s politics. “Stakeholders” are political activists!
And as is true with all ideological ninnies who want power to tell us how to live, we end up grappling with their crackpot choices. Classic example: the ev. And you know what? A “silent majority” in the auto industry c-suite in their quieter moments recognize the shambolic nature of the scam. Others in the know are beginning to write about it. The Wall Street Journal and National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford, among others, are part of a growing chorus writing about this shortsighted stampede to the ev.
Take the recent comments by the CEOs of Suzuki (Maruti Suzuki India, Ltd), Toyota, Nissan, and Stellantis (Fiat Chrysler/Peugeot) who have expressed misgivings. In the drumbeat of NFL game ads and the enthusiasm blanketing the whole gamut of media, you’d never know of their anxiety. Producers can’t completely ignore the manufactured mania, but amidst the monotonous din some drum up the courage to say the obvious: the “stakeholders” are looney.
It’s like the manufacturers being caught on an open mic. President Akio Toyoda of Toyota Motor Corp. was reported in The Wall Street Journal as being “among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.” Oh, they can abruptly transition, but how much carnage would follow in its wake? Interesting question.
Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.
In January 2022, the CEO of Stellantis was quoted as saying, “What is clear is that electrification [of cars] is a technology chosen by politicians [and their stakeholders], not by industry . . .” Further, according to him, it takes about 44,000 miles to begin to experience the carbon benefit of an ev over your ICE. By that time, your ev is half worn out. Then, what do you do with the toxic thing with its toxic batteries? Recycle? Hogwash. You can’t cost-effectively refurbish the things in the quantities that they will have to be produced. And you thought that your fossil-fuel contraption was an eco-disaster.
Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt. was encapsulated in a Bloomberg report, “. . . the automaker that sells every other car on the nation’s roads [India], believes electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in the world’s third-biggest releaser of greenhouse gases — at least not in the immediate future.” Yep, because millions of Indians in ev’s requires a steady flood of electricity from – you guessed it – coal and natural gas. See, the stakeholders’ central planners are all about the glitz in the flashy tv ads, like the stakeholders themselves, and are not into the grimy details. Don’t expect practical advice from political activists posing as “stakeholders”. They’ll get you into trouble.
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt.
Nissan Chief Executive Uchida Makoto predicates more ev production on government help in the form of regulations to herd consumers into his products and cash payouts from taxpayers to his company’s pocket to make the things. It’s the same attitude that turned Detroit’s Big Three into basket cases in the 1970’s and required TARP in 2008. After WWII, Europe and Japan were wrecked and Detroit was riding high. Then, our competitors’ stone age ended in the 1960s and 70s and Detroit and its featherbedding unions turned to Uncle Sam for protection. Ironically, another European import, the Fascists’ idea of corporatism (the tripartite alliance of big corporations, big government, and big labor), entered the go-to manual for American policy makers and their “stakeholders”. It was already resplendent in FDR’s New Deal as a policy maker’s template.
Uchida Makoto, CEO of Nissan Motor Co.
American automakers are well-versed in taking hat in hand to Washington, D.C. Uchida likes the idea, and so does GM. GM pledges to go all electric by 2035. Of course, when things get sticky, they’ll expect Uncle Sam to continue to manufacture the market for them. In the throes of eco-stakeholders, DC will comply. In other words, we’re back to where we were with TARP . . . and a bunch of impractical four-wheelers crowding our driveways
We’ll then experience déjà vu for that fuel-injected ICE under a dusty cover in the garage. Remember the time when a fill-up took a couple of minutes, and the a/c didn’t cause a frantic search for an open charger in the 110-degree Texas/Mojave heat?
Mountain View, Ca., Teslas waiting in line for a charge.
You see, the electric vehicle has nothing to do with the creative freedom of entrepreneurs and voluntary interaction of free consumers and producers, the stuff of an economy in a free society. It’s a central planner’s dream. A central planner is a government employee. “Stakeholders” use political clout to make government empower central planners to make you live according to their lights. Out of the mire comes the ev and your struggles to get the kids to school, show up on time at work, and visit grandma for Thanksgiving. Of course, the “stakeholder” says that you don’t have to do any of that. The whole crusade is soft totalitarianism, soft because of the absence of a massive extra-legal secret police, but then again there’s the unceasing state indoctrination in teacher training and control of the curriculum in nearly every classroom K to grad school. It sounds to me like a totalitarian perpetual motion machine self-generating the support for power to the state’s “stakeholders”.
Interestingly, the problem is not with the electric vehicle itself. It’s the forcing of the things on the entire public. A golf cart made to look like your car is your future, whether you like it or not. The concerns of the auto industry’s execs stem from the exclusive focus on the ev. Hybrids, alternative fuels (biomass, compressed hydrogen, etc.), our trusty reduced-emissions ICE, and many others should also be part of the mix in a truly free society, one without the so-called “stakeholders” running the show. Yeah, it used to be called a free market.
The “stakeholders” aren’t into freedom, or a market with “free” – the autonomous soul – in front of it. They’re into making you think like them. Your life is to be rigged by them to be loyal clients of big-corp whose production decisions have been constricted by big-government under the influence of big-activists, aka “stakeholders”. Once government has a “stake” in electric vehicles, it’s going to make you buy them. Count on your state to resemble the hellscape of California.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs”, River Davis and Sean McLain, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2022, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-president-says-silent-majority-has-doubts-about-pursuing-only-evs-11671372223
* “Electric Vehicles: Mr. Toyoda is Worried”, Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online, Jan. 1, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/electric-vehicles-mr-toyoda-is-worried/
* “India’s Top Carmaker Bets on Hybrids Over EVs in Clean Shift”, Ragini Saxena, Bloomberg, Jan. 26, 2022, at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-26/india-s-top-carmaker-bets-on-hybrids-over-evs-in-clean-shift?cmpid=BBD062722_GREENDAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220627&utm_campaign=greendaily&sref=KgEBWdKh&leadSource=uverify%20wall
* The History Channel’s “The Cars That Built the World” prompted the following reaction.
History shows that we go through periods of frenzy. Nearly everything gets sucked into a time’s all-encompassing and obsessive manias. We’re in one of those crazy times. You can’t escape the time’s convictions. The idea(s) permeates every nook and cranny of modern culture. There can be more than one overriding and widespread infatuation, but “climate change” seems to rise heads and shoulders above most others. It’s an ideology and is only science insofar as science can be recruited to lend it some credence and therefore an aura of irrefutability. Thus, a seemingly objective excuse is presented for intolerance of countervailing views and force-feeding the people into the narrow confines of its beliefs.
It’s an ideological enterprise with overtones of authoritarianism, even straying into totalitarianism. The difference between the two is summarized by the fact that authoritarians don’t really care how you think and live so long as you don’t threaten their power. Totalitarians seek to control everything about you. The “total” thing enshrines a surveillance state to manage your life in the most intimate details.
Can democracies be totalitarian? Impossible, you say? We are in the midst of an experiment to prove them compatible. Totalitarianism enters through the door of the mass acceptance of an ideology that has many of the characteristics of a religion – with or without God of course. Most often, if God is mentioned as part of the equation, He is the caboose trailing the train of thought. As a quasi-faith, environmentalism has its dogmas, such as “climate change” and an assortment of sacraments like “net zero” in carbon. One manifestation of “net zero” is the full-frontal assault on the internal combustion engine and the drive to get everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).
The infatuation with the ev is a product of our time’s Secular Great Awakening: the vast upsurge in ethusiasm for Environmentalism. Environmentalism entails a severe preservationism that implants a loathing to alter the natural world for man’s benefit. It’s a prejudice against convenience for humankind. The ev is one allowance approved by the faith’s ecclesiastical leadership because it is said to address the cardinal sin of climate change, similar to the purchase of an indulgence.
Au contraire to The History Channel, the electrical vehicle has a distinct developmental history as compared to the rise of the SUV. The modern all-electric auto is not the outcome of the earlier scattered, hit-and-miss process of freedom-loving actors that led to the conventional automobile. The ev was essentially commanded into existence by the faith’s politically powerful adherents. In that sense, the ev mandates have much more in common with Stalin’s Five-Year Plans rather than anything recognizable in Adam Smith’s free market.
The track record of command-economy technologies isn’t impressive. Mao thought that he could jump-start Chinese industrialization (The Great Leap Forward) by turning the country’s peasants into steel producers with smelters in village backyards. It all was a bunch of hooey and culminated in the worst famine in history.
Chinese people working in a commune during the Great Leap Forward
Then along came the Soviet MIG-25 “Foxbat” fighter. A Soviet pilot defected one to an American airbase in Japan in 1976, and, low and behold, its materials and avionics were outdated. Like most everything coming out of the Soviet Union’s command economy, it was as flawed as the fake tractor that first rolled out of one of Stalin’s first new tractor factories in the 1930’s. Politicians, ignorant of production processes and engineering, are agog over flashy, showy things. The impracticality of their hairbrained ideas is unknown to them, and irrelevant to them anyway. In today’s political eco-system, environmentalism’s dogmas are assumed to be true and therefore windmills, solar panels, and ev’s are commanded to be the only true path to the Promised Land.
Soviet MIG-25 fighter that was flown by Soviet pilot Victor Belenko to Japan on Sept. 6, 1976
These thoughts were lurking in the background as I watched the four episodes of The History Channel’s “The Cars That Built the World”. I kept expecting the ubiquitous reference to the threat of man-caused apocalyptic climate change to rear its ugly head in the program’s rendition from the development of the internal combustion engine to Toyota, like so much of today’s litany of programming. It’s usually lurking in there somewhere. It finally did at the end of the last installment by associating the development of the electric vehicle to the creative energies of the bygone era.
The parallel is misleading to say the least. The ev is the dream product of today’s ideologically driven central planners. The thing’s glaring deficiencies are overlooked in the headlong rush to get people into them. True, advances in the ev have been made but not enough to overcome its inherent shortcomings and justify a junking of nation’s entire car fleet in a few decades. This can only happen when powerful political actors stray outside their limited lane of competence to force us into their preferred choice.
By contrast, no one was forced out of their horse-and-buggy at the dawn of the twentieth century in order to go further, faster, more cheaply and reliably than ever before. But our choice today isn’t between facing the back end of a horse and Henry Ford’s Model T. It’s a choice between a cleaner and fuel-efficient multi-cylinder and something that can’t be charged quickly, drains quickly the moment you turn on life support (heating, a/c), and is tied to a grid that ev-enthusiasts have made astonishingly unreliable. The trajectory of the internal combustion engine is toward lower emissions and greater fuel-efficiency. Ev’s have an improvement ascent as well, but where’s the cost-benefit for the centrally planned disruption that will inevitably ensue?
Answer: There isn’t one. Cost/benefit commonly stems from a calculation of the opportunity costs and tradeoffs of competing options. What opportunity costs and tradeoffs are entailed in the massive shift to ev’s by government command? What are we giving up by doing so? Therein lies the limiting principle for these politically driven economic schemes. It’s not that the product doesn’t look and sound great – you know, the all-agog reaction of our elected nincompoops. It’s what we are forgoing as we turn a good portion of our lives upside down. The amount that we spend or give up on this choice isn’t available for other things.
The result isn’t a seamless transition but a chaotic, disruptive mess. It won’t be anything like the shift from analog to digital recordings (cd’s, etc.). Digital’s advantages were immediately apparent. Leaving aside its recording superiority, its portability and ease of transition across multiple platforms using its storage advantages, flash drives, WIFI, streaming, cellphones, and assorted peripherals, it turned music into an easy-to-access commodity. Music was democratized every bit as much as personal transportation was by Henry Ford’s Model-T. Can we expect the same glorious outcome when we are forced to scrap our $30,000 sedan in exchange for a thing that will introduce us to serious “range anxiety”. It’s a step down, but for what?
We will be expected to accept the devolution because of the faith’s catechism in the original sin of climate change. So, we must forego something that has only gotten cleaner and more efficient in return for something with inherent difficulties in recharging, long recharge times (1 hour to 2 days) producing long wait times, a range dependent on ambient temperatures and use of basic accessories (such as a/c), and a dependence on a fitful grid.
To iron out the some of the most glaring deficiencies, batteries, batteries everywhere will be necessary for the zillions of ev’s and to level out electricity generation from an uncooperative nature with her flippant spasms of wind and her half-day time off when the sun is on the other side of the planet. More open-pit mining and disposal facilities for all those environmentally unfriendly batteries will be imperative. And, by all means, if you happen to live in a flood-prone area, park your drenched ev blocks away from anything of value. They spontaneously combust like Spinal Tap’s drummers.
Luxury electric vehicles bursting into flames after being damaged by floodwaters and car batteries catching on fire have prompted a new warning from the state after Hurricane Ian. (ABC News)
The electric vehicle – like the secular catechism’s other components such as wind, solar, locking up the forests, and the assault on suburbia – is a product of an ideology that functions as quasi-religion. Though, an ideology is different from a religion. While exhibiting many of the characteristics of one, ideology possesses one fundamental difference: a religion doesn’t generally concern itself with your choice of car, but an ideology can. A religion is primarily limited to the condition of your soul. An ideology can march you off to the death pits or simply shame you into fealty to the ordained lifestyle. Puritanism never really faded. Our modern version just stripped away the God-garb and donned the raiment of the prig. Only this time, the self-righteous are commissars.
Progressives pride themselves in being in the vanguard of history’s arc of betterment, thus Obama’s “wrong side of history” claptrap. But history has no arc. While one technological advance can lead to others, amidst the science and gadgets, we are the same hoard of clashing ambitions, prejudices, and interests. We can still spend ourselves into oblivion and turn the knowledge to malevolence such as robust ways to kill babies, surveille the population, force everyone into lockdowns, and believe in the unbelievable. So, history isn’t an ascending glide path but the teeth of a saw blade. The quality of life bounces up and down. It can register a descent if the balance of nonsense overwhelms the sense.
The electric vehicle as a substitute for your regular family sedan makes no sense. One sure way to institute a new dark age is to force people into making their lives more difficult. The ev aligns more appropriately with the rule of Xi Jinping. Welcome to the reign of today’s eco-Puritanism.
Here’s a disturbing tidbit: tweens (8-12 years old) are on their cell phones for an average of five and a half hours per day; teens (13-18 years old) average eight and a half hours (The Common Sense Census, see below). In addition, as of 2019, half of adolescents and tweens owned a cell phone, and 84% of teens owned one. I suspect that it’s only gotten worse. Why “disturbed” and “worse”? Think of the behavioral and mental contagions unleashed by these “pocket computers”.
The mania can be measured in “eyeball minutes” by Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. For them, they are the equivalent of the oilwell gushers of old. Much that they do is geared to maximizing the fixation of the eyes, particularly of the young.
Now, we have a new meaning for “viral”. What used to be applied to contagious diseases has greater relevance for today’s addiction for that eyeball-and-thumb rummaging through websites and pictures. It’s easy to alter mental states as never before. The emotional enslavement to the device was properly characterized by Bill Maher when he said on 60 Minutes,
“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd-gods building a better world, and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in t-shirts selling an addictive product to children.”
Think of the emotional conditions that are sparked by the incessant activity on the thing. Anorexia nervosa, gender dysphoria, experiments in alternate sexual orientations, teen jealousies, distorted expectations, new and toxic behavioral norms, flash mobs, are just some examples of mental and behavioral contagions that a tween or teen can potentially experience through their incessant connectivity.
No wonder that a good chunk of today’s under-30’s are moonbat crazy.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Bill Maher quote at “Tech Insiders Call Out Facebook for Literally Manipulating Your Brain”, Jon Brooks, KQED, May 25, 2017, at https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/379828/tech-insiders-call-out-facebook-for-literally-manipulating-your-brain#:~:text=%27The%20tycoons%20of%20social%20media%20have%20to%20stop,to%20children.%27%20Bill%20Maher%2C%20on%20his%20HBO%20show
* “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teen (2021)”, Common Sense Media, at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf
* Much thanks to “I Was One of the Last Kids in America to Grow Up before the Smartphone”, Alexandra DeSanctis, National Review Online, Dec. 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/i-was-one-of-the-last-kids-in-america-to-grow-up-before-the-smartphone/
Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy. Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that? Crazy is the easy part. The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.
It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.
I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know. “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment. The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present. It stems from the young’s newness to the world. All they really know is what’s around them.
They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them. My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat. Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change. Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity. There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else. And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.
The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections. No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice. Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power. The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps. Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.
Well, the young are at it again. Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s. Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide. On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease. I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).
The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness. Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip. No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that. It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism. You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff. Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.
The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”. Well, prove it. Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis. Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism. Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person. History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery. What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended? History isn’t encouraging.
Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness. The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022. The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points! The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them. It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.
Long lines of students waiting to vote at a Michigan college.
What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning? The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump. The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”. That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.
“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair. Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners. Or do they? “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability. Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman. For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion. But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism. The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores). What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?
Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores). Dismal results and political illiteracy. Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.
Economic illiteracy too. Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military. As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons. But it isn’t that simple. A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin. Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia. Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers. The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.
Abandoned office/industrial building in Detroit.
The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions. Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money? Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches. “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary. Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums. We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.
It doesn’t end there. More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers. As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port. Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers). Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.
Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike. Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country. Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations. The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits. We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California. Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?
Unfinished California high-speed elevated rail line outside Fresno, Ca.
Such episodes don’t register with the young. I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation. They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.
Why bother to vote If that is the case? Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act? Think about it. An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one. As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other. If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools? Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age. Before you do something, do it responsibly.
Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time. Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.
But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron? Has the thought ever graced their mind? Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults. In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation. For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required. Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children. That’s not the point. The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being. The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.
That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings. Whether they have children or not is a personal matter. Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples. But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation. A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival. Heterosexuality must be privileged. Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.
The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”. That’s pure sophistry. Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.
Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea? The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity. More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate. Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.
It comes back to maturity. One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all. No one can. We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity. That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come. It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.
The young are just moonbat crazy. Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/
* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.
* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.
The backstory on Dylan’s “My Back Pages” is a teaching moment for the censorious zealots who happen to dominate the commanding heights of our culture and many of our political institutions. So are the lyrics, if rightly understood.
Here’s what I’ve been able to glean in my research into the song. In the mid-60’s, Dylan was given the Tom Paine Award for social activism by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Before this, he was getting irritated at being pigeonholed as a radical activist. He got drunk, made a speech at the award ceremony, and much of that speech made its way into the lyrics. As one source put it regarding the song, “. . . Dylan intensely criticizes his younger self for his moral arrogance and intellectual naivety. More than anything, he’s mocking his own hypocrisy. His outlook on these subjects, on himself and on the progressive movement he lambasted from the awards ceremony pulpit . . . .” Further, according to this source, “The way Dylan saw it, he was becoming the authoritarian by continuing on his old path.” Sound familiar?
The song’s chorus, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”, was a personal admonition for turning into a vain know-it-all. In the following lines, he upbraids himself for his hypocrisy in becoming as narrow-minded and pushy as the other side:
“In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach”
Equality at all costs was every bit the holy grail among the radical Left in Dylan’s time as it is today among the so-called social justice warriors spitting and fulminating in lecture halls against anyone who disagrees. Dylan saw it in the mid-60’s and portrayed it in the following lines:
“A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
‘Equality,’ I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow”
What we are experiencing today is a rehash of an earlier time; only some people saw their descent into inhumanity and corrected. Others didn’t and won’t. The full lyrics are below.
***********
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges soon,” said I
Proud ‘neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Girl’s faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
***********
Enjoy the all-star version at Dylan’s honorary concert from the 1990’s with Neil Young, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and of course Bob Dylan (below).
RogerG
Source:
* Backstory of “My Back Pages” at https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bob-dylan/my-back-pages#:~:text=Those%20lines%20clearly%20mirror%20the%20chorus%20for%20%22My,More%20than%20anything%2C%20he%27s%20mocking%20his%20own%20hypocrisy.
The Democrats know how to play political hardball. After all, they are the party of government. They want it, worship it, and are highly motivated to take it over. They need it because they have so much to accomplish, like make all of us into them. Not surprisingly, they’re socialists, the American edition of Europe’s many Social Democratic Parties. No name-calling here. They just are, despite their face-saving protestations to the contrary. The 2022 midterm was their template for dominating the government. It illustrated how to make people ignore their lyin’ eyes.
The fly in the ointment is that this socialism doesn’t work, never will. Government’s control of the means of production, using a little Marxist lingo, is simply turning over nearly all the important stuff to an entity that operates like the DMV. Government is a sloth and can never be a cheetah no matter the volume of synthetic hormones or gender reassignment surgeries. The Squad and the self-deluded Bernie Sanders keep harkening to a Scandinavia that no longer exists, the region having long since eschewed the poison. Yet, the dream never died, notwithstanding its long record of failure. To avoid a shellacking, the Democrats discovered the recipe to electorally prosper despite their socialism’s inherent fiascos.
The Michigander and auto critic Henry Payne recently performed an interesting autopsy on Michigan’s election. Whitmer and the rest of the authoritarian gang overwhelmed the party of government restraint (GOP). Amazingly, the donkey party found a campaign strategy to make it possible for people to prefer the sewer that the Democrats made of their lives.
First, the party of government used their control of Michigan state government to choose their opponents. This sounds like Xi Jinping at work – by the way, another socialist. Credible opposition was ordered off the Michigan ballot, much like Xi commanding the removal of ex-CCP president Hu Jintao from the recent Party Congress. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers was convened under the overseership of the Soros-backed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and on a pure party line vote of 2-2 disqualified the Republican front-runner James Craig, the former Detroit police chief with a huge following, and four other Republicans allegedly for fraudulent signatures on their petitions. The tie means that they’re gone. No Democrats were ever affected, just Republicans. It’s fishy as you get into the weeds of the case. In the end, the Republican primary ballot was amputated to include only the weak with Tudor Dixon winning the primary.
Michigan Board of State Canvassers earlier in 2022
That’s not all by a long shot. The party knows how to exploit and champion the cultural barbarity that is now resplendent in certain demographics: the young, single women, mostly professional, and the quasi-educated with degrees. Of course, I’m speaking of some groups’ love affair with terminating pregnancies. Abortion has moved from trauma to a personal state of ecstasy in the psyche of some. We shouldn’t be surprised since the sex act has lost its procreational purpose and has become purely recreational in the minds of some. Humans being human, we get lazy and sloppy and babies unintentionally result. We can disagree on the starting line for human life, and compromise is possible between a complete ban and carte blanche to the moment of exit from the birth canal. All that is lost in the hubbub once the fear of losing power is on the table. Dobbs was mangled by the donkey party to fit the purpose of stampeding the base to quickly mark their mailed ballot.
Speaking of those mailed ballots, previously (2018), Michigan voters exhibited the now common and strange attraction for Rube Goldberg changes to their government through ballot initiatives. It’s an interstate phenomenon. For instance, the superficial glow of term limits in deeply blue California merely ended up replacing seasoned leftists with immature ones. The state’s adoption of the jungle primary means the routine choice between leftists in the general. Alaskans chose to mutilate their elections with ranked voting. For Michiganders, they chose in 2018 to grease the skids for the donkey party’s base, heavily populated as it is with low-information and low-motivated voters. Adult expectations of reasonable civic effort and responsibility has been reduced to nil with election-day registration and voting thereby complicating the tasks of verification for a government that can barely count them. Additionally, the no-fault absentee ballot – a device that makes mockery of the secret ballot – means that a person can remain in their pajamas and pause their Xbox hand controller for a short interval to vote their state into California-style chaos.
Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
With the election system duly lubricated, the ginned-up hysteria about Dobbs can be exploited by another contraption in the form of a state proposition: Proposition 3 to place in the Michigan state constitution alongside the usual Bill of Rights the “reproductive freedom” to end the existence of a fully formed baby in utero. The “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” language is pure jargon for infanticide. Notice that they can’t say “woman”; it’s “individual”. This whole thing is a monstrous theater of the absurd.
But it does work to get the sex-as-recreation crowd to vote early and often. Remember, this is a demographic at the start not too keen on the Dobbs’s federalism rationale. For them, federalism, what’s federalism? Anyway, the polyamorous are energized to show up and vote the state into oblivion.
Like chain immigration, chain-propositions bring in tow the scandalously authoritarian politicos. It’s a strange authoritarianism though. Freedom is the mantra, but freedom isn’t the result. There’s no freedom for in utero babies. What about the “freedom froms”? There’s certainly no freedom from car thieves, smash-and-grabs, killers, burglaries, muggings, drive-bys, and the mentally unstable and addicts turning our sidewalks and parks into open sewers. Watch where you step.
The use of hysteria-propositions to elect and reelect people who ignore what they should be doing in order to pursue what they ought not to do is folly on stilts. Whitmer garroted life in Michigan from closing the schools to pronouncing an end to gardening and boating without a scintilla of “science”. And election 2022 showed how you can get away with it. Gauging by the returns, terminating pregnancies mattered more than the kids’ lost education and the decline into barbarity. The kids experienced a double whammy in the election. Was this the most anti-child electorate ever from womb to classroom? One has to wonder.
I will not try to absolve the electorate’s responsibility for this descent into dégringolade (rapid decline or deterioration). Don’t pretend that democracy always translates into wisdom. A majority vote is not proof of righteousness. It is only evidence that certain campaign tactics work: construct a well-funded political machine; rearrange the election system to enhance the operation of the political machine; incite the base with fabrications; and with initiatives, distract the people from the politicos’ manifest failures.
It worked. Expect to see more of it. As in the fable of Nero, election 2022 showed how to pass out fiddles to the electorate as Rome (Michigan) burned.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The Lessons for Republicans from Michigan’s Midterm Disaster”, Henry Payne, National Review, November 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-lessons-for-republicans-from-michigans-midterm-disaster/
* “Five Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidates booted from primary ballot”, Washington Examiner, May 26, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/five-michigan-gop-gubernatorial-candidates-booted-from-primary-ballot
* “Gretchen Whitmer Can’t Hide Her Track Record Of Shutting Michigan Children Out Of School”, Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, Nov. 1, 2022, at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/gretchen-whitmer-cant-hide-her-track-record-of-shutting-michigan-children-out-of-school/
* An analysis of how strategically timed ballot initiatives can enhance a campaign’s electoral chances: “How ballot initiatives will impact voter turnout in the 2018 midterms”, John Hudack, Brookings, Oct. 22, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2018/10/22/how-ballot-initiatives-will-impact-voter-turnout-in-the-2018-midterms/
Pres. Biden making his September 6, 2022, speech in Philadelphia
Margaret Thatcher once said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” It’s become a cliché, but sometimes clichés are nonetheless true. Then again, we can make them no longer true. Today, it’s increasingly apparent that winning arguments aren’t necessary. You can win the vote without an argument, program, plan, defense, etc. Brand your opponents, refashion the election system to your likes, then harvest the votes. Thus, it’s possible to have a majority government of mediocrities, strident revolutionaries, nincompoops, power-seeking narcissists, and a laughingstock to the world. Welcome to America 2022.
Margaret Thatcher
Throughout 2022, I expected, like everyone else, a red wave for the midterms. It didn’t happen. I wasn’t the only one gobsmacked. The whole conservative commentariat was left filling baskets with jaws lying on the floor, including their own. Oftentimes, shock is soon followed by scapegoating those who we already had a well-established emotional investment in disliking. It’s a way of never having to admit you’re wrong. A prime example would be the Fox News primetime lineup of entertainer-critics and their gaggle of contributors such as Mollie Hemingway. They aren’t the only ones.
For others on the right, they talk and write as if we’re still in the bygone era when going to the precinct polling place, being handed a ballot, and taking it to a privacy cubicle to mark it in the sanctity of your conscience was the default setting for elections. Today, the secret ballot is dead due to the machinations of the Democratic Party and the excuse of COVID. Pundits like National Review’s Jim Geraghty refuse to recognize how voter behavior and electioneering has been dramatically altered for the worse as a result. The character and personality of our elections has mutated beyond recognition. People adapt to new environments, sometimes grotesquely. Do we need a psychologist to remind us?
The nightly Fox News primetime lineup replaced talk radio as opinion setters on the right. They glommed onto the rising Trump phenomena and out came the jargon of the “establishment” and “RHINO“ as objects of derision, and a romantic attachment to the “outsider”. The terms are invoked like magical incantations, absent of much content. The words are ways of emoting.
Earlier this week, speaking of gobsmacked, Hemingway on Ingraham’s show jumped at the opportunity to blame the leaders of the party – the “establishment” – for the debacle. She’s right, to a point, but that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that most everyone on the right was caught off-guard. So, they condemn others for believing what they believed. Got that? Theirs is a criticism of others for reading the tea leaves as they did. It’s rank hypocrisy.
Mollie Hemingway
As the French philosopher and writer Rochefoucauld pithily put it, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The vice of never having to say your sorry makes a hypocrite of us all.
Then we have the refusal to accept the fact that elections have radically changed, altering for the worse electioneering and what is expected of the voter. Jim Geraghty fell into this trap. He dismisses “conspiracies” as an explanation of the outcome, as do I. But a “conspiracy” is one thing, a revival of Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine on a national scale is another. Bribery or a voter roll littered with the dead isn’t necessary. Just warp the system under the color of law so you don’t have to cheat. Some of the chicanery of an older time is legally permitted today. Many, many states have no-fault mail-in balloting and early voting. Ballots are shotgunned through the mail in some states from long out-of-date voter rolls. The secret ballot is dead, dead, dead, as ballots go into domiciles and get marked God-knows-how. Ballot harvesting invites highly partisan activists into the space between the voter’s conscience and its delivery into the box.
No, Hugh Hewitt, the harvesting isn’t the innocent act of collecting them. The older safeguards abounded not because everyone will violate moral norms without them. There’s a reason for the fingerprinting and background checks for school personnel. Without them, more miscreants will be quietly enabled to molest the kids. Ditto for partisan activists being kept as far away as possible from a person’s vote and its depository. The older voting safeguards were confidence-builders for the voter to be safe with his or her choice.
Geraghty cited the unevenness of the results throughout the ballot as proof of the absence of a “conspiracy”. For one, the election was not a conspiracy but exhibited the characteristics of political-machine style electioneering made possible by early voting, mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, etc. For instance, Laxalt loses the Nevada Senate race but the Republican captures the governorship. This line of thought ignores how a political machine might operate, particularly a national one, like stressing high-profile races, a laser-beam focus on keeping control of the House and Senate, and how closely a candidate adheres to the script. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid – with emphasis on the “must-haves” frees up space on the ballot for disparate choices.
Jim Geraghty
Hemingway dismisses candidate quality, as do I, and Geraghty thought it mattered. I think that if it was of consequence, both parties had a problem. Blake Masters was a novice and John Fetterman was unable to hold a train of thought or put a sentence or line of logic together. Katie Hobbs was a glaring millennial-uptalking/valley girl/airhead. The list is long and filled with charlatans and wastrels. Many Democrats refused to debate or only agreed to one after enough votes were locked up in early voting. Joe Biden in 2020 showed how political-machine campaigning is tailor-made for a basement strategy. This election season had few debates and very little face-to-face campaigning by the Democrats. The strategy was to hunker down, avoid any risk, and tar the other side with over-powering evil.
Was Chicago’s Richard Daley or Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett ever known for their debate prowess? Their expertise was in running the machine of an army of operatives steeped in favor-peddling. Today, single potentates aren’t necessary, just have an overwhelming fundraising advantage to build a machine that facilitates a safe space/basement presence on a nonexistent campaign trail.
Nobody was put through a wringer to make the average voter ferret out their preferences, because the wringer was absent, or reduced to irrelevance. In many places, especially in blue states, for many voters, the campaign season began and ended within a week or two after receiving their ballot in the mail. The machine went to work locking up these votes ASAP at favorable moments in a news cycle that they helped engineer with an always compliant media. Make broad, spurious charges – “a threat to democracy” or “MAGA Republicans” or “they want women to die” [abortion, Dobbs] – and contort anything to reinforce their self-created stereotype of their opponents (the Paul Pelosi incident). But, by all means, flood the bank with early votes before the public’s attention is drawn to the real issues, the ones that are hammering their daily lives.
In this election, given its structure, issues really didn’t matter – inflation, the border, the Kabul disaster, XY “girls” invading girls’ bathrooms and sports, crime, kids barred from their schools, urban barbarity, greenie authoritarianism, etc. – in order to keep the eyes trained on the meanie Republicans. That’s the reason for hunkering down and let Biden occasionally emerge from his bunker to plaster the meanies.
This style of campaigning leads to some real eye-opening results. The “they want to women to die” led to an endorsement of what can only be described as infanticide in more than a few states. Some state constitutions became festooned with carte blanche abortion. Persistent polls for decades have shown a popular rejection of late-term abortion. Did people really know that they were embracing it, and, in some cases, forcing other people to pay for them or others to perform them under criminal sanction, without parental consent? Did people really know that the “health of the mother” language is subterfuge for late-term abortion? In my own state, Montana, the voters couldn’t bring themselves to protect a baby who survived one. If there is a Judgment Day or some moment of cosmic justice, many souls are imperiled by what they were led to spuriously believe. In some not-to-distant future, will “my body, my choice” join the ranks alongside “racial purity”?
These results, grotesque as they are, are only possible if the vetting of traditional campaigning is replaced by our newly minted political-machine style. We’ll only get more of what we didn’t intend in a government filled with acolytes of the mindless talking point. Highly partisan activists and political groupies seldom make for statesmen/women.
Geraghty, Hemingway, Ingraham, and me too, would probably agree on the need for Republicans to follow suit. It’s a time of reciprocal escalation to avoid unilateral disarmament. However, Republicans should only get good at this malignant political-machine style in order to destroy it. End universal mail-in voting, make election day one day, re-enshrine the secret ballot, and secure the vote. It’s not hard, just use this bastardized system to gain power to end it.
Until we come to grips with a malignant election system that brings out the worst in all of us, anything that we do in the long run will be pointless. A government of shallow narcissists and brain-dead activists will only hasten the decline of a once mighty nation. Competing national political machines encouraging ill-considered voter behavior will guarantee it. Without correction, paste R.I.P on the once-great citizen republic called the United States of America.
RogerG
Read or watch here for more:
* Jim Geraghty’s explanation of the midterm results: “The Magnitude of the GOP Midterm Debacle”, National Review, Nov. 14, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-magnitude-of-the-gop-midterm-debacle/
* Mollie Hemingway’s analysis of the midterm results on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show at https://youtu.be/cCyPdLtx844
Absentee ballots handled by a poll workerLaura Ingraham’s 2022 midterm prediction
After more time to ruminate on the midterms, I’ve drawn to two conclusions: democracy is in critical condition and the Fox News commentariat and much of the punditry on the right, clouded by “populism” (aka Trumpism), provided a distorted view of the political landscape. As such, the red wave didn’t materialize, and, for that matter, wave elections may now be a thing of the past. Elections no longer reflect the deliberations of an informed citizenry thus making a mockery of popular sovereignty. 2022 brought it into clear focus.
For one, it’s the return to the old practices of political machines, brought to you by the Democratic Party’s current fixation with mail-in balloting and its cousin early voting. Leave it to the Democratic Party to bring machine politics back into vogue since they pioneered the urban political machine in the late 19th century. Harry Truman began his political career in the Kansas City Prendergast machine and would spend the rest of it trying to break away (read David McCullough’s “Truman”). FDR adopted machine tactics on a national scale, using the federal New Deal purse and expanded regulatory power to steamroll the country into four straight terms and Congressional dominance for half a century (read Amity Schlaes’s “The Forgotten Man”). Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by their latest edition since it is, after all, in their DNA.
Machine politics is back thanks to the absentee ballot. Hugh Hewitt in his post-election review yesterday (11/9) cut short any discussion of the wisdom of mail-in voting by saying it is “here to stay”. Regardless of its longevity, it’s corrosive to democracy. Fact! How? Democracy requires deliberation, information, debate, and attempts to make a convincing case. That means speeches, ad buys, and exhaustive travels to convince voters. Now, no longer. Get the political machine up and running, identify the party’s voters long before they’re any the wiser, put an absentee ballot in their hands, and collect it long before election day. It’s like the gambling house fronting the approved player with a mountain of chips before a single hand has been played. Campaigns are reduced to ginning up the base with fear, reducing public appearances, and eschewing the risk of exposure to the equivalent of cross examination in something called a debate. We’re back to the days of machine politics with the power to elect a cocker spaniel.
The Democrats got away with it throughout 2022. Heck, Biden got away with it in 2020. 2022 Democratic candidates avoided debates and rigorous interviews like the plague. If that isn’t enough, contrary views are censored in a cabal of Biden lackeys and Big Tech oligarchs.
COVID was the excuse to bring back machine politics. Not only did it result in stunting the education of our kids; it introduced “emergency mitigations” like the broadcasting of absentee ballots from dirty registration rolls and an election day stretching over a month, and sometimes after, with collection boxes scattered all over the landscape. With so many votes in the bank, the messiness of retail politics is avoided, especially important during times when you’re in power and royally screwed things up.
And we got a senescent president, an impaired stroke victim of Bolshevik sympathies in the Senate from Pennsylvania, a millennial-uptalking airhead/valley girl in a neck-and-neck race for Arizona governor, and other assorted nincompoops and wastrels potentially filling the seats of power – so long as they have a “D” after their name. Where’s the democracy, particularly if you think that it includes a voter weighing the candidates and issues? Frankly, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter. It’s been reduced to the mechanical act of punching a ballot. It’s shameful.
Thus, the polls may accurately pick up a red wave approaching election day but it doesn’t matter since so many votes have already been collected before anyone has a chance to change their mind. Polls may be accurate but much of what they’re registering is buyers’ remorse; their votes having long since been locked. The Machine invalidated the polls. A candidate’s high negatives and “wrong track” numbers were made irrelevant.
The Fox News blockbuster lineup looked gobsmacked the day after. Red-wave dreams in a mist of pixie dust were shattered. I watched Tucker, Hannity, and Ingraham stumble around groping for an explanation. Of course, they highlighted the GOP’s bright spots: DeSantis, Kemp, Vance, Johnson, a likely GOP takeover of the House, and the sending out to pasture of Beto and Stacey; however, at no time did “Trump” cross their lips. It could be that they are as scared of the mythological Trump Leviathan as current GOP officeholders since Trump boosters comprise a good portion of their ratings. Trump may be a Nielsen winner but he’s a turnoff to voters. He’s more than kryptonite to the GOP. He’s a bug light. Candidates attracted to his glow get zapped. In battle ground states, his endorsement acted as the light as these candidates flew into the electrified screen.
Laura came closest to admitting the baleful Trump influence. Listing as one of her lessons from the election, she mentioned that future GOP campaigns should have no room for “revenge and ego”, or some such. It’s a vague swipe at Trump. Good for her, but she goes on to miscast the results. Factors such as coattails evaded her gaze, and her ritual misuse of “establishment” soiled her commentary. And there’s more.
She couldn’t resist extolling the “populist” cause. She obviously attributes it to Trump, and she’s correct, to some degree. The party has broadened its appeal. Trump, though, isn’t the only one to credit. The Democrats contributed the most. They traded blue-collars of all demographics for the utopian visions of the faculty lounge. Anyone, regardless of race or gender, with a family must grapple with closed schools and stunted educations for their kids, bankrupting gas prices, unsafe neighborhoods, urban war zones, XY “girls” in the locker room and on the team with their daughters, abortion-infanticide, a national debt piling on the backs of their children, humiliations abroad, a steady influx of the “undocumented” to undercut their wages and overrun their towns, blackouts and sky-high utility bills, shortages, and a trip to the grocery store eating up what’s left of the paycheck. Blacks and Hispanics have eyes like anyone else and are noticing the consequences of Democrat rule. Trump just happened to be around when the Democrats went full-bore into Lefty ravaging mode.
Sadly, all this occurred when the Democrats turned democracy into machine governance. Many of the unwitting were roped into the charade before their attention could be drawn to the Democrats’ complicity in the realities about them. Trumpist pundits refused to admit that Trump’s influence in the GOP assisted the Democrats in their distraction campaign. In the end, democracy may not be dead, but it is certainly comatose.
Now, as per Laura Ingraham in her commentary, the Republicans must imitate or die. They will, and soon we’ll be off into escalation and the land of electoral mutually assured destruction. Republicans will have to follow suit or face unilateral disarmament. But somebody has to put a stop to this devolution and return us to a real election day and 90% of the electorate voting in-person. If not, everything from candidate quality to stump speeches will be made into antiquated notions in a fading memory.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Democracy has been defined down to the near-animal act of marking a ballot. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about what happens when standards decline in his essay “Defining Deviancy Down”. He stated, “By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards.” Substitute “democracy” for “deviant” and you might begin to understand what happens when democracy as a standard is defined down to the equivalent of a psycho-motor tic.
