In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the character of Nigel Tufnel (guitar and vocals in the faux group) divulges their secret in being “one of England’s loudest bands”. They stenciled their amp dial scales to end at 11 and not the usual 10 – not increase the actual power output, mind you. Thus, “We go to 11.” The difference between the regular Right and the most recent edition is that the newest vintage will “go to 11”, always on the lookout for new opportunities to be loco.
The New Right is content with the batty isolationism-lite, the battle against those mysterious and formless “neocons” and the “establishment”, and a zeal for protectionist tariffs. Their political darling is Donald Trump and prominent mouthpiece in the academy is Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson has twisted his intellect into knots to turn Trumpian incoherence into coherence. The old wisecrack “Give him enough rope and he will hang himself” could be rejiggered to apply to Hanson in “Let him talk long enough and reasonableness is overtaken by bunk”.
It was on full display in the October 26 podcast of the “The Victor Davis Hanson Show”. Hanson loves the term “reestablish deterrence”. I do too. In a dangerous world, bad actors need to understand that they’ll pay a heavy price for harming you: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” But it’s strange to the point of incredulity to apply it to only two of the three theaters of Cold War II: Israel and the Middle East, yes, of course; Taiwan/CCP/South China Sea, yes, of course; but Ukraine/Putin/Russia, no. What’s with that?
For Hanson, “reestablish deterrence” somehow stops when considering Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Hanson’s logic is a ball of confusion. He blathers about the “scared soil of Mother Russia” as quicksand for Ukraine and their supporters in order to justify a replay of 1967’s Vietnam War micromanagement when then-president LBJ chose bombing targets in North Vietnam and restricted efforts to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail and clean out NVA and Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia. According to Hanson, we should not be supplying offensive weapons nor should Ukraine in any way, no matter how modified, adopt the tactics of the invader. Is there at least a hint of inconsistency here? Hypocrisy?
Weapons are weapons, whether labeled “offensive” or “defensive”. Is it “offensive” to strike Russian airbases, supply depots, missile sites, command-and-control centers, or occupy areas near Ukraine’s borders that are essential to keep Russia’s murderous juggernaut rampaging in Ukraine well-supplied? That’s defensive, Victor!
For Hanson, “reestablish deterrence” only applies against Iran or the CCP. How does Putin deserve a free pass? It’s the strangest thing. Putin’s desire to resurrect the Soviet empire is somehow different in Hanson’s mind from the mullah’s ambition to bring back the caliphate over the bodies of millions of Israelis or Xi’s craving to rebuild the Middle Kingdom of earth. Putin is decimating Ukraine as Iran would like to see done to Israel. Instead, Hanson strays off into a gripping fear of stepping onto the “sacred soil of Russia”. No word about the “scared soil of Ukraine”.
Try to make sense of it. You can’t. Emotions must account for it. Angers, resentments could be swamping the brain. Col. Vidman is Ukrainian and testified against Trump. Hanson must have been grinding his teeth. (Honestly, me too!) Zelensky visits an American factory that’s viewed favorably for Biden and Harris. The Left hates Russia for magically electing Trump; therefore, the Right automatically loves the place. Putin, manly man, versus XY “girls” and XX “boys” regaled at the White House. The faculty lounge flies Ukrainian flags at their homes while blue-collars languish in joblessness and meth. Hanson is seething.
Hanson tries to use the national debt and an open border as an excuse not to have a foreign policy, at least one that makes some sense. He’s actually saying, until all our problems are solved, to hell with Ukraine and foreign affairs. We’ve done it before regarding the continent of Europe, circa the 1930s prior to the fall of France, Pearl Harbor, and the Holocaust. It’s a theater of the absurd, and Hanson is begging to play a key role in the sordid drama.
Dodger Stadium and central LA in the backgroundPiles of trash remain near 25th Street and Long Beach Avenue. (photo: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Tuning into the broadcast of the World Series (game one and two in Los Angeles), viewers were regaled with “beautiful Los Angeles”, especially centering on the weather. Shortly after landing at LAX and a chauffeured drive, one telecaster gushingly described the terrace view from atop his Beverly Hills hotel as exquisite, as sublime. Yes, the weather is wonderful, and the scene must have been handsome for him, but only so long as he remained off the surface streets and in one of the super-zip bubbles, and doesn’t actually live and work there like the average Angelino. The beautiful weather and the human reality don’t compute.
For about 15 years prior to my retirement in 2015, we trekked back and forth through 3-4 states between our then home in Bakersfield and northwest Montana during the spring and summer breaks. While crossing back into California near Barstow or Bishop, and our descent toward Bakersfield down Highway 58, a slight depression washed over me. The condition recurred every time that I made, and still make, the trip.
The two experiences say more about California than the sunny skies and the beautiful, manicured grounds of Dodger Stadium. The first one is media hype and superficial. The second one is genuine from a native Californian of 60+ years.
California is alluring . . . if you stick to hovering above the surface and/or zip through the many stretches of disarray and stay on the freeways. The state is a combination of disorder and a colossal regulatory Leviathan and over taxation of its people. It’s visible on the ground, and spreading. The disorder is a consequence of popularly elected choices. Beating enterprise into the dirt, expanding the dole in innumerable ways, and centering law enforcement on the private economy and not on the miscreants that make life miserable have made a shambles of the state. The state is at war with prudence and decency.
Piles of trash remain at the corner of East 10th Street and Naomi Avenue in downtown Los Angeles in 2019. (photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The lunacy is a result of conscious political acts, if gauged by the number of bills passed by the state’s full-time, Democrat-controlled legislature. In no year since 1993 has the number fallen below 632, and more commonly around 800 to frequently over 1,000 (see #1 below). Such bills have included the criminalization of separate boys and girls toy isles; mandatory neo-Marxism in K-12; authorizing school personnel to hide gender confusion from parents; the establishment of the state as a sanctuary of teenage genital mutilation for anybody from anywhere; a whole series of acts that have destabilized the grid, jacked up energy prices to new heights, and force the population into feeble EV’s; etc. And all of this as the state’s 60-year-old infrastructure decays and its streets and public spaces become havens of crime and filth.
Gov. Newsom signs bills
As I watch the World Series, we must realize that we’re being gaslighted by Big Media. California has wonderful weather (Mediterranean climates are like that) and natural beauty to rival anywhere, but the state’s electoral choices for decades have made it unlivable for anyone with their heads screwed on straight. Indecent public policy is popular alongside its fabulous weather, coast, and mountains.
Just driving up to a California gas pump is enough for me to sour on any of its advantages. I prefer to stay away.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “California Bills: Introduced Versus Enacted”, Chris Micheli, California Globe, 10/1/2024, at https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-bills-introduced-versus-enacted-2/
Former congresswoman Liz Cheney applauds as Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., October 3, 2024. (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)Kamala Harris arrives to speak at a campaign event with former Congresswoman Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wis., Oct. 3, 2024. (Photo: AP)
Republican primary voters in ruling majorities are infatuated with Donald Trump. I am a Republican, and am not. Neither is Liz Cheney, former congresswoman and scion of the Cheney political dynasty. She, however, in searing hatred of Trump, has endorsed his opponent, who is the exact opposite of nearly everything that Liz and the Cheney family patriarch and matriarch have been saying and doing for the past half century or more. This is more than incongruous. It takes hypocrisy to another level, to a complete shredding of one’s life story. It’s a lesson in how to incinerate your reputation.
Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney belong in the same coffee klatch as a coming together of Antifa and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (if such a thing was possible). After endorsing Harris, Liz Cheney takes understatement to the point of absurdity. While campaigning for Harris, she brazenly tries to brush off the stunning incongruity in throw-away lines “[we] may disagree on some things” and “[we] may not see eye to eye on every issue” (see #1 below). Do ya think?!
Liz Cheney, in her role as the sister of Plastic Man, stretched all the way to the other far end of the political spectrum to work for and elect a person who would undo everything that she and her father have spent a lifetime building. Kamala Harris is trying to make the Cheneys’ Wyoming, and everywhere else, into . . . San Francisco, the Bay Area cauldron that shaped and gave birth to Harris’s ambitions. As such, Liz Cheney’s choice for president is more at home in Berkeley than Wyoming.
Doubt it? Look to Harris’s record as California senator in the 115th and 116th sessions of Congress. According to Mark P. Jones of Rice University (see #2 below), “Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century”. It’s true, and more than a cliché. She loses the crown to Elizabeth Warren, and only Warren, in both sessions. Going back to the start of the 21st century, 109 Democrats served in the Senate and in terms of left-wing zealotry, Harris came in at 108th in the most-left wing sweepstakes, just ahead of comrade Warren (see #2 below).
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, left, stands alongside Vice President Kamala Harris at a dinner nearly a month after the senator failed to endorse a 2024 Biden-Harris ticket. (Photo: Callaghan O’Hare / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
To get a sense of the sheer farce, and the extreme mental contortions required, look no further than the issue of abortion. Harris has repeatedly called for the restoration of Roe v. Wade across the nation all the way to “fetal viability” (superficially set at 22 weeks) and beyond (see #3 below). Where’s Cheney? Juxtaposed to Harris’s enthusiasm for aborting babies is Cheney’s 2021 co-sponsorship of the “Life at Conception Act” which would extend 14th Amendment protections to the “preborn human person” from “the moment of fertilization” (see #1 below).
Still, in spite of the flippant demurrals, Cheney fawned all over Harris by declaring that she would “inspire our children” . . . if they survived Harris’s abortion gauntlet, and once out of the womb, the exposure to gender confusion and “transition” medical interventions. Thanks to Biden and Harris, the gender-confused XY “girls” will be allowed to rip through girls’ sports in a twisting of Title IX. Thank you, Liz Cheney.
Liz Cheney is a lesson in allowing your personal vindictiveness to sell out the country to a San Francisco/Berkeley/countercultural revolution. She’s already begun her personal “transition” to the left by adopting the donkey party’s smears against states who actually made law, heartbeat laws, to put meat on the bones of what it meant to be pro-life. Now, Liz adds her voice to the left’s lie machine in her feeble attempt to make the most incomprehensible political tag team in recent memory seem “normal” (see #5 through #8 below).
It’s a scene of political self-immolation. For the rest of us, if Liz Cheney has her way, we’ll be stuck with porn in elementary school libraries and third-grade classrooms, bankrupting energy prices, DEI run amok, CRT-style “public safety” which means no public safety, no borders, Israel facing a new Holocaust, Taiwan as a new base of operations for the Red Chinese PLA Navy, tax-and-spend to national oblivion, and the crusade against babies in sanctioned/subsidized abortion up to birth. As for your personal prospects, don’t take your kids to the park. Sounds like where Kamala is from, San Francisco.
And all of this because Liz Cheney is infuriated by the presence of Donald Trump. In her mind, we avoid Trump, but in our mind, we get a country that we won’t recognize nor want to live in. Speaking of minds, Liz Cheney has lost hers.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Charles C.W. Cooke for his insights into this topic in “Liz Cheney’s Abortion Comments Show Why Stumping for Harris Was a Mistake”, National Review Online, 10/22/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/liz-cheneys-abortion-comments-show-why-stumping-for-harris-was-a-mistake/
2. For an analysis of Kamala Harris’s brief history as a U.S. Senator go to “Kamala Harris is extremely liberal — and the numbers prove it”, Mark P. Jones, The Hill, 8/8/2024, at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-is-extremely-liberal-and-the-numbers-prove-it/
3. “Kamala Harris’ call for ‘reproductive freedom’ means restoring Roe”, Megan Messerly and Alice Miranda Ollstein, Politico, 7/29/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/29/kamala-harris-abortion-restoring-roe-00171657
4. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, USNWR, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
5. “Abortion Advocates Are Lying about the Tragic Deaths in Georgia”, Calum Miller, National Review, 9/24/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/abortion-advocates-are-lying-about-the-tragic-deaths-in-georgia/
6. “The Abortion Pill Killed These Women. Its Supporters Blamed Pro-Lifers”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 9/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/the-abortion-pill-killed-these-women-its-supporters-blamed-pro-lifers/
7. “Untreated Side Effects of Abortion Drug Killed Amber Thurman, Not Georgia’s LIFE Act”, Kayla Bartsch, National Review, 9/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/untreated-side-effects-of-abortion-drug-killed-amber-thurman-not-georgias-life-act/
8. “Kamala Goes on Sex Podcast to Lie about Georgia Abortion Law”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, 10/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kamala-goes-on-sex-podcast-to-lie-about-georgia-abortion-law/
No, but not because she isn’t unwittingly trying to be. For her, Marxists are communists who are meanies, much like Cinderella’s stepmother. Deep down inside, she, in the manner of all who rose out of the California one-party tar pit, has an abiding affection for much that lies under the Marxist rug. For her and all her delirious fans, James Lileks, essayist and satirist, has produced a concise description for Kamala and her classmates in his hypothetical history class. Here it is:
“Communism was invented by a hairy, smelly dude who sat in the library all day writing an explanation for why he was broke and ignored. He came up with some ideas that appeal to people who think they can figure out a secret special formula that explains everything and also has the totally coincidental outcome of giving them stuff they didn’t work for or deserve, at the expense of successful people with lots of friends and hot wives and steady access to a bath so that people don’t faint when they walk into the room.
“This system is utterly at odds with human nature, history, economics, and common sense, and hence it is beloved of two kinds of people: college professors who can fasten on a fat Western college like a leech on a whale, and clever sociopaths who can use it to exert power over the masses. It killed millions in the 20th century, yet we are told true communism was never tried, which is like poisoning 200 million people with a dose of arsenic and insisting they would have been fine if they’d been fed twice as much. Any questions?”
I don’t think Kamala is listening. She’s too busy passing notes.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, first verse:
“I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a foot-loose man
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need”
Needs and wants, there’s a difference. Mick Jagger knew it. Needs are fundamental; wants are desires, the things that we would like. In normal times, the two are mangled beyond recognition, doubly so in election season.
Both parties – one a neo-Marxist enterprise, the other a personality cult – are in a mad dash to pander to the so-called middle and working classes, non-college educated. By so doing, the two parties in this time of voting advocate a command economy for the benefit of this general mass of people who work by the clock, do contract labor, and own small businesses. Here’s a splash of cold water: command economies don’t work, no matter their alleged beneficiary. Why? They’re commanded by the government, it’s employees and politicians. Any goodies granted one group come at the expense of the others, not just the rich, and will include many in the middling ranks of the socioeconomic pyramid. It’s the philosophy of beggar-thy-neighbor. That’s all that governments can do. Any bennies for blue collars – or the middle class – will come at the expense of the gradual negation of their own jobs and the futures of their children as future growth is diminished by “fair share” demagoguery against the rich. We’ll pay in more ways than one, not just at the checkout counter. The economic math is inexorable.
Though, to be real, today, the college-educated aren’t any more cognitively advantaged than the non-college educated. Many BAs, maybe most, are just proofs of indoctrination in claptrap. Indoctrination is not education.
The claptrap may help explain the broad acceptance of economic nonsense. A belief is deeply embedded that our specie of unionization is good, that you can wall off the country from foreign competition, hike taxes on the rich, and ignore the rest of the world, and everything will be hunky-dory. That isn’t a realistic game plan. It’s merciless, incremental national suicide.
Anyway, such is the political fashion of the time. Warning: fashionable politics and economic good sense don’t mix, like drinking and driving.
Profoundly galling is the demagogic blue-collar suck-up from both parties in the form of a love affair with “coerced” unionization, for that’s what we’re talking about, coerced. Of course, “coerced” is a yucky word, so they want to leave it at simple “unionization”. But honesty demands that we realize that the NEA, AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Teamsters, the entire litany of labor monopolists, actually demand “compulsory” (coerced) membership for everyone in the workplace. These folks aren’t into “voluntary”.
Their political word play doesn’t clarify squat. More of the word play clouds the picture even more. Coerced unionization comes in something referred to as “collective bargaining”. The question is, for them and everybody else, how to make a “collective” out of an inchoate mass of workers of divergent individual interests and beliefs? Answer: set up a system of legal protocols to force everyone into the thing, that’s how. A monopoly of labor under one set of masters, that’s how. Use the power of the state to impose one man, one vote, one time, since it’s harder than hell to decertify the labor monopoly once it’s established. After the initial certification vote to create the thing, you might be able to opt out, but you’re still going to have to pay for the thing (in California, “agency fees”). And don’t underestimate the organization’s creative bookkeeping to vacuum as much as possible out of every employee’s paycheck into the union treasury.
And guess what the dues-fueled slush fund goes for? Politics and more politics. These unions realize that their very existence is dependent on the power of the state to create and enforce the protocols that create them. Their existence and power are dependent on the state. Limited government, on the other hand, by definition, leaves little opportunity to hobnob with politicians to make law to squash dissenters at the workplace. That’s the reason for the unions’ hearty distaste for our constitutional republic. By definition, a constitution limits government power to what’s written. Big Labor demands what’s not written and therefore legally impermissible, and progressivism obliges. Progressives (in today’s parlance, neo-Marxists), as the unions’ chief political benefactors, simply interpret The Constitution out of the way by calling it a “living constitution”. How convenient.
In the end, these politically privileged labor monopolies cannibalize their own industries and morph into pillars of radical cultural revolution, ready to join their lefty comrades at the parapets. Industries flee their self-destructive grip; opportunities decay for upward mobility; many of its members discover their daughters sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with XY “girls”; and their schools, streets, parks, and downtowns are dangerous pits of despair. So much for “look for the union label”. This ain’t your grandpa’s UAW.
In fact, the UAW eyes richer fields to plow in organizing tomorrow’s cultural revolutionaries in the growing cadres of college teaching assistants. Imagine it, your son or daughter might be taught or their papers graded by a Hamas-loving activist who can’t be removed due to the protective political and legal force field provided by the UAW. It’s happening in California. The UAW has jumped on board the organizing gravy train of public employment, the very thing that has rendered California irredeemably ungovernable. California’s one-party state has turned itself into a clone of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the CCP with the guardians of the revolution, like the mullahs or the Party politburo, being the cabal of labor mandarins who were empowered by the very same state government that they now dominate. For the worker bees, they mostly approve of this arrangement so long as the pipeline of bennies keeps flowing, a glaring example of stage one thinking.
“Most thinking stops at stage one.” — Thomas Sowell in Applied Economics
Thomas Sowell
Stage-one thinking? Sowell defines stage one as a myopic concern with only the immediate consequence of a proposal or action. Then a sharper mind, in response, forces the person to address, “Then what?” After a series of then-whats, the person quickly realizes that their great idea is buffoonery. But don’t expect much stage two or three among most of those without a BA, and many of those walking around with one. According to a Pew survey from 2019, those with less than a college degree are four-and-a-half times more likely to view our participation in the global economy as a bad thing (see #1 and #2 below). Blue collar support for a wide range of foreign engagements has been waning for years. But then what, after the tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine?
You see, a stage-one buzzword of the Left has entered the lexicon of the Right: industrial policy, which basically translates into raising the economic drawbridge in international trade. It parallels Lenin’s infamous “central planning”. In central planning, the government manages, or directs, the economy to mold the “better society”. Whose better society? Of course, it’s the one in the mind of those perpetual obsessives who’ve spent their adult lives in fevered hatred of the existing patterns of life. The mental pathology infects the Left, and now the virus has come to the Right.
The scheme runs four-square into Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Their end state of bliss – America First – demands great power in the form of more government interventions to direct the lives of millions of economic actors acting both as buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, taxpayers and beneficiaries, in the whole range of possible economic activities available to each one of these participants. Such knowledge and wisdom are beyond human capacity, let alone the people manning the controls of the massive administrative state, the Fed, congressional committee staff, local planning commissions and boards of supervisors, a state’s Dept. of Fish and Game, Coastal Commissions, or the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the people who’ll enforce Trump’s tariffs. It’s a fool’s errand, but one, today, the Right seems anxious to pursue. Read J.D. Vance’s or Donald Trump’s speeches.
The people who don’t like you driving a Toyota are the same people who see no reason for NATO, an independent Ukraine, protecting Taiwan and its Taiwan Semiconductor, or preventing the oil-rich Middle East from becoming the playground of the mullahs. For stage-one thinkers, anything beyond our borders places an out-of-sight second to the extortionate goodies made possible by a cozy relationship with accommodating politicians. Don’t expect stage-one thinkers to have a grasp of the world war stage-setting in the 1938 Munich Agreement. Aggression was rewarded and soon we were embroiled in a total war of 80 million deaths, civilian and military.
Scene from the Battle for Iwo Jima, Feb.-March 1945
We could have stayed out as the first edition of America First in 1940 demanded. It took a brazen surprise attack to shock stage-one thinkers into realizing that events an ocean away can lead to Americans dying in large numbers.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” — G. Michael Hopf in his novel Those Who Remain
Though, are we the same kind of people who could tolerate the bloody storming of the beaches of Iwo Jima and D-Day’s Omaha, or show persistence in the horrid conditions of Okinawa, the Hürtgen Forest, or the Battle of the Bulge? One has to wonder. Our elections are a barometer of the public psyche. Look at the pitches, now from both sides. Our elections are looting expeditions. Republicans promise not to touch our bankrupting entitlements while delivering on all manner of goodies to the middle class and blue collars. Ditto for the donkey party, only by a factor of ten. It’s all billed as fair-share justice when in reality it’s just targeting the successful to bankroll their pet social engineering schemes. Being spoon fed from the public treasury isn’t a promising approach in preserving a hardy people.
The Democrats used to be the party of government command and control. Not any longer. The Republicans offer a similar farce.
Think about it. What’ll happen in this command economy of the Right is a replay of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli) signed by Reagan. We got the amnesty but little of the other component: enforcement. Trump will get his tariffs – something the Democrats are already giddy about – but won’t get much regulatory relief, the very thing that makes us uncompetitive with the rest of the world. The blue-collar suck-up in the form of compulsory unionization also awaits. We might get some reprieve from the greenie totalitarianism, but NIMBYism remains a populist obsession. Republicans have no stomach to fight hikes in the minimum wage, nor the other humungous host of mandates that raise the cost of doing business in the U.S. The tariff wall goes up and we will wallow in our own petri dish of fiscal and regulatory incontinence.
Prices will rise, and we may not even notice it. Higher prices only become apparent if there is a point of comparison. Where’s the comparison after walling off the competition? However, we will see an economy frozen in amber, limping along, with accountability and the essential force of creative destruction limited to those smaller firms without an intimate relationship with powerful politicos. The big government of the command economy necessitates big business. Big government and big business are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.
Welcome to the cesspool of the blue-collar command economy and an electoral choice between detestables. That’s our choice this time around in the presidential sweepstakes: a California totalitarian with a velvet glove or a self-absorbed panderer. Oh, the panderer is “tough”, but only tough on foreigners and not to some within his own ranks who unwittingly demand undeserved and extortionate privileges. Which one of the offerings do you dislike the most?
For me, I’ll put on the hazmat suit and vote for the bombastic panderer. Somehow, a cultural revolution of porn to grade schoolers, teenage genital mutilation, XY “girls” everywhere in women’s spaces, eat the rich, carte blanche abortion inclusive of pedicide (killing of children), and greenie totalitarianism seems to be more Orwellian than the tariff buffoonery and blue-collar suck-up. There, I made my choice.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “6. Views of foreign policy”, Pew Research Center, 12/19/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/6-views-of-foreign-policy/
2. “Majority of Americans take a dim view of increased trade with other countries”, Pew Research Center, 7/29/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/29/majority-of-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-increased-trade-with-other-countries/
Get ready. Buckle up. The dysfunction of California is about to become the dysfunction of the United States. Take a look at a red/blue county or precinct election map of California and you will see what lies in store for our country (see maps below). East of California’s Coast Range, and beyond the coastal plain from San Diego to the Bay Area, extends a vast Republican hinterland that is essentially inconsequential to the governance of the state. The same thing awaits the huge stretch of the country between the two coasts and outside the deep blue urban bubbles that dot the landscape like islands in a vast red ocean (see maps below). Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace even in solidly red states, they too will increasingly resemble the quality of governance in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and California. Today, urbanization is poison to good governance.
2020 election nationally by precinct
Who’s responsible for this sorry state of affairs? First, the people, whether in town or country. They vote for “wrong track”. Many believe in the impossible, such as bountiful entitlements (unreformed Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), papering over in trillion-dollar spending bills every grand greenie scheme, a strong national defense . . . and, amazingly, low taxes and fiscal sanity. The tooth fairy anyone?
Second, the Democrats’ base. They are the boosters of America’s institutional socialist party, the equivalent of Europe’s Social Democrats. Well, let’s just call them the Social Democrats. And third, the Republicans’ base. They are in the grip of a psychotic personality disorder, one that emotes in bouts of vengeance, and will blindly follow the person who best captures their sense of resentment and defiance. The result is a competitive socialism and a broad and chronic sense of post-election disappointment.
The “people”, both in their party’s primaries and in the general electorate, choose failure. Let’s not be puerile in blaming somebody else: “elites”, “establishment”, academia, the media, or some other nebulous cabal of the beautiful and hyper-wealthy-and-powerful. We did it; we chose it; we continue to choose it. Period.
Low-information voter
In more sensible times, the Democrats’ socialism should write them off as an electoral joke. Instead, they’re competitive. It’s much more than the wind in their sails from their much larger stable of lefty zillionaire donors and left-wing academic/media commissars who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Sometimes, your greatest strength arises from your opponent’s weakness. And lately, to the great joy of the donkey party, the GOP base has decided to go bonkers.
The evidence of the Republican voters’ mental incapacity lies in a Democrat Senate (51-49) and their poor showing in the last four national elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 2016 was a squeaker (No, DJT, you didn’t win by a “lot”.) with a Republican Senate narrowed to a two-seat majority. The 2018 midterms saw our Social Democrats capture the House. 2020 was a Trump loss and a Social Democrat Senate. Then, we had the 2022 midterms. Inflation gripped the country; the national debt exploded; many of our urban spaces are violent open sewers; a totalitarian COVID shutdown destroyed our economy and public schools; our educational system is a mess; housing and energy are out of reach; appeasement foreign policy has made a comeback; the Kabul humiliation; boys are taking over girls’ sports; and a new Axis is turning the international scene into something that resembles our urban spaces. 2022 was supposed to be a red wave but became a desultory mist with a paper-thin Republican House majority that is both ungovernable and too busy neutering itself.
It’s a personality type that seems to attract Republican voters today like moths to a light; that and the endorsement of their new avatar, Donald Trump. The precursor to MAGA was the Tea Party bursting on the scene in 2009. Within Republican ranks, a feistiness was brewing which gave us 2010 Senate candidacies of, for example, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (the so-called “witch”) who went down in flames. Republican voters had more electable choices at the time – including a former Delaware governor – but favored the fiery type so long as they showed sufficient belligerence. The general election results of that year and following, however, were dismal.
Sharon Angle (l), Christine O’Donnell
Nonetheless, a truculent streak survived to remain a big part of the GOP base’s psychological profile. It’s attractive to them but not much to anyone else. But 2016 seemed to confirm their “wisdom” in the surprising Trump victory. They probably thought that the rest of the country was now onboard with their war against “the establishment”. And then along came 2018, 2020, and 2022, and repeated letdowns for the party. 2024 may yet prove to be a replay of 2022, or worse, and proof of the old definition of insanity falsely attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting ….”
In 2022, we saw Trump endorsements in key competitive races go down in flames: Kari Lake (Az.), Herschel Walker (Ga.), Dr. Oz (Pa.), to name a few. Trump’s pugilistic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 paved the way for Georgia to be represented by two socialists in the Senate. Think of that: Republican governor Brian Kemp – the one who wouldn’t kowtow to Trump’s 2020 election rantings – sailed easily to victory as Walker succumbed to the Social Democrat Raphael Warnock. Even in Georgia, cantankerousness and an “outsider” status aren’t appealing attributes once we leave the tight confines of a party primary. It’s a lesson that today’s GOP base stubbornly refuses to learn.
The GOP base enthusiastically walks into the Social Democrats’ field of fire as the socialists throw money behind the most MAGA-like candidate in the Republican primary. The Social Democrats know something that Republican voters willfully ignore: pugilism in a candidate may whip up primary voters but is an advantage for the opposition in the general election. Funny thing, the Republican base wants Trumpiness and the Social Democrats are happy to accommodate them.
It is for this reason that socialism is competitive. Social Democrats get away with hiding their neo-Marxist roots – don’t expect their ideological soul mates who dominate our media to spill the beans – while Republicans continue to ignore reality. The Social Democrats know how to muzzle their cranks in election season. The GOP gives theirs a bullhorn.
So, expect more boosterism for a culture of death (abortion unrestrained, euthanasia), drug legalization, fiscal stupidity, increasing dependency on public assistance, a dilapidation of national defense, the weight of the Leviathan behind teenage genital mutilation and XY “girls” in women’s spaces, a furtherance of the official pogrom against white males, and the world around you turning to crap. Much of it can be laid at the feet of Republican primary voters for refusing to present viable alternatives.
When candidates like a stroke victim (John Fetterman) and a mentally addled senior citizen (Joe Biden) consistently best MAGA darlings (Dr. Oz, Trump, Lake, etc.), it’s proof that something has gone awry, not with the “system” or the “establishment”, but with the base. In other words, Republican voters are making it easy for the USA to become USC – no, not that USC, the United States of California. California is the template for the entire country, with its dysfunction, greenie totalitarian utopianism, fiscal insanity, flood of refugees fleeing the dysfunction, its feudal society of a shrinking middle class and burgeoning poor amidst the super-rich behind their manor walls.
And watch after this election for the “wrong track” number to hit the stratosphere. The Social Democrats’ base is brainless for its belief in the impossible, such as a prosperous socialism. The Social Democrats in their base are firmly committed to oxymorons. For their part, the Republicans are impervious to simple campaign arithmetic.
Welcome to the United States of California. Yuck!
A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
BLM co-founders from left: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Pictured at the Glamour of the Year Awards at NeueHouse Hollywood, 11/14/2016. (photo: Jordan Strauss, AP)
Preface:
I wrote most of the following before the release of Matt Walsh’s film “Am I Racist?”. He stole my thunder.
After viewing the film, there are two takeaways. First, jargon-laced pseudo-scholarship predominates in many academic fields, especially in education and the other “soft sciences”. They are laced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of phrenology or astrology. Much that is produced is riddled with the silliness of circular reasoning. How so? They use what they’ve never proven to justify major actions to defeat what they’ve never proven. It’s absolutely embarrassing to watch the drivel take hold.
The peddlers are chasing ghosts of their own fevered imaginations. The absurdities look compelling to the unwary as the proponents beam so confidently and arrogantly in their nincompoopery and glibness.
And this leads to the second observation: it sells to a more than insignificant chunk of the population. Random people sign petitions to rename the George Washington Memorial after Geoge Floyd. They are easily goaded into saying “f*#& you” to a semi-sentient allegedly racist old white man in a wheelchair. Some people, maybe many, are easily shamed into believing the unbelievable, and paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to debase themselves in what can only be described as Maoist shaming sessions. At least Mao’s Red Guards seized, beat, and tortured their victims into the humiliation. They had to be brutalized into demeaning themselves. Not so with these deep-pocketed sheep. Is this what late-stage civilizational decay looks like?
So much for the “wisdom” of the American people. It’s enough to cause the sane to seek refuge in a hermitage.
********************
Well, here it comes. I’m a “racist” to today’s activist-entrepreneurs who’ve turned racial oppression into a lucrative career. If I am, so is Booker T. Washington when he wrote in 1911,
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
And to think that he wrote it in 1911. He was way ahead of his time. He was branded an “accommodationist” for lacking sufficient militance in that era. Derisive labels are commonplace for this crowd of the race obsessed. That way, these race hustlers don’t have to explain themselves or their political jihads, just spew epithets and force skeptics to cower.
And the hustle certainly pays well. The hustle popularly known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) hit the mother lode on the back of the killing of George Floyd, raking in $90 million in 2020. BLM people, who before were just getting by, became celebrities with real estate portfolios, six-figure consultancies, and five-figure speaking gigs. Self-described Marxist and co-founder Patrisse Cullors fell into the lap of luxury in the purchase of a $1.4 million, 2,370 sq/ft Malibu area home. No more Banquet frozen dinners for this aspiring member of the Fortune 500.
No one really knows what happened to about half of that $90 million windfall from 2020. What we do know is that friends and associates in this hustling conglomerate – now called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation – are watching as their fortunes blossom. Oppression pays, and not necessarily for the oppressor, but especially for the self-anointed spokespeople of the oppressed. It once again proves that mammalian waste attracts flies.
These champions of the oppressed need to keep the pot boiling. They covet oppression, real or imagined, like John D. Rockefeller coveted crude oil. Into this swamp of race-covetousness dives Hasim Coates. Who’s he? Coates carved a Denver satrap out of this vast oppression-mongering empire. A small fish in an ever-expanding pond, Coates joins Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin D’Angelo, et al, in the CRT brigades as they swim about for fun and profit. He’s a fixture on the Denver political scene pushing causes and fellow-travelling candidates, and himself, into the control of Denver schools and wherever he can sell the gambit.
Kristen Fry, left, and Hashim Coates, right (Photo courtesy of Kristen Fry, (Screenshot via Hashim Coates for County Commissioner/YouTube)
Sometimes, people who’ve made a career in noisy hyperventilation necessitate the regular use of epithets, slanders, and smears, but inflate the balloon too much and it pops in their face. Coates’s ears must be ringing after one Denver school principal and mom stuck a pin into his hustle. Coates is a fan of redistributionist justice at the school level (and male prostitutes as it turns out) which translates into the same approach as the “reimagining law enforcement” of wannabe future president and Democratic standard bearer, Kamala Harris. “Reimagining” is making a shambles of the schools like it did our streets.
Coates, a common fixture at Denver Schools’ board meetings, claimed a white woman, parent Kristen Fry, grabbed him and used a racial slur to threaten him. He filed charges with the Denver PD; police criminally cited Fry; Coates won a restraining order against her; and the local DA accommodated by filing charges against Fry. The problem is that there is no evidence of anyone using the “n” word or touching Coates. Surveillance tape shows no touching and witnesses close to the encounter vouch to no use of the slur.
Coates is no stranger to the race hustle in Denver. Now, Fry is suing Coates, one of his associates, and four members of the Denver Public Schools Board for defamation, reminding all of us that the race hustle is still a hustle and therefore open to legal action by its victims. Not surprisingly, many hustlers end up penniless or behind bars. Right now, though, there’s still quite a bit of money left in the game to attract half-witted academics and scammers with the right melanin count, choice of bed partners, genitalia, and pronoun diversity.
Epilogue: Please go see “Am I Racist?”. Matt Walsh does a great job in exposing the baloney.
P.S.: Facebook wouldn’t initially approve this post because it “goes against our Community Standards”. What exactly does? A New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge as one of my sources, that’s what. I removed the source but you can access the piece by searching “Patrisse Cullors real estate buying binge”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets”, Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 5/17/2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html
2. “Who’s In Charge of Black Lives Matter’s Millions of Dollars?”, Robby Soave, Reason, 2/1/2022, at https://reason.com/2022/02/01/black-lives-matter-funding-millions-patrisse-cullors/
3. New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge censored by Facebook.
4. “Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out”; Ryan Mills, National Review Online, 9/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/radical-activists-nearly-ruined-a-denver-mom-with-racism-charge-then-the-evidence-came-out/
While listening to a recent episode of the “Victor Davis Hanson Show” podcast, I heard Hanson make reference to the Republican Party becoming a “conservative working man’s party” under Trump. Memories came to mind of Karl Marx’s International Working Men’s Association (see #1 below). Hanson, a renowned conservative, was adopting the jargon of the historical international Left, the same kind of rigid and simplistic homogenous-class thinking that is the hallmark of Marxian socialism – indeed, all of modern socialism and its more recent iteration as neo-Marxism.
He isn’t the only one. Some prominent MAGA-adjacent Republicans are sounding like Eugene Debs, the last Socialist Party candidate for president to garner 6% of the popular vote (in 1912). An enthusiasm for class warfare is one of the key pillars of so-called National Conservatism since the rise of Donald Trump. And the dictum of class warfare brings in tow a cry for big government. How else to prosecute the class war except with the long and powerful arm of the state? People like Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri), like a shark on alert for the blood of votes in his home state, and reneging on his pledge to support right-to-work laws, announced his opposition to the laws that would actually free the worker from compulsory union membership and payment of dues (see #2 and #3 below). That’s what is meant by right-to-work, and now Hawley opposes it.
Somehow, Hawley’s mental gymnastics has turned the freedom of a worker to choose whether to join a union or not into an unjust imposition. Missouri legislative Democrats, with the support of a small group of Republicans, placed a measure on the Missouri ballot which passed in 2018 to repeal the state’s right-to-work law. As usual, a good portion of union dues were showered on political advocacy to kill the legislation, and as usual the union cash to the tune of $600,000 was lavished on a political consultancy to run the campaign, which doesn’t include all the soft contributions that unions are famous. After which, we have Hawley joining the picket lines at a recent UAW strike against American automakers and announcing, “… I certainly wouldn’t support any federal legislation to impose right to work on anybody.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri) on picket line in support of striking members of the UAW in Wentzville, Missouri, 9/25/2023.
Impose? Again, right-to-work is the exact opposite of “impose”. Hawley’s stand against right-to-work is empowering unions to impose themselves on reluctant workers. The rhetoric and Josh Hawley’s brain are incoherent.
Hawley isn’t the only big government firebrand in the GOP tent. Hawley joins Donald Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, in rooting around in the same mental garbage bin conjuring ways to jack up wages through government intervention. Hawley has concocted a “blue collar bonus” to reward, and only reward this class-based constituency using the tax credit gambit to hike minimum wages to $16.50 (see #5 below). Vance to his credit, and true to his Ohio State and Yale academic pedigree, has declared a broader, more philosophical war on “doctrinaire free market economics” to accomplish the same ends. The guy wants to use the power of the state to imitate the Soviet Gosplan, the state economic planning agency. How? Throw up tariffs walls to shield American firms from competition: “You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers ….” (see #7 below). The Soviets did the same thing. He can’t mean all American manufacturing – it’s too big. He’s got in mind those of his region; think Michigan to Ohio.
Vance isn’t done with state interventionism to advantage one group of workers and their select industries. He doesn’t care a lick for the young. Social Security is a trainwreck; it was designed that way from the get-go. The scheme has young workers supporting the elderly. No, in speaking truth to my elderly peers, you aren’t getting your contributions back in your benefit check. A good portion of it comes out of the paychecks of overstretched young workers and their families who can barely afford the mortgage. The ploy was great when 160 workers supported one retiree (1940). It’s not so great when the ratio has been whittled down to under 3 to 1 due to a birth dearth and advances in health care stretching more people into their sunset years (see #8 below). Vance apparently wasn’t a math whiz at OSU and Yale.
Here he is at his most calloused:
“One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t. So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #7 below)
If he isn’t busy working to abandon Ukraine to Putin, he’s dead set on throwing struggling young families into the maw of the AARP.
Hanson, Hawley, and Vance are all bollixed up in their heads. They blame nebulous foreigners, billionaire left-wing techies, Wall Street, and the mysterious force of globalization. It’s the same message peddled by Lenin and his Bolsheviks in the heady days of 1917 in Petrograd. These befuddled firebrands of so-called national conservatism target “elites” as the Bolsheviks did the “bourgeoisie”.
19th century Marxists coined the word “capitalism” to give focus to their rantings and produce a perpetual hate figure: the “capitalist”. Today’s national conservates proffer “neoliberalism” and the “neoliberal”. This neoliberalism is actually the beginning of economics as a field of study. It didn’t originate in J.P. Morgan’s den or the faculty lounge of the University of Chicago. It came into being during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment when people applied reason, empiricism, and science to an understanding of how people organize themselves in making a living. Best and worse practices came to light and economic liberalism was born. Out of it came thinkers such as Jean Baptiste Say and Adam Smith. The “neo” part came about when others (Milton Freidman, F.A. Hayek, Arthur Laffer, George Stigler, et al) resuscitated these earlier insights during a dark period of government interventionism and inflation, insipid economic growth, high unemployment, and the overall social breakdown of the 1970s (see #9 below).
The national conservatives’ heartily disliked “neoliberals” of 20th-century America and Europe, from left: F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.
You’d never know that history in the way Vance, Trump and company depict the plight of American manufacturing and blue collars. They’re victims of “doctrinaire free market capitalism” and its cousin “globalization”. And, in their pronouncements, a cabal of bi-coastal financiers and techie zillionaires are hoarding the rewards. Everybody else is reduced to peonage in their mind. Anyway, that’s the story per Vance, Hawley, Trump, and company.
What they get wrong is that American manufacturing was plagued by . . . us! Yes, we did it to ourselves. We distorted our economy by punishing with imperial unionization, regulation, and taxation the kinds of industries that are likely to more conspicuously impact the land, water, air, flora, and fauna. They happen to be the primary industries (ag, lumber, mining), the skilled trades, the muscular occupations, manufacturing, nearly anything that demands brick-and-mortar construction and the need for permits, approvals, reports, consultancies, and a team of lawyers on retainer. It’s a gauntlet that other industries are less likely to face to the same degree.
Climate activists, 2022
Versus
The skilled trades
We developed a love affair with “clean” industries. In the 1980s, communities more receptive to growth would preface their support with the call for “clean” businesses. Of course, they have a “clean” environment in mind, social and natural. By the 1980s, a cumbersome Leviathan was erected by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), Clean Water Act and its amendments, Clean Air Acts, Endangered Species Acts and the breeding of state-level knockoffs like the California’s Environmental Quality Act, activist court decisions to broaden the reach of regulatory agencies, etc. Add to the anti-manufacturing legions the empowerment of local gangs of activists exploiting this flood of regulation. It’s a wonder that we have any manufacturing left.
That’s how you clean the air in the LA basin: you regulate manufacturing out of existence. Permissionless industries began to fill the economic space left empty by the war against “dirty” manufacturing. Coding can take place by a teenager with a laptop and the pc was developed by a couple of twenty-somethings in a garage, all accomplished without interference from the local building inspector, state fish and game overseers, air quality district commissars, enforcers from the Army Corps of Engineers, demands for environmental impact reports, etc., etc. What began without permission of a government employee soon occupied pride of place – tech, communications, financial industries – in our economy. We did this, voted for it, and some of us turn around and complain about the results (see #10 below).
What’s the answer among national conservatives (natcons) to the distorted nature of our economy? They lead assaults on the rich and free markets. The reality on the ground, however, is that “neoliberalism” hasn’t been ascendant since, let’s say, the 1920s, maybe before. It’s been talked about, papers filed in scholarly journals, but our government hasn’t been enslaved by it since, maybe, dinosaurs weren’t oil, certainly since the New Deal. Have you taken a look at the Federal Registry of regulations? Here’s a clue: it hasn’t gotten smaller. Natcons have fits over “globalization”, as if we don’t have tariffs. Here’s another suggestion: examine the 4,392 pages of U.S. tariffs in our Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Natcons are feverishly breeding straw men, not unlike their left-wing cousins.
Fact: free markets aren’t free in America. Talk to anybody trying to build a housing project, frack, irrigate, open a new steel plant in a blue state, manage an auto plant with the UAW breathing down your neck. Manufacturing didn’t disappear; they were just discouraged, and the survivors fled the worst blue-state snake pits for those right-to-work states that Hawley now castigates. Listening to the mouthing of natcons sounds like the prescription of low-dose poison to kill intestinal parasites only in overdose amounts.
They are under the delusion that they can calibrate free markets without killing markets. If prior government interventions are any indication, they are fools. It’s regulation that must be carefully calibrated, not markets, much like Bill Clinton on abortion: safe, legal, and RARE.
If natcons occupy key positions in a new Trump administration, watch as they burden our economy with rising costs for consumers and producers which will translate, as it always does, in less opportunity, especially for those striving for upward mobility. We’ll get the tariffs, but not any appreciable reduction in regulation or its multifarious mandates. The Trump economy of his first term was a Larry Kudlow economy, one of cheap energy, tax cuts, and Congressional Review Act rescissions of some Obama regulations. A new Trump economy promises to be a Vance/Hawley one. Two very different beasts.
It’s sad to see Marxism take hold in both parties. Some Republicans are attempting the trick of freeing “Republican Marxism” from the oxymoron category (a contradiction in terms). Their Marxism won’t succeed any better than the Maduro Marxists running Venezuela.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Most mass encyclopedias such as Wikipedia or Britannica have an article on “Karl Marx: Role in the First International of Karl Marx” and “Second International” to describe the history of international socialism.
2. More on Sen. Josh Hawley and his newfound faith in unionization can be found at “Republicans For Coerced Unionization Likely To Remain A Small Caucus”, Patrick Gleason, Forbes, 12/23/2023, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2023/12/13/republicans-for-coerced-unionization-likely-to-remain-a-small-caucus/
3. An additional source of this new “conservatism” can be found at “Josh Hawley’s Pro-Union Folly”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 10/11/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/josh-hawleys-pro-union-folly/
4. Sen. Josh Hawley’s advocacy of raising the “blue collar” minimum wage can be found at “Josh Hawley Proposes Tax Credit to Raise Minimum Wage, Says Large Businesses Could Support Hike”, Newsweek, 2/25/2021, at https://www.newsweek.com/josh-hawley-proposes-tax-credit-raise-minimum-wage-also-signals-support-democrats-15-bill-1571660
5. Sen. Josh Hawley’s endorsement of raising the minimum wage can be found at “’The world has changed’: The scrambled new politics of the minimum wage”, Alex Seitz-Wald, NBC News, 3/8/2021, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/world-has-changed-scrambled-new-politics-minimum-wage-n1259647
6. More on Sen. J.D. Vance’s embrace of big government can be found in “GOP VP Nominee J.D. Vance Is an Enemy of Free Markets”, Ilya Somin, Reason, 7/15/2024, at https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/15/gop-vp-nominee-j-d-vance-is-an-enemy-of-free-markets/
7. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578
8. “Social Security History: Ratio of Covered Workers to Beneficiaries” at https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
9. An excellent synopsis of neoliberalism in “Conjuring Up the Neoliberal Bogeyman”, Samuel Gregg, National Review, 3/13/2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/conjuring-up-the-neoliberal-bogeyman/
10. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Moutii, Econlib, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
11. An excellent summary of the national conservative and neoliberal divide can be found in “Too Much Deregulation? We Wish.”, Dominic Pino, The Washington Free Beacon, 9/15/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/culture/too-much-deregulation-we-wish/.
It’s election season so the truth goes into hiding. Want Proof? Watch the latest edition of the Democratic National Convention. Earlier, the GOP took their stab at forcing truth into exile at their confab, but they have the advantage of being out of power and not responsible for the donkey party’s forced death march of America to societal collapse. It accords the GOP a target rich environment, thanks to Democrat buffoonery. Yet, as it was said of the PLO’s Yassir Arafat, the elephant party will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Want proof? Look at their mad dash to nominate their weakest candidate to head the ticket, but even he has a decent shot at the brass ring given the hash that the Dems have made of the country. Making America look like California isn’t a good look. So, what do the Dems do? They distract our gaze to some shiny object – “bad Trump” – dress up misery as glory, and tar good sense as the return of Sauron. Case in point is the bombast directed at Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The Dems’ ideological soul mates in newsrooms are quick to paste “right-wing” all over it in dark, sinister overtones (see #2 below). But what is it? It isn’t a resurrection of the Spanish Inquisition, the return of Jim Crow or Dickensian workhouses as they would have you believe. A product of the Heritage Foundation, it’s what the group has been doing since their founding in 1973 as a counterpoint to the big-government consensus among elites from the New Deal to Nixon’s surrender to the progressive Leviathan-philosophy of government (wage/price controls, founding of the EPA, etc.). As such, they produced policy proposals with intellectual heft for a burgeoning conservatism that arose around William F. Buckley that ultimately led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Think of them as one of a constellation of think tanks (CATO at times, American Enterprise Institute) making up the loyal opposition to the center-left’s Brookings Institution or the more stridently left-wing Center for American Progress.
Project 2025 has the same philosophical roots as the ideas dating back to Reagan’s ascendancy: tax cuts; deregulation; a return of deterrence; a rollback of Soviet expansionism; missile defense; real education, entitlement, and labor reform; etc. The same outlook is evident in Project 2025, but this time its suddenly and menacingly right-wing to the young babes in the newsrooms and on The View. Has Heritage moved further right, or our chattering classes further left? It’s the latter.
Project 2025 has much in common with the same outlook advanced by Heritage’s first president in 1973, Paul Weyrich. Today’s Left, however, are neo-Marxists. For them, FDR’s Keynesianism is passé. They have revolution in their sights by sanctioning a seizure of power to eradicate the evils of heteronormativity, white and male privilege, the traditional family, global warming, the rich, capitalism, and opposition to gender ideology, alongside their compulsion to shower benefits and favoritism on an ever-growing list of the “oppressed” (“To be an antiracist, you have to be a racist”, a paraphrase of Ibram X. Kendi of CRT fame).
Roosevelt’s New Dealers would be shocked to learn of the prevalent worldview among reporters occupying cubicles at places like the New York Times. The battles over pronouns and bathrooms and the smothering and now-habitual thought-smog of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxism – of the Marcuse/Foucault/Gramsci zeitgeist – would seem dismaying to the likes of Woodrow Wilson or New Dealers such as Harold Ickes, Cordell Hull, Adolph Berle, Jr., Harry Hopkins. No wonder that the consistency of Heritage appears so frightening to young cadres who’ve unknowingly jettisoned their liberal forebearers and are fully immersed in a revolution for which they have little understanding. They don’t realize how radical they’ve become.
Go read Project 2025 (see #1 below). It reads like much of the 1980 GOP platform, and that’s because it adheres to a set of universal and well-understood principles: keeping the federal government in the box of its critical and Constitutional responsibilities (protection and fostering comity among its citizens) and ensuring national safety and security abroad.
The Project’s first section is a call for elected officials to once again gain control of a sprawling and increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy. The thousands of federal civil service employees in DC, just below the appointed level, can act as a disloyal opposition thwarting an electorate’s control of their own government. Think of it, cozy relationships between reporters and civil servants result in leaks to obstruct policy initiatives. Just recently, anonymous worker bees signed an open letter opposing aid to Israel in the aftermath of a rabid, barbarically gruesome killing of 1,200 innocent Jews at the hands of a duly elected terrorist group in Gaza. The administrate state is partisan and all the efforts to insulate it from politics have only protected it from facing consequences for their partisan meddling.
The Wikipedia writer(s) castigate Project 2025 for pushing a “highly controversial” view of the unitary executive. No, it is they who have a “highly controversial” view. The mammoth Leviathan that is our modern administrative state is the unmentioned aspect of our Constitutional structure since the federal government took on powers absent from the Constitution (in Article I, Section 8, Cl. 1-18). This humungous entity is a power unto itself. The Wikipedia article is shameful.
The unitary executive isn’t some novel invention. It goes back to the founding (see #3 below). The 19th century’s civil service reforms (Pendleton Act, etc.) were meant to remove the corrupting influence of patronage, the approach to governance represented by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City. Today, the threat comes not only from pay-to-play but from a partisan, activist base in the civil service, mostly in DC. The reformers never envisioned public employees becoming a political constituency, a voting bloc with an ability to supplant the wishes of voters across the nation in an election. If you want to “save our democracy”, how about making elections matter once more?
The rest of Heritage’s proposals range from rebuilding deterrence to ending the politicization of education, our health care, to a return to a free market/sound money economy. Vintage Reagan. Of course, the Left doesn’t like it. They never have. If implemented, Project 2025 would set the country up for a second Reaganite resurgence. The Left could be out of power till future generations forget what they did to the country in the second decade of the 21st century.
The only problem is, Republicans also show signs of forgetfulness and the corresponding need to obfuscate and lie about it. Trump is fond of saying, “I made China pay billions [in tariffs]”. No, he didn’t. His new taxes on imports were paid by American manufacturers and consumers.
Trump has a blinkered focus on the “trade deficit”. He, and most Dems, believe that they can politically engineer more American manufacturing and bring the “trade deficit” into balance or positive. For one, the “trade deficit” is only one computation in ascertaining the state of the economy. If you think about it, if a positive trade balance was such a great thing, all nations should pursue it. But if so, it’s an impossibility. Some have to be negative, but that doesn’t necessitate economic despair. That’s because the trade deficit is only one part of the account balance, which includes capital flows. Deficits in one lead to surpluses in the other. Trump and the Dems don’t think that deeply.
So, Trump sends the truth into exile, and that’s where people seem to like it. But if you want to know why manufacturing isn’t the big economic draw that it once was, we elected people for over a century who taxed and regulated the people who make physical goods nearly to death. The industries that subsequently ballooned were the ones that didn’t require them to run into the EPA, the Endangered Species Act(s), the plethora of land-use and environmental regulatory bodies at all levels that have sprouted across the fruited plain. Tech/financial services/communications firms are less likely to run into NIMBYs and greenie activists with activist attorneys to block and delay at every step of the way. Coding and an app can take place on a teenager’s laptop or a garage. Taxes advantage human capital (example: coders, analysts) and punish physical (example: machinery, factories). Manufacturers face adversarial unions who are protected by labor law. The mandates – paid leave, childcare, benefits, exotic interpretations of equity rules and laws – have pounded the dynamism out manufacturing (see #4 below).
Not a word out of Trump about any of this. He only wants to slap tariffs on foreigners. Without correcting any of the above, he’s just jacking up prices and subsidizing economic sloth. Lives don’t get better on the whole, opportunities for generations to come languish, and once again we get reintroduced to TINSTAFL: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Right now, Americans love the lie, and our political mavens are happy to give it to us good and hard. Yep, it’s election season. The Great Bamboozle is in full swing.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Project 2025: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025” as a pdf at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
2. Wikipedia encapsulates the left’s reaction under their title “Project 2025”. No doubt, the article came from left-wing contributors. The rhetoric is jarringly of the left.
3. The notion of a unitary executive was explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70. A summary of it can be found at the Bill of Rights Institute, “Federalist 70 Explained | Why Does the U.S. Have a Unitary Executive?”, at https://billofrightsinstitute.org/videos/federalist-70-explained-why-does-the-u-s-have-a-unitary-executive.
4. An explication of the disadvantages of manufacturing in America are presented in “What Washington Should Learn from Tech Companies”, Dominic Pino, National Review, August issue, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/what-washington-should-learn-from-tech-companies/.
(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)
NIMBYs, schmucks
The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent. What about the people, the people doing the flinging? The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater. How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent? Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves? Democracy, schmuckocracy?
The level of discontent is palpable in polls. Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below). 11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance. Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct. Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.
It doesn’t end there. Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.
The Supreme Court takes a hit as well. That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk. Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it. A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it. So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb. The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself. But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.
Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole. The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it. Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.
We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression. Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that. An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College. Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus. It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution. The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.
Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders. Here’s a sampling of their views:
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison
“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington
There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”. Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries. That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.
The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators. They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators. Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections. These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power. Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.
In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state. This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate. Where’s the democracy? It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.
No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess. Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows. In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today. The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.
Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)
One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California. The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”. “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it. California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.
Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party. The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems. The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else. Quite a tag-team duo.
The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female. Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc. The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum. Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).
The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere. That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere. They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating. In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below). It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s. However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.
Do “the people’s” government in America care? Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care? As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight. As for the second, no sé. These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant. They are coming to get more than your sedan. They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below). This is totalitarianism pure and simple. Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever. You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you. And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.
Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy. The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis. Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.
We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected. Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024? Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.
Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”. The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending. No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem. It’s been building for decades. Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.” Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”? Nobody. The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.
This method of governance was pioneered by California. Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961). In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place. What do you think happened to the housing supply? Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.
In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended. “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”, which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.
The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together. Eco-obsessions reign supreme. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump. It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs. It’s a veritable goat rope.
In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county. Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below). The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court. I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.
Gauntlets bedevil the entire state. It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below). According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below). Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex? Good question. Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.
But do the powerful really care? Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs? Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive. So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent. The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come. Their “American dream” will be stillborn. But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court? It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.
All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb. The people chose societal collapse. It didn’t magically appear out of the ether. And it shows in the names on the ballot. The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases. The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”. For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”. Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive. For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere. All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes. They deny it while implementing it. Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe
The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”. It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump. People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism. Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.
The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New DealMAGA from 2023 (?)
What would a second Trump term bring? I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan. In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites. Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote. Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone. We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine. Would any of this be popular among the general public? It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.
How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested? Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability. The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such. People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below). He’s a consistent stinker. In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable. She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.
The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult. For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.
Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution. Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses. Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP. It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.
Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise. Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base. For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed. They’ll hide it because they have to. The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.
It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris. At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.
Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP. Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup. Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it. An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.
It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites. Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror. Me too! More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit. Party bases can be full of them. The general public too. “The people” can desire things that they ought not get. The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born. The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.
It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy. Democracy, schmuckocracy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/
